The Three books are:
Tom Rachman: The Rise and Fall of
the Great Powers.
Jonathan Coe: Expo 58
Siri Hustvedt: The Blindfold
. The Rachman book starts with Tooly, in her thirties, running a
failing bookstore in a Welsh village. We then go back to 1988 when she was nine
years old living in Bangkok with Paul—the relationship is not clear. There are
chapters set at other dates: 1999, in Brooklyn, where she is living with an
elderly Russian émigré called Humph, and having an affair with a law student,
Duncan. We move to the present day when she meets Duncan again—now married with
two kids—and Humph living in squalor in Brighton Beach, close to Coney Island.
Apparently Tooly has moved around over the years, from city to city—always with
Humph, but sometimes another male—Venn—appears on the scene and seems to use
Tooly as an accomplice in scams. And there is Sarah, who drifts from country to
country, and meets up with Tooly now and again.
And
all the time you are asking yourself, how was all this peripatetic wandering possible?
Slowly the chapters on the past—interspersed with happenings in the
present—provide the answers. But you have to plough through a lot of
philosophizing by different characters to get those answers.
One reviewer of the Rachman book
said he was beginning to go to sleep at page 40, but fully awake at page 340.
For me it was the other way round: fully awake at page 40, but losing my
patience at about page 300.
But to be fair, here is an excerpt
from a review in The Guardian:
“There's something slightly cutesy about the wall-to-wall
eccentricity, something slightly precious about the fey withholding of
information from the reader. Tooly isn't quite the Manic Pixie Dream
Girl stereotype, but she threatens to be. You find yourself
thinking: get on with it. But if you stick with it, Rachman hits his stride. The Rise and Fall of Great Powers gestures
with its title and its scope at something world-spanning. That's semi-ironic.
Its background music is world-historical – there are intermittent bursts
of chat about Reagan and Gorbachev, 9/11, the Rwandan genocide and the Clinton
impeachment – but it's at its heart about individual lives: how opaque
we are to each other, and how little we understand our own
histories.”
The Jonathan Coe book is a neat piece of work, well
written, funny, and touching in places, but one gets the impression that the
author simply enjoyed recreating the World’s Fair in Belgium in 1958. I think
he described the process in his author’s notes as a form of archaeology. Tom
Foley, the protagonist is transported from his humdrum civil service job, his
small house in Tooting, and his problematic marriage, to the glamour and
international ambience of Expo 58, where he oversees the Britannia Pub, which
is a major feature of the British exhibit. And he gets caught up in Cold War
spying and falls for a beautiful young Belgium girl. You want to keep turning the
pages, but I thought the novel was a fairly light-weight piece of
work--well-written, well-observed, and worth a read if you are a bit tired of
the intellectual effort of reading more weighty tomes.
The Siri Hustvedt book, her first novel, is “The
Blindfold.” It is weighty—but not a tome—221 pages in a small page format. I
found it at the Library when I was searching for her most recent, much praised
book, “The Blazing World.” “The Blindfold” is an extraordinary book. It consists
of five sections. In the first four sections, the first-person narrator—a graduate
student named Iris Vegan—relates strange and disturbing experiences. In the
fifth section, she goes back to a time before these episodes, and brief mention
is made of each of them as she goes over the whole period. BTW: Iris is Siri
backwards, and Vegan was the author’s mother’s name. The first four sections
could be independent short stories. The fifth section is novella length.
Hustvedt, who is married to Paul Auster, has published a non-fiction book about her
migraines and her psychic disorders called “The Quaking Woman or A History of
my Nerves” (well reviewed by Hilary Mantel in The Guardian) and one can only assume that much of this novel is at least
semi-autobiographical.
You may not like Iris: you may well ask, “what the hell
is wrong with this girl:” you may lose patience with her obsessions: but I
think you will keep reading…to the end.