Wedding Song, Naguib Mahfouz (translated by Olive E. Kenney)

Sesheps, The Great Sphinx of Giza

(November 28) This is a cool little book -- a kind of puzzle or mystery à la Roshomon (I think -- I've never seen the movie) in which four points of view of a chronicle of events provide partial details of what "really" happened. By the time I got to the fourth point of view, that of Abbas Younis, the pivotal character, I was quite anxious to know the "truth." The other narrators are clearly unreliable -- but you are never sure just how unreliable -- and their own doubts and guilts and biases complicate the suspense.

Of course, what "really" happened is what each character experienced; there is no single point of view that does not have its blind spots.

"Wedding Song" is the name of a theatrical play that affects all the characters, and it is also a play on words that has meaning for Cairenes (I think). But, to me, the title reflects the fact that the four points of view are all driven by the characters' first true loves -- or, rather, by the subsequent disillusionment, disappointment, self-delusion and (in the case of the fourth and happiest relationship) death that resulted from the few happy moments of exhilarating love -- and that these love-graphs shape everything the characters see and do and believe. There are four different "wedding songs" here: each one starts beautifully but becomes a dirge in the end.

I love how the same conversations are revisited from each point of view (not always what you get in murder mysteries or narratives that feature rehashes (like The Woman in White, e.g.)). It is amazing the nuances that can be brought to the same set of words by four different people.

Mahfouz paints a portrait of Cairenes as people who are extremely sensitive to "corruption" -- they vehemently despise vices such as drinking, gambling and extramarital sex, but they are ineluctably drawn to them all the same. They are heroes who believe themselves villains, and they are utterly charming.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

Thomas Bewick, The Wolf Trap

(November 21) Liked it. I didn't think I would at first -- I was wincing over the pseudo-19th-century style and debating whether I could stick it out when, on page 32, Clarke came up with the most imaginative and captivating description of how statuary might behave if animated, and I was hooked.

I thought she did very well throughout with scenic description, and the characters were vivid. The magic element was interesting and inventive, but I wouldn't say JSMN is "Harry Potter for adults" as a lot of reviews have; there's still something goofy and Mother Goose-ish about it all (and I don't know what "Harry Potter for adults" is supposed to mean, anyway -- I, an adult, love the Potter books).

Editing related: Susanna Clarke is the most comma-free author I've read in a long, long time (or "long long time," as she would have it). At first this unkemptness grated on me, but it's amazing what you can get used to after 200 or 300 (eventually 800) pages. Comma, shmomma!

Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party

(October 26) I really liked Three Men in a Boat – it’s the buddy movie of its day – the Seinfeld or Mary Tyler Moore Show of the 1880s. It’s very funny. The story is nominally about one trip up the Thames in a rowboat undertaken by three young urban professionals, but this particular trip is really just the backdrop for a series of comic monologues about other boat trips and adventures and about life in general, à la George Carlin or Dave Barry. As the friends get ready for the excursion, for example, J., the narrator, pauses to lampoon weather forecasting and barometers:

Then there are those new style of barometers, the long straight ones. I never can make head or tail of those. There is one side for 10 a.m. yesterday, and one side for 10 a.m. to-day; but you can't always get there as early as ten, you know. It rises or falls for rain and fine, with much or less wind, and one end is "Nly" and the other "Ely" (what's Ely got to do with it?), and if you tap it, it doesn't tell you anything. And you've got to correct it to sea-level, and reduce it to Fahrenheit, and even then I don't know the answer.

The book is fun also because of the sensation of travelling back in time 120 years – paid work is done by children, people move their bathtubs around, a complete supper can be bacon and a jam tart, young men share single beds matter-of-factly. Spookily at one point, J. reverses the time-travel effect by making fun of the fashion of collecting antique china:

Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?

Well, yes, they will!

It was surprising that interspersed among the funny anecdotes and clever observations are serious little flights of poetic fancy that occasionally verge on the mawkish. I was struck by this one, though:

And yet it seems so full of comfort and of strength, the night. In its great presence, our small sorrows creep away, ashamed. The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers, and smiles; and, though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone.

I can’t ever remember encountering a metaphor for Night that presents it as a maternal experience.

Three Men in a Boat and Jerome K. Jerome were unknown to me till I read Robert McCrum of The Observer’s list of the 100 greatest novels of all time a couple of years ago. He put it at No. 33 and called it “one of the funniest English books ever written.” I can easily think of 20 or 30 books that are far funnier, but it’s pretty funny.

Empire Falls, Richard Russo

(September 28) Liked it. I picked this up because a booKCEL member recommended Russo to Irving lovers.

I can see why Irving and Russo would be compared -- their novels have many broad characteristics in common (bearing in mind that I'm basing my knowledge of Russo entirely on Empire Falls): there's a motley crew of likable characters, modern New Englanders, who are trying to carry out plain-vanilla lives as best they can while something evil and frightening looms in the background. Despite the dark clouds on the horizon, there's a charming and humorous passage on every page.

But I would say Irving and Russo are fundamentally very different. Or, perhaps, what I think of as "Irving" is a very specific quirkiness in the point of view and in the mapping out of the tale that Russo just doesn't have. Irving is a step away from his characters -- you can hear him lovingly puppet-mastering above the fray. Russo (like many writers) is much closer to his characters, more invisible as a narrator. Irving is also eccentric in the way he tells his characters' stories, often taking up and developing topics and side-stories that never get returned to in the course of the über-story -- which is a way of disarming professional readers, who are used to taking note of seemingly random details, confident they'll later on be woven neatly into the climax of the book.

In some ways, Irving is an "unprofessional" novelist.

Russo is professional -- in both the good and bad senses. Empire Falls is very neatly plotted: all the disparate issues affecting individual characters are brought to bear on the novel's climax, which is a series of surprising, and in some cases shocking, revelations about individual characters' secret intentions. The climax of Empire Falls is quite dramatic, in fact -- way more than any Irving novel ever is.

But Empire Falls is also a bit conventional. You kind of know right off the bat how the chips should fall, and they do fall that way. It's a TV-generation quality. Irving definitely doesn't have that quality.

The best thing about Russo is the witty little turns of phrase he often uses to capture a detail in a scene or the mood of a character. He's in the Dave Barry or Bill Bryson schools of humour, only subtler.

Overarching observation: with The Cider House Rules and Empire Falls, I have spent the month of September in Maine.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks

The Cider House Rules, John Irving

(September 15) Liked it. Even though I'm a big Irving fan and even though The Cider House Rules was published 20-odd years ago, I had never read it -- had never even heard of it until the movie came out in 1999. The Cider House Rules is not in the running for my favourite Irving novel -- my top three are still The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meaney and A Widow for One Year -- but it was very likable in a typically Irving way.

What is that "way"? Why do I like Irving? Roger Ebert said of the movie version of The Cider House Rules that it "is often absorbing or enchanting in its parts." That is certainly true of all the books. There are always several totally enchanting characters, who seem to embody various combinations of my own best qualities, lol. The events that befall these characters are sometimes surreal, but charmingly so. The threat of something awful about to happen often hangs in the air around Irving characters, but that only compels me to read on. Perhaps the really attractive thing in Irving's books is how much groups of characters love one another. There are weird and hateful characters in every Irving novel, but there is always a core group of people whose love for one another is very affectingly portrayed.

Ebert also said of the movie version of The Cider House Rules, "The story touches many themes, lingers with some of them, moves on and arrives at nowhere in particular. It's not a story so much as a reverie about possible stories." This is true of all the Irving I've read, and I like it fine.

But, in fact, there is a very poignantly painful question posed by this novel: "How do you protect the one(s) you love from how much you're going to hurt them?"

When I started reading The Cider House Rules, Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic came to me as the image. It was startling to see, further into the book, how appropriate this was -- knives are a big part of this novel, only beginning with scalpels.

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic

Books, books everywhere

In the last month I've started six books and finished none: Six Easy Pieces (Richard Feynman), The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens), Cosmos and Psyche (Richard Tarnas), The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon) and Collapse (Jared Diamond).

Nothing's grabbing me. (Well, I got squeamish about The Kite Runner, which I attribute to a year of reading Sikram Veth, Rohinton Mistry and Shyam Selvadurai novels -- I could not put them down but they were traumatizing to read -- ; and Cosmos and Psyche was recalled by the library before I even cracked it open.)

I am becalmed, à la "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Joan Miró, The Gold of the Azure

Halbot K. Browne (Phiz), Mr. Pickwick Slides

François Gérard, Cupid and Psyche

Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street

Roy Lichtenstein, Wham

Viking Urnes brooch, ca. 1100

Dress Your Best: The Complete Guide to Finding the Style That’s Right for Your Body, Clinton Kelly and Stacy London

(May 15) Fun. I have gotten on a kick of watching What Not to Wear on Friday nights while wrestling the dog, and have slowly learned there’s a science to choosing clothes. Dress Your Best is mostly images with magazine-style cutlines and bullet points, not a book, really, but it gave me an awareness of the visual aesthetic of clothing that reminded me of learning the compositional aesthetic of The Oath of the Horatii in art history (only quicker).

Now, would Stacy and Clinton say that Madame X is dressed appropriately? Oh, I think so.

-- John Singer Sargent, Madame X

The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

(May 7, 2006) Good read. I really liked it. I haven’t read a lot of time-travel novels (just the Diana Gabaldon books), but I feel like I know the genre from movies (Groundhog Day, Time Bandits, Austin Powers, Back to the Future, Lola Rennt, Peggy Sue Got Married, Somewhere in Time, Terminator, Prisoner of Azkaban) and TV (Quantum Leap, Mr. Peabody, Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits), and I think that this was a very innovative approach to time-travelling. I like how she schemed it all out, so that for a while Henry knows more than Clare, then Clare knows more than Henry, and at almost every encounter one of them is surprised and one of them knows what’s going on. Despite this constant dislocation, both always know some of the “back story” and can guide the other through. The characters are very likable, and they do the harmless things you’d do if you had this kind of relationship with time -- they get a lottery win, they play the stock market, they get prepared for September 11th. It’s clever and imaginative. It gets a bit gruesome at the end, but Niffenegger must have felt that she couldn’t wind up the whole thing too happily.

-- Caravaggio, Narcissus

When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, Gabor Maté

(May 1) Bittersweet: “sweet” because it confirms my own amateur observations; “bitter” because I feel like a ticking time bomb now, lol (the word I really need instead of “bittersweet” is “vindicating-scary”). Maté is completely convincing with his thesis that autoimmune diseases are caused by inappropriate responses to stress (repression, resentment, overcompensation, etc.). I am so convinced and have internalized the theory so thoroughly that my own reaction to a news story I heard the other day surprised me. The story reported how raloxifene is showing better results than tamoxifen in treating breast cancer, and my reflex reaction was, “Why are researchers wasting our time with these finger-in-the-dike drugs?” It was, to me, so clearly a big waste of time and money to do this kind of research -- yet I realize this is an impious reaction to “good news.” But I also know that the relationship between emotions and cancer will never galvanize people, neither researchers nor victims -- it’s too “unscientific,” no matter how many studies prove it.

-- Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of St. Theresa

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

(May 30) Hmm. I got this out of the library because I liked Gilead so much and because several reviews of Gilead harked back reverently to the predecessor, Housekeeping, as an amazing book. My expectations were very high, and they were not met at all, at all, at all. This is one of those books in which semi-insane people float around lyrically, occasionally noticing details of their environments. Because what they do is so aimless, it’s hard to bond with such characters. I don’t find myself looking forward to “what will happen next” -- it could be anything (shrug) . The word “cold” must appear on every page.

-- John Everett Millais, Ophelia

"Brokeback Mountain," Annie Proulx

Disquieting. I haven’t seen the movie, but I kept running into reviews that called the original short story “haunting,” the “most powerful love story I’ve ever read,” “a tale of star-crossed lovers,” etc. I found the story brutal -- there’s violence, suffered by the characters themselves and featured in their stories about other people, the characters are in extreme denial and don’t have much to live for, and the narrator’s attitude toward them is sort of cold and clinical. I can’t believe the movie treats them this way -- Jack and Ennis couldn’t have remained the blank slates they are in the short story for the whole two hours of a movie; nobody would stay till the end. And even though there is star-crossedness, there’s no catharsis, no real tragedy, because there’s no effort on anybody’s part to challenge his dismal existence, and no awareness that it even is dismal. I don’t know why Jack and Ennis fall so profoundly in love; one minute they aren’t in love, the next minute they are. All I know is that these are very sad lives, and that it was not a good thing to be gay in Wyoming in the ’60s through ’80s.

-- Daniel Brown, See You Tonight for Supper

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, John Fox, Jr.

Charming, involving, but peculiar. I was a bit surprised by what this turned out to be. When it was mentioned in Gilead, it sounded like it might be about two men, one older, vying for the love of a young woman. That premise would have had some bearing on the love relationship and the conflict in Gilead if it were entirely the case. But, really, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is a twist on the Pygmalion story, with the Eliza Doolittle character symbolizing Kentucky’s pre-industrial wilderness paradise. The age difference between the principal characters is completely different from that in Gilead: it’s slightly disturbing that Jack Hale falls in love with June at her young age. On the other hand, it strikes me as something you’d get away with in 1908, as well as with the usual anachronisms, such as the old-fashioned terms and turns of phrase and the unenlightened attitudes about class and race.

It’s quirky because it’s from 1908, but the author’s also quirky. The pacing is very uneven -- you can tell that Fox wove a fictional narrative around scenes he actually witnessed among mountain people -- he dwells on some moments with a vividness that is out of all proportion to their importance in the story while paying bare lip-service to moments that should be dramatic in the alleged story. He also has an odd way with a phrase every once in a while: he’ll write a sentence backward: “The longest of her life was that day to June,” or he’ll open a chapter in a funny, detached way: “Spring was coming: and, meanwhile, that late autumn and short winter, things went merrily on at the gap in some ways, and in some ways -- not,” or he’ll describe something bizarrely: “The Hoosier was delirious over his troubles and straightway closed his plant.” He shifts point of view frequently and without warning.

Still, I liked it a lot; I even ordered a fairy stone from www.highhopes.com.

-- J.C. Leyendecker, The Watchers of the Plains

Live the Life You Love: in Ten Easy Step-By-Step Lessons, Barbara Sher

A very encouraging book. This was a re-read for me. I read it a few years ago but never practiced any of the principles; I got it out of the library again because I recalled some good advice about setting priorities and de-cluttering that I would probably benefit from if I followed it. However, it’s just too file-card-heavy a system, and I will never keep it up. Nonetheless, it is fun to read -- Sher has a bracing, encouraging attitude that everyone is capable of great things, and she has a charming, chatty style that goes down easy. It is the perfect voice/style for this kind of thing.

-- A Mon Seul Désir, early 15th-century French master

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley

Very interesting. It addresses some of the gaps I felt in university English classes: I imagined that in university we would examine what it was that made poetry and prose great, powerful, whatever, and how the artist achieved the effects he did (it was always “he” then). Of course, we never did look at those things; courses were usually historical surveys and we were supposed to analyze technique fairly dispassionately. So Smiley has opinions on what I think are some really interesting aspects of how novels are written and how they achieve their effects -- such as the relative entertainment value of the first-person narrator vs. the omniscient narrator, etc.

It was a bit of a shock after 10 chapters on the features of 100 well-known novels to turn to two chapters on how to write a novel. I was not expecting the DIY aspect.

I had never heard of Jane Smiley before hearing of this book, but don’t want to read any of her novels now -- perhaps because they’re thoroughly autopsied here. She did make me want to read Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Clèves and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.

-- M.C. Escher, Drawing Hands

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

This is a lovely, winsome, “restorative” kind of book. It was wonderful to share consciousness with the narrator of this book, who is such a gentle, well-intentioned individual that your heart wells up with pride that the human race could produce such a worthy specimen. Experiencing this book is like being given a warm coat when you’re freezing, or a soft bed when you’re exhausted, etc. -- it’s nourishing or strengthening somehow. The creation of this character is amazing -- it never for a minute feels untrue, and yet a paragon such as this could never exist. It’s several days since I finished Gilead, and I am only now struck by how artificially structured the story is (to create the contrasts of good and evil that the author is obviously interested in). It felt real and true throughout, and compelling. I want to read Housekeeping now, and also The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.

-- N.C. Wyeth, Portrait of Lincoln

The Sparrow: A Novel, Mary Doria Russell

Good read. I started reading this simultaneously with Gilead, and this won out. The premise is interesting, the storytelling is vivid and the characters are so likable. In fact, I don’t know why I kept reading, since you learn early on that only one of the group of eight survives. I guess that’s a sign of how likable the characters are -- I couldn’t let them go even though I could see I was going to lose them one by one to gruesome deaths. I enjoyed this book, but I’ve had my fill of torture and gruesome death for a while. I will not be reading the sequel to this.

-- Ferdinand Hodler, Night

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles, Bruce H. Lipton

The author loves histology and is probably a good teacher, and probably has made a breakthrough in the understanding of cell biology... but the editing and copy-editing of this book leave a lot to be desired.

-- Paul Plante, Northern Cardinal

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman

Fascinating. I would recommend this book highly to anyone. However, it bothered me throughout that Fadiman didn’t explain what she was doing or why; she simply provided a description of what appeared to be an investigation of some kind. This was especially odd since she offered extraneous personal details of other kinds to animate her scenes. But she never said to the reader or the interviewees: “I’m trying to find out more about Hmong culture” or “I’m a professor of medicine investigating what went wrong at this hospital” or “I’m a human rights lawyer following up on a complaint,” etc., all of which she could have been doing.

-- Hmong embroidery (from a private collection)

I, Claudius, Robert Graves

Very enjoyable. I was put off by glimpses of the swanning BBC series 30 years ago and so never read it till now. As it turns out, there are soap opera elements and a lot of gore, but these are redeemed by the interesting presentation of Roman history and daily life, and by Graves’ clever explanations of vexing historical anomalies. Will I go on to read Claudius the God, though?

-- Claudius (British Museum)

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells

Yuck. I read this because Malcolm Gladwell said it took the U.S. by storm, and I realized it had been made into a movie, and so concluded that it must have something compelling about it. But no. It is nowhere near as good as Gladwell made it seem [see “claims” below]. It’s written by someone who obviously really loves Louisiana but is unable to find a way to make the reader experience the place.

-- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Yvette Guilbert