Money - Martin Amis

 

London Fields, I was fully behind. Witty, engaging, "reasonably excessive". 

Money, on the other hand, was for me a completely pointless exercise. Its vitriolic portrayal of the excesses of the 1980s didn't read particularly vitriolic; just boring. And its depictions of the dodgy minor characters that populate the book are as lazily caricatural as their own names. 

I found this book to be as devoid of meaning as Wall Street with Michael Douglas. The biggest difference is that Wall Street made me lose a couple of hours, Money is a book that I dragged along for a good couple of weeks...

The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster

Quite possibly the best Paul Auster novel I’ve ever read, and I don’t say this lightly.  

Hector Mann, the real protagonist of the book, is as mysterious and fascinating a figure as Master Yehudi in Mr Vertigo (and his bizarre career path post-acting reminds one of Walt’s life in the same book). The love story between the narrator and Alma is a thing of beautiful delicacy, and by the end of the book the reader is happy to know that Zimmer has moved on, but also that he sees no need to tell us anything about who has taken Alma’s place. And it is always refreshing to read an Auster novel that is not set in New York (despite the fact that Zimmer lives there for a while, accidentally in Brooklyn – who would have ever thought…).

The fact that Auster went through the trouble of inventing not just a character, but also his movie plots and his entire body of work, is something that deserves a literary standing ovation (and they’re so realistic that I actually had to look up Hector Mann on Wikipedia, thinking he was a real – if a bit obscure – figure of the silent film era that I had never heard of…).