Atonement (Ian McEwan)

I don't know if I would call this novel the "compelling fictional landscape" that the cover comments claimed it would be. It was an interesting story for two reasons:


1. The setting of WWII, which is always quite gripping given that our country is obsessed with the heroism of the "last great war," which still appears so much more noble than the terroristic or diplomatic character of today's conflicts. There was good and bad, there were lines in the sand.

2. The ending laid quite a twist on the rest of the story, which made the reader have an Ah-Ha moment, where they run over the story again in the their head to take in the new context and therefore the new shades of meaning, putting the whole tale into a softer focus.

A good read, but not what I would call my favorite type of "literature." For Gnomey's definition of real "literature," click here. Funny how a story of atonement, one of the major universal themes of human expression, can be beat out by that of a Bengal tiger on a lifeboat, huh?

The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)

I have read a lot of Hemingway. He is ubuiquitous in the literary world, some people think for little reason--what, with his simplistic style, betraying his "low" journalistic roots, with his party party storylines and characters. The man's personality, after all, has been captured so well in the modern mind. His drinking, manliness, ex-patriotism, adventuring, travelling, womanizing. I myself am guilty of this in calling my father's style of interior decorating very Hemingway. Well, the man has zebra-striped dining chairs for god's sake! In all that personality and the hype surrounding his works, I don't think a lot fo people take the time to sit down and read Hemingway. Just read the words and discover their worth for themselves, wiping the whiskey and zebra stripes out of their mind's eye to do it.

This, I believe, is the ideal Hemingway work to practice this theory. His first novel-length piece, it tells the story of a journalist living in Paris after World War I, a journalist with a mysterious un-named wound to which our only clue is that he can no longer, ahem, function as a man. He and his group of ex-pat friends travel to Spain to fish and watch the bull fights, as well as drink themselves silly. Easy to summarize, yet hard to truly express the essence of it. The themes are like the deep currents of a river, the river itself being simple yet the currents underneath are always playing on the sun-sparkled surface, reminding you of the chilly power underneath.

The perfect instance of this is in the main character's relationship with his lady love, a British aristocrat by the name of Brett. She's a loose and easy type, strikingly beautiful but ready to live life to the fullest now that the horror of war had shown how dear and fragile it can be. Though their conversations together are simple and appear breezy, I almost want to cring with the unfulfilled emotional undercurrent:

"Don't talk like a fool," I said. "Besides, what happened to me is supposed to be funny. I never think about it."

"Oh, no. I'll lay you don't."

"Well, let's shut up about it."

"I laughed about it too, myself, once." She wasn't looking at me. "A friend of my brother's came home that way from Mons. It seemed like a hell of a joke. Chaps never know anything, do they?"

"No," I said. "Nobody ever knows anything....

"It's very funny. And it's a lot of fun, too, to be in love."

"Do you think so?" her eyes looked flat again.

"I don't mean fun that way. In a way it's an enjoyable feeling."

"No," she said. "I think it's hell on earth."

"It's good to see each other."

"No. I don't think it is."

"Don't you want to?"

"I have to."

Excellent style, exotic storyline, and great depth. A three punch-er in my book. If you keep hearing about that Hemingway guy, that drinking author who lived in Cuba, that Kilamanjaro bloke your English teacher keeps pushing down your throat... give The Sun Also Rises a try. If it effects you similarly to me, well the, Ole! If not, you poor literature-loathing college student, it's always great as a drinking game. Simply count and take a shot every time a character says, "Let's have drink!" Looks like the first instance is on page 10.

A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." - Jonathan Swift

I have no idea how to begin describing this book. Perhaps that is why is has been finished for nine days now and I have yet to review it, letting 1.5 books accumulate behind it in the queue. I think I must begin with a few simple words to get the ball rolling: irreverent, witty, grotesque, farcical, erudite. I would compare it to a book of Thomas Aquinas and a MAD magazine, both left under a boy's bed to grow mold and develop patches of stickiness until they gel into one unit of random, insightful and tragi-comic ramblings.

These ramblings are the work of a character named Ignatius Rielly. An over-educated and under-motived slob and medievalist. A slave to the workings of his "valve" and the food that bloats him up to monumental proportions. Lazy, badly dressed and arrogant, Ignatius lists through life, living in his mothers house, living to yell obscenities at daytime television. That is, until he is almost arrested for appearing "suspicious," which stresses his mother, who drags them into a dive on Bourbon Street, where they get quite drunk and offend the establishment, after which his mother drives drunk into a stranger's house, that causes a little problem with the money for reparations, which makes Ignatius venture forth into the workplace and attempt to change the world. All in the first few pages, of course.

The rest is about this interaction between the world of Ignatius and the world reality. I think we begin to love Ignatius, repulsive as he is, for how he doesn't fit in, doesn't want to fit in, and blindly plows through his oddball antics with true courage--that is, the courage to not give a damn whether your world makes sense to anyone else or not. Incredibly funny and often very incisive, Confederacy of Dunces should be standard reading for every high school in America. Would definitely be a jumping off point for further literary ventures. I think this book could bridge the gap for non-bookies, proving to them that literature, even "classic" literature, can be more entertaining than sex. Okay, not sex. Television, though? I hope?

The innate tragedy of the novel, however, is the story of it's author, John Kennedy Toole. This novel was published 11 years after he committed suicide, partially because of his failure as a writer and partially because he was a writer (you know how moody we can be, right?). It was his mother and a professor she recruited that lobbied for the book's publication in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously, obviously, in 1981. I suppose that knowing this information in advance, the novel reads out some of Toole's angst against a society that doesn't recognise genius and yet, simultaneous, pokes fun at the oddity, grotesque quality, and stupidity of that genius.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Steamstress (Dai Sijie)

I picked this book up used at the library for $.75, mostly because the cover design and title attracted me. Intriguing and colorful yet simple, short enough to take on vacation. Turns out that most of my observations about the exterior held true for the inside. Sijie writes clean fiction, with brilliantly done subtext and tone, that speeds the pages along a simple, everyday storyline that is still artistic, poignant and... good. Yes, good. Very good.

This book is the tale of two Chinese boys, city boys of well-educated parents, parents who became "class enemies" during the Cultural Revolution. These two best friends are sent deep into China's countryside for their rural, prolitariat "re-education." It is, of course, mostly a coming of age story--love, naivite, and how to fit in the big, bad world. But what I love is the historical context. Now this is how you do historical fiction! The tale is technically and truly about universal themes but every aspect of these boys lives is regulated by the time period and geography that they inhabit. Chinese Communism effects every turn--their relationship to the rural locals, their distance and precarious relationship to their parents, and the education they do receive during this re-education, mainly through illicit books by Western authors. Books that expand their minds to distant places and dangerous points of view.

Yes, I really liked this book on all the fronts that I judge literature--great tale, excellent writing style, and ideas that will stick with me, that will grow and radiate through my brain through my life. It taught me so much about how that era felt, what it meant, and made these two little boys bright, real characters that walk straight off the page.

Smilla's Sense of Snow (Peter Hoeg)

I had heard of this movie. It was an indie flick quite a few years ago that I always meant to see yet didn't. After reading the book, I'm rather glad as it seems the plot would never fit neatly into movie form without losing a great deal of complexity. Don't get me wrong, I will see it now. I'm just glad I had the experience of this very engrossing novel beforehand.

A novel about Smilla Jasperson, a Greenlandic native living in Denmark, a scientist by education, an excellent dresser, an introvert to the extreme, a woman caught between her youth and her present in the colonizing power who took over her homeland, a woman obsessed and I mean obsessed by ice and snow. Smilla's neighbor is a little boy who is also Greenlandic, with a drunk for a mother and a horrible end--dying by falling off a roof. Though his footprints in the snow show he was alone, Smilla senses foul play and this "sense of snow" leads her on an engrossing chase with all the frills. Conspiracies, explosions, fist fights, ice expeditions, sex, viruses, riches, autopsies...

You get the point. It's a thriller and a mystery, which usually isn't my style. It is, however, very well done for it's genre. Hoeg gets inside this very cold character of Smilla, isolated, intelligent, who sees the world and relationships in terms of winter, ice, fog, snow. Crystalization, temperatures, geometry. A thriller told by character sketch. A character that can walk on water (well, on the fragile ice that drifts on the surface but, hey, still cool). I don't know if I find the ultimate conclusion satisfying. As in all mysteries, this conclusion is supposed to answer all the questions of the rest of the book, retroactively explaining every event before. It seemed a bit implausible, or maybe the word is far fetched, the big giant conspiracy leading up to.... you'll see. And if you got sucked in like I did, beware the Dyson vacuum cleaner of Smilla!, you will definitely enjoy the ride.

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr [the main character's room mate] was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle."

This classic tragi-comedy by Joseph Heller epitomizes the oxymoronic nature of military intelligence and the violent meaninglessness of war to the poor, vulnerable soldier on the ground. The ones who have to face their own death every day for intangible ideals that have nothing to do with their lives, their blood. Soldiers like Yossarian, who appears naked to roll call so as not to have to accept a medal (because there was no where to pin it on, see?). Orr, who has apple cheeks from the crab apples he like to keep inside of them. Major Major, who his officers can only see if he's out--if he's in, they will have to wait until he goes out and then leave again when he returns.

Or Dunbar, who lives his life based on the principle that anything boring makes time go slower and therefore makes your life longer, or seem longer:

"You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older could you be at your age? A half a minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?" Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.

"Well, maybe it is true," Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. "Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?"

"I do," Dunbar told him.

"Why?" Clevinger asked.

"What else is there?"

I tried to watch the movie based on this novel a while ago and failed. It simply didn't compare to the deft word play and tricks with time that Heller pulls off in writing. This is one classic that is a breeze to read and will have you laughing out loud, hopefully not on an airplane as I was during this last re-reading. People kinda look at you funny.