Aravind Adiga, White Tiger

Aravind Adiga's White Tiger focuses on the rise of "Munna," a boy so neglected in his childhood that nobody has really bothered to name him. "Munna" merely means "boy" in Hindi.  Sitting in his small office, beneath a lavish chandelier, he is dictating a letter to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier, to teach him about the reality behind the now-cliched image of the Indian entrepreneur.  Of course, the letter will never arrive, that is clear from the outset, but it contains within it the whole of the life of Munna, AKA Balram, AKA "The White Tiger."  The novel, though, is not about its narrator.  He is merely a vehicle (an apt metaphor, since he he serves as a driver) to discuss India's tremendous wealth inequality, and the many social, political, religious, familial, and personal ties and systems that perpetuate it. Together, these create the "chicken coop" entrapping the poor of India, though the narrator argues that they hold the key to their cage.

Balram tells us that he might have called this book "The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian."  He continues:

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling.  Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas:  sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences of politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of our old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep -- all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

The book is fiercely funny, with humor that grows darker as the plot moves forward, and while the humor never recedes entirely, at a certain point I would have preferred to stop laughing along with the narrator.  But I didn't.  The book is an antidote to the two narratives we get in the West about India:  the up-and-coming superpower of technological knowhow, and the land of desperate poverty and disease.  The book presents both in stark, sardonic terms, demonstrating clearly again and again the gap between The Darkness (the rural, poverty-hobbled villages) and The Light (the new, tech-fueled areas of Delhi and other major cities).  And while Balram has indeed crossed this uncrossable gulf, the method he uses -- vicious and bloody murder -- highlights the impossibility of the crossing.

Read this book.  It is now on my official Required Reading list.

Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot

Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot is tremendous fun, smart, witty, amusing, compelling and interesting.  A rookie cop in London accidentally finds himself apprenticed to the single surviving member of an ancient society of wizards who work to keep the peace among the supernatural elements still active throughout the city.  Sounds deeply improbably, and of course it is, but Aaronovitch carries it off lightly, and our everyman hero Peter voices our skepticism for us, despite all that he encounters.

Aaronovitch wrote for the BBC's popular Dr. Who series (delightful, at least until the entrance of the 11th Doctor), and the tone will be familiar to fans of the Doctor.  Also for those who have spent time in London, there is the added entertainment of reading of supernatural happenings in familiar haunts.  Give it a go.  I've got the sequel on my wishlist...

Matthew Pearl, The Poe Shadow

Matthew Pearl's The Poe Shadow attempts to be two things at once:  a mystery novel, and a serious attempt to unravel the mystery of the death of the great master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe.  Although he gained a cult following in his life, Poe was never a financial success, and died a dismal death, surrounded by questions.  This book tries to capture something of the dark tone of the works of Poe, and does not succeed, here.  It has a bit of a gloss of nostalgia, which is somewhat deadening in a work of historical fiction, but the narrative is compelling enough and keeps the reader moving along.  For a fan of Poe, or of 19th century literature, an entertaining read.  For others, probably not.  (The endorsement on the cover from Dan Brown ought have been a warning, but then, I picked it up for a pound at a charity shop in Scotland, so no harm there.)

Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites

It has been a while since I "borrowed" a book from a local coffee shop.  The last time I did so, I was delighted with the results -- a book that seemed to be written by a lunatic.  This inspired me to pick this one up, and I am now convinced that all books left in coffee shops are written by the insane.

Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites is something of a cult classic, as it turns out, but this does not mean that it is any good. Indeed, it is perhaps the worst book I have ever read or, at least, it is in the bottom five.  It is, though, bad in delightful ways, like a B horror film. In essence, super-geniuses of the future discover that hostile alien "mind parasites" have been restraining humanity from achieving our true potential as god-like beings, and it is up to a noble band of man to stop them, at last.

Signs of a novel with serious problems:

1. There are several footnotes throughout.  But not of the amusing sort found, for example, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  Just footnotes.
2. Numerous direct references to phenomenology, a theoretical approach to the world in which the individual's own experience of things ("phenomena") is made central, and frequent mention of philosopher and mathematician (and phenomenologist) Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl.  
3. The use of said phenomenology as a major plot device.
4. The impression that the use of recreational drugs was responsible for the majority of the text.  Indeed, many passages remind me of conversations I've had with friends who have dabbled in such substances:  "They were all so preoccupied with their petty worries, all enmeshed in their personal little daydreams, while we were at last grappling with reality--the only true reality, that of the evolution of the mind."

The narrator's sudden understanding of phenomenology allows him to understand the true nature of the universe, communicate telepathically, move objects with the force of him mind, and, yes, of course, to loose excess weight.  And to become unbearably condescending.  One does not win over audiences by frequently stating "This is very difficult to explain to non-telepaths," or by referring to all of humanity as "squalid, quarrelsome, [and] small minded."

For all of its claims to having unlocked the secrets of the universe, though, it is hard to take all too seriously a science fiction novel written in 1967 (the year of the Summer of Love and of MLK's speaking out against the Vietnam War, among other landmarks), and set centuries in the future, that predicts a major paradigm shift in human consciousness, but fails to predict women's liberation and sees -- in Wilson's term --"negroes" as a threat to civilization.  

I'd recommend this as a horror show, but cautiously, since it seems that many readers have taken it seriously.

Carlos Fuentes, Aura

Carlos Fuentes' Aura is a strange gothic tale, a short novel of love, lust, and horror.  A young scholar, living in poverty, responds to a job ad that reads, he thinks, as if it were written for him.  An ancient widow, decaying in her old home, genuflecting before a wall of votives and devotional images, hires him to edit her husband's memoirs.  He comes purely for the cash, which he needs desperately, but is almost immediately distracted by the widow's beautiful, green-eyed niece.

The relationship between the old crone and young beauty is disturbing, and generates the force of the narrative.  Just how are they connected?  And what will this mean for the young scholar?

Written in the second person, "you" are the narrator, a uncommon conceit (also found in Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller...) that draws the reader in, and toward the creepy conclusion.

C.S. Forester, The African Queen

While the 1951 film of The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Catherine Hepburn is likely more well known, at this point, it was based on a 1935 novel by C.S. Forester.  The novel is both better and worse, giving greater clarity to the interior lives of the protagonists but also revealing deeply problematic racist and sexist perspectives.

The novel is set in Germany's African colonies at the outbreak of World War I.  Rose, the spinster sister of a sour missionary priest, and Allnut, the working-class mechanic and jack-of-all-trades are thrown together in the much dramatized heart of "darkest Africa," where they battle malaria, heat, and their own passions all in the name of Mother England: The decide to travel down an unnavigable river to use a rickety steamboat to blow up a massive battleship dominating a lake and preventing the English from making advances into the German territory.

True to form, the Hollywood ending is grander and more glorious than the somewhat deflating ending to the novel.  The sexism is also muted a bit, as is the racism (though both are present).  This is in part because the film gives us less access to the inner thoughts of Rose and Allnut, something we can perhaps be grateful for.

Kerstin Ekman, Forest of Hours

Kerstin Ekman's The Forest Of Hours is the tale of a troll that, in the process of saving a giant trapped beneath a fallen tree, finds himself imbricated in the world of humans. As a supernatural being, his life span is quite long -- something like 500 years. We find him as a young creature in the northern Swedish Skule Forest, sometime in the Middle Ages. As he talks with children and then adults, he begins to learn their habits and practices, and eventually begins to "pass" for human. Wearing this disguise, as it were, he engages is the full range of human endeavors, from religion and science to sex and murder.

Skord starts out barely able to put two thoughts together, and ends up an (occasionally) famous doctor and chymist (sic). While at the outset he is able to effortlessly send his soul into the body of passing animals, by the end he has lived long enough to enter the Enlightenment, and in so doing outlives the age of magical thinking. He becomes a product of his surroundings to the point that he repudiates, in effect, his own being.

The novel's great strength is its evocation of the landscape of the forest, described with unusual precision. We do not read of "trees" and "undergrowth," but of aspens and white moss. This clarity of location becomes the setting for sweeping historical scope; it is the only constant in the novel. One passage serves to demonstrate the precision of the prose and also to give a sense of the tone of the novel. After a bloody scene, in which the protagonist has joined a band of outlaws, we read:

The light rose over the crest of the hill, the frost still lay on the moss and tiny droplets of ice hung like buds in the bright green bilberry plants There were bodies and clothes and bundles holding stained pewter and salt-encrusted hams; there were knives and straps and clasps, hair, blood, guts, liver -- there was no one at all, and no one was riding through the forest.

This starts out sounding like a tacky Halmark poem, and then the camera moves, as it were, and reveals the scene of horror, all the more effective for the soft setup.

Ultimately, like so many books about monsters and other such beings, this is a book about the nature of humanity. Skord's "passing" as human allows him to serve as an outsider within. He becomes, though, more and more human in his thoughts and goals, as a product of his adoptive context. The overlap of issues of race and of humanity come together when Skord comes across an old acquaintance named Gugo, a native of the Caribbean now working as a servant in Sweden. Skord soliloquizes to Gugo while the latter is unconscious. He seems to be speaking at first of Gugo's race, but then we realize he is talking, of course, about his own potential humanity which, in effect, undermines our own:

May I ask what makes you so sure that you are a human being -- quite apart from this rather superficial resemblace that makes you hang around human beings rather than a herd of pigs? You find swine distasteful. They grunt, they potter about. They guzzle rotten potatoes and bits of dead bodies..

I have seen people do that.

Are people human?

As like each other as leaves are.

Look at the leaves. Can you not in the blink of an eye eliminate their similarities? See the networks of nerves, spreading and curling and twisting? Not a single one has the same pattern as the next. Spots, rust. Dots, warts; jagged edges, shifting colours. Dry rustling. Long, drifting waves. Spreading and shrinking. Leaves.

Are they leaves?

I don't know.

Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

This will be brief, because I can convey the feel of this tense, dark, gritty novel in very few words:

Smoke. Gin. Bullets. More gin. Bogart, not literally, but you won't be able to not see the nameless narrator as Humphrey. And this quote:

"I haven't laughed so hard over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother."

If you think we live in a jaded, brutal age, try this Depression era novel. If you think we live in a violent age, try this novel. If you think we live in an overly drugged age, read this novel.

In short, read this novel. I look forward to the other four (including, most notably, the Maltese Falcon) in this volume.

Johanna Sinisalo, Troll: A Love Story

Johanna Sinisalo's Troll: A Love Story is a strange, dark, stunningly beautiful novel about the boundaries of humanity. The premise is that trolls, longstanding elements of Scandinavian myth, have at last been documented by science. This process (which has happened with a great many creatures like the giant squid and the rhinoceros, both of which were once considered mythical) transforms them from "monsters" to "animals," as they are shifted from books of mythology to books of biology.

They remain, though, highly elusive, rarely captured or even observed. Still, as has been happening win many large predators from wildcats to bears to wolves, habitat destruction and global climate change has shortened their periods of hibernation and pushed them closer to human settlements.

The plot begins with advertising designer Mikael (aka "Angel") stumbling home, partly drunk, to find some local teenage thugs beating someone beside his building. He yells and threatens to call the cops, and when they scatter, he finds that they have been attacking a young troll, roughly human-shaped, though tailed, jet-black and feline in its litheness but clearly in terrible shape. Against all good sense, he scoops up the wild "animal" and brings it into his apartment:

It's very weak. When I lower it onto the bed it doesn't struggle at all, just contemplates me with its reddish-orange feline eyes with vertical pupils. The ridge of its nose protrudes rather more than a cat's, and its nostrils are large and expressive. The mouth is in no way like the split muzzle of a cat or a dog: it's a narrow, horizontal slit. The whole face is so human-looking ... It's easy to understand why these black creatures have always been regarded as some sort of forest people who live in caves and holes, chance mutations of nature, parodies of mankind.

Each short chapters is told from the point of view of one of a handful of characters (Angel, his ex-lover "Dr. Spiderman," his frightfully oppressed mail-order-bride neighbor Palomita, and so on). These are interspersed with passages from other books and journals, real and fictional, that give background on the troll mythology and biology, ranging from Aki Bärman's The Beast in Man: An Enquiry Concerning the Kinship Between Man and Wild Animal in Myth and Fantasy (1986) to Väino Linna's The Unknown Soldier (1954).

Angel becomes increasingly fascinated, captivated, obsessed with the troll, and this relationship begins to eclipse all of his human relationships, professional and personal. The novel is driven by the interior concerns of several characters, external pressures on and between them, and the ticking time-bomb of the razor-clawed, sharp-toothed wild animal in Angel's bedroom.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

As a teenager, I read hundreds of sci-fi and fantasy novels (not all of them masterpieces, I realize in retrospect). All fantasy novels essentially owe a debt to J.R.R. Tolkien's pioneering masterpieces The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; so too, much of science fiction owesa debt to Ray Bradbury and his short stories and novels, including The Martian Chronicles, but also the harrowing and wonderful Something Wicked This Way Comes and, perhaps most famously, Fahrenheit 451.

What these works all share in common is, perhaps, the hallmark of the genre -- a penchant for looking at humanity as if from the outside, an estrangement in time or place or species that allows us to see ourselves anew.

The Martian Chronicles was originally published as a series of short stories in a number of publications, and does not have the scope or cohesion of this proper novels. Still, a series of themes run throughout them. The narratives are set in a future which seems, now, rather like our own past, as if the 1940s (when it MC was written) were pushed into the future, without the intervening years having occurred. It is a quaint future, for all of its sudden violence, which highlights how, no matter what we predict about the future, we are always, in essence, wrong.

Hilary Mantel, The Giant, O'Brien

This novel of the famous Irish giant Charles Byrne was recommended to me over a pint in a pub in London by an Irish friend, so of course I was compelled to seek it out. The real Charles Byrne died a young man in 1783, after attaining the prodigious height of 7 feet, 7 inches. Hilary Mantel puts flesh on his bones which, somewhat chillingly, remain on view in the Hunterian Museum in London:

Mantel's fictionalized Byrne, re-christened Charles O'Brien by his dubious promoter, is a storyteller in the ancient Irish tradition, and the mythical tales he delicately weaves for his admiring (and ultimately traitorous) form a stark contrast to the bleak life of the giant who tells them. He speaks of gold-trimmed chariots led by teams of white horses, but plods his way on foot. He speaks of castles hug with Flemish tapestries and furnished in ornate antiques, but lives in squalor. We read:

The poet has his memorial in repetition, and the statesman in stone and bronze. The scholar's hand lies always on his book and ... the rebel has his ballad and his cross ... But for the poor man and the giant there is the scrubbed wooden slab and the slop bucket, there is the cauldron and the boiling pot, and the dunghill for his lights; so he is a stench in the nose for a day and a week, so his is a no-name, so he is oblivion. Stories cannot save him. When human memory has run out, there is the memory of animals; behind that, the memory of the plants, and behind that the memory of the rocks. But the wind and the sea wear the rock away; and the cell-line runs to its limit where meaning falls away from it, and it loses knowledge of its own nature.

The novel begins perhaps slowly, it winds perhaps more than is necessary, but it finishes with withering power. Modern science can tell us why Charles grew so tall, but it must remain mute on what it would be like to live as a giant. For this, we need a novelist.

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room is composed of three travel accounts, each one somewhat more fraught and disastrous than the previous. The protagonist (a South African named Damon, so there is likely strong identification between narrator and author) is clearly running from something fundamental to himself, something that he cannot escape through travel but that is worse when standing still. Just what this fracture is, Galgut never makes clear, but the fact of it is palpable.

The prose are strangely ungrammatical, with run-on sentences and missing punctuation, and this is tolerable, though I don't know that it adds anything to the novel. Still, despite this approach, the novel is tense and taut, with an increasing sense of a spiraling toward disaster. Most of the text is written in the third person ("He is feeling harried and under pressure and in this state he would rather be alone."), but there are periodic interjections in the first person. For example, the protagonist briefly steps in to says "So even in the first few day I become aware of certain differences between them." The "them" here includes Damon (protagonist), while the "I" is also Damon (narrator). Neither is identical with Damon Galgut (author), though all three overlap with one another. This device is quite effective, providing a tension between the direct punch of the first person and the distance provided by the third. That said, it is often the first person interjections that are the most remote, the most removed from the heart of the narrative ("I forget his name." "I don't remember how long it was.").

In the first of the three accounts, Damon meets a strikingly handsome German man, Reiner, while they are both traveling in Greece. They strike up a fast friendship of the sort that any frequent traveler knows. There is, though, a constant pull between them of a sexual attraction that neither (for differing reasons) seems willing to engage. They meet up again for a lengthy hike through Lesotho, at which point their travel becomes a proxy for their desires and their struggles for power, culminating in misery for Damon.

In the next, Damon again makes friends while traveling, now with a trio -- a brother and sister, and an older man whose connection to the two young siblings is never made clear. He is strongly attracted to the brother but, surrounded as they are, can only find the briefest moments for the most sparse exchanges with him.

Finally, as a middle aged man, worn out by his constant motion, Damon heads to India with a dear, but troubled friend. Here, all the looming disaster builds and builds until the dam breaks and chaos erupts.

Throughout, the novel is compelling, almost riveting, despite its simple tone, broken structure and basic plot. Pared down to the essentials, In a Strange Room vibrates with energy.

Jospeh Brodsky, Watermark

Watermark is the first extended prose piece by Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky. It is a memoir, written in slightly disconnected little snippets. We read of past loves, past friends, favorite cafes and bars, architectural details, and the like, as we might expect of a memoir is one of the world's most beautiful cities.

The surprise (and pleasure) of reading Watermark is the connective tissue binding it all together. Brodsky, who was thrown out of the Soviet Union for his stances and viewpoints, has made a lifelong habit of visiting Venice in the heart of winter. The whole of this slim volume, then, is connected together not only by the icy waters of the canals but by the numbing fog that collects above them, by the damp chill of the stone walls, by the dim light and by the heavy coats and hats pulled low over the eyes and ears.

While I have only once been to Venice, and in the early fall, I have a similar penchant for visiting Paris in the middle of winter when, like Venice, the city is empty. No tourists visit, and many locals leave. The metros are empty, the museums have no lines, and a visitor can walk into any cafe, stroll right to the counter, and order up a café viennois and a few macaroons.

If you have been to Venice in the winter, read this book. If you have been to Venice in the summer, read this book. If you have not yet been to Venice, buy your ticket today.

Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World (which won the Nobel Prize for Literature) and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto are utterly unalike in subject and content, and yet reading them in alternation (I began the later before finishing the former), I found them to be absolutely in concert with each other. One is a desperately grim, epic account of a war between religious fanatics and a repressive military and the other, the ramblings of a sexual hedonist (Rigoberto) and the highly erotic concerns of his wife Lucretia and his son Fonchito. The War is page after page of starvation, sudden bursts of horrific violence (mutilations, rapes, and, ultimately, senseless slaughter of a grand -- if indeterminate -- scale), set within the parched landscape of the Brazilian backlands of the 19th century. The Notebooks is set among Don Rigoberto's etchings, his leather-bound books and, most centrally, the soft, silken sheets and down pillows of numerous beds, couches, chaises, and lounge-chairs.

And yet, and yet, ultimately both, relying on a similar pattern of overlapping narratives, chronological shifts and blurred transitions between narrative, flashback and fanstasy, embody the same worldview, and do so powerfully. Both novels virtually spit out a dissatisfaction with all human institutions -- religion, marriage, government, the military, the police, capitalism, communism, any and all social institutions -- which are seen at best as useless and more often as insidious, invidious, inherently prone to violence and failure. Rigoberto's loathed day-job as an insurance agent, which serves as a sort of cover for the hedonism and fantasy that forms the core of his life, is perhaps emblematic of the pointlessness of all these institutions. Why insure the pointless dreck with which we surround ourselves?

Don Rigoberto sounds off on one of several passionate digressions on the flawed nature of collective identity, the common delusion lurking behind all such institutions:

Behind patriotism and nationalism, there always burns the malignant fiction of collectivist identity, that ontological barbed wire which attempts to congregate "Peruvians," "Spaniards," "French," "Chinese," et cetera, in inescapable and unmistakable fraternity. You and I know that these categories are simply abject lies that throw a mantle of oblivion over countless diversities and incompatibilities, and attempt to abolish centuries of history and return civilization to those barbaric times preceding the creation of individuality, not to mention rationality and freedom.

In both novels, everyone is brimming with hypocrisy. Characters in love cheat on one another (and in the most violating of manners), "saints" engage is senseless violence. The War presents the nature of religion and of the state and pathetic and hypocritical, with both represented as equally based on ideology and equally vicious. At the most desperate moment, at the end, the marauding bandit Satan João, rechristened Abbot João in his new role as religious leader, orders the killing of the starving aged, women, and children who are in the process of surrendering. This is, for Llosa, the senseless and unavoidable result of faith in social institutions.

At the very end of The War, a minor character returns after a hiatus of a few hundred pages, and serves as a metaphor for the entire epic that has come before. "Bandit-Chaser" Colonel Macedo has come, like so many others, to the "holy" city ofCanudos with glorious visions before him, but finds only the dust and rot at the core of the whole endeavor:

[T]his entire experience, which was to be the greatest one in his life, the crowning reward of his perilous race toward respectability, has turned out instead to be a series of disillusionments and vexations.

In contrast, the libertine Don Rigoberto finds bliss through rejection of these very institutions. He becomes so deeply lost in a series of personal fantasies that, by the last page, much of what had seemed to be part of the main narrative is dissolved in to his elaborate escapism. Indeed, throughout, many of the short chapters and passages melt away before they reach their conclusion, with little or no transition between the fantasies they present and the "reality" of the novel, with shifts in voice, perspective, or time sometimes occurring mid-sentence.

The sly duplicitousness of Fonchito is perpetually before the reader. Young though he is, he is as much the author of his father and stepmother's fantasies as they are. Intermingled with their various obsessions is Fonchito's preoccupation with Egon Schiele and his torturously and sexually posed figures, twisting amongst one another with troublingly young partners in echo of one of the main themes of the novel.

Ultimately, though, underneath all the turmoil, is real passion. I will leave you with this beautiful fulmination. If it appeals, buy both these books and read them in tandem:

I know of no lie more base than the phrase taught to children: "A sound mind in a sound body." Who ever said that a sound mind is a desirable goal? In this case, "sound" means stupid, conventional, unimaginative, and unmischievous, the vulgar stereotype of established morality and official religion. That is a "sound" mind? It is the mind of a conformist, a pious old woman, a notary, an insurance salesman, an altar boy, a virgin, a Boy Scout. That is not health, it is an impairment. A rich, independent mental life demands curiosity, mischief, fantasy, and unsatisfied desires, which is to say a "dirty" mind, evil thoughts, and the blossoming of forbidden images and appetites that stimulate exploration of the unknown, renovation of the known, and systematic disrespect toward received ideas, common knowledge, and current values.

Damn.