Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides—wonderful rambling saga of Detroit and the coming of age by a hermaphrodite who finds out she is genetically and gonadically male around the age of 15.
The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo by Stieg Larsson—Pretty standard antisocial, brilliant detective
character, Lisbeth Salander. Remindes me of Eve Dallas series by J. D. Robb.
Such stories as these emulate the troubled but less extremely troubled psyche
of James’ Dalgliesh. Her Death in Holy
Orders and The Murder Room at the
top of the heap of the detective/crime genre with hers being true novels.
Death Comes to
Pemberley by P. D. James—outdoes Jane Austin in prose style and cleverness
for getting Wickham charged, tried, found guilty, then found to be innocent and
traveling to the New World—most impressive for digging into Elizabeth’s guilt
over attraction to Wickham and Darcy’s mild internal struggle with his own
arrogance toward Wickham and slight struggle over his class biases.
Finn by Jon
Clinch—Clinch’s first novel, beautiful prose style, reminds me of
Faulkner—tells the story of Huck Finn’s father, an alcoholic who is obsessed
with black women (slavery times) and who at the same time hates Black Folk, a
kind of self-denigration functioning in the novel—very cleverly answers the
question “Is Huck Black?” by giving him a free-slave mother.
Unnatural Causes
by P. D. James—the second or third Dalgliesh mystery (Cover Her Face being the first) with Dalgliesh not being on the
official case but he and his Aunt Jane Dalgliesh being drawn into the mystery
of the seemingly natural death of a neighbor whose body has had its hands cut
off. Lovely metadiscourse with the opening section describing the body in a
boat also being part of the novel that the dead man was writing.
Reality Hunger by
David Shields—on the fictionality of reality and the human urge toward the
fictionally dramatic in life, memoir, autobiography, documentary, etc.—also on
art forms that sample/plagiarize, including Reality
Hunger itself, and on bricolage.
The Mimic Men by V.
S. Naipaul—read for possible EN325 Postcolonial Lit course, but found no
narration and too too much of the first-person internal monologue of a
“colonized man.” Seems to follow the pattern of
The Plague by Camus but with
no balance between narrative’s plot and the internal monologue. The middle
section is pretty solid, but not the first part, and the 3rd (last) section is
also a bit weak.
Waiting for the
Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee—read for EN325, will use it because the
first-person reflections are set within a plot clearly told by the main
character. On the frontier life revolves around the dread, the expectation, the
raison d’être of “waiting
for the barbarians.”
Weep Not, Child by
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—a compelling story told in flat minimalist prose, so the
reader has to imagine most of the internal reflection process. We get to see
something of the thoughts of the main character, Njoroge, as he imagines
himself a scholar savior to his people in Kenya.
Ragnarok: The End of
the Gods by A. S. Byatt, a telling of the birth and end of the Aesir. Really interesting for its inclusion of dense lists of plant
and animal and mineral and astronomical life forms as well as thick
descriptions of two key plants, the world-ash Yggdrasil and the sea-tree Rándrasill.
The vividly described Norse myths are juxtaposed with and shaped by the thoughts
of an unnamed “thin child” who is sure her father will never return from the
war (WWII) and fills her wartime days with reading. She questions the way the
world was formed, the nature of God/gods, the “ineluctability” [a word used again
and again in the novel] of the badness of gods and badness of humans, the role
of destiny in human life. She is drawn to Loki, whose shape-shifting fiery
“light-bearer” being is all about finding the patterns that exist in all things
and bringing chaos to them. The thin child, too, is concerned with knowing the
patterns that control life. The narrator makes much about the gods being
creatures who bind each other and other creatures. “The word for gods is also
the word for bonds, and Loki, like his son Fenris, was bound” (119), the narrator says of the Aesir’s revenge on
Loki for the death of Baldr. The descriptions of Jörmungandr, the Midgard-serpent, and her father,
Loki, are wonderful presentations of (for Jörmungandr) a voracious appetite to contain all life
within her oroboric self and (for Loki) an obsession for collecting and
studying the patterns of life and subjecting them to transmogrifying chaos.
The Marriage Plot
by Jeffrey Eugenides—very fun meta-fiction, where audience gets inside the head
of Leonard so that we want him to succeed in his marriage plot as much as we
want Mitchell to succeed. Finally, even though Mitchell loves Madeleine, he
lets her go because that is the plot she needs. As he says, a new plot, a new
novel ending.
Anansi Boys by
Neil Gaiman—Fat Charlie Nancy has to deal with his trickster brother Spider in
the way humans have to deal with their amoral gods. And then Spider actually
falls in love with Fat Charlie’s fiancé Rosie.
