Moon Palace - Paul Auster

 

The one time in my life I had to request a renewal of a library book loan (it took me more than two weeks to read it!) and it was a Paul Auster novel...

Testament to the fact that we had a lot going on (family holidays, in part, and a huge kitchen refurb waiting for us back home), but also to the fact that this wasn't my favourite Auster book. 

Had it not been for the fact that I've read most of his other works, I would have probably enjoyed Moon Palace a lot more, but (un?)fortunately I have read most of his other works, and had already come across much better renditions of his traditional "cultured and troubled Columbia student is confused and tossed around by chance and mysterious fortuitous encounters". 

Zero K - Don DeLillo

 

It might be that I've read way too many of DeLillo's books, or it might simply be that, having just had my second child, I am not quite ready for anything too deep, but Zero K didn't quite do it for me. 

I understand why plenty of critics found this to be a fine book, but I couldn't bring myself to love it. The scientific/futuristic dynamics are not particularly exciting for me (then again, he probably is miles ahead of everyone and foreseeing things like he did with Cosmopolis) and the bodies with severed cryogenically heads just remind me of Futurama...

Like all of DeLillo's books, I'm really glad I've read it. And, like most of his books since Underworld, it is a quick read (but not a light one by any means!).

The Childhood of Jesus and the Schooldays of Jesus - J.M. Coetzee

Two hardcover books from the stock clearance section of the Barbican library bought for a grand total of 50p. That would be a good buy for any author, let alone someone of the calibre of Coetzee.

Both books follow the same story, and while I find certain aspects profoundly fascinating (and eerily current) I was ultimately bothered by the magic undertones of the two novels, particularly the second.

The idea of two migrants who reach the shore of an unknown country, unable to tell (or remember) anything of their previous escape, tied together despite not being father and son is an extremely compelling one. And yet the abstract discussions about letters, numbers and, ultimately, dance, are a bit too much for me to bear. In particular towards the end, where I so wouldn't have wanted to see Simon start to dance.

All the characters are full of mysteries and miseries (not just Simon and David, but everyone else too). I just wish someone was a bit plainer and a bit easier to understand...

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

A 30p investment at the Barbican library worth – at the very least – every penny!

Jokes aside, Cloud Atlas was a rather enjoyable read, but also a very uneven one. Some of its chapters were brilliant (Timothy Cavendish and his misadventures in the nursing home, Massa Ewing sailing in the Pacific and facing death, Robert Frobisher writing the Cloud Atlas Sextet), while others were, well, not so brilliant.

Luisa Rey’s story reads like little more than a Tom Clancy novel (if you are looking for Californian greed and corporate aggression I think you are much better off opening a token Ellroy novel), the interview to Sonmi-451 would probably leave Vonnegut of Dick rather unimpressed, and I’m not exactly sure of where I stand on Sloosha Crossing as, despite me being a pseudo-bilingual (if not trilingual) reader, I really struggled with the imagined dialect of the future…

It is a best-seller after all, but one that I’m really glad to have read (although it’s not going to enter my list of favourite books anytime soon).

Immortality - Milan Kundera

Very slowly, and not particularly steadily, but I will try to catch-up on missed entries. A couple of months ago a colleague of mine dumped a few unwanted books on my desk – in there I found some greats reads (Peter Carey’s Bliss, for instance), and some not-so-great ones, like this one (although admittedly, it probably didn’t help that I had to read it intermittently during a time of sleepless nights and when my in-laws were around).

As I was reading Immortality I actually started wondering whether Kundera used a ghost-writer for The Unbearable Lightness of Being or whether he simply took himself too seriously after writing that book. Sure, Immortality does have some nice ideas (the first appearance of Agnes, the tyre-slashing, and the first few pages about Goethe – before these start to become rather boring), but I really could have done without hundreds of pages of pseudo-philosophical quibbles. 

And if you want pseudo-philosophical quibbles, the trajectory of the physical copy of the book I read actually represents the circle of life: someone probably once loved it, then my colleague picked it up, and dropped it on my desk after reading it, and after I finished it myself I brought it to the book exchange shelf of an urban farm next to my flat, where I am afraid it will sit for a rather long time (if not for ever). 

Oracle Night – Paul Auster

Another solid 30p buy from the Barbican Library’s overstock titles. On its cover it has a line from its Herald’s review saying “If you have never read Auster before … this is the place to start”. True that. The issue, however, is that if you have read plenty of Auster before, this is quite far from being a particularly original work.

Sure, it’s beautifully written like all of Auster’s novels, and it’s also gripping and nerve-wrecking as only his stories can be, but everything in it has already been seen: the Sisyphean task of reorganizing phone books reminds the reader of the wall of The Music of Chance, the inability of a writer to proceed with his work is, well, just like pretty much every other novel Auster has ever written, the importance of colours (like team Blue) echoes The New York Trilogy, and both the in-house aggression and Nick’s story within the story and his slow but inevitable death look very much like scenes and anecdotes taken from Smoke.

This remains a really good read, and, I agree, it would be a great introduction to Auster’s world, but it’s not exactly ground-breaking. To give credit where credit is due, however, the little side-stories that the author develops in his page-long footnotes are truly great. 

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me – Javier Marías

This time a book that my dad tried to get me to read for years (and I’ve only done it now because, rather surprisingly, its author is coming to speak at the LSE – not a school known for its love for literature! – next week).

The novel is beautifully written, and the starting idea (the unexpected death of an almost stranger in the arms of the narrator) is a majestic literary device. The constant references and quotes are intriguing if a tad bit too high-brow (I didn’t get any of them, except perhaps the tailing of Luisa – the sister of his dead lover – through the streets of Madrid as maybe a reference to Hitchcock’s Vertigo).

But (there is always a but) after a while the book gets slightly too repetitive. Yes, life is weird and goes in circles, but there is no need to repeat the same sentences a number of times (the first time you do that it’s interesting, after a while it just grows old). Most of all, because of these constant circular references, I just didn’t find the surprising finale that surprising, which was a bit of a shame and left me rather unmoved (speaking of cultural references, The Big Bang Theory’s treatment of Schrödinger's cat is definitely more interesting, and also undoubtedly funnier!). 

Mrs Dalloway – Virgina Woolf

Yet another one of the books that I got from Books for Free in Stratford before its untimely closure last year. Having only read To the Lighthouse, I was determined to find something by Virginia Woolf that could be, erm, readable for me. I picked Mrs Dalloway not so much because I knew what it was about, but rather because I loved Cunningham’s The Hours so much (maybe not the most valid of premises, but hey, it did the trick).

Turns out that Mrs Dalloway was in fact readable (so much so that I even managed to read most of it during a train ride between London and Cambridge without feeling the need to shoot myself in the foot) and, rather surprisingly, it was also quite enjoyable. Clearly, I found the troubled life of Septimus Warren Smith to be much more interesting than Clarrisa’s own (despite the fact that her relation, or lack thereof, with Sally is so very beautifully sad).

Most of all, having been at the London School of Economics for almost ten years now, surrounded by the myth of Virginia Woolf, the Fabian Society, and the Bloomsbury Group, reading Mrs Dalloway has allowed me to have an eye-opening epiphany: most of them were probably horrible people who ultimately either hated (or at the very least disliked profoundly) each other and only pretended to be friends because it could come in handy. Yes, rather sad…

Cosmopolis – Don DeLillo

Yet another book from what is essentially an unending stock of novels that I either got for close to nothing from Fopp or actually for nothing at the good old Books for Free shop.

I loved DeLillo’s White Noise, had mixed feelings about Underworld, and saw Cosmopolis as a “DeLillo meets absurdist Paul Auster, meets Joyce, meets Minority Report” kind of pastiche. There is clearly nothing wrong with any of those four ingredients, but this mix just doesn’t work for me.

The novel, despite its shortness, ends up being crammed with ideas that are potentially interesting but surely overwhelming, and Eric’s frequent meetings with his wife are just too dreamlike for me (so much so that I was afraid they would turn into something like the bathroom scene in The Shining). There is also too much death around (including that of his bodyguard which is, honestly, absolutely gratuitous).

This is not to say that the novel is uninspiring – there are plenty of interesting points raised about our expectations from society and about human nature (why does Eric ultimately hope that the rap star he idolizes died in a gunfight and not of a common heart attack? Why does he confront Benno Levin when he tries to kill him instead of running away from him?) – but it’s just, well, a bit much (ado about nothing). 

The Music of Chance – Paul Auster

Last Saturday I crossed the Thames and went to Stratford for my Life in the UK test (which I passed, by the way – meaning that there is now nothing stopping me from becoming a British citizen, hopefully). I had to walk through the Shopping Centre on my way and found this wonderful place (https://www.facebook.com/BooksforFreeStratford/) where they give away up to three free books for every visitor – no strings attached and no catches! In terms of maintaining my faith in mankind, this place ranks right up there with Parkrun. Visit it, pick up books, donate books, and prevent them from essentially going to landfill…

Moving on to the actual book, I have now read most of Auster’s works and, as far as absurdist novels go, this is one of my favourites (I liked it a lot more, for instance, than the stories of the New York Trilogy). It’s deeply disturbing and the reader knows from the start that everything is spiralling out of control but doesn’t know how it will all end (Will the wall close in on Nashe like it used to do on Roger Waters and David Gilmour after the first half of The Wall? Will Stone and Flower create a tiny little replica of Nashe and run his life for him through the “City of the World”? Will he get killed as he tries to escape?). Yet, there is always a sense of hope: maybe Nashe’s sister, his daughter, Pozzi, or maybe even Tiffany, the prostitute from Atlantic City, can help the guy survive in one way or another.

The one thing that annoyed me, though, is that I am sure I didn’t manage to pick up on tons of the novel’s insightful remarks and metaphors – the links to the myth of Sisyphus are clear, but there are surely millions more…

To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

If reading The Hours made me want to read something by Virginia Woolf, reading To the Lighthouse quickly made me reconsider that. I initially borrowed a copy of the book from the library of my Canadian school, never going beyond page 3, and last year I just forced myself to read it.

I don’t think I’ve ever struggled as much with a 200-page book. Its stream of consciousness was considerably heavier than any I had read before. Its lack of dialogue drove me mad. I knew the novel wasn’t going to have much of a plot, but I wasn’t expecting it to be essentially about nothing.

The one thing I liked about this book was its cover (one of Hopper’s lighthouses) and now I can’t even find it on Google images. I’m glad I’ve read it because I felt like I had to, but I could think of so many better things to do with my time (including popping bubble wrap, doing jumping jacks, giving my grandma a call, etc.)

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago

I have the feeling I should have read some of Pessoa’s work before actually starting this book. Then again, my mother tried and found him utterly unreadable, and I kind of trust her blindly when it comes to literature (and, sort of, life in general I guess). The book is as beautifully written as it gets. Yet, my problems with anything remotely magical-realistic very much remain. Again, I probably should have read this book ten years ago.

Ricardo Reis is an endearing character much like Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira is (or is it just the Portuguese atmosphere that surrounds the characters that makes me put the two together?), but if you have to patiently accept your death in a dream-like passage, I would suggest going through the corn in a field in Iowa with Shoeless Joe Jackson, rather than walking with Fernando Pessoa to his graveyard. 

Nausea – Jean Paul Sartre

It took me years to read my first novel by Sartre. I blame it on the (mutual) dislike for my high-school philosophy teacher and his classes on existentialism (disclaimer: he was a great teacher, but wasn’t particularly nice to me and my then girlfriend – the same girl I ended up marrying).

Despite its title, Nausea is a really enjoyable book. Much to my surprise, its apathy doesn’t rub onto the reader, and I actually managed to appreciate its deep and reflective passages a lot more than I would have expected.

And I was a big fan of the Autodidact (probably because I like to think of myself as having a similar approach to my cultural growth), but I really wish he would keep his hands in their place...

The Stranger – Albert Camus

I have already commented on my discovery of Camus. The Stranger was the first book of his that I read, and it came in the most obscene format: I bought in on Amazon without realizing that it was one of the print on demand books that they now produce – needless to say the edition wasn’t particularly nice, in particular because it was printed on A4 paper and at first sight felt like a children’s book.

Clearly, the book is quite far from being a children’s one. While I definitely liked it, I cannot really say that I loved it. The protagonist’s detachment from life – and from his crime – probably rubbed on me as I found myself reading without too much interest about his life in prison, his trial and, ultimately, his sentence.

Or maybe that was all Camus wanted the reader to feel? Probably so. The guy, after all, was a genius…