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.

L'Uomo Verticale - Davide Longo

 

What a great dystopian novel. I'm increasingly persuaded that Davide Longo is one of the very few Italian writers able to both write well and actually interest me. L'Uomo Verticale shows us a country literally going to the dogs (unlike many other similar novels that seem to start in a setting already looking post-apocalyptic) and the quest for survival of a father and his improbable extended family. 

Or, if you are familiar with McCarthy and The Road: been there, done that. Half of the ideas of this book are more ore less openly borrowed (and/or they are a tribute from Longo to one of his favourite authors), including the relationship between a father and his child and the desperate attempts to get to the sea at all costs. 

A really good read though. Just not an original one after all.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh

If only the student who gave me this book as a Christmas present had submitted an essay all year (though he actually was one of the best students I've ever had, and I hope he got his act together for his exam!).

Despite taking place mostly in the narrator's own flat, this book is so clearly a "New York book". The plot is so disturbingly believable that I wondered whether the author hadn't gone through similar periods herself (maybe not quite a year's worth of drugged up oblivion, but a few weeks).

It's very well-written and (in a twisted way, obviously) pleasant. Yet it raises so many questions about our society, access to medicines, self-medication, depression etc., and a number of the answers are fairly cringeworthy...

Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow

Behold, a book by Saul Bellow that I didn't fully and thoroughly adore! And my last acquisition from the £1 Halcyon Books store in Greenwich before its closure.

What I liked were Henderson's back-story, his sheer size, and a number of his inner thoughts and dialogues with himself. Then again, all of these things - except the size! - are the things I normally love in Bellow's books.

What I was far from being comfortable with was him going to Africa and playing (an arguably well-intentioned) god. When he does get things epically wrong and blows up the village's cistern, I wasn't happy that he was being put in his place. I could only think about the lives destroyed by his act and about the (very) rich white man who would then move to the next village (with all the guilt in the world, obviously, but also with his millions).

Had I read this book when it was first published I would have probably reacted differently. But it would have been quite hard, because, well, that was 28 years before I was born...

The Page Turner – David Leavitt

The random books one ends up reading when one (or one’s wife) picks up a large pile of novels primarily because they are free. My parents had been talking for years about While England Sleeps, so I figured I should give Leavitt a try.

It was an enjoyable and remarkably light read. The one issue, though, is that I really didn’t find much in the book that I could relate to: as an Italian expat with very little intention of ever going back to the country I didn’t really find anything too magic in the – rather standard – poetic and idyllic descriptions of Rome; as the stereotypical manly heterosexual man, I found little interest in the heady journey of sexual discovery of the main character; and as a spoiled only child who always got along rather well with his mother, I had very little interest in the relatively problematic relationship between the titular Page Turner and his mom.

So yeah, a good book to read on a Sunday afternoon while one is trying not to think of the state of his legs after running 18 miles (damn marathon training…), but that’s about it for me…

Siddahrta – Hermann Hesse

Dare I say it, but I have the feeling that oriental mysticism transposed into Western culture often serves to hide the (spiritual) emptiness of our society. And Siddahrta, to me, is to a large extent a reflection of a readership that turns Eastwards to find a meaning to an otherwise fairly hollow existence.

I am being dreadfully harsh, I know, but I’d rather leave traditions where they are, without indiscriminately borrowing from them and watering down their unquestionable meaningfulness.

I am probably questioning the people who love Siddahrta more than the book itself, but I have the feeling that, in 1922, the novel might have actually had much more literary weight than it does now.

The Impressionist – Hari Kunzru

Another 30p surplus copy that my wife bought at the Barbican library, and a novel that I later took on a research trip to Rome, where I would hit the archives in the early morning, hit the city in the late afternoon, and hit the bed of a centrally located convent (yes, I wasn’t swimming in money as a Ph.D. student!) with a book or a movie in the (very) early evening.

I’m not quite sure if I was upset with myself for not liking a book by Kunzru, or kind of upset with him for writing a book that I couldn’t like. I had very high expectations from the book right after reading of Pran’s conception (in its biological rather than literary meaning) and getting ideas about the kinds of reactions that his complexion could cause.

But, sadly, the novel was a bit vacuous (like Pran himself) and never really won me over with its description of idealized and glorified places (which, to me, remain very much idealized and glorified even when they are deprecated in the novel). I just felt like Woody Allen’s Zelig was a much more interesting (and likeable) chameleonic character...

On the Road – Jack Kerouack

"Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there."
"Where we going, man?"
"I don't know but we gotta go."

I had this quote written on a post-it note and placed on my wardrobe in Italy ever since I was a teenager. It took me a dozen years, and countless hopeless tries that usually stopped at around page 14, before I was actually able (mature?) to read the book.

Much to my surprise, by the time I was 27 I was actually able to read On the Road and, even more surprisingly, I didn’t find it dated at all. The story is made even more interesting by the fact that so many of its characters are actually disguised real-life artists (including Burroughs – and the fact that I really didn’t like Naked Lunch doesn’t mean I didn’t find his life fascinating).

Some of Sal’s trips are more exciting than others, but I had the feeling that, ever since crossing into Mexico for the first time in the fourth part, the quality of the books rises to new heights. And the final scene is a coming-of-age and end-of-an-era realization of epic proportions.