The Daily Sabbatical

This seems to have been an especially strong year in fiction.  It seems as though every book I have read recently has merited enthusiastic jigs.  Perhaps I’ve simply become better at choosing what I read.  Who cares.  The result is that I’m a happy reader.

Atmospheric Disturbances is a wow book.  It is a gift.  I had heard Rivka Galchen’s name, and I had seen the book’s striking cover, but I was not ready for such an excellent work.  I was, in fact, poised to hate this book.  It has an epigram from Gilles Deleuze, one of the great intellectal pretenders, and an epigram drawn from The Journal of Atmospheric Sciences that suggests all sorts of trying metaphors.  The last thing we need is another fiction that flirts with quantum profundities and chaos-theoretical butterflies.  That mess barely worked for Pynchon in Entropy, and it doesn’t need revisiting.

Then Rivka Galchen kicked my ass.

Galchen is apparently smart enough to avoid such intellectual muddling, but she is also clever enough to see that it still has comedic and, surprisingly, dramatic potential.  Her narrator is a psychotherapist who, in the process of treating a patient who believes he has the power and the duty to affect the weather, gets caught up in the delusion. He believes, to begin with, that his wife Rema has been replaced with a doppleganger, and the book follows his quest to find the real Rema.  A sort of post-modern Quixote, Leo finds clues everywhere he looks, particularly in the writings of one Tzvi Gal-Chen, a meteorologist who, incidentally, may or may not be the author’s husband.  Since the reader’s world is filtered through Leo’s confused perceptions, his disorientation is infectious–which fact explains, I believe, the chaos that was my dreamlife last night–but Galchen allows just enough reality to peek around the corners of his consciousness to make the whole adventure a very humorous farce.

I suspect some will compare this book to The Crying of Lot 49, but it doesn’t really read like Pynchon at all.  It reads more like a mix of Barthelme, Borges and Sebald.  That, my friends, is a good mix.

I’ve read some excellent stuff this year, and I don’t feel I can really name a favorite of 2008.  But there is no book I had more fun reading than Atmospheric Disturbances and there is no author I am more excited about than Rivka Galchen.

It’s finally out, and it is a lovely little book if I do say so myself.  And boy, it seems so much cleverer now that it is bound and formatted.  It’s too late for Christmas, but all of your philosophical friends and relatives would no doubt appreciate A Dialogue on Consciousness as a New Year’s present.  Great for birthdays, holidays, and hell, even Fridays.  Amazon has it listed as a pre-order, but it should ship now if you order it.

I know I’m being presumptuous to think anyone reading my blog will order the book, but in any case, I’d advise against buying the hardback.  It doesn’t have the cover art and is bound for libraries only.  The paperback is much prettier.

Salvatore Scibona is an extraordinary writer.  His first book, The End, was nominated this year for The National Book award, and I’d say there is a very good chance he would have won it had the staggeringly good trilogy by Matthiesson not been allowed in the race.  What’s even more impressive, I suspect this author will only get better.  Scibona is a crafter of sentences in the DeLillo tradition–and in fact his dialogue, at times, feels like that of the Don.  His love of language comes through both in form and content, but he’s no pedantic formalist.  His craft is still the telling of tales, and he does it splendidly.

The End is an immigrant tale, of sorts, but like any good book it transcends the moldy stereotypes.  Scibona’s Italian-Americans reside in Cleveland, and though the city isn’t actually identified until later in the book, one is led to feel as if one spent the early part of the century in the neighborhood surrounding Elephant Creek.   As present as the city itself is, however, one reads this book for the people.  One character in particular, Constanza Marini, is so finely wrought that she becomes ones own neighbor.  Costanza, who is an old widow for most of the novel, is a whip-smart pragmatist who provides that axis around which the book’s events revolve.  And without spoiling, the book does have events–it has a sort of mystery at its core that had me combing back through earlier pages looking for clues.

There are not many debut novels that i plan to reread.  The End is one of them.  Before I do, I’m going to search out some of Scibona’s short stories–this is a writer to follow.

The blog largehearted boy has posted an extensive list of links to “best of the year” lists, for both books and music.  An excellent resource.

At this point I’ve read almost everything Vladimir Nabokov ever published.  There is simply no other writer like him.  When I finish reading his prose, I immediately feel like holing up in a garrett somewhere and crafting sentences that dance and narrative strategems that make a first reading useless.  If I actually get so far as to put pen to paper, I feel so dwarfed by the master that I quickly consign my pen to the dustbin.

Mary is Nabokov’s first novel, written when he was in Berlin in 1925, shortly after he met the inimitable Vera.  Nabokov didn’t translate Mary into English until 1970, and he apparently resisted tinkering too much with his young effort.  At least for those of us who want some reassurance that the man was human after all, this is fortunate.  While many of Nabokov’s trademarks can be seen budding in this short novel–his somewhat condescending humor, his intricate adjective play, his narrative gamesmanship–none of them are really in full blossom.  I’m reasonably sure I could spot it as a Nabokov a mile away, but had he not grown immensely after Mary, he would not hold the curlicued spot in our hearts he now holds.

The novel follows the young Ganin, a Russian exiled in Berlin–hmmm–who lives in a pension occupied by other idiosyncratic Russian emigres.   One of these is expecting the arrival of his wife, the titular Mary.  When he shows her picture to Ganin, our hero is shocked into reminiscences about his youthful romance with young Mary, his first physical love.  Soon a plan is in the hatching, to intercept Mary upon her arrival in Berlin and to resume Ganin’s lost romance.

Of course things aren’t so simple, but nothing substitutes Nabokov’s unravelling of his own knots.  Mary is ultimately not the recommended first stop on the Nabokov tour, but it is a joy for the completist.  Which I am fast becoming.  Next station, King, Queen, Knave!

I’m always tempted to break up my anally alphabetical ordering of books to create a special shelf of books that, to me, constitute lessons in writing.  These are not necessarily the best books–although they often are–but they are the books I feel I could read and reread in hopes of penetrating the secrets of their consruction.  They are the books that would signpost the way to the literary style I’d most like to emulate.    Body Snatcher by Juan Carlos Onetti would find a place on that shelf.

Onetti remains a bit of an unknown in the States, but one hopes that the surge of interest in Roberto Bolano will spur interest in some of his Latin American predecessors and contemporaries.  Onetti was born in Montevideo, but eventually fled to Spain after being persecuted by the Uruguayan dictatorship in 1974 for presenting a prize to a short-story considered pornographic by the powers that be.  His heroes number among mine–Knut Hamsun, William Faulkner, Celine–and his writing shows their influence.

Published originally in Spanish in 1964, Body Snatcher was translated into English by Alfred MacAdam in 1991.  It tells the story of the arrival of a brothel in a small town named Santa Maria–which is the setting of many of Onetti’s works.  The Body Snatcher of the title is Larson, a sort of pimp, who runs the brothel, but this story is not his alone.  It is also the story of Jorge, a boy in his teens who is having a strange but seductive relationship with the unhinged widow of his dead brother.  It is also the story of Father Bergner, who runs a complicated campaign against the moral deterioration of Santa Maria, and it is the story of Marcos, a gritty man of violence and indignation who keeps both sides guessing.  I say Body Snatcher is a story, but that’s only true in the sense that As I Lay Dying is a story about a burial.  Onetti’s style is the main attraction.  There are subtle tricks of narrative perspective and tormenting convolutions of language that are, to be honest, only poetic in retrospect.  It all fuses together, however, into something magical.

I love this book, and I hereby add Onetti to my list of heroes.  If the translators don’t get on it, I might have to learn more than get-to-the-bus Spanish.

Coming soon….

I have two episodes before I am done with The Wire, and I am sick.  I already want more.  It might be the best TV show ever made, and though I’m sure I’ll rewatch it from start to finish, it just won’t be the same.  Still, I can take some heart: the writers for The Wire are out there writing novels, and if Lush Life by Richard Price is any indication, they are almost as good.
As Dennis Lehane says on the dust jacket, Price is one of the best writers of dialogue this country has.  (Actually, Lehane says the best we have ever had.)  His writing feels real in a way that even the best writing doesn’t.  His characters speak in sentence fragments, with bad grammar, and they often use the wrong words.  But the flow is undeniable, and though I’m just a white boy who has led a somewhat sheltered existence, during the hours I’m reading Lush Life I feel like I’ve descended into the eddies of Manhatten as they rush from the housing projects to the happy hours.  The book is around 400 pages and I read it in less than a day.  Granted, I was sick in bed, but it was that riveting.
Price is not writing the sort of high literature that has us looking to Pynchon, McCarthy, DeLillo or Roth, but I don’t think he wants to be.  I don’t want him to be either.  This is simply more fun.  It might not stay with me in the same way, but that’s ok.  I’ll just read it again.

Suite Francaise is worth reading if for no other reason than for the unique perspective it has on the second world war and the French occupation in particular.  The harrowing story of its author gilds the work with both authenticity and poignance.  Irene Nemirovsky was a Jewish, Russian born novelist who achieved great success with novels such as David Golder, which became a play and a movie.  She lived in Paris during the French Occupation, and decided to write a five volume work about what she was seeing.  Before she finished, however, she was sent to Auschwitz where she died in August of 1942.  The manuscript of the novel was kept by her daughter Denise who, believing it was simply a journal, didn’t read it until 1990 when she was about to donate it to a Frech archive.  It was finally published in 2004 where it became a bestselling winner of the Prix Renaudot.
The story of the novel has an undeniable Anne Frankish appeal, but unlike the Diary this book is written by an extremely talented, deeply reflective author with a mature understanding of human weakness.  Suite Francais is not written as a journal, but as a work of fiction in the vein of, perhaps, Flaubert.  It feels as though it could have been written when it was published, except for the fact that one can sense that its author had no idea how all of it would turn out.  There is no anticipation of an eventual liberation, no sense that France would come out of the war an autonomous nation, and no expectation that Germany would eventually lose the war.  It is not a sentimental, mournful document, however.  It is, in fact, a rather biting depiction of the hypocrisy and the frank materialism of a group of French citizens who would rather just be left alone.  The outrage we see is like that of a Orange County wife who discovers there are no more seats in first class, not the sadness and anger of a French patriot in danger of losing his country.
Despite the despicable behavior of many of the characters in this novel, Nemirovsky doesn’t just make them into objects of scorn.  She forces the reader to ask himself: Would I be any better?  What after all can one man do when his nation is falling? 
Suite Francais is not without its flaws.  Occasionally its characters become archetypes ala Dickens, but that seems to be the danger in a social novel.  In general, this is an elegantly written novel catches history in a candid moment and asks all the right questions.

This is a really good list.  Of course the fact that every man should read them doesn’t imply that not every woman should read them.  Many of these books I would recommend to anyone.  Raymond Carver, Blood Meridian, John Cheever, Revolutionary Road…how good can it get?  I’m a fan of a surprising number of there.

Thanks to Kerry for letting me know about this!