Stoner - John Williams

 

A book that I read this Christmas during a solo trip to see my parents. And what a pleasant read it was!

Perhaps the beauty of campus novels is that (when they are good?) they age remarkably well. Or perhaps it's just that, having been on a campus for the last 20 years, I feel particularly drawn to these kind of stories. 

Stoner though has a significant added value: its main character is one of those figures who seem to be particularly dear to (some) students despite not having the infinite list of credentials of senior academics. And, go figure, I rather relate to that!

Though one thing I can't quite relate to is Stoner's (at times dreadful, at times simply improbable) family life, or his rivalries at work (perhaps I'm too unimportant at my university to even be on anyone's radar!). 

Unsheltered - Barbara Kingsolver

Yet another author that I read because of my mother's recommendation (though admittedly she did win the Pulitzer, so I don't think my mom can be credited with discovering Barbara Kinsgolver!). 

Despite the fact that some of the more romanticized passages about the house and the locations of the novel bored me a bit, this was a truly pleasant read. 

Surprisingly, even the 19th century part of the plot kept me entertained, and brought to life the scientific debate of the time in a much more persuasive way than many other works of fiction. The optimism in the face of uncertainty that transpires through much of the contemporary part of the plot was at times a bit overdone for me, but hey, I acknowledge that the author might need to sell some books (and that she might feel optimistic about life in general...). 

The Bee Sting - Paul Murray

 

Beware the Ides of March. 

But also, beware the "instant classic" (The Washington Post). 

This is a novel that I thought desperately tried to be a Great American Novel. Except it isn't great, and it isn't American (on the plus side, it's a novel). As I was reading it, I often had to remind myself that the book wasn't set in the American Midwest, but actually in Ireland. And when I thought the plot was getting almost incestuous, well, it got even more incestuous. 

On the plus side, it was a pretty quick and almost effortless read. At times it was even quite pleasant, but between that and considering this one of the best novels of the last few years there's a big difference!

Intermezzo - Sally Rooney

 

I just wanted to see what the fuss was all about. And, wow, turns out the fuss was about a truly excellent book. 

Having never read anything by Rooney, I didn't quite know what to expect, and was truly carried away by her ability to make the reader care for (while not necessarily like) what happened to all the broken and flawed characters in this book. 

It wasn't enough to tempt me to learn how to play chess (luckily, most likely!) or return to Ireland (my one visit to Dublin remains rather underwhelming, though I really should visit the rest of the country), but it was enough for me to binge on all the other Rooney novels so far (which, good as they might be, in my opinion pale in comparison to Intermezzo). 

Patria - Fernando Aramburu

In my desperate search for something to read over the last couple of months, I decided to read this widely acclaimed novel. Winner of all sorts of awards and, for me, very much in the mould of A Little Life - something so bad that it made me question the sanity of thousands of supposed intellectuals around the world. 

While I do understand that ETA caused a lot of problems to people in the Basque countries and all over Spain, the vision of the book feels excessively Manichean. Miren feels little more than a caricature from a 1950s B-movie. And while on critic wrote that this is War and Peace for our times, I think it's more like a very low calibre feuilleton (then again, I have never actually read War and Peace!). 

I unfortunately read this in translation, and the translator did a monumentally pathetic job: some  Spanish expression were translated literally, others more freely, the verbal tenses (already confusing in the original, I've been informed) were all over the place, and the whole prose was so incredibly stilted. 

Tutta la Vita che Resta - Roberta Recchia

 

One of the Italian books that I just have to read every now and again. Melodramatic to the ninth degree - with somehow managed crisis after somehow managed crisis and the very occasional brief interlude of something resembling calm. 

Yet, this is not the utterly unbearable A Little Life. I actually got to feel something for the characters, and in all this drama I didn't think that the author was simply riding on the readers' emotions (and their manipulation), but was actually telling a genuinely compelling story and touching on a variety of themes with skills. 

Obviously, a number of plot twists were rather predictable - ranging from the family eventually finding a way to patch things up, to the solution of the initial crime, to the disappearance of central yet ultimately expendable characters. Still, this remain a book that I enjoyed way more than what I had expected.  

Fame d'Aria - Daniele Mencarelli

 

Another book that I borrowed from my hometown's e-library chiefly because of its appealing title (loosely translatable as "hunger for air"). 

Because of the themes it deals with (a desolate father running away with a disabled child who is growing into a man, the poverty of those who have a job and because of that are not supported by the state, the drama of the daily challenges that families on the brink have to face) one can't not like the book. 

Yet, it also reads as excessively melodramatic (or perhaps excessively influenced by the well-meaning values of the Italian petit-bourgeoisie) to really leave a mark on me, or go beyond being the kind of book that one has to read every now and again. 

Flesh and Blood - Michael Cunningham

I read this book because I couldn't get my hands on Cunningham's latest novel. 

Surprisingly, it didn't make me think of the other Cunningham novels that I had read, but rather of a relatively unsuccessful Eugenides or Franzen book. I do realize that very often Cunningham looks at his characters' family background in order to explore the lives and actions of the younger generations, but this attempt felt particularly botched. 

The most problematic character of all for me was Constantine, whose gradually revealed flaws seem to be sprinkled throughout the book without much planning. All in all, this to me looks like a book that would have loved to be a great American novel but falls considerably short. 

Strong Motion - Jonathan Franzen

 

While I didn't like this book as much as The Corrections (hell, at times I think I won't ever like another 21st century American book as much as I liked The Corrections...) I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed Strong Motion and by the fact that it's not held in higher regard by critics. 

When compared to other books by Franzen, I feel that Strong Motion does religion better than Crossroads, environment better than Freedom, and historical digging better than Purity.  

At times the prose felt a bit too underdeveloped, but two passages that I felt stole the show were the initial confrontation between Reneé and reverend Stites and the crash course in the (economic) history of the United States by Louis's father. This is possibly a relatively raw and juvenile work, but really one that - in my humble opinion - deserves more attention. 

Snow - John Banville

 

Running out of readable ebooks on the Southwark libraries app (add some new decent titles, please!) I decided to give Banville's attempt to write a detective story a go. 

And I spent most of my time thinking (and sometimes saying aloud) "John Banville, come on, since when have you become a banal author reverting to all the most obvious plot twists used in airport paperbacks?!?". 

Seriously, rarely a writer has disappointed me as much as Banville did with this book. It had them all: the detective with the troubled love life, the manipulated and mentally unstable black sheep of the family, the abusive Catholic priests (I'm really, really far from being even just remotely a fan of the Catholic Church, but this is one of the three easiest and most annoying tropes around), etc. 

And not a single actual surprising moment through the book. Never. 

Fury - Salman Rushdie

  

Another one of those books that I don't remember well (just a few weeks after having read it) and that have left me more with a vague feeling than with any specific recollections. This can't be a good sign, either for the book or for my growing forgetfulness...

Out of the few images that I can recall are the terrifying picture of a father looking at his wife and child sleeping with a knife in his hand, the creation of a doll called Little Brain (that I kept on mis-reading as Little Britain, probably another not-so-good sign), and a series of more and more problematic intercontinental phone calls. 

I actually don't even remember whether the main character ends up returning home or not, which again can't be a good thing. And I've by now decided that it's a problem with the book, and not with my memory.

Three Floors Up - Eshkol Nevo

  

Three Floors Up was the first book by Eshkol Nevo that I read. Without my mum's insistence, I wouldn't have given him a second chance because I didn't particularly enjoy this novel. 

At a superficial read, I considered it the equivalent of a sub-par Yehoshua book. At a deeper read, with its links to Freudian psychoanalysis, I found it pretentious and excessively symbolic and allegorical. 

Of the three floors, the only one I'd honestly try to peek into would be the first, with the over-protective father determined to find out the truth about what happened to his sister despite the risk of ruining everyone's lives; the second floor left me uninterested, and the third one actually kind of annoyed me with the judge appearing as a self-styled deus ex machina of the Israeli street protests.

Companion Piece - Ali Smith

  

Yet another distinctively Ali Smith-esque book, and yet another very pleasant read. 

But that got me wondering: has Ali Smith reached her plateau as "amazing author, but maybe not the best of her generation"? It feels like a pretty good plateau to be completely fair, but the fact that the style, the pace and the prose in her novels is always so easily identifiable after a while to me is suggestive of someone who experiments, but mostly within his/her comfort zone. 

Still, I'll pick up an Ali Smith novel pretty much any time I see one, in particular as she pretty much covers and analyzes contemporary events as they happen, but I'm not going to be looking forward to the next one in the same way I was when I had just started to discover her.

I Diavoli - Guido Maria Brera

  

My dad hit the jackpot by suggesting I read 54. He didn't manage to pull it off twice with this finance thriller. 

Brera gets London wrong, its topography and architecture are just wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And that upsets me. 

I understand that the finance world is dominated by men, but the female characters in this book are rather pathetic. And it's not like the male ones are that much more developed, otherwise the author wouldn't have to keep on labelling them "the French", "the German", "the Indian" etc. because their nationality is the only thing that differentiates them.

And the number of ideas that he steals (from Bryan Singer to Christopher Nolan) is just infuriating.

Crossroads - Jonathan Franzen

  

Hmm...

I feel like I would have liked this book had it not been for the fact that it's all around a religious community. A nice grassroots lay organization with a similar structure and ethos, yes. A religious community, no. 

I'm probably just an awful human being, but hey. 

I would have probably had more time for Russ had he not been a priest, and would have probably found him less boring and petty. Also, had he not worked at a church called First Reformed, I wouldn't have pictured him as a 1970s Ethan Hawke

Il Fuoco Amico dei Ricordi - Alessandro Piperno

  

For once an Italian book (actually two, as Persecuzione and Inseparabili are also stand-alone novels) that I truly and unapologetically loved. And also, incredibly, one that I didn't find provincial in comparison to works of similar scope and goals by a number of great American writers. 

The troubles of the Pontecorvos are painfully plausible, the sort of thing that can destroy a family, but also the sort of thing that a group like theirs has the tools to potentially overcome. Except that they don't, and as the situation gets out of control in the first book and a number of issues remain unsolved in the second one, Piperno paints a family picture that reminds the reader of a Mike Leigh movie ("Secrets and lies! We're all in pain! Why can't we share our pain?"). 

A Jewish family saga was always going to be a hit with me, and to think that it took me years between illegally downloading a dodgy PDF of these books, and actually reading it (legally) with my Italian library subscription.

Solar - Ian McEwan

  

I much prefer McEwan doing "science" (or thereabouts) like in this book than him doing sci-fi like in Machines Like Me, but that's not saying much. 

Solar wasn't a bad read, but I have the feeling it's already aged quite a bit over the span of a dozen years. The main driving force behind it shouldn't be the personal life of its main character (which is not as interesting as that of a number of his other characters), but rather its scientific approach, which in 2022/3 already feels quite dated. 

And the finale, with the chickens coming home to roost isn't really the most surprising.

Falling Man - Don DeLillo

I wonder whether all of Don DeLillo's books get remaindered within 24 hours. Seriously, there's always at least two of his novels at Fopp. Not that I'm complaining though, as ultimately I tend to like most (if not all) of them. 

Falling Man is a typical DeLillo book, with typical troubled characters victims of traumatic events (in this case, 9/11) and struggling to live their lives as the parameters around them are shifting. 

What was good was the idea of the artist (the Falling Man of the title), the fictionalized accounts of the moment in which the planes hit the towers as seen from the inside, and the children looking up at the sky in search of the mysterious "Bill Lawton". 

What was possibly not so good was the bizarre link (through a suitcase) between the two survivors. 

And what was ultimately a bad sign for the book is that, despite having finished it only a couple of weeks ago, I have already forgotten most of it. 

A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro

A very battered copy of this book made its way to me from the Turin airport book-crossing shelves (via my mom). And maybe it could have stayed on those shelves and waited for someone able to better appreciate it.

I absolutely love Ishiguro when he writes about posh British people, or about a dystopian British future, but whenever he writes about Japan he somehow sounds trite to me (and in terms of how he "sounds", well, in interviews he just gives me the impression of being a British aristocrat).

An Artist of the Floating World had virtually the same effect on me - I just find Ishiguro's portraits of Japan quite unimaginative, despite liking his decision to tell the story from a woman's perspective, and despite wondering whether the narrator is telling her own story or that of "a friend".

Sabrina - Nick Drnaso

A few weeks ago, IKEA in Wembley was giving out one free book from the 2018 longlist for the Booker Prize to its customers. I was happy to force my wife, her brother and his girlfriend to make it all the way there to get four free hardcover books that would have otherwise cost £64 (disclaimer – we were already in Green Park and my wife wanted to go to IKEA anyway, so it wasn’t that crazy…).

Of the four books, Sabrina was the only one that I had heard of before, given the attention that the press gave to the first graphic novel to be longlisted for the prize (attention here being really rather relative, as the mainstream press doesn’t really care that much about the longlist for the Booker, or literature in general).

At the cost of spoiling it for the readers, it was a huge relief to finish the book to realize that the build-up made of conspiracies and fake news did not result in further deaths. While the alienation and the agony of the novel make it a really good book, their continuous presence (for me) prevent it from being a great book – I really could have done with an occasional page of light relief.

Also, the stylized drawings are visually really pleasing, but am I the only one who found himself confused by characters that looked rather similar (though I suppose that was something done intentionally)?