Tag: novels

Books: The Lying Life of Adults. A Novel by Elena Ferrante, 2019

I have previously had mixed feelings about the writings of Elena Ferrante. My esteem of her rose after the film adaptation of “The Lost Daughter” by Maggie Gylenhaal, a truly original and thought-provoking film. My initial complaints about her fiction were related to the first part of the Neapolitan quartet – “My Brilliant Friend” which I found cliched and uninspiring, especially her very traditional class-struggles approach. In contrast – I was impressed by “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” which is an example of an in-depth look into the motherhood and womanhood themes of her previous books and a sort of more incisive continuation of “The Lost Daughter.” In the former, I enjoyed the string of character studies – contradictory and complex, the prose – dense and subtle, the non-judgemental representation of opposing kinds of “femininity,” the ambiguity of female strife for independence as a mix of libration and egotism. “We all narrate our lives as it suits us.” writes Ferrante. This is the powerful message of “Those Who Stay and Those Who Leave” – and it is the meta-revelation of the first-person narrative in that novel.

In “The Lying Life of Adults,” this principle is taken to a level of arbitrariness. An exceptionally smart girl, the author wants us to believe, is debunking the “narrative” of the adults that surround her as lies. Doing that she builds her own, supposedly innocent and honest, narrative. Not a new thing, by the way (i.e. What Maisie Knew) . The problem with the narrative of the coming-of-age girl, is that at some point the “disbelief” cannot be suspended. It becomes impossible to give credit to her unusual for her age intelligence, her interest in higher matters of politics and philosophy, the impression she creates for adults and peers, and her supposedly penetrating representations of the adults in her life. This time, Ferrante is invested too much in binary oppositions: ugly-beautiful, dreamy-cynical, rich-poor, entitled-self-made, so that instead of transforming into psychological “depth” the oppositions come across as confusing and arbitrary. In the main character’s narrative everything becomes possible and hence — not engaging.

Books: First Lie Wins. A Novel by Ashley Elton. 2023

It is a book about a female con artist who is controlled by a mysterious Mr. Smith who instructs her to do various jobs and defines her marks. The protagonist does not know who is her Master. The plot follows her relationships with her most current mark, Mr. Smith and some “helpers” and antagonists. OK, so far so good. BUT – the plot is so arbitrary and incredible that a self-respecting reader would get very annoyed and offended by the stupidity of the whole thing.

Here is the heroine talking: “I shove a few fries in my mouth while I consider my next move.” This is exactly what the author was doing while writing this novel…The protagonist has about ten other aliases for her previous “jobs” and they are all called upon when something in this outrageous plot has to be motivated.

I found this title on the best-seller list and it was an editor’s pick on Amazon, and a book-club selection! It is either a symptom of the enormous power of advertising or the stupidity of the (mostly) female reader or both. Scary!

Books: Money, A Suicide Note. A Novel by Martin Amis, 1984

Thanks to Carl Hiaasen for discovering for me “Money” via the WSJ book-club. It’s such a pleasure to read a book where the language is not just a vehicle for the narrative – it’s a sheer source of aesthetic pleasure. It clicks so perfectly with the character it portrays. The novel’s main character is on an nightmarish rambling spree in search of himself. His hilarious monologue draws a satirical self-deprecating portrait of himself, the protagonist, and his surroundings. Still, the novel is not a pure satire. It is too mainstream in terms of plot, to qualify for this. A true satire would be totally unforgiving to its subjects (the way Gogol is). Amis’ main character is quite sympathetic and and on top of this — looking for redemption. The whole line of Self trying to win Martina’s love, and become “good” and “normal” is too sweet and romantic – it spoils what could have bee a true cynical work of art where nobody is spared and nobody is redeemable.

Still, the writer is at his best here. Quoting pieces of the book would not do it justice still I am tempted…:

…I am not allergic to the twentieth century. I am addicted to the twentieth century…
…Cold out there.When it’s cold. That’s when you really feel your money…
…the whole show has the suspended air and sickly texture of treated film, that funeral-parlor glow – numb, tranced, and shiny, like a corpse….
…his Latin rug sweats with vitamins…
[this woman].. has a wraparound mouth…
…My life was a joke.My death will be serious.That must be why I am so afraid….
…My theory is – we don’t really go that far into other people, even when we think we do.We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and quickly ask if anybody’s there.
…At sickening speed I have roared and clattered, I have rocketed through my time, breaking all the limits, time limits, speed limits, city limits, jumping lights and cutting corners, guzzling gas and burning rubber, staring through the foul screen with my fist on the horn. I am that fleeting train that goes screaming past you in the night. Though travelling nowhere I have hurtled with blind purpose to the very end of my time. I want to slow down now and check the scenery, and put in a stop or two. I want some semi-colons…

Pleasure to read when phrases create a short-circuit between meaning and wit and brevity+complexity of expression.

Books: The Good Girl, 2014 A Novel by Mary Kubica

Publishers Weekly needs to apologize for false advertising! The jacket quotes a review from them claiming that the book “will encourage comparisons with Gone Girl….” What a nonsense and a lie!
The book is a weak attempt at fiction writing by a housewife well-read in romance novels. The story could be transplanted in a fantasy “medieval” setting and could well be told as, for example, the story of a princess abducted by a Highlands shepherd who eventually fall in love. It is totally phony, banal, and boring. Too many pages dedicated to describing physical details don’t make a “psychological” novel. Literally describing looking, touching, walking, sitting, glancing, driving, etc. and doing all kinds of things a physical presence in the world comprises, is not the “detail” that fiction is made of. It fills pages. The author should go back to her other hobbies like “gardening, photography and taking care of animals in the local shelter” or find another way to make her kids proud of her, different from the fact that “mommy wrote a book.”

Books: "Deep Water", A Novel by Patricia Highsmith, 1957

Returning to Patricia Highsmith is always such a pleasure. And this novel in particular is such a delightful, despite late, “discovery” (thanks to Gillian Flynn.) A suburban marital thriller plays out like a magnificent war of the sexes tragedy where no extreme is incredible. The wife is pushing all the buttons, the husband is taking all the imaginable abuse, and then punishing her by killing others. The killer is both sympathetic and sociopathic. The wife is not a victim, she playfully and spitefully explores the boundaries of someones submission. And despite some critical opinion, this is not a “loveless” marriage that both characters are trapped in. A fatal marriage never is. One of the characters, in this case the man, is pathologically in love. And he is quietly destroying both — himself and Her — one chilling murder after another. Immediately after the second murder, Vic Van Allen, goes to a school concert to hear their daughter sing. He hands in his ticket at the entrance and the ticket says “Admit two”. Highsmith’s sense of humor is superb – it never fails to bring chills in the appreciating reader.

Books: The Circle. A Novel by Dave Eggers, 2013

A nice dystopian novel which reads with pleasure. The style is crisp and light as in Zamyatin’s We and the balance between sarcastic humor and dark insights is just right. We follow an inspired young lady, Mae, into her spiraling path: literally – spiraling up in the ranks of her corporation driven by ambition and willingness to be perfect at work and do good in the world  and metaphorically – spiraling down into a state of brainwashed enthusiasm for “transparency”. The critique of the corporate culture of advanced high tech companies is scalding. The tensions between “secrets” and “morality” are examined bravely and honestly. Eggers describes a world permeated by a sense of creeping totalitarianism. 

Occasionally the book becomes repetitive but in a way this “circling” is necessary to build the ominous presence of “the Circle”…Gospodinov could be developed more as a character.

Otherwise, Very Good!

Books: Paris: The Novel. Edward Rutherfurd, 2013

Could not finish this book by internationally best selling author of historical fiction Edward Rutherfurd.

It is a combination of a Paris tour guide and a soap opera intertwined with French history on high-school level. 
Think about the vast audience out there that actually reads Rutherfurd – readers endowed with intellectual naivete and literary innocence…

Books: My Struggle – Part 1. A Man in Love – Part 2. A Novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard, 2012, 2013

I resisted liking My Struggle. It won me over slowly after I had finished the first half of the book and at the end of it I was convinced that it is one of the best books I have come across recently. The ending of the first part of My Struggle (the events following the death of Karl Ove’s father) is an example of some truly great writing without even trying to be one. This is actually the secret of the book – it is great literature pretending to be a documentary account of simple everyday events. The book has some of the magnificent qualities of  Scandinavian literature – the somber tone, the harrowing honesty to oneself to the point of self-flagellation and to the point of cruelty when it concerns the others, the fearless embrace of life. It is written in the great tradition of Ibsen, Strindberg and Bergman…And of course, it owes a lot to Proust but in a sense, it is also quite anti-Proustian. This book deals with the nature of memory but not in the narcissistic way that can be so boring in Proust. It dwells on the minutiae of life with a sense of desperation – the desperation that life has no essence, that there is nothing beyond the string of fleeting moments which can never be satisfactory because one is always speeding towards the next moment dreaming that it would be more complete. The sense that the present cannot be truly experienced because one always is in want of something else. 
I have never been so conscious of the oppression of small talk and socializing as after reading Knausgaard. His account of a child’s birthday party is more valuable than a book with dozens of fictional characters vainly searching for happiness. His descriptions of a drive home after a failed attempt at vacationing with his family, or a Christmas party with friends, or trying to return a soup in a restaurant, or just smoking outside his apartment building and observing the kids’ play, etc. etc. — are more insightful than hundreds of pages of many (critically acclaimed) novels.
Sometimes, the emotions conveyed are so true, so close to reality, that because of that lack of fictional distance between the narrator and the reader, one just wants to close the book and cry.
I don’t want fiction, I want to read Knausgaard.

                                                                                                                             “Too much desire, too little hope“
                                                                                                                                                                           Knausgaard

Books: Troubling Love. A novel by Elena Ferrante

I decided to give a second chance to Ferrante hoping to read something of the quality of Days of Abandonment. Troubling Love is satisfying to an extent. It is a bold and ambitious book which tries to capture the complexities of a mother-daughter love-hate relationship. The narrator Delia, struggles to understand her relationship with Amalia, her mother, on the day after her mother’s death by drowning. As Delia puts it quite appropriately at some point: “I was here to cross a line”. And she does cross that line. Occasionally, she also crosses the line of literary taste getting lost into convoluted psychoanalytical kitsch. Had the narrative been simpler, crisper, Delia’s digging into the past in order to recover the truth buried under convenient post-factum rationalizations and lies, would have provided a more revealing and cathartic experience. The “truth” about Amalia’s past, not surprisingly, revolves around her husband’s jealousy, his violence, her lover (imagined by her child-daughter), her repressed sexuality. Delia both wishes for, and hates and fears her mother’s erotic liberation. One of her childhood memories is of her sitting with her parents in a summer theater, her mother furtively glancing around in the dark, her father possessively putting an arm around her shoulder: “Amalia after a stealthy look sideways, curious and yet apprehensive, let her head fall on my father’s shoulder and appeared happy. That double movement tortured me. I didn’t know where to follow my mother in flight, if along the axis of that glance or along the parabola that her hair made in the direction of her husband’s shoulder.I was beside her, trembling. Even the stars, so thick in summer, seemed to me points of my confusion. I was to such an extent determined to become different from her that, one by one, I lost the reason for resembling her.” Good writing.