Book Review: Margaret Atwood's "MaddAddam"

Ever since I stumbled across an old paperback of Cat’s Eye, I've loved reading Margaret Atwood. Everything that I've read has been well constructed, thought-provoking, and highly entertaining. So I'm a bit surprised to have to report that MaddAddam - the final entry in her Oryx and Crake dystopia - is not the slam dunk I expected it to be.

Don't get me wrong: Parts have the propulsive narrative and interesting ideas that made the previous two books in this trilogy – Oryx and Crake (the best!) and The Year of the Flood - so compelling. But I’d be lying if I didn't say that I thought the characterization of the female characters – especially Toby, such a strong woman in TYotF – to be weak and inconsistent compared to their previous lives. Hell, Toby spends a good part of this book pining for or wallowing in jealousy for a man! In addition, parts of this book are - sadly - boring. This may be to the fact that she's revisiting scenes we've seen before in previous books, but also it's due to her framing devices, in which events are depicted at a distance. This is especially problematic with the climax of the novel, which is told as an afterthought and thus so removed from real-time action that it feels like a dream, and makes its repercussions (which were also blatantly foreshadowed beforehand) seem unreal.

This doesn't mean that the book isn't worth your time! On the contrary, any time spent in Atwood’s O&C world is worth it. It's a place where humanity has come to a horrible end through the efforts of the titular biologists who both design an ideal human being (the “Crakers”) and also unleash the apocalyptic virus via a designer vitality drug. There are so many fascinating and scarily prescient ideas here that exploring them is half the fun. MaddAddam in particular really gets rolling when she starts exploring Zeb’s story, the fascinating tale of this preacher's son who ends up intertwined in the lives of all of the main characters in what lead to the end of humanity.

Overall, though, what I found most interesting about MaddAddam was it's strange combination of hope and rebirth to what had been a relentlessly grim series. (The previous books read like The Road as written by Kurt Vonnegut.) The main arc of this third book is humanity’s efforts to rebuild and reestablish itself, perhaps most importantly with how to define its relationship with the Crakers and the other GMO beings (especially the pigoons: a pig with implanted human stem cells who escaped from their organ-harvesting fate and how are one of the most intelligent post-apocalyptic species).  And while I read the end of the book to be a delightfully snarky and ambivalent take on where all this might end up, overall MaddAddam is an interesting (if uneven) take on what happens the day after the world ends.

Rethinking Kafka

I like Kafka, having read everything he wrote in or immediately after college, although it’s been a few years since I've cracked any of his books. My impression of his writing is that it consisted of very logical depictions of fugue-like states, where byzantine bureaucracies, anxiety, and the capricious powers of aloof and often distant figures (the government in The Trial and The Castle, father figures in many of his shorter stories) rule the day. The stories are filled with powerful dream-like symbolism, but - probably because a good chunk of his writings were unfinished (and certainly unpublished) at his death - fizzle out rather than have a traditional ending.

For these and other reasons, Joseph Epstein argues that he’s overrated, that he’s simply a remnant of his time and place – essentially that “[he] reads like Freud fictionalized. Freud’s reputation is now quite properly in radical decline; Kafka’s, somehow, lives on. Without belief in Freud, Kafka’s stories lose their weight and authority." I don't really buy this. I certainly am not a Freudian, and don't know anything about 19th century Prague, but regardless still got a lot out of his writings. I think one reason Kafka's works have thrived is that they are general and vague enough to let people impress upon them their own thoughts and options. And - of course - he quite accurately depicts the absurdity of the modern bureaucratic state (most powerfully in The Trial). However, Epstein makes an excellent point when  he criticizes Kafka’s propensity for writing dreams with bad endings:

“Kafka felt that his talent was “for portraying my dream-like inner life.” But dreams, however gripping they can be, are aesthetically unsatisfying, especially in their endings. Kafka himself did not find the ending of “The Metamorphosis,” his greatest story, satisfying, and it isn’t. Perhaps for the same reason, he was unable to complete his novels: dreams, especially nightmares, want for artistic endings.”

Again, part of this may be that he quite simply died before he could finish them, but I don't think so. The Castle in particular just fades away with no clear hint of what the ending might be. And there are many passages that, while adding to the overall mood of the whole, simply wander along with vague intentions. Of course, this may be the point:

Kafka created “obscure lucidity,” Erich Heller wrote in his book on Kafka. “His is an art more poignantly and disturbingly obscure,” he added, “than literature has ever known.” One thinks one grasps Kafka’s meaning, but does one, really? All seems so clear, yet is it, truly? A famous aphorism of Kafka’s reads: “Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.” Another runs: “A cage went in search of a bird.”
 As with Kafka’s aphorisms, so with his brief parables. The parables, Walter Benjamin wrote, are “never exhausted by what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings.”

In this sense, some of Kafka's writings are like listening to someone else describe their dreams - interesting to a point, but so filled with personal meaning that they will remain forever inscrutable. I certainly didn't know what half of what I read meant - particularly in the novels - but then i'm comfortable (and sometimes even seek out) ambiguity in my art. 

Anyways, it's always good to question your assumptions about things, so Epstein's article is a fun read. What do you think about Kafka? Overrated? Genius? Somewhere in between?

Cross Posted on Thought Ambience

James Salter - All That Is

Well, shoot.  I am only three chapters in, and already I am ready to declare that, line for line, All That Is contains the finest writing by an American novelist in many years.  Consider, for example, the book's opening:

All night in darkness the water sped past.

In tier on tier of iron bunks below deck, silent, six deep, lay hundreds of men, many faceup with their eyes still open though it was near morning.  The lights were dimmed, the engines throbbing endlessly, the ventilators pulling in damp air, fifteen hundred men with their packs and weapons heavy enough to take them straight to the bottom, like an anvil dropped in the sea, part of a vast army sailing twoards Okinawa, the great island that was just to the south of Japan.

But there is more to a great novel than great writing.  Can Salter make the grade in this, his first novel since 1979? 

I'm optimistic.

Mohsin Hamid on Haruki Murakami

"it made sense that while [Murakami] has to run to get fit enough to do what he has to do, I could manage with just walking . . . . Walking unlocked me. It's like LSD. Or a library. It does things to you."

--Mohsin Hamid, interview in The Atlantic

Acknowledgments

I thoroughly enjoyed Noreen Malone's rant in the New Republic about the ever expanding length of the Acknowledgments page chapter in books today.  And I was especially amused to learn that, because the New York Times Book Review has a policy of not assigning reviews to anyone who is thanked in the book's acknowledgments, authors will sometimes purposefully "acknowledge" the names of reviewers who they fear. 

But I have an idea for Ms. Malone: if you are so offended by lengthy name dropping in the Acknowledgments section -- don't read it.  It is almost always clearly labeled and can easily be skipped.

The Most Popular Books in America, Reviewed

Matt Kahn is undertaking to read and review every book on the Publishers Weekly annual bestsellers list from 1913 onwards. You can see his progress and the list of books on his blog.

I took a quick look through the list and i'm struck by how many books and authors I've never heard of - like The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, which topped the charts in 1931-32 and also won the Pulitzer. I'm also surprised about some of these results. I mean, Johnathan Livingston Seagull was the best selling book in America for two years straight? The Tommyknockers - most definitively NOT Stephen King's best book - was the most popular book in 1987? And it's disheartening to remember just how many people read the taught plots and lazy prose of John Grisham and Dan Brown. I was also surprised to see some film books - what seem to be adaptations of  E.T. and The Return of the Jedi - on the list, but read Kahn's note that Harry Potter books are not included in the PW bestsellers for some reason. (For the record, the Harry Potter books make for excellent reading.)

An interesting project!

eBooks and the Library

David Vinjamuri, writing at Forbes, points out that how libraries lend books will change as more and more people read eBooks. The problem is that neither pricing nor usage has stabilized  as a result, libraries are spending a significant amount of money on eBooks that a limited (but growing!) amount of patrons use, and publishers are looking to charge higher prices - and dictate more limitations - for eBooks than they do for printed books. Money quote:

For better or worse, Big Six publishers are unlikely to adopt a pricing model for eBooks that mirrors how print books are sold to libraries.  But current pricing and lending restrictions unfairly penalize libraries to the detriment of publishers and readers.  A system based on actual use would more fairly allocate cost and risk as long as eBooks are not governed by the First Sale doctrine.

Personally, despite reading more and more eBooks, I use the library less and less because I don't really understand the lending process and so few eBooks are available for lending. It's a problem that will need to be solved at some point, between the lack of eBooks at the library, the question about what happens to eBooks when an account goes dormant, and other factors, a real availability issue may be starting to take shape.

H/t to the Dish for pointing out the article. Also interesting at the Dish is the reading trends graphic.

Johnny Depp, Publisher

So anyway, Johnny Depp has decided to get into the publishing business.  Sure, why not?  The first books that have been announced for his new imprint The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan, by Douglas Brinkley, and House of Earth, by Woody Guthrie. 

If you have a folk-music sort of book that you've been working on, maybe you should mail Depp a manuscript. 

Mo Yan

This year, the Nobel prize for literature goes to Mo Yan. 

Happily for us, many of Mo Yan's works are available in English translation by the estimable Howard Goldblatt:

Red Sorghum
The Garlic Ballads
Big Breasts and Wide Hips
Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
The Republic of Wine
Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh

Western bookmakers, of course, had Haruki Murakami as the favorite to win.  I've never quite understood why, given that Murakami's work does not grapple with social issues in the manner of Mario Vargas Llosa, Orhan Pamuk, J.M. Coetzee, Imre Kertesz, V.S. Naipaul, and other Nobel  winners.  Perhaps just because he is a popular non-English author? 

In any case, congratulations to Mo Yan!  I look forward to reading some of his work.  For those who have a headstart on me, do you have a recommendation as to where to begin?

Monotone Book Reviewing

Andrew Sullivan points us to this chart depicting that the overwhelming majority of the books reviewed by the New York Times are by white authors.

It's yet another reminder of the deep divide in this country on race, here extended to the book reviewing community (given that the NYT is one of the most respected book review outlets in the States). I myself also typically read only white authors; when I step away from my race, it's typically through the international community, like with Hari Kunzru and Haruki Murakami. Different viewpoints lead to new and more interesting thinking, so this tendency is alarming and something to be aware of when picking out new books in the future.

How about you? Do you typically stick to your race when reading (or writing about books)?

Genre Writing and Protocols

Boing Boing published a great interview with China Miéville recently, and within this interview there's a great discussion of Miéville's knowing use of, and meta-commentary on, his genres, leading to this great passage:

Tom: You could call this a paradox of genre realism. All fiction is ultimately formulaic, so only fiction that's willing to acknowledge that it's formulaic is actually in a position to go through this into being realistic again. Often, literary fiction invites you to collude in this pretence that you don't know exactly what's going to happen, what's going on—and this can get in the way of having some genuine and unaffected emotion, and being honest about enthusiasms and limitations. Instead, both you and the author are busy playing this game that says we're all too marvellous and sophisticated to acknowledge that narrative has rules and formulae.

China: I wouldn't go for the word "formulaic," because I think that's quite harsh. But what I would say is "structured by protocols". The vast majority of fiction certainly is structured like this. Even genuinely, wildly avant garde stuff has its own protocols. So you do have to start from that position.

Then the way you relate to those protocols and that structure is up to you. If you don't want to fall into despair, you have to cheerfully accept it as a norm and move on. But also—and I say this a little more tentatively, because I dislike very much the self-congratulation that can take place within genre fiction—my sense is that, at the moment, there is a little more space for this moving on within the best genre fiction than within the mainstream of "literary" fiction: a bit less anxiety about protocols and structures. And that gives me a certain hope.

I've seen this a bit myself recently but hadn't realized that this is what was happening: a genre so comfortable with itself that it's willing to still be SciFi, or Horror, or whatever, but as part of accepting that and "moving on," transforming itself into something new. To choose an example from 2312, the novel i'm currently reading, you can get stereotypical "hard SciFi" passages in which technologies and/or history are described in detail, but Robinson does this as separate chapters so that he doesn't need to put these explanations into his character's mouths. These sections are like the minor chapters of Moby Dick, except instead of being minor treatises they are made up of - and called - fragments, with the effect being that you're brought up to speed in a way reminiscent of continually channel surfing past the History Channel. I like the approach, and hope to more aspects like this in the future.

Originally posted on Thought Ambience.

Review: Wish You Were Here, by Graham Swift

On the Isle of Wight, the owner of an RV park waits alone in his bedroom.  A shotgun lies, loaded, on the bed beside him.  His wife sits a few short miles away, in a wind-rocked, rain-lashed Cherokee, wondering if she should cut loose, or return home.

How has it come to this?  In slow, steady strokes, Graham Swift traces how Jack Luxton's ancestral farm was decimated by epidemics of hoof-and-mouth disease and mad cow disease; how his brother abandoned the farm to join the army; the death of his parents; Jack's sale of his ancestral lands; and the ultimate impact on Jack of his brother's death in Iraq.

Of the various writers from Ireland and the Commonwealth that I enjoy reading--including John Banville, Julian Barnes, Tom McCarthy, Ian McEwan, and David Mitchell--Graham Swift is perhaps the least given to flashy narrative tricks, the most able to disappear inside the voices of his characters.  These are voices are rooted in a sense of place, and in the best of his novels, such as the Booker-nominated Waterland and the Booker-winning Last Orders, Swift explores how modernity uproots those places, leaving the characters exiled, haunted, and, only occasionally, redeemed.

Wish You Were Here may not stand with Swift's various best, but it is still head-and-shoulders above much of this year's fiction.  With its compassionate tone and its suspenseful ending likely, Wish You Were Here is likely to be a serious Booker contender.  Highly recommended.

Scott Jurek: Eat and Run (Book preview)

It looks like this is shaping up to be the summer of the long distance running book. 

Coming on June 5 is Scott Jurek's Eat and Run.  Those who have read Born to Run (and these days, who hasn't?) will already be familiar with Jurek, who McDougall described as "the top ultrarunner in the country, maybe in the world, arguably of all time."  Whether you agree with that statement or not, his record is undeniable: he won the Western States 100-miler seven years in a row, not to mention two victories at Death Valley's 135-mile, 130 degree Badwater Ultra and numerous victories at other major races.  In 2010, he set a new U.S. record in the 24-hour run, covering 165.7 miles in that period. 

And all this on a vegan diet.  ("Remember," Jurek said in an article in the New York Times a few years back, "almost every long-distance runner turns into a vegan while they’re racing, anyway — you can’t digest fat or protein very well.") 

Jurek is an amazing ambassador for the sport, and this promises to be a fascinating book, full of stories, science and practical advice. 

Alberto Salazar: 14 Minutes (book preview)

In general, I don't read books about running.  I enjoy running -- but there are too many other interesting things to read about in my not-so-abundant free time.

Nevertheless, I am thinking of picking up 14 Minutes, the newly released memoir by Alberto Salazar.  Salazar won several marathons and set numerous records in his early 20's, but perhaps is most famous for his epic "Duel in the Sun" against Dick Beardsley in the 1982 Boston Marathon, a race he won by a mere two seconds.

Having drunken almost no water along the way, Salazar's weight went from 140 pounds to130 pounds.  He would recover, but he would never run so fast again.   As his body began to decline, Salazar began to train harder and harder, running sometimes close to 200 miles per week. 

Salazar, himself the son of a Cuban revolutionary, would eventually wander the world, seeking solace in Yugoslavia and South America. Finally, having retired from professional running, he returned to the States, where he took employment with Nike.  Today, as a running coach, Salazar is obsessed with running form.  Check out this detailed and fascinating New Yorker article about his work with Dathan Ritzenhein.

It's a fascinating life story, and so far, and the few reviews that have come in so far have been excellent.  The Wall Street Journal calls it "meditative and affecting, an engaging account of a true champion's rise, near-demise and arrival at peace."

Can anyone comment who has read it already? 

Mini-review: The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

The narrator of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is a famous author, largely indistinguishable Mario Vargas Llosa himself.  His project is to write a fictional portrait of a Trotskyist intellectual who tried to lead a 1950s uprising in the Andes mountains.  But to do so, he first needs to understand the truth of that intellectual's life.  And so he sets about to interview the family, friends, and co-revolutionaries of Alejandro Mayta, each of whom shares contradictory stories.   As he listens to each account, the narrator shapes his project in his head, forcing readers to move up and down through multiple levels of narrative.

If this sounds like a Nabokovian conceit, it is, but it is also a political commentary, an adventure story, and generally a damn good read. (What it is not: "magical realism").  I'd not paid too much attention to Vargas Llosa before he won the Nobel Prize in 2010, but I am looking forward to becoming more familiar with his work.

Broken Kindle

 The fire has gone out of my Kindle.  Its death was announced by random horizontal and vertical lines across the screen, with sections of the screen that would not refresh. 

The same thing happened to my wife nearly a year ago.  At the time, her Kindle was still under warranty, so Amazon promptly sent her a new one.  I have no such luck.

Since it is no longer under warranty, I figured I'd open up the back and see what it had going on inside.  That big white brick is the battery.  No wonder it got such nice battery life.  It looks like it is upside down, but in fact I am holding the device right side up.  The positioning is odd.  If they were to move it toward the bottom, the Kindle would be less top heavy, and would "feel" lighter to the reader.  Perhaps this is different in the new models.

I've enjoyed my Kindle plenty, and the new models are even nicer.  So, I am happily buying another. But when you consider the cost of replacing the hardware every few years, Kindles do not make book reading less expensive.  They just make it more convenient. 

No Pulitzer This Year

On Monday, it was announced that the Pulitzer Prize board had withheld its fiction award for 2012. Speculation ran rampant as to why this occured for the first time in 35 years. For more, we go to the WSJ, who clarifies:

"In an interview with the Daily Beast, Maureen Corrigan, one of the three judges for the Pulitzer prize in fiction, clarifies that it wasn’t the judges, but the larger Pulitzer board that decided not to award a prize this year:

“I can safely say that anger and surprise/shock, and just sort of feeling this is an inexplicable decision on the part of the board—that really characterizes, I think, the way all three of us feel,” Corrigan said. “The obvious answer is to let the [jury] pick. We’re the people who have gone through the 300 novels. All the board is asked to do is to read three top novels that we’ve given to them…In fact, what’s happened today is a lot of the articles and blog posts have gotten it wrong—they’ve been blaming the three of us!”

“Honestly, I feel angry on behalf of three great American novels,” added Corrigan, a critic for NPR who also teaches at Georgetown University. According to the Pulitzer’s ground rules, the choice of the judges (or an alternative selection) must be approved by a majority of the board. Evidently that didn’t happen this year."

I am surprised that the larger board didn't feel that any of the three novels - Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and David Foster Wallace's unfinished The Pale King - were worth promoting. I think one needs to consider the make up of the board: only one novelist - Junot Diaz - is on the board, and the rest are made up of journalists, reviewers, and academics. Are they really the best judge of the best literature in the land? Personally, I haven't put a lot of faith in the fiction Pulitzer Prize since I learned that in 1974 the board rejected Gravity's Rainbow, the unanimous consensus of the jury. They refused to give an award that year. From the 5/8/74 NYT:

"...members of the 14-member board, which makes recommendations on the 18 Pulitzer Prize categories ... had described the Pynchon novel during their private debate as "unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and in parts "obscene." One member editor said he had tried hard but had only gotten a third of the way through the 760-page book."

If the board reacts this way to one of the best books of the 20th century, god knows what their reaction is to the best of contemporary literature. If they don't like the three finalists, that means I should pick up my copies today!

Kindles, Collusion, and Copy Protection

NPR gives us a good history of the recent governmental ruling against Apple and several book publishers for price collusion, and makes this prediction:

“No matter what the outcome of this mountain of federal and state litigation, the agency model [an agreement that allowed publishers to set the same price for digital books across all online marketplaces.], in its present form, is dead. Within the next month, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and other e-book retailers will undoubtedly mount a fierce price war for control of this new market. Publishers will bemoan the loss of the tool for preventing predatory pricing, brick-and-mortar booksellers will struggle to compete in the digital marketplace, and cash-strapped book buyers will cheer the competitive prices.”

The article also claims that: “The model may be moribund, but [successful in that] customers no longer think of $9.99 as the only possible price for an e-book. We regularly pay everything from 99 cents to $14.99 for a best-selling e-book.”

This is interesting and all, and I’m looking forward to being able to pick up some ebooks at rock bottom prices. However, I was surprised to not to see anything in the lawsuit about the ability of ebook manufacturers to look their customers into devices. It turns out that I’m not alone: Cory Doctrow at Boing Boing points out that “Every dollar that is spent on a locked, proprietary platform is a dollar of opportunity cost that society will have to spend to get out from under the would-be monopolists of ebooks when (not if) they abuse their power (see my latest PW column on this)."

Frustrating! I guess this came about because the publishing industry, the device came before the format. Thus, if you buy a book on your Kindle, you can’t read it on an iPad or Nook and vice versa. This is opposed to the consumer win in the music industry, where the format for sharing music (mp3s) came before the portable devices that you would use to listen to the devices. Thus, any device that wanted to be successful needed to be able to play mp3s that you could pick up anywhere.

I love my kindle, but amazon's market power and being frozen into one device does makes me nervous. Interesting to see how this will play itself out.

Reading Young Adult Fiction, Part Deux

A great quote from C.S. Lewis about labeling fiction as "adult" or "young adult":

"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development.

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

H/t The Dish

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Reading Young Adult Fiction

Review: Men in Space, by Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy's second-published novel, Men in Space, came out in the U.K. in 2007.  However, it has only made its way to the United States this year.

I found Men in Space to be an astounding book, yet another example of how young British authors are finding new directions to take the novel.  So why are we only getting it now?  Perhaps, publishers perceived the setting -- Prague before and after January 1, 1993, when Czechoslovakia split apart -- as having been overdone.  But  McCarthy knows every sight, sound, and smell of the city; it has been a long time since I have read a novel with such a knowing sense of place.

And the place perfectly epitomizes the drift of the motley group of individuals, that McCarthy follows, including a leading modern artist; a Dutch gallery curator; an assortment of Bulgarian thugs, an Interpol agent, and various British and American expats.  The axis around which these characters revolve is a stolen religious icon and a forgery scheme gone awry.

The style of Men in Space has much in common with that of C, McCarthy's Booker-shortlisted third novel.  McCarthy is fascinated by systems of knowledge including, here, art, astronomy, and physics.  Symbols abound, linking together, for instance, the geometry of a Prague flat with that of a soccer stadium with that of the stolen icon.

But where C sometimes felt ponderous, Men in Space is a fast-paced page turner.  In particular, the scene of a jailhouse interrogation was the best scene of this sort I have ever read -- it had my heart beating faster and my hands unable to stop turning pages.   The story only falls short at the ending, as McCarthy struggles to wrap things up.

Unfortunately, other duties call, so I need to wrap this review up.  If you have any questions, or if you have read Men in Space and want to share your thoughts, please comment below!