Fall Reading List

The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje, is getting rave reviews from the New York Times, the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and just about everyone else.  Despite the fact that I felt the New Yorker excerpt didn't work as a short story, I will be picking this up.

So, my fall reading list (with publication dates in parentheses) is shaping up as follows:

The Cat's Table, Michael Ondaatje (10/4)
The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes (10/5)
The Stranger's Child, Alan Hollinghurst (10/11)
1Q84, Haruki Murakami (10/25)
The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco (11/8)
The Angel Esmeralda, Don DeLillo (11/15)

Holy crap - after a dry summer, what an embarrassment of riches! And on top of that, when it comes time for a break from fiction, there's the new biography of Hemingway due on 10/17, Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost.  Definitely, there's no need to sit around bemoaning the end of the baseball season.

Are there any upcoming new releases that I am missing?

Monsoon and Anil's Ghost

I've been promising to put up some book reviews for some time. Unfortunately, work got the better of me, leaving me without time to write. Things are now returning to normal, but it's been a while since I finished reading, making the reviews that much harder much to write.

The first book I wanted to discuss was Monsoon, by Robert S. Kaplan. Kaplan has been one of my favorite non-fiction writers for a long time. In books like Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth, he travels to some of the harshest areas of the world, to explore how their history, culture and politics create modern powder kegs. He ignores or rejects even the most basic conventional wisdom about these regions, preferring to learn for himself from the ground up.

Monsoon, by contrast, contains very little in the way of travel or original exploration. He pops into a few places and looks around for a few hours, but mostly it felt like his editors made him. Otherwise, it reads more like a college thesis, simply regurgitating other people's writing. You will learn a lot about Bangladesh and Myanmar and Pakistan and Sri Lanka from reading this book. And there's an interesting thesis about the roles of Chinese and Indian naval power in the Indian Ocean. But reading it was a real chore.

That being said, it was a chore that quite unexpectedly paid off when, a few books later, I read Anil's Ghost, a novel by Michael Ondaatje set in the midst of Sri Lanka's civil wars. Ondaatje plunges right in, keeping a tight focus on the interwoven lives of the story's characters. Although the effects of the war are all around them, he never broadens his gaze to explain who is fighting, or why, or where. I would have been bewildered if I hadn't just had Kaplan's crash course.

Otherwise, Anil's Ghost is not as challenging as some of Ondaatje's other work. Although it does move forward and backward in time, it is (relatively) more straightforward and more plot focused than, say, The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion. It also includes a wallop of an ending that rivals the best political thrillers. His prose, as always, is amazing, deployed here to describe beheadings and suicide bombings and torture in a manner that is somehow luminous and brutal at the same time. His skills are put to equally impressive service when he delves into forensic archaeology and Buddhist ritual. A highly recommended book.

The Cat's Table

I tend not to get terribly excited about short stories. Indeed, I've bought only two collections of short stories in the past two years, the outstanding Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro and, almost equally good, The Lemon Table, by Julian Barnes. Neither of these is simply a collection of unrelated short stories. The stories in The Lemon Table are each about old age and death, and the suffering that accompany them. The stories in Nocturnes relate to each other in a manner similar to that of individual pieces of a musical cycle. Though moods and tempos shift from story to story, motifs and themes are woven throughout, connecting them into a greater whole.

So, when it comes to one-off short stories, you see where I am coming from.

Nevertheless, I will sometimes be flipping through my New Yorker and see a new (or previously unread) piece by a favorite novelist. In this week's issue, it was "The Cat's Table," by Michael Ondaatje. So, last night I took a detour from my current novel to read this.

My overall reaction? Meh. A young boy boards a cruise ship to travel alone from Ceylon to England. While not a particularly original setup, it has potential. But an initial shift from the third person to the first person serves no discernible purpose. The ship's stopover in the port of Aden is too-quickly glossed over, and the narrator lingers overlong on the (often unbelievable) activities of his 17-year-old cousin, Emily. Throughout, the language is missing the luminosity of, say, The English Patient.

The New Yorker doesn't say so, but those who follow such things will note that "The Cat's Table" is an excerpt from a full length novel by Ondaatje (titled The Cat's Table), to be published this fall. Fine. But if you are going to publish a short piece, it needs to work as a short piece. I am hopeful that Ondaatje (or his editors, or his agent) simply chose the wrong section to excerpt. At the moment, I am not excited enough to put it on my list of upcoming books to watch for. Maybe when it comes out in paperback...