For the Record--Three More Books...

 1. Ricard Russo--Trajectory
Great writer, winner of many awards, and this was a book I just happened to spot in the library. Four quite long stories, each with a protagonist for whom the current situation is strongly influenced by events in the past.

     In the first of the stories, "Horseman," Janet is a lecturer in English at a university and her husband is a stay-at-home father who looks after their retarded three-year-old son. Her life is haunted by the Robert Louis Stephenson poem about the horseman in the night that keeps riding by--and this is associated with the adverse comments of a star professor who taught her some years ago.
    The second story, "Voice," is about two brothers who go on a organized cultural tour in Venice. The relationship of the two brothers on the tour is the present aspect of the story, and the past is revisited to show how that relationship has developed from tragic childhood experiences, to which each brother reacted differently, and--for Nate, the protagonist--from his disastrous handling of the problem of a young girl student with severe Aspergers Syndrome, which has weighed heavily on his mind over recent years.
    In "Intervention," the third story, Ray is a real estate agent facing the need for a cancer operation and dealing with the difficult problem of selling a house full of the owner's accumulated clutter.
He looks back to his upbringing, his relationships with his father, his brother, and his uncle.
    The final story is "Milton and Marcus," in which a writer is suddenly contacted about a book he wrote many years ago. He is asked to come out to Jackson Hole to discuss a possible screenplay. The original effort to create a screenplay has been found in the effects of a dead actor and has resurrected the idea of a new film. So the trip to Jackson Hole and the discussions there are interspersed with backward looks at the events at the time when the
first possibility of a screenplay was explored.

In all these stories, the writing and the psychological insights are very well done. Definitely a book I enjoyed reading.

2. "The Neighborhood," by Mario Vargas Lhosa

    Well, what can one say? This is the first book I have read by this Nobel prize winner. It is excellent from a variety of points of view. It focusses on two married couples in the very upper reaches of Lima society: one of the four--a mining magnate--is the subject of a lurid story in a muck-raking magazine. And there are two other characters who are explored in detail--one a small woman--"Shorty"--who is a reporter for the magazine, and the other an old, poverty stricken man who once was a clown on a popular TV show and whose career was ruined by the muck-raking magazine. The two married couples have somewhat complicated sex lives.
Just a thoroughly good story, interesting characters, and very well constructed and written, with highlights on the corrupt rule of the Fujimori regime in Peru.

3. "Personal," by Lee Child.

    Another Jack Reacher...
     I do not recommend this book to any serious reader--maybe an aeroplane or a beach read. For me it is a treadmill read, on my I-pad as I march up a 10 percent grade at 3.5m.p.h. It passes the time, relieves the boredom, and I can skip easily if I do not want to read about the inevitable fight when Jack Reacher takes on four or five assailants, kills a couple with his trademark elbow to their throats or huge punches to their kidneys. And the descriptions of firearms tend to bore me--skip them. I am not interested in the details of the logo on the Glock...or the the way the safety catch works on the Uzi.
However, part of the Lee Child technique, is to end each chapter with the strong need to start the next one. And incidentally, he never uses a semi-colon.
The plot of "Personal" is far too complicated to attempt a brief description and in the end I am not sure I understood it. But I did move from chapter to chapter.
And it is my rule--only on the treadmill.

"We Begin Our Ascent," by Joe Mungo reed

Yes, the name Joe Mungo Reed seems rather off-putting, but he is an accomplished writer and clearly has an inside knowledge of cycle racing and how things work on The Tour de France, where his racing cyclist narrator, Solomon, is a domestique, whose aim is not to win stages himself but to help Fabrice, the principal rider of his team to win. To quote a review: "fast, smart, funny and sad, this is an outstanding sports novel and Reed is an author to watch."
The team uses drugs, and when Solomon's wife drives from England to spend a couple of days with the Tour, she also gets involved in picking up a consignment of dope for the team...with unforeseen complications.
There is an interesting article about Reed at:
https://www.powells.com/post/original-essays/weird-detail

"Kudos" by Rachel Cusk

'Kudos' is the third book in a trilogy by Rachel Cusk--unless the narrator--Faye--is going to attend another conference or make another trip on which her neighbor on a plane tells her the essence of his life. What's the next step up from a trilogy?

The first book, "Transit," had something near a plot, with Faye--a newly divorced middle-aged woman--starting a new life in a run-down, shabby house. But much of that book, as in "Outline" and "Kudos," has Faye as a listener and a reporter as the characters she meets relate their experiences of life. It's never quite clear what it is about Faye that leads these characters to unburden themselves. to her.

In "Kudos," Faye goes to a literary conference in some Mediterranean city, and she hears and reports numerous life stories or chunks of her characters' lives. There is no plot--indeed I have read that Cusk has gone on record with something to the effect that plots are out-moded devices. So the interest in this book is whether you are intrigued by the very varied experiences of the different characters she meets, who proceed to tell her about their lives in great detail. I had no problem with it--read it to the end: but I guess others might long for a plot, or might just get fed up with the lives of one or more of Faye's interlocuters and give up or skip on to the next.

One thing is abundantly clear--she is a brilliant creator of the stories her character tell.

More Catching Up...

Just quickly, one I gave up on:

"The Night Ocean" by Paul Lafarge.

Not too much sticks in my memory about this book, which I stopped reading about two thirds of the way through. It is the story of a search for the origins of what is supposed to be a diary of H.P. Lovecraft, in which are detailed his homosexual relationship with a much younger man. The quest is to see where this diary was supposed to have originated, and whether it was a fake. At least, that is how I recall it. But I just got bored with it. If you happen to be an H. P. Lovecraft fan, you might enjoy it. There are apparently crowds of Lovecraft fans--they seem to be some sort of cult.

"Word by Word" by Kory Stamper.

This book is by a lexicographer who worked for Merriam Webster, and if you would like to know how dictionaries get created and edited and up-dated, this is an amusing guide to the life of a lexicographer. As a word maven, I enjoyed it. As an afterthought, I grieve these days over my print dictionaries, of which I have so many, though I still like to look up words in my two volume Shorter Oxford English dictionary. But with my British library card number I can go into the full OED online for free.

"Super Sad True Love Story" by Gary Shteyngart.

Anything by Gary Shteyngart is worth reading, but the library cut me off about three quarters of the way through this book. The plot is set in the future when everyone is constantly online on their "apparat," with each 'a' crowned by an umlaut--the device is a super-sophisticated smart phone that provides users with heaven knows how much information about everyone around them and the world at large. And to 'verbal' someone is to by-pass the use of the apparat. The United States is ruled by a single dictatorial party: it is totally in debt to the Chinese: Central Park has become a tent city: black helicopters circle overhead: there is a  disastrous war with Venezuela: and road blocks proliferate around cities.The love story is that of a geeky, Jewish, middle-aged man and his relationship with a young Korean girl. Shteyngart is obviously drawing on his own experience in his descriptions of the Korean family and culture because he is married to a Korean. I enjoyed what I read, with some reservations, but not sufficiently to get back on the 'holds' list to download it again.

"Solar Bones" by Mike McCormack

This novel was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and it has won an important award in Ireland. It's a stream of consciousness narration, right there in the James Joyce/Virginia Woolf tradition. (It is not like Ullysses: the language is straightforward) There is little in the way of punctuation--in fact, one review correctly describes it as "one long sentence." There are occasional breaks in the text that tend to show shifts in the train of thought. And the whole text is a review of a middle-aged man's life, not in chronological order but moving from the present to the past--from childhood to middle age: from the early days of marriage to dealing with grown-up children: coping with his wife's desperate case of food poisoning: pursuing his career as an engineer that brings him in conflict with local politicians--and all with plenty of rumination about the nature of life and love, religion, and human suffering.
I thought there was a degree of repetition in some of these musings, but overall this is a very impressive novel that I recommend.

Catching Up..just for the record...

I have neglected the blog for many weeks. This entry is just going to catch up, and it will not give much detail about the very mixed bag of books I will mention. The bag is mixed as the new public library here in Cleveland Park is such a pleasure to visit, and I have taken to patrolling the fiction shelves and picking up books by well-known authors or authors whose names I have recently heard mentioned on the New York Times weekly book review podcast. And then there are the e-books from the library, which come shooting into my I-pad at odd times when my turn comes up.
So--let's just get into the list, with a few words about each book.

"Anything is Possible," by Elizabeth Strout.
I quote: "..lovely new novel is a requiem for small-town pain....you read Strout, really, for the same reason you listen to a requiem, to experience the beauty in sadness." The book is set in the mid-west, in small towns, and it consists of a number of longish stories that have rather tenuous connections with each other. This was the first of Strout's novels I have read, and I thought it was very well done--clearly she is a first-rate writer.

"Speak No Evil" by Zodinma Iweala.
This is an extraordinary book by a Nigerian whose first novel some years ago was about boy soldiers in West Africa--highly praised. This new novel (coming out after the author has qualified as a medical doctor) is about Niru, an adolescent of Nigerian parents (both doctors), growing up in Washington DC and attending a school that seems to be a cross between Sidwell Friends and St. Albans. He realizes that he is gay and has great problems with his conservative religious parents, who try to change his nature with religious indoctrination in Washington and back in Nigeria. None of which works. He has a friendly relationship with a girl, Meredith, who becomes the narrator in the second half of the novel. I would certainly recommend it, though I stumbled a bit (as did a reviewer in The Guardian) over dialogue that was unpunctuated, and often you didn't know who was speaking or if they were, in fact, speaking. But that is just a minor criticism.

"Gone Tomorrow," by Lee Childs.
I am almost ashamed to mention this book, which was I=Pad reading as I walked daily on the treadmill in the gym. I had heard a pod-cast in which David Remnick interviewed Lee Childs, who has apparently written a dozen books, and made a fortune, starring Jack Reacher---a big man, ex-army and some form of secret service, who travels the world with just a toothbrush, a wallet with a credit or cash card, one set of clothes, and in the first chapter something happens that draws him into a complicated plot--involving bad guys, detailed descriptions of weapons, fights, killings...you name it. Short sentences...never a semi-colon--who needs them? And apparently Lee Childs sits down each September the first and starts a new Jack Reacher, and he claims he has no outline. He finishes in March of the following year. It's easy reading, and it works well for reading on my I-pad when I am on the treadmill. Dare I say--I have just downloaded a second one. My justification?  Good enough for David Remnick's summer reading, then good enough for me.

"Train Dreams" and "Nobody Move" by Denis Johnson.
Having heard this author fulsomely praised, I took these two short books from the library.
A review of "Train Dreams" provides the following quote: "...it's a love story, a hermit's story, a refashioning of age-old wolf-based folklore....it's a small masterpiece." I read it in one sitting.
"Nobody Move" is much longer. I quote: "A short, tight crime noir, produced under a deadline for Playboy Magazine." There is a lot of wise-cracking dialogue, and the convoluted plot is difficult to follow. I am still not sure I understood what it was all about. But as the review said, "...you do keep reading." I did.
Johnson--unknown to me before these novels--is a very accomplished writer who won a Pulitzer Prize.

"Memories of a Marriage" by Louis Begley. I vaguely remember reading highly praised novels by Begley some years ago. I spotted this in the library and read it with interest. Philip, the narrator meets an old female acquaintance at the ballet in New York. She is in her early seventies and Philip has not seen her for years. Slowly, with talks with old friends and visits with her, he unravels the rocky progress of her marriage. I quote a review: "An engrossing novel that explores two different, often obscured, worlds. One is the private recesses of a couple's marriage: the other is high WASP society." Not a bad read: very well done.