Norman Mailer- An American Dream

An American Dream

Norman Mailer

1965

“The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.” 

Despite the fact that my pile of unread books is usually long enough to keep me preoccupied for many, many months, I'm always on the look out for books and authors to add to a mental list of future exploration. There's a massive allure of coolness with certain authors and their time periods that keeps me hooked, partially based on the style alone. I just bought a calendar with famous authors on it (because I'm a nerd), and January has a cool black and white picture of Jack London, so now I want to read Jack London. I'm kind of shallow like that.

Anyway, for a long time, Norman Mailer was just a name and its reputation for me, but a name that led me to imagine a great big bibliography for me to eventually get around to and enjoy. An American Dream was the first book I came across, and ended up being the perfect start, turning out to be an incredibly stylish, individual, downbeat and compelling story. It fits into its own place in US literary history perfectly, and I enjoyed it for many of the same reasons I enjoy Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Bukowski; though with its own special brilliance.

Originally released in 1965 as a series of installments for Esquire, An American Dream follows the story of former congressman and current television star Stephen Rojack, who, at the beginning of this relatively short book, murders his estranged wife and appears to get away with it, and spends the next two hundred pages or so spiraling into a drunken voyage through a perfect pulp fiction/film noir Manhattan. Rojack has to deal with constant suspicion from the police and from his ex-father-in-law, while meanwhile becoming more and more intoxicated with this New York underworld. He falls for his femme fatale, a night-club singer and mobster's girlfriend, and revels in the violence and decadence.

Like Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and others before him, Mailer presents a very dark and embittered take on American society, encapsulated by the bitterly ironic title. His portrayal of New York as Rojack sees it is detailed and described through his warped viewpoint, but despite being dark and dangerous it's also incredibly poetic and stylish; the charisma and poise emanates from every line, evocatively conjouring images of film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction. There's plenty to think about regarding Mailer's stylistic choices in relation to his presentation of 1960's American society, but whether you choose to imbed yourself in deconstruction or just want to follow a roller-coaster ride of style and suspense, then this book is for anyone with any fondness of gritty, hard-boiled black fiction.

Goerge R.R. Martin- A Song of Ice and Fire 04- A Feast For Crows

 A Song of Ice and Fire 04- A Feast For Crows

Harper Voyager

George R.R. Martin

2005

Game of Thrones - A Clash of Kings - A Storm of Swords: Book One: Steel and Snow -  A Storm of Swords: Book Two: Blood and Gold - A Feast for Crows

“All me lie when they are afraid. Some tell many lies, some but a few. Some have only one great lie they tell so often that they almost come to believe it ... though some small part of them will always know that it is still a lie, and that will show upon their faces.” 

Before we get going with this review of the fourth installment of George R. R. Martin's soap opera with swords, I feel like I need to make kind of an apology to the friends I have who really, really like the series. Honestly guys, I'm sorry in advance, because I understand how the power and lure of a good franchise universe can extract an unconditional love for even its weakest entry. Then, when a guy comes along who admits he's not really a fan of fantasy, starts reviewing the beloved series, and goes from enthusiastically positive to drearily repetitive within four micro-blogs, I can see how that might kind of annoy people.

So yeah, the above paragraph might give the impression that I really didn't enjoy A Feast for Crows, and that impression would be right. On this whole, this review is going to be pretty negative, but, don't fret, will aim for a bit of positivity. I'm not giving up on this series (I've got a copy of A Dance with Dragons- Book One sat on my shelf), and I do expect it to return to a more enjoyable standard, because the reason that I didn't at all like this one was pretty obvious. Going back to the franchise thing above; A Song of Fire and Ice is no really different to, say, Star Wars in that it's continuity-based storytelling where the appeal lies in strong, memorable characters. If George Lucas wrote Empire and cut out Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Yoda because it was getting too long, it would be rubbish. In A Feast of Crows, George R. R. Martin excludes Jon Snow, Tyrion, and  Daenerys completely, and I'm pretty sure those three are the best characters.

On the one hand, I'm looking forward to reading the next book a bit more, but on the other it leaves this book as dull and fairly event-less, as it follows the stories of second-tier characters like Cersei and Samwell, taking another 600-pages to do so. I'm not a fan of Martin's writing style by itself, so I was left with almost nothing interesting. The only character I really had any interest in was Arya Stark, and nothing much happens with her either.

So, what did I like about this book? Not much. The pace of events picks up somewhat towards the end for certain characters. There's plenty of violence and other nastiness, as is tradition for this series. The cover is a nice colour. I'm suspiciously looking forward to the next one. That's about it, really. Essentially it comes down to the fact that I'm only a casual Song of Ice and Fire fan and I don't hang on Martin's every word, so his decision to slimline the scope of this book only served to damper my enjoyment. That's enough of that.

Paul Auster- Timbuktu

Timbuktu

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

1999

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible
 

“That's all I've ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn't matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.”

I don't really get any hits on this website. Admittedly a lot of this is because I barely ever update it and put almost absolutely no effort into promoting it whatsoever. The remaining reason is probably because all I do is write about books, and books aren't massively popular. Don't get me wrong, they're not in danger of going anywhere, and millions of people worldwide enjoy reading, but they're definitely behind films, television and music in the modern entertainment pantheon, and perhaps video games too. It takes the average person far more time to finish a novel than to watch a film, and so anyone who wants to egotistically consider themselves to be well-read has to spend a lot of bloody time sitting still, thumbing paper.

I've distracted myself from the original point of the above paragraph, which I never actually made. Anyway, my point is that the ten people (maybe) who've opened up my blog site today are undoubtedly groaning in unison at the sight of yet another Paul Auster review. He might be a great author, but he's not exactly fashionable, and he's probably not going to shoot up the page ranking. But that's what I get for committing myself to review everything I read.

Anyway, the thing about Timbuktu that genuinely makes it stand out from every other Auster novel such as- gratuitous link time- Invisible, Mr. Vertigo and The Invention of Solitude) as a book that I honestly think could have major mainstream appeal is that it's literally about a dog. His name is Mr. Bones, and he is very clever. He's not a talking, intelligent Disney-style dog, but he does have the neat narrative ability to understand English, leaving him somewhere between Goofy and Pluto on the intelligence scale.

At the start of the novel Mr. Bones is in the care of one Willy G. Christmas, a long-suffering now-homeless kindly soul who also happens to be about to die. He and Mr. Bones take their last journey together to Baltimore, in search of a figure from Willy's past, but inevitably Mr. Bones finds himself alone.

Partly a philosophical look at our hopes for the afterlife and partly a nerve-wracking adventure of danger and confusion, Timbuktu is a book that stayed with me permanently the first time I read it some years ago, and had the same effect the second time around. It might be that it's easy to tug at the heartstrings when your lead character is a lonely dog, but Auster still does it very well indeed, mixing up narrative fantasy with harsh doses of reality to lead to a unique, intense, and poignant ending.

Short, simple and bittersweet, Timbuktu may look like a curio in the author's bibliography, but it's actually one of his strongest efforts and certainly something I'd recommend to anyone wanting to read him for the first time. 

Self-Peer Pressure

I was ill for a bit, and after I recovered I increased my hours at work, plus I'm lazy. Anyway, in the hope of some organisation, the following is a list of all the books I need to review to catch up;

Paul Auster- Timbuktu
Paul Auster- Leviathon
George R. R. Martin- A Feast for Crows
Soren Kierkergaard- Fear and Trembling
Darren Shan- The City- Book One- Procession of the Dead
Norman Mailer- An American Dream

I'm pretty sure that's it. That and about 30 Discworld books.

Hunter S. Thompson- The Great Shark Hunt- Strange Tales from a Strange Time

The Great Shark Hunt- Strange Tales from a Strange Time

Picador Press

  Hunter S. Thompson

1979 (Collected)

“I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.”

“In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.” 

First of all, Hunter S. Thompson is probably the most quotable author I know, and settling on a quote for this review was really hard, so I went with two. Secondly, this is the fifth installment in my frantic (well, ish) attempt to catch up with the list of books I'd read and not reviewed, which puts me more than half way there. For a lazy writer like me, this is somewhat of an achievement.

Anyway, this brings me to my latest review and it's my second Hunter S. Thompson one, after Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. If you can remember, or just clicked the link and trawled through my rambling nonsense, I wasn't as much of a fan of that book as I'd like to be, though I did gain a positive impression of it overall. Basically the deal with that one is that I frantically admire, adore and worship Thompson's ability to select his vocabulary and manipulate his prose like a true genius, like a modern-day-drug addled Thomas de Quincy (he who wrote the book of which I stole and adjusted the title of for this blog) or Joseph Conrad (Thompson's quest to track down Ricard Nixon reminded my of the hunt for Kurtz in Heart of Darkness)- I like him that much. It's just the topic matter that I don't care enough about; like when Paul Auster inserts an article about baseball in a novel I'm enjoying.

The Great Shark Hunt- Strange Tales from a Strange Time is somewhat like Campaign Trail '72 in that both are collections of Thompson articles and columns from a set period. The latter was a pre-planned series following one topic, but this collection is far more open, collecting the author's most notable work from the late fifties until the end of the seventies, for famous publications such as Rolling Stone, Playboy & The New York Times as well as some very early articles writing for the US air force.

The subjects of these angrily-written, expletive-ridden, extravagant prose filled articles are generally the things that Thompson was most interested in. This means lots of articles about politics, and about the world of politics. Nixon and Jimmy Carter are constant targets of aggressive analysis, as is the Watergate scandal of course. Altogether the politics encompasses around half of the book, which I had mixed feelings about. As in Campaign Trail, I learned a little and enjoyed a little more about the 70's US politics scene, but the aspects that I enjoyed (namely Thompson's ability to portray the world in the way he does) were swamped by a deluge of names of people and societies that I've never heard of before, and so the deep context alienated me as a reader somewhat.

Everything else, though was very entertaining and interesting. The first part of the book is short but intriguing, containing a selection of Thompson's air force work. The character within his writing is totally clear and identifiable, but it's the thought of Thompson writing for the establishment (and failing to meet their standards) which is interesting. Part two of the book is the politics stuff. Some of it is taken directly from Campaign Trail and included as extracts, which is basically just a way of ripping the buying reader off. The third part of the book was the one that appealed to me most, as it avoids politics and instead focuses on travel and culture; looking at the beat generation, at South America. The book concludes with a focus on Thompson's gonzo influence, and the Fear and Loathing name.

This book isn't going to appeal to many people who pluck it randomly from the shelf, and, ironically, it'll never be as recognised as the amazing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it's definitely the place to go for newer fans of Thompson who've just finished Raoul Duke's story, and also for readers particularly into the post-beat movement. While there are plenty of great full novels from that period, these shorter snippets of encapsulated life offer a manic, ingenious, and unique view into a fascinating artistic world.

Cormac McCarthy- No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men

Picador Press

Cormac McCarthy
2005

“I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.”

As I frantically and purposelessly rush to catch up with my surplus of finished but yet-to-be-reviewed books before adding more to them- though I've just started reading George R.R. Martin's A Feast for Crows and it's about six million pages long- I found myself returning to the polarizing figure of Cormac McCarthy. When I use the word polarizing I'm referring to my varying opinions on the first two McCarthy novels I've read; The Road was a superb modern novel, a slice of thoughtful post-apocalyptic fiction written fairly recently and winner of the Pulitzer prize. Blood Meridian, however, was written twenty years earlier than The Road, back when McCarthy was mainly known for very bloody, and very gritty Western/cowboy fiction.

I did not like Blood Meridian at all, which left me feeling rather apprehensive about starting McCarthy's third very famous book; No Country for Old Men (famously adapted by the Coen brothers two years later into an Academy Award Best Picture winner that I should probably watch some day). I honestly wasn't expecting to enjoy it because it's another Western, albeit a modern one, and I think the combination of typical accented, regional Western dialogue with McCarthy's regular decision to abandon regular speech punctuation can create a frustrating experience for a reader not attuned to it, like me.

With my expectation of enjoyment pretty low, I was still surprised that I ended up liking it. Not a huge amount, but I liked it. In hindsight the key to this was I hadn't realised that No Country was a lot more contemporary than Blood Meridian. Set in the present day, No Country revolves around a small cast of tough, gritty and very western characters all caught up in the aftermath of a drug deal gone badly wrong. Tough, gritty Westerner Llewellyn Moss accidentally stumbles upon the the crime scene, where amongst a collection of bullet-ridden bodies and heroin he discovers a bag containing $2 million dollars. After some internal debate, he takes it (and spends much of the novel re-evaluating and regretting his decision). He also sees and speaks to the only survivor, who is mortally wounded, and Moss later returns with some water for the man. He's already dead though, and his friends have turned up to investigate. Moss barely escapes the scene, and the chase that comprises the rest of the book is on.

Moss has a charismatic and introspective detective on his trail, as well as a psychopathic hit-man, who essentially exist as an angel and a devil both fighting for his soul. Moss is an ambiguous, unpredictable character who certainly isn't evil, but is easily capable of making the wrong decision. The set-up from then on is actually kind of simple and easy to follow, as the reader follows the inevitable fate of each of the three main characters in a standard-length novel. The contemporary nature of the novel, including the writing style, character portrayal and (importantly for me) the dialogue was far more typical than the genre-specific style of Blood Meridian. I'm probably making myself out to seem like an idiot here, but I can't be bothered to mentally invest in a genre and style I get nothing out of, but No Country only takes what it needs from the classic Western genre rather than all of it, which made it far more interesting for me. Recommended to most fans of contemporary fiction, particularly if you like grim, gritty and introspective. I'll have to watch the film next.

David Eagleman- Sum- Tales from the Afterlives

Sum- Tales from the Afterlives

Cannongate Press

David Eagleman
2009

“And once again the Rewarder and the Punisher stalk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal.”

The phrase 'don't judge a book by its cover'; I've never understood that one. If you decide specifically not to judge book by their covers then you place serious limitations on what you'll buy. It's fine if you see a book that you've heard has a great reputation and you're willing to buy because of the author or the title alone, but if you go book hunting and don't find one of these examples then you have no other alternative but to go home and cry into a bowl of cornflakes. Judging books by their covers is great fun, I do it all the time, and sometimes it helps uncover an absolute gem.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, originally from New Mexico, currently working in Houston, Texas. His name on the front of a book, any book, would not attract my attention by itself. Nor would the title; Sum- Tales from the Afterlife, which could be any kind of esoteric new age hippy spiel. Put this title in the center of the book surrounded by a sparkling galactic arc of stars, and then place a glowing quote by Stephen Fry underneath and you're guaranteed to catch my attention.

In addition to this, other quotes of complete positivity from broadsheet newspapers, Phillip Pullman (His Dark Materials) and Brian Eno for some reason sold it. I completely and totally judged this book by its cover, making an educated gamble based on the information I had. I've done this with other books in the past, and a few of them were a bit of a waste of time, but on this occasion I found an absolute gem, because Sum- Tales from the Afterlife is one of the most uniquely interesting, compelling and memorable books I think I've ever read.

The book is essentially a collection of forty different micro-stories (I've made that phrase up) all emanating from the same simple theme; the afterlife. These forty stories consist of no-more than four pages each, resulting in a book that only just makes it past the one-hundred page mark; culminating in what isn't really a novel, but instead a collection of philosophical introspective wisdom. In each story, Eagleman describes to the reader through an extended summary the details of an individual (though generally Christianity-based) afterlife, where events have contrived to create a scenario far different to typical depictions of Heaven. For example, in the opening, title-track story Sum, Eagleman details an afterlife where the individual relives every moment of their life through experiencing every job, every sensation grouped together ('you spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. you sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes).

The story Absence tells of an afterlife where God has vanished, leaving his spiritual charges alone in heaven to spend endless years warring over Him, as they do on Earth. My favourite story is Quantum, telling of an afterlife where for each individual every possible action or thought they can have exists and occurs at the same time. This story is merely a lead-up for a joke about relationships. As becomes clear very quickly on with each different example, this book is about the world we live in today, simply turned upside down and shaken about a bit so Eagleman can make his point.

At times funny, inspiring, and very poignant this book was very enjoyable. I'm hesitant to describe it as a curio because it's more than that; it's a book that could be returned to as a whole, or in segments to provide a moment of interest. I shot through this book very quickly, reading it in two short sittings because I found it so compelling, so I have a suspicion that I didn't even get as much out of it as I could've. Before I do get around to looking at it again, I'm going to have to look at everything Eagleman's done since.

Haruki Murakami- A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase

Vintage

Haruki Murakami

1982 (Japan) - 1989 (English)
Translated by Jay Rubin
   

Other Murakami Reviews- A Wild Sheep Chase - Dance Dance Dance - Underground - Sputnik Sweetheart - after the quake - After Dark - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - 1Q84- Books I & II - Book III - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Strange Library

“What is this Will?” I asked.
“A concept that governs time, governs space, and governs possibility.”
“I don’t follow.” I said.
“Of course. Few can. Only the Boss had a virtually instinctual understanding of it. One might even go so far as to say he negated self-cognition, thereupon realizing in its place something entirely revolutionary. To put it in simple terms for you, his was a revolution of labour incorporating capital and capital incorporating labour"

  

It's starting to really occur to me that I seem to be reviewing books by the same authors over and over again, but I tend to get hooked on writers' full bibliographies so there's still a good few Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster and Cormac McCarthy books to go. This time it's back to 1982, and Murakami's first major work, one that I initially thought was his debut novel but is instead the final part of a selection called The Trilogy of Rats. The confusion comes from the fact that Murakami's novels are published in the UK by Vintage, but for some reason they didn't publish either Hear the Wind Sing or Pinball, 1973 and those are harder to get (in yea olde timey booke stores, I mean, not Amazon). So I bought and read this out of order, but it didn't really make a difference to me because A Wild Sheep Chase works fine as a book by itself.

That's generally because Murakami's plots are often so surreal and dis-corporate that I don't expect a book I'm reading for the first time to make direct sense to me. I'll try and accurately describe the plot of this one; an unnamed narrator (fitting the bill of Murakami's favourite lead type; male, anonymous, sensitive, detached and uncertain) introduces the reader to his life, consisting of a dull profession in advertising and P.R. with a partner, and a girlfriend with the most beautiful ears in the world. The narrator unassumingly takes possession of what he believes is merely a photograph of scenery, of a group of unknown sheep in an unknown field. Instead the photograph is far more valuable than that, as a representative large and powerful society of people approach him offering him a great sum of money for both the photo and his silence.

Naturally, the lead is far too intrigued by this strange series of events to simply let things go, and after some investigating he realises that the key to the issue is one particular sheep in the picture; one with a strange star-shaped pattern in its fur that proves to be unidentifiable to anyone. Our lead character and his girlfriend with the beautiful ears are forced by narrative law to investigate further, and so begins a confusing, paranoid, mysterious odyssey. As in Murakami's other longer fiction (like 1Q84 or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the Edge of the World), events proceed under an unpredictable logic. Characters disappear and arrive unexpectedly, as the reader and narrator become almost as equally lost as each other.

Comparing Murakami with other authors is fairly easy by now. He's clearly passionate about Western fiction, film and music, with the results seeping into his work. Like Murakami's other work it's all thematically and stylistically comparable to the surrealism of Franz Kafka (The Secret Agent, for me), and the hard-boiled dialogue of Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlow character. Or you could go deeper back in to literary history and even more roughly compare it all to a classical Oedipal odyssey, if you want to be a bit snarky and all that. To me, though Murakami throughout each of his novels remains unique because of the combination of his influences and his attributes.

A Wild Sheep chase is not amongst Murakami's best efforts, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a first time reader of the author. As the plot progressed and became more inexplicably convoluted the novel failed to match up to Murakami's later efforts (Kafka on the Shore) in presenting the absurdity and surrealism as meaningful for the character. Murakami's lead is very much an alien, who loses contact with the reader further into the novel. Ultimately I enjoyed the book as another powerful, imaginative novel through its prose and tone, but the story and the characters didn't grab me.

Ray Bradbury- The Silver Locusts- The Martian Chronicles

The Silver Locusts- The Martian Chronicles

Corgi

Ray Bradbury
1950

'“Do you ever wonder if--well, if there are people living on the third planet?'
'The third planet is incapable of supporting life,' stated the husband patiently. 'Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.”' 

Returning to Ray Bradbury and his seemingly-endless droll science fiction antics, after reading and very much enjoying Bradbury's take on 1984 in Fahrenheit 451 I returned to a short story collection not unlike the first Bradbury book I read, The Illustrated Man. The stories in The Silver Locusts (a book more commonly known as The Martian Chronicles in its native United States, but that's not where I be) were written between 1946 and 1950- or later, depending on the edition of the book you own, mine is the UK original- for various science fiction publications. In this bastardized novel form Bradbury attempted to include thematically similar stories and added around a handful of new ones in an attempt to bring the concept together cohesively. For me, it just didn't work.

The original edition of this collection contains twenty-eight stories, arranged in chronological order to tell the greater story of a suffering and desperate human race attempting to colonise Mars. The stories are split in to three parts; the first selection tell of man's desperate attempts to reach the red planet and escape a nearly totally devastated Earth in the face of nuclear destruction. Those that do make it arrive to encounter the martian race in various ways, but almost all with tragic outcomes. Bradbury writes several of these stories with a heavy emphasis on the Martian's perspective, and as a result quickly establishes the key narrative element of using his alien characters to offer a twisted glimpse into humanity. Though I've only read three of his books, it seems that he has certain concepts that remain paramount throughout his writing; for me, those were boiled down to the essence of a lack of faith in humanity to be able to deal peacefully with others.

As in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, the downfall of the Martian race is through a lack of immunity to common human diseases, and soon the human colonists seem to have the planet to themselves. Transposing important human issues and history into new visions with new perspectives is an integral part of the best science fiction, I think, and it perhaps wasn't a distant concept to turn the prairies of the newly colonized American west into vast empty Martian deserts. Anything seems possible, in an understated mesh of southern gothic and alien horror genres.

The third act of the collection requires an important plot point to explain, so I'll refrain from that because nobody likes big spoilers, but truth be told it's a continuation of the colonisation theme taken to its natural conclusion, in Oroborous fashion. By this point, though, my interest had bottomed out and it was only stubbornness that forced me to complete the book. Thinking about what left me so cold about The Silver Locusts compared to how much I enjoyed Fahrenheit 451 (a lot) and The Illustrated Man (a bit), it seems to me that the answer lies in the telling of the stories; thinking back over the overarching plot and themes it's a very clever book, and a very well organised collection of cohesive parts, but I couldn't enjoy them. Partly I think because the variety of setting was understandably slim, but mostly because Bradbury failed to make me care about almost any of the characters in the short time they were each granted on the page. Montag, of Fahrenheit 451 is allowed much more space to breathe and grow in what is still a short novel, and existed as a point of identification. The characters of this book mean nothing to me. Perhaps as a Brit rather than an American I just can't bring myself to care enough about thoughts of a new world and the dangers of a fresh civilization.

Yann Martel- Life of Pi

Life of Pie

Cannongate

Yann Martel
2001

"I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality."

Okay, I've been lazy for far too long with this blog. My original excuse was that I moved house and didn't feel like writing anything while I was settling in, but to be honest it's just because I'm one of those people who finds it way easier to spend time reading or watching the work of others than actually composing something in my own words. That's probably why I write a book review blog. Anyway, now I'm finally forcing myself to catch up with the backlog of stuff I've read and haven't reviewed (so the Discworld stuff is going to have to wait), and it seems appropriate to start with a book that's soon to be released as a probably massive Hollywood blockbuster; Yann Martel's Life of Pi.

Before I started to read Pi, I wasn't honestly expecting to like it, because I'm constantly suspicious of any book I see that's been included and praised by a TV book club, because the type of people I've seen on those programs make me want to go to sleep for the rest of my life. I had the same problem with Cormac McCarthy's The Road before I read it, but I enjoyed that. So, after being promised it was brilliant, I gave Life of Pi a shot. Thankfully, it was brilliant.

I love this cover.

The initial attraction for most people to this book is its intriguing high-concept set-up; a young Indian boy named Piscine is shipwrecked on a lifeboat in the Pacific ocean with a Bengal tiger. It's very attention-grabbing, but obviously the reason why the book is such a successful and unclassifiable piece of work is because there's a great deal more than that. First of all, Martel presents the tale as a first-hand story being narrated to the author by Pi as an old man, recounting not just the primary tale but detailing his life from the beginning. From the beginning Pi is established as a very eccentric, but passionate and willful child (like Rudyard Kipling's Kim on Red Bull), who, despite being raised as Hindu, chooses to declare himself both a Christian and Muslim as well. Pi's family own and run a zoo in Pondicherry, India, and Pi enjoys an amazing childhood with the many animals he knows by name. But then the zoo is sold, and Pi learns he is to travel to Canada with his family on a large boat, with many of the zoo animals caged beneath deck. Guess what happens next?

As the ship sinks, Pi is thrown onto a lifeboat, alongside a Zebra with a broken leg, a ravenous hyena, an orangutang, and a  Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. What follows is a desperate fight for survival, with each day a battle of will and cunning between tiger and boy. Naturally events progress somewhat unexpectedly, but I'll stubbornly resist spoiling any of them. The third part of the book is different in style, as Pi has a long conversation with a third party of individuals in a manner which potentially changes the whole nature of the story we've just read. While I felt the main narrative was thrilling enough, it's this conclusion which elevated Life of Pi for me as something not just good, but great.

Hopefully at some point I'll re-read it, because it certainly seemed like a book that could improve and change with each revist, especially during the second reading when events can be approached in a much fuller context. Also, in hindsight I can see why Life of Pi was selected and highlighted by mainstream popular culture because it works well on several levels; not only as a surreal character odyssey but as an engaging human drama, and one that should be a pretty easy sell for the 20th Century Fox if they pitch it right. I'm pretty excited to see the film because a proper rendition of the novel could be stunning, but then I guess you should probably never get your hopes up in those cases.

These things.

To be done, for my own sanity;

Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian
Haruki Murakami- A Wild Sheep Chase
Ray Bradbury- The Silver Locusts
Norman Mailer- An American Dream
Yann Martel- Life of Pi.
 .
*Edit* Yay, I did it

George Owell- Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

Penguin

George Orwell

1950 (Collected)

Other Orwell Reviews- Burmese Days - A Clergyman's Daughter - Homage to Catalonia - Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

 "The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges."
- The Prevention of Literature (1946)

With my perusal of George Orwell's bibliography of fiction almost finished (well, aside from Burmese Days which I have sitting on the pile), I was really excited to visit my first collection with essays. Orwell is obviously a very well known and appreciated essayist, and besides that much of his appeal to me within his fictions (I'm specifically thinking of A Clergyman's Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying as well as 1984) is his ability to convert the most salient, entertaining and insightful points of a quality, passionate essay into his fiction without too much trouble, seemingly effortlessly both enriching the story and further establishing his sociopolitical viewpoints.

Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays is a very popular compendium of around twenty Orwell essays of differing length and subject. As an aside, it slightly irritates me that I didn't get a hold of a more complete, chronologically accurate collection of the complete Orwell, but I suppose that gives me something to do in the future. Now, to state the absolutely obvious, the variety of subjects, subject length, in-depth analysis and whimsy (or lack of) is sure to effect the reader's enjoyment of each individual essay. Personally, while I'm very glad I read each essay and certainly learned a lot, it was the extended length (and, to a certain extent) subjects of two essays in this collection which left me feeling a little bored and disinterested temporarily, while most of the shorter pieces were utterly fantastic.

Black + White= Cooler

To get the less-interesting (to me) out of the way first, I wasn't particularly interested in the 60-page plus critical analysis of Charles Dickens, entitled simply Dickens. Without meaning to go on a distracting diatribe, I did go on a bit of a Dickens binge in my late teens, but gave up after eight or so books due to the increasing feeling of boredom I felt with each new book. In fairness, Orwell's essay is certainly no fawning fan worship or anything like that, instead seriously studying the social reflections and interpretations of the then one hundred year novels with insight and care. I just didn't find it that interesting, and its length distorted the collection somewhat. The other essay I found uninteresting was Politics vs. Literature- An Examination of Gulliver's Travels, which is probably because I've never read Gulliver's Travels, and can't really be bothered to.

Now, the good stuff; pretty much everything else. The title essay, Shooting an Elephant is an autobiographical snippet about Orwell in Burma working as a policeman, on a day where an elephant went rogue and Orwell had to shoot it. Mostly lacking in political analysis and doom and gloom, it's an enthralling and dramatic piece that's interesting and emotional, and gives a great insight into the mind and ethics of the author. The Decline of the English Murder is another extremely famous essay, which satirises in a very black way the representation of real life crime stories in the English press of the time. How the Poor Die is an extremely bleak autobiographical look at a Parisian hospital Orwell visited in the 20's, and provides another fascinating insight into the mind of Orwell.

I very much enjoyed the numerous essays on literature aside from Dickens and Swift; Bookshop Memories might be my favourite of everything collected here, and is accompanied by Boys Weeklies and Good Bad Books as charming, thoughtful and joyously written essays on popular literature and personal experiences on it. One of the things I love about reading Orwell is that he leaves his heart on each page; you can trace through his bibliography and get a full impression of his personal development and thoughts throughout the years, leading eventually to the epic 1984. Each snippet collected in Shooting an Elephant adds towards that, giving a fuller and fuller picture of one of the most important authors of all time. I would heartily recommend this collection because it offers a variety of moods and themes, but consists of great, great writing from a unique and talented mind.

Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

Random House

Cormac McCarthy
1985

"And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons."

I really didn't like Blood Meridian.

Apologies to all dedicated Cormac McCarthy loyalists out there. Apologies to the legions of my fellow book reviewers out there, to the hundreds of men and women who have put pen to paper or fingers to keypads to compose a no-doubt sterling and well thought-out and well-received pieces that have all eventually combined through the power of the Internet to pronounce McCarthy's break-out work of fiction as a legitimate classic in twentieth century American fiction. Sorry you guys, but despite all the fawning plaudits I thought it was kind of a bad book; by no means lacking in substance or craftsmanship, but consistent of different factors put together as a package that didn't give me very much enjoyment.

Blood Meridian is only my second exposure to the now very large literary figure of Cormac, with the first naturally being previously reviewed The Road, which (spoiler alert) I really quite liked. Of course The Road remains McCarthy's most recent novel (published 2006), while Blood Meridian is twenty-years older, written back in a section of the author's life where his favoured preoccupation was the genre of the Western (leading towards The Border Trilogy, which sits on a unread pile of mine) , and Blood Meridian is very much a Western. It follows a portion of the life and adventures of a lead character known only as 'The Kid', introduced as a tough-as-nails teenage boy with a murky, escaped history, who has been traveling the wilderness of Texas, surviving with his fists and wit. He soon meets a series of quirky, dangerous, and equally mysterious individuals who cast a shadow over the story, and play a major part in its developments; particularly 'Judge' Holden, charismatic and vicious.

The Kid's ramblings and new friendships lead him through San Antonio, and into Mexico as part of a group of army irregulars hunting for Mexicans. The result is a mass of violence, mayhem and murder, continuing as The Kid travels back over the border, and characters such as the Judge pop in and out of the narrative. McCarthy unexpectedly (to me, anyway) stretches the story over decades to follow The Kid into adulthood suddenly, and into further conflicts and contacts that ultimately lead to his fate, in a somewhat ambiguously downbeat ending. Supposedly, according to others, the many intense trials and tribulations of The Kid's life leads towards the ending being not only climactic, but meaningful and poignant, but unfortunately by this point any real remnants of my interest had crawled into a ball and died.

A Cowboy and Indian, yesterday.

Despite being somewhat of a grammar Nazi, I've gotten over the fact that Cormac McCarthy doesn't like quotation marks, or really much punctuation at all. I'm also happy with the fact that McCarthy chooses to go with an established genre feature of not giving his lead character a real name. My real problem with this book as a whole was that, after maybe a hundred pages or so, I was completely sick of the repetitive tone of the narrative. Dedicated stylistic prose is an incredibly tough trick to pull off over a sustained period without becoming a self-parody; not only from a technical standpoint but through running the risk of becoming stale. If your style isn't entertaining or personable, then it can become boring, and the dry, unhelpful tone of McCarthy's narration couldn't sustain my interest. Even the much-vaunted brutality, staining many of the pages red and black with blood and death, gets old and meaningless, unimpressive to me compared to the striking individuality of something like Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho.

So again, I apologies to all those that worship this book, because perhaps it was simply not for me. I greatly enjoy authors who are full of variety and surprise; whom mix reality and the surreal on a whim, and whom make me care about their characters on a personal level. Cormac McCarthy doesn't do that for me, not even in The Road, which I liked. It worries me slightly that I've got four Cormac McCarthy books to read from my pile (Border Trilogy and No Country For Old Men) and it might worry you, dear reader, that I might have four more dismissive, self-righteous rants about why I don't like them. Ah well, can't say I didn't warn anyone. 

Terry Pratchett's Discworld 10- Moving Pictures

Moving Pictures

Corgi

Terry Pratchett
1990  

Other Terry Pratchett Reviews- The Colour of Magic - The Light Fantastic - Equal Rites - Mort - Sourcery - Wyrd Sisters - Pyramids - Guards! Guards! - Eric - Moving Pictures - Reaper Man - Witches Abroad - Small Gods - Lords and Ladies - Men At Arms - Soul Music - Interesting Times - Maskerade - Feet of Clay - Hogfather - Raising Steam - A Blink of the Screen - Sky1 Adaptations- Dodger - The Long Earth (w Stephen Baxter)

"Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleaning, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact."

So it turns out that updating a web blog with a five-hundred word book review once every 3-5 days is actually really difficult, physically and mentally tiring, and a big drain of resources. It's with this in mind that I admit to not updating my blog in about two weeks or something, because the sheer pressure crushed me like a lump of coal. Thankfully only about people ever read this site anyway, including me, so I don't think anyone will mind. To the review!

Amazingly, we've reached double-figures on this odyssey of a series and I haven't given up yet, which is like a lifetime record for me. After creating a bunch of beloved regular characters over the course of the last few books (Guards! Guards! and Wyrd Sisters, for example), Sir Terrence Pratchett attempted to repeat the trick with a brand new set, in a novel where he focuses on very specific satire to make the Disc mimic the Earth. To backtrack, I seem to remember writing a little while ago in a Discworld review that at that point Pratchett was about to embark on a run of about ten or more genuine comic fantasy classics. It's with a sad sigh that I'm going to rescind that statement a bit, because Moving Pictures doesn't quite reach his highest standards. It's still quite good though.

In the story of Moving Pictures, the inherent magic of the Discworld combined with the ingenuity and persistence of its many alchemists has led to alarming discoveries in the field of photography and camera, which itself has led to the foundation of a familiar sounding business in an even-more familiar-sounding place; the 'clickies' are here, promoted and created in a place called Holy Wood, where dreams come wildly true. Naturally people flock to be involved in the clickies, dreaming of stardom on a suspiciously spiritual level, including Victor Tugelbend, lead character and wizard in training. In no time at all, Victor becomes the biggest star in Holy Wood, and then really bad things start to happen regarding the very nature of reality. 

So, to the negatives; Victor Tugelbend isn't a very interesting character. He starts off as the same po-faced, innocent-yet-crafty young person on the verge of adventure as Mort, Esk of Equal Rites and Nijel from Sourcery, but doesn't seem to develop any further than that. Instead, Victor and his love interest exist more as plot devices and bases of satire for the story to progress further, while the actual charisma and funny dialogue comes from other sources. Here that's from series regular (mostly minor parts) Cut-My-Own-Throat Dibbler (Ankh-Morpork wheeler-dealer extraordinaire) and Gaspode the Wonder Dog (sarcastic talking dog). Victor kind of ends up as a situationist hero, who fights the real evil lurking behind Holy Wood almost because it's very similar to his job as a clicky star, but without any of the poise or charisma that's needed to keep the book interesting. Maybe it's kind of the point and theme of the whole book; that ordinary people are magically captivated by the idea of the movies to such an extent that we can't tell when art is imitating life or vice versa. On the Disc, of course, the distinction is utterly irrelevant.

To be more positive, Moving Pictures is pretty funny, and certain to be the Discworld book of choice for film buffs, as Pratchett references and parodies dozens of films, studios and performers from the very early days of Hollywood to more recent efforts. The book is very thematic, and probably fun to study, with an intriguing look at the effects of fame and fortune and its allure. Meanwhile, Gaspode becomes somewhat of a fan favourite character, and is one of the few new characters from this book to turn up in the future. Also, Pratchett's now very familiar style of prose is out in full force, having certainly been very well defined if not completely mastered by its originator.

Pratchett would write a spiritual followup to Moving Pictures in the utterly excellent Soul Music a few years later. This book remains a bit of a poorly-remembered oddity that most should enjoy, but doesn't really represent the author's full capabilities regarding characterisation and sheer sense of fun.

Busy/Lazy

I'll get around to writing something new here at some point, I've just been really busy/lazy recently. I've got the next Discworld book and some Cormac McCarthy to catch up on.

Haruki Murakami- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Vintage

Haruki Murakami

2007 (Japan)/ 2008 (English)
Translated by Jay Rubin
   

Other Murakami Reviews- A Wild Sheep Chase - Dance Dance Dance - Underground - Sputnik Sweetheart - after the quake - After Dark - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - 1Q84- Books I & II - Book III - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Strange Library

“The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.”

That this was my third non-fiction book in a row is certainly a personal record that might never be broken, with normal service to resume very shortly. Of course, this work of non-fiction is from one Haruki Murakami, who happens to be my favourite author of fiction in the world, and a maverick writing genius whose mind and methods hold a kind of mysterious aura for me (and surely many other readers too), with works of indescribably strange and magical fiction like the two-part 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore thrilling a global audience. With that in mind, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running contained an element of intrigue unique to all of Murakami's work, as it promised to provide insight on the man from the man, in the form of an ethereal memoir focused around the topic of one of Murakami's favourite activities; running marathons.

Weighing in at just 177 pages (Vintage edition), What I Talk... is a very curious book, in that it's kind of hard to pin down the genre. Only Murakami's second non-fiction title (the other Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, which I just ordered from Amazon today), this one steers far away from the typically-heavy surrealism of Murakami's fiction, meaning there's a distinct lack of parallel universes or talking cats; instead this reminds me of a book (handily reviewed here) by my second favourite non-dead non-Terry Pratchett author, Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude, in that it's kind of a small window into the personal life of an enigmatic author who turns his every day experiences into a range of philosophical musings. In this regards it's actually not too dissimilar to aspects of Murakami's normal work, where the magical realism often relies on his lead characters having the mundane aspects of their lives exist as the basis for the thoughtful madness that engulfs them.

Murakami, not running.

The lead narrative of these chronologically-mixed memoirs revolves around Murakami preparing to run the 2005 New York City Marathon, though it's far from his first. Murakami has been running for the majority of his life, for at least an hour each day, and competing in at least one marathon per year, as well as a more recent triathlon. There's no preaching or moralizing involved, no encouragement for the reader to join in and get healthy, as Murakami doesn't really know why he started running, nor does he need to justify it; for him, and for this book, it's simply another way of looking at the world around him, allowing him to make gentle observations on the world he views as he runs, and on the nature of his own desires in life. He speaks in very little detail about his literary work, which I found disappointing, and not much more about his own personal life.

Fairly ethereal, but not particularly essential, I casually enjoyed this book as an aside to the author's more serious novels; as a kind of extended essay that offers a carefully-constructed glimpse, but no more, at the man behind so many complicated novels. As a Murakami completest, I was thus both a little frustrated at the purposeful lack of insight but contrarily intrigued further by the few details given that further shaped the personality of an enigmatic figure. It's impossible for an author to write books as distinctive and individualistic as Murakami's without casting the shadow of his personality across the narrative, and Murakami's personal narration is very similar to that of Kafka of Kafka on the Shore, or Hajime of South of the Border, West of the Sun, but obviously the tale never drifts down the same dark paths of magic and mystery, which means ultimately means I can never really love this book on the same level of those fictions.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb- The Black Swan

The Black Swan

Penguin

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2007

“If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.”

It's not very often that I feel tempted to read two non-fiction books in a row, and it's even less often- almost never, in fact- that one of those books happens to be classified by its own publisher (Penguin, if you must know) as a book about economics. In truth, my decision to pick up The Black Swan from the 'miscellaneous' shelf at my local second-hand booke shoppe was merely one built by coincidence that I'm going to explain for no real reason; I'd been reading up on the film Black Swan (which, as everybody already knows, is bloody brilliant), which in turn led me to lightly reading up on the scientific philosophy. When I spotted Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, the topic, the gushing quotes and the snazzy cover tempted me to pick it up.

Taleb is a guy who has plenty of experience working around areas involving risk and the economy; from his younger days as a Wall Street trader to his more recent exploits as a scientific adviser and a university professor, Taleb has met a seemingly-innumerable amount of experts (or idiotic experts) in various parts of the field of economics, and throughout this book offers a very personally-written take on the nature of the black swan phenomena (very briefly for those not aware, a black swan event is any kind of completely unexpected incident that disrupts the field of play; 9/11, for example, or the literal discovery of black swans in newly-discovered Australia), and on the many human reactions to them. Despite having worked around risk and risk advisers his whole career, Taleb's basic message is very simple; black swan events are so inherently unpredictable in many aspects of the world that it's a fools errand to try and predict them, so people should probably stop it.

To achieve his goals, and to ensure his book can appeal to the non-technical reader, Taleb mostly stays away from field-specific lexis and statistics to keep things much more personal; giving the readers lots of autobiographical information  and personal and impersonal anecdotes regarding famous figures in the fields of science, philosophy and business. At times it feels like he's bragging about knowing so many clever people, but Taleb, through years of practice writing essays and his previous book Fooled by Randomness is a talented and charismatic enough author to just about pull off his goals. Later on in the book Taleb does get a little technical, but even warns the reader beforehand so they can skip the chapter if they want to, which is nice.

Like the king of scientific non-fiction (and another name Taleb drops) Richard Dawkins, Taleb is a witty, interesting, and well-written individual, and it this was enough for me to quite enjoy a book that, in lesser hands, could've bored me senseless. Despite finding myself not particularly engrossed by the science, Taleb made me somewhat care about his agenda, which was enough to carry me through. I'm sure there are those with far, far more knowledge of statistics and economic fact who could read this book and absolutely hate it for its opinions, but I am devoid of all intelligence in this matter, and, as they say, ignorance is bliss. Well, not quite bliss, but general amusement nonetheless. 

René Descartes- Discourse on the Method and the Meditations

Discourse on Method and the Meditations

René Descartes
1637 & 1641

"The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts."

Although I really enjoy dabbling in the odd bit of philosophy, picking up famous titles by legendary authors and waving them about in other people's faces so I can make myself look smarter than I am, I'm by no means any kind of expert on the subject. In the past I've picked up some famous titles that I happened to find on the shelves; essays by  Nietzsche, Spinoza and Plato and philosophical fiction from Satre, Camus and Kundera, but if anybody ever tried to quiz me on the possible deeper meanings etcetera of these texts I think I'd crawl up into a ball of tears and embarrass them into going away. I'm explaining this now so when this review fails to tell you anything relevant about René  Descartes and Discourse on Method and the Meditation you can't really complain.

This Penguin Classics edition contains Descartes two most famous pieces, along with a typical haughty introduction and a personal letter from Descartes. The first essay, published in 1637 and fully-titled Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences, is one of the most important and influential works in the history of philosophy and scientific thought, and essentially involves Descartes attempting to address the world of scientific thought in relation to skepticism; by first stripping his thoughts of any preconceived established knowledge so he can tackle the title topic through a supposedly entirely clear and unbiased perspective. Much of this involves the existence of god, and Descartes elegantly argues the proof of the existence of god, though thankfully without the inclusion of typical dogma. Did he convince me? Not really, but I'm a very skeptical person.

The second essay, full and unwieldy title of Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the existence of God and the Real Distinction Between the Soul and the Body of Man are Demonstrated, published in 1641, is a metaphysical exploration summed up by its title- a thematic sequel to Discourse on the Method, Descartes explores through a series of six meditations the logical existence of god as demonstrated by the nature of the human condition. It's a lot more complicated than I can really sum up here in my clumsy prose, and, to tell you the truth, my attention on the subject completely wavered after reading so much concentrated personal logic. Anybody expecting some sort of insight into the subject please refer to the opening paragraph of this review.

Someone who went into this book looking for brilliant insight and mind-opening concepts might find them if they read it about five times alongside an open page of Sparknotes, but otherwise it's certainly not a quick read. While I find it fascinating to explore the extravagant prose and impeccably organized mental thoughts, I wasn't interested enough in the overtly religious and archaic social scientific topics, and therefore didn't really get much out of it and have very little to say here. However, since I'm on a mission to review every prose book I read, I had to do this one as well for some reason.