"The Separation," by Katie Kitamura

My eye was caught by this book on the 'new books' shelves at the Library, and the blurbs were very praiseworthy. One Lucy Scholes, in the London Independent, wrote, "A separation is a beautifully written power-house of a novel that defies all expectations."      Another critic--"...writes with piercing clarity."
And another--"What unspools is not a traditional mystery--despite the appearance of a body before too long--but a psychological meditation on the bonds and boundaries of love and marriage."

The first person narrator and Christopher, her husband, have agreed to separate. Her mother-in-law phones to tell her that Christopher, has gone to Greece and cannot be contacted: can she go to Greece to find him? Her mother-in-law does not know that the narrator and Christopher have agreed to separate. She goes to Greece, to a hotel in a remote fishing village, where Christopher has left his hotel room in a mess and disappeared.

The novel focuses on the psychological state of the narrator, with all her changing impulses, ambiguities, and instincts--her ruminations on the questions of love and marriage, her attempts to piece together what may have happened to Christopher, what his relationship might have been with an attractive woman on the staff of the hotel, and what does her driver--Stephano--know or not know about Christopher...

One reviewer compares the author to Conrad, and I can see what he meant. Recently we saw a BBC dramatization of The Secret Agent, and I downloaded it (free) from I-Books to read on my I-Pad on the elliptical trainer. And I was staggered by the extent to which Conrad was constantly and in great depth exploring the inner workings of the minds of his characters. And Katie Kitamura does indeed spend most of her time inside her narrator's head, although there are some few pages of what can only be described as digressions.

The narrator sums up as follows: "Perhaps wife and husband and marriage itself are words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than can be contained in any handful of syllables, or any amount of writing."

A shortish read in a few sessions. Well worth the time.











    

"The Gambler's Anatomy, " by Jonathan Lethem

    Bruno Alexander is the gambler, handsome and impeccably tuxedoed, he travels the world--seemingly controlled by one Edgar Falk who lives in Singapore--seeking out 'whales,' rich men who feel they can beat him at backgammon. They usually fail, but Bruno also has his disastrous losses from time to time.
    We meet him first in Berlin, where is plays backgammon with a rich man who is attended by a half-naked dominatrix named Madchen. Bruno has 'blot,' a sort of floater in his vision that he is trying to deal with; but he collapses and has to be taken to a Berlin hospital where he is diagnosed with a meningioma, a cancer behind his eyes that is probably inoperable, although one doctor tells him that there is a surgeon in San Francisco who does operate on this form of cancer.
     Back in Singapore, Bruno meets up with an old high-school friend, Keith Stolarsky, and his wife, Tira Harpaz. Keith has made a fortune in Berkeley, in real estate, and with a huge, trendy store and a hamburger joint called Zombie Hamburgers. Keith finances Bruno's return to San Francisco and pays for the enormously expensive surgery, that is performed by a semi-hippy brain surgeon, Dr. Behringer--bearded and wearing sandals--who operates to music by Jimi Hendrix.
    The operation has drastic effects on Bruno's face, and thereafter he wears a mask most of the time, while he develops a weird relationship with Tiri Harpaz, and with a chef at a 'slider' joint (small hamburgers), where he sometimes works. And Keith provides an air-fare for Madchen to come from Germany to join Bruno. And on it goes.
     I greatly admire Lethem's writing. His chapter on the surgery is 
extraordinary, and it must have required considerable research, possibly even witnessing a similar operation.
     Not a short book (and you know I generally prefer short to long) but it kept me interested until the end.

"Nutshell," by Ian McEwan

    The first person narrator in this compact novel by Ian McEwan, is, I believe, like no other narrator anyone has encountered. Most reviewers call the narrator a fetus or foetus (depending on their nationality). To me a fetus has always seemed to indicate a baby in the earlier stages of its life in the womb, and McEwan's fetus is getting ready to be born. I would be inclined to say it is already a baby, but the dictionary does tell me that a fetus covers conception to birth.
    Be that as it may, Ian McEwan has written a gem of a novel with a seven-month (at least) womb-bound baby as narrator, often disturbed by his mother's couplings with her brother-in-law and often made fuzzy by her drinking. Suspend belief that this baby knows as much as he does (it cannot all come from BBC Radio 4) and that his vocabulary is so extensive, and his modes of expression so sophisticated, and that he dreams.
    Trudy is married to John Cairncross, and she lives in his decaying mansion in a good part of London, and its value is well up in the millions of pounds. She has exiled John to a tawdry flat as she "needs to be alone"...and, on her own, she is having an affair with Claude, John's brother, whom our narrator rightly considers an evil idiot.
    And here we move to Hamlet. "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams,"says Hamlet. We know what Hamlet's mother and brother-in-law did to Hamlet's father....and there is the plot of "Nutshell."
    Thoroughly recommended...read it in a few enjoyable sittings.

"A Book of American Martyrs,": By Joyce Carol Oates

    Yes, of course she can write--amazingly. Yes, she can churn out 800 plus pages in this novel, and--yes--the writing is of the highest caliber.
    But, but, but--- I do not recommend this book. It kept me interested for 400, perhaps 500, pages...but interest waned and waned. Perhaps her fame is such that no editor dares to tell her, "Joyce, this has got to be cut down--these 50 pages should not exceed 20. It will have much more impact if is more compact." And this formula could readily be applied to much of the book. 
    OK, briefly--an abortion doctor is assassinated by a man who believes he is doing it for Jesus: he is eventually executed by lethal injection in a way that goes horribly wrong. The legacy of these deaths is borne by the two families, where the future lives of the daughters of the abortionist and his murderer are affected in major ways. Thoroughly unconvincing is the course of the murderer's daughter's life, which seems to have been chosen simply because the avocation she follows has always interested Oates, has been the basis for an earlier novel, and it allows her to parade her expertise.
    The book is, I must concede, an achievement, but I doubt if you will stay with it longer than about 500 pages.

"The Art of Rivalry" by Sebastian Smee

    This is a fascinating read for anyone interested in art. It relates the rivalry between four pairs of artists: Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, Manet and Degas, Matisse and Picasso, and Pollock and De Kooning. With each pairing, we are not only looking at the art of the painters but also their psychologies and their--often chaotic--lives.
    The author is an Australian who has been the art critic for The Boston Globe since 2008. He spent the previous four years in London, writing on art for a number of newspapers.
    One critic, in the New York Times, noted: "This is a magnificent book on the relationships at the roots of artistic genius. Smee offers a gripping tale of the fine lines between friendship and competition, tracing how the ties that torment us are often the ones that inspire us most."

"The Sport of Kings" by C.E.Morgan

    Until I revisited my other blog on Medium and looked at an entry I wrote on lynchings in the United States, I had forgotten that before going to Australia I had read a novel by C.E.Morgan called 'The Sport of Kings.'
    There is no doubt that this book is an extraordinary piece of work by an enormously talented writer. It is dedicated 'to the reader' and it surely demands of the reader a great deal of 'sticking with it' to get through the 500 or so pages. Indeed, one could say it is two or three novels in one.
    The author gallops through the fortunes of the generations of the Henry Forge family, the scion of a Kentucky dynasty of planters, slave-owners, and racehorse-breeders. But there is a lot more than this central narrative--we look at slavery, a slave who escapes to Ohio, creation myth, the selfish gene, oedipal struggle, the rock formations of the Ohio valley...and a lot more.
    And often the language is absurdly inflated. One critic chose the following passage to illustrate how over the top Morgan goes quite frequently:
 “After a long night of sleep in the underbelly of the earth, the armored sun rose and charged the horizon, pressing against the dark with long arms until night fell back, wounded and floundering, to earth’s antipodal edge.” 
    At one point in the text, the author seems to question her own methods:
“Is all this too purple, too florid? Is more too much – the world and the words? Do you prefer your tales lean, muscular, and dry, leached of excess and honed to a single, digestible point? Have I exceeded the bounds of the form, committed a literary sin?”
    But her own judgement is:
“There aren’t too many words; there aren’t enough words… we’re infants before the Ohio coursing its ancient way, the icy display of aurora borealis, and the redundancies of the night sky.”

I am not sure whether I recommend this book or not, but C.E. Morgan can surely write...

I had never heard of her, but she has published one earlier novel, "All The Living," which seems to have been well-praised.
In 2016 she won the Kirkus Prize

Catching Up...Howard Jacobson and David Szalay

     Well, it has been a long time since I last posted anything about my reading. On January 10 we flew to Australia to stay in the same apartment in Sydney that we rented in 2016, and we spent close to four weeks in Sydney before flying to Melbourne. We rented a car there and with the assistance of Agnes--our intelligent Sat-Nav, with the dulcet female voice--we found our way to Lorne at the start of the Great Ocean Road, a spectacular drive along the southern coast, which we followed most of the way to Adelaide, although we took side trips into the Grampian Mountains and, by ferry, to Kangaroo Island, finally approaching Adelaide through the wine-growing area around Hahndorf. We stayed several days in the palindromically-named Glenelg, on the wonderful coast to the south of Adelaide. Adelaide itself? A bit underwhelming.
     Not too much chance to read, and luggage limitations meant recourse to downloads from the DC library to my I-pad. One of these was "The Finkler Question," by Howard Jacobson, which explored what it is or isn't to be Jewish. Frankly, I do not recommend it unless this is a subject of some interest to you. I grew bored with it at about the half-way mark and abandoned it--or at least minimally skimmed it through to the end. I only down-loaded it because I searched for Jacobson in the DC Library catalogue, looking for his modern version of the Merchant of Venice, which the library did not have as an e-book. So I tried Finkler. Let's be fair to Jacobson-- he is a great writer. I have just picked up from the library the print edition of "Shylock is My Name," and a blurb on the back cover by Jonathan Safran Foer reads--"As the brightness of his brilliance is hard to look at, so is the darkness of his humor. I do not know a funnier writer alive."  And another blurb reads--"How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration for the music of his language, the power of his characterization , and the penetration of his insight?" And, dear David, 'Finkler' did win the Man-Booker prize--so maybe the problem lies with you rather than Jacobson...
     So I will revert to Jacobson after reading "Shylock is My Name."
        I did read in Australia David Szalay's "All That Man Is," which was short-listed for the Man-Booker. It was published as a novel, but it is in reality a set of nine, superb short stories, with only the vaguest of connections between them: there is a direct, but minor, linkage between the first story, which concerns a seventeen year old English youth touring Europe and a distinguished retired English civil servant coming to terms with his life in his 'seventies. And there is a certain progression of subject matter. The first five stories reflect love and sex, while the next several are heralded by an Latin epigraph signaling a change from love to war. As a Danish investigative journalist is going to destroy a politician whom he has known and liked, he says to himself--'c'est la guerre.' 
     But publishing it as a novel was a stretch.
    The range of major characters runs from a Russian billionaire contemplating suicide to a French youth on a cut-rate holiday in Cyprus (or was it Crete?). And the locales and nationalities in these stories seem to have been deliberately chosen to stress a European context. Szalay is highly skilled writer, and I certainly recommend this book. Now...maybe the feminists among you may not take to it...