Friday, January 17, 2014

Getting Caught Up: Read in April/May, 2013 

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.