A SYSTEM SO MAGNIFICENT IT IS BLINDING, by Amanda Svensson

 Long-listed for the Booker Prize, "A System So Magnificent it is Blinding" is a meandering, sometimes incoherent journey into the family dynamics of triplets who have a major skeleton in the family closet that has skewed their personal and familial identity. The book presents an impossibly complicated, twisted plot as the struggles and personalities of the 3 siblings create odd situations and intra-family conflicts. Ultimately, by means of a big revelation of the truth that comes about in a convoluted and bizarre turn of events, the family reconciles itself to the truth and reconstitutes itself. Although often tiring to make sense of, the writing is clever and even beautiful at times, and worth the effort overall. To be honest, though, I did sometimes find my self pondering, "Is this really Booker Prize material?"

Click here for a review of the book from NY Times: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/books/review/amanda-svensson-system-so-magnificent-it-is-blinding.html

MY REVOLUTONS, by Hari Kunzru

 My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru's third novel, is the story of a "failed" revolutionary, a member of a radical left-wing group (think, Weather Underground) set in Britain in the late 1960s. The protagonist, Chris Carver, AKA Michael Frame, has gone "underground" for several decades as the story starts - in 1998. "Hiding in plain sight" would be a more accurate description of his situation. He is living a manufactured identity as a middle-class househusband in London. His affiliation with a radical group of revolutionaries decades earlier resulted in his having dropped out of sight as things got too hot, doing a stint in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand to detox from a heroin addiction among other adventures, before taking on a new identity. His new status quo is shaken when, on a holiday in France, he sees a women he thinks is his old companion, lover, fellow revolutionary in the old days who he presumed had been killed in the violent takeover of the West German embassy in Copenhagen years earlier. This incident, along with the unexpected and "unfortunate' meeting of someone tangentially connected with his revolutionary days precipitates a crisis. The narrative jumps back and forward in time and paints a clear picture of Chris/Michael and his current mental state as well as what he has been through. Considering the fact that the writer was actually born in 1969 and certainly had no first-hand experience in the milieu he describes so vividly, it is a believable and compelling story of a turbulent time and the reflection about it in the mind of one of its participants.

For a review of the book from the NY Times, click here: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/books/review/Blythe-t.html

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND, by Anthony Doerr

 

Cloud Cuckoo Land is an enjoyable and profound reflection on preserving what is valuable and the unlikely combination of chance events that might make that possible. It also focuses on the way love preserves that value. The novel has a complex intertwining set of narratives of the stories of 5 main characters spread over wide historical and geographical settings, such as around the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in the mid 15th century, 20th and 21st century Idaho, the fields of the Korean War,  aboard an inter-generational space ship enroute to a "second earth" in mid-21st century. All of these at first seemingly disconnected narratives gradually converge to tell a story of preservation that is centered on a "lost" ancient Greek comedy entitled "Cloud Cuckoo Land". The novel itself is much more interesting than what my above comments suggest, not in the least because of the often beautiful writing that situates us as readers at each of these narrative spaces and connects us to the memorable characters.  

For a review of the novel by The Guardian, click here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/24/cloud-cuckoo-land-by-anthony-doerr-review-a-joyous-epic-of-love-and-survival

Nights of Plague, by Orhan Pamuk

 Like several other writers, Orhan Pamuk took time during the recent COVID-19 pandemic to write a "COVID book" (Jonathan Lethem's The Arrest also comes to mind). Pamuk's book, the nearly 700-page long Nights of Plague is an epic story set at the start of the 20th century in the fictional backwater island in the Aegean Sea "Mingheria", that was part of the disintegrating Ottoman empire. The island territory, at the start of the story, is in the early stages of a plague epidemic that ultimately gets much worse and ravages its people and precipitates an independence movement away from Ottoman control.  The long and convoluted story, embedded in a self-reflexive narrative structure, is detailed and vivid. There is also a murder mystery at the start of the story that regularly comes back into focus.  The book is a pleasure to read if you are a Pamuk fan and don't mind getting dragged through a convoluted story that eventually comes together in interesting ways. 

For a review of the book by NY Times, click here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/books/review/nights-of-plague-orhan-pamuk.html

BIG BANG, by David Bowman

 I first noticed David Bowman's novel Big Bang when I recently did a search of titles by Jonathan Lethem, one of my favorite writers. I hadn't seen any new novels by Lethem since his "COVID novel" The Arrest in 2021, so I was interested to see Big Bang pop up in my search. It turns out that Big Bang was not written by Lethem at all, but he had written the introduction to the book. Both the introduction and the novel are very entertaining. Big Bang is an encyclopedic walk through the American social landscape of the mid-20th century. Influenced by DeLillo, particularly the novel Underworld, Bowman puts a dizzying array of personalities on the page, writing blunt and often very funny vignettes about the lives of a diverse set of well-known '50s and '60s characters such as: JFK, Jacqueline Kennedy, Aristotle Onassis, Richard Nixon and Ngo Dinh Diem, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Lee, Dr. Benjamin Spock and his wife, Jane, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Marilyn Monroe, etc. (just a representative list). Major events in American society and politics are also part of the story, such as the Cuban missile crisis, Watergate scandal, "Red scare" of the '50s, etc. Central to the story is the assassination of JFK (the Big Bang?). The book starts and ends with this event, presumably the pivotal moment starting the downward shift of US culture/society over the past half century. After reading the 600+ pages of this loosely structured book (very roughly chronological but seemingly random in the choice and sequence of individual episodes), the reader feels both exhausted and excited. It's particularly satisfying for Baby Boomers who have actually lived through all the stuff narrated in the book.

For a review of the book by New York Times, click here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/10/books/review-big-bang-david-bowman.html

WHEN WE CEASE to UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, by Benjamín Labatut

 When We Cease to Understand the World is an extraordinary work of ... nonfiction? historical fiction? Dystopian fiction? Some sort of combination of all three.  The book consists of a number of vignettes - narratives about scientists who were mostly part of the often contentious discourse about the newly-"invented" field of Quantum Physics in the first half of the 20th Century. The stories all highlight some dark aspects of the lives of these scientists (and others), often with mixed results for the reader. They are seldom absolute heroes or villains. One reviewer called the book a dystopian novel set in the present, because the unsettling real-life uses of mathematics underlying the work of these scientists are certainly dark and destructive. 

For a review of the book from The Guardian, click here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/10/when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world-by-benjamin-labatut-review-the-dark-side-of-science

THE FRIEND, by Sigrid Nunez

 The Friend is  moving novel about the themes of mourning, loss and writing that is based on an unusual device - the "friend" in question is both the narrator's close writer friend who has recently committed suicide and his dog, a comically huge Great Dane that scarcely fits into her tiny NYC apartment, whom she is "willed" to take care of. Based on this setup, the story could have turned sentimental or even silly, yet the story is fiercely honest and emotionally raw.  The story is narrated directly to her dead friend, reflecting on their past relationship and her current feelings, which are heavily oppressed by trying to deal with his suicide. It's a heartbreakingly transparent view of the narrator's grief. The canine "friend", though, plays a role in her grieving and coming to terms with the tragic loss of her friend, who was certainly no angel while alive and with whom she had a complex relationship that gets described little-by-little. The third theme, writing, is very interesting. The book is a real-time reflection on the power of writing to help the grieving process (or not). Descriptions of her interactions with other writers and with her students in the creative writing classes she teaches leaves the whole neo-romantic notion of the healing power of writing unresolved. It's a wonderful book and was very favourably received by critics.

For a review of the book from NPR, click here: https://www.npr.org/2018/01/23/579233885/the-friend-is-no-shaggy-dog-story