SILENT HOUSE, by Orhan Pamuk

Being a great fan of the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, I was excited to see a "new" book by him that I hadn't yet read. The book, Silent House, was written in 1983, which makes it his second novel. It was only recently translated and published in English this year. The book is a good one - themed as a portrait of a nation on the verge of the particular social collapse that led to the 1980 military coup. As in his beautiful novel Snow, the political situation is filtered through the experiences of "ordinary" people. In the case of Silent House, though, "ordinary" is a relative term. The book has a distinctly claustrophopic or even gothic atmosphere, suggested by the title. The case of characters is a grandmother, her dwarf servant, middle class members of her family visiting from Istanbul, and a young, disaffected family acquaintance who falls in with 'nationalists" and inpacts the family in a serious way. There are plenty of skeletons in the closets.The story is told via multiple narration by the main characters and consequently meanders widely across history and psyches.   It's a strong novel, and an interesting insight into the historical period and early Pamuk for his many fans.

For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/books/review/silent-house-by-orhan-pamuk.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

NEUROMANCER, by William Gibson

Neuromancer is the amazingly forward-thinking scifi novel written in 1984 in which Gibson coined the term "cyberspace". The story, set in an indeterminant, dystopian Japan (and other venues, including an outerspace "location"),  traces a kind of "cyber-cowboy" named Case as he embarks on a mission to breach a kind of digital "matrix". It's a very interesting experiment in putting into words the abstract construct (at the time) of going online into cyberspace. The characters of Case, his two women Molly & Linda, and an assortment of other strange characters, some human, some "constructs" and some of indeterminate form are not well rounded in general . The novel reads like an extended hallucination and is somehow compelling despite its very loose structure and plot. If anything, it is a visionary piece of writing that unwittingly invented the "cyberpunk" genre and catapulted us into the cyber age at a time when we were banging on word processors with 16K of memory and using dot matrix printers.

For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/08/books/they-ll-always-have-tokyo.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

 

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Having read a couple of other books by Murakami that I liked  (The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. and After Dark) I had expectations that this well-known novel would be interesting. I was rather disappointed as it proved to be long (not necessarily a problem in itself) and boring. The novel uses twin narratives to follow the two main characters, Aomame (a  young fitness trainer/assassin) and Tengo Kanawa (drop-out math genius who teaches in a cram school). There is a link between the two, of course, which is revealed half way through the book. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Tengo ghost-writing a book called Air Chysalis, which relates to a kind of parallel universe (not exactly parallel, but something like that). Both protagonists find themselves drawn into this universe. Well, nothing much happens after that...  I have  a high tolerance for books that are not plot driven and that have confusing elements, but this just goes nowhere, and takes a long time to do so.


For a review of the book from the NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/books/1q84-by-haruki-murakami-review.html?_r=0

THE LACUNA, by Barbara Kingsolver

The Lacuna, written by Barbara Kingsolver in 2009,  is an interesting  bio piece about a fictional Mexican-American writer named Harrison Shepherd, who moves back and forth between Mexico and America during different phases of his life. His American "flapper" mother is a kind of flighty gold-digger who drags the young Harrison with her to Mexico at age 10. He comes of age in the household of the great Mexican muralist painter Diego Garcia. Lev Trotsky comes to hide out from Stalin in his friend Diego's home, and ends up getting assassinated. The communist connection comes to haunt Harrison years later, after he returns to the US and becomes a best-selling author of historcal fiction set in Mexico. The country becomes crazed by the "red scare" and McCarthyism, with dire consequences.  Things deteriorate from there and the story takes an unexpected turn. The story is narrated by Shepherd's secretary, pieced together from his diaries. It's a vivid story with some lovely writing, particularly in the Mexican parts.

For a review of the book from the NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY, by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon's 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a wonderful, tragic yet humorous and spirited story of an unlikely team of creative geniuses (a loner Jewish kid from Brooklyn and his immigrant cousin from Prague) who find themselves in the midst of a pop culture movement - comic books - at the right time in history. The story runs from 1939 to 1954, from the heady pre-war golden days of the superhero comics, to the genre's decline in the postwar suburban culture. The narrative of the pair, Sammy and Joseph is sometimes told together and sometimes separately, as their lives and that of their loved ones take interesting turns. Steeped in the "colorful" comic book subculture, the book is rich with NYC late 30s-early 50s culture, reminiscent of Doctorow's treatment. The book also brings another great novel that is immersed in comic book culture, Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude. It's a beautifully written book from an important contemporary writer of great strength.

For a review of the book from NY Times (and a link to an interview with Chabon and chapter one of the book), click here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/24/reviews/000924.24kalfust.html

 

CLOUD ATLAS, by David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas is an amazing multi-voiced novel that spreads across several centuries and explores the mysterious connections that spread across time and space, ranging from 1840s Polynesia, to 1930s Belgium, dystopian 2045 Seoul, more remote future dystopian Hawaii, early 21st century Scotland, etc.. The novel is an unusually constructed set of six individual stories with subtle thematic links. Each story is told in a completely different style, with different narration. The book is structured so that each story is not told as a complete whole, but rather told in pieces, forcing the reader to struggle to understand the connections among them and to wait for the resolution of each story.  The effect is like an interesting verbal puzzle with growing connections and profound implications. It's a wonderfully written book and a triumph of the kind of polyphonic writing that is hard to get right but very enjoyable to read.

For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/books/history-is-a-nightmare.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm


Cloud Atlas was recently made into a film (amazing idea in itself) starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in multiple key roles. It's a very strong effort that of course takes liberties with the plots to an extent but keeps the themes intact. It's visually stunning and strongly acted, and although 3 hours long, flies along at breakneck speed.

For a review of the film by NY Times , click here: http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/movies/cloud-atlas-from-lana-and-andy-wachowski-and-tom-tykwer.html?_r=0

 

AMERICAN GODS, by Neil Gaiman

If you want to catagorize American Gods in terms of genre, you'd probably say, like the Guardian reviewer, that it is a fantasy. No doubt this is true, but it has little in common with the kind of pop fantasy series like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter that mention of the genre generally brings to mind. In fact, it reminds me more of the often dark magical realism of the S. American writers like Garcia Marques or even Murakami. American Gods is Gaiman's multiple prize-winning effort to get under the skin of the American psyche by exploring its mythical underbelly. Part road-trip and part hallucination, the novel traces the journey of one "Shadow Moon", a noir type antihero caught up in a magical and harrowing battle between the old imported gods of the old country and "new" gods of materialistic modern America.  To call the narrative bizarre would be an understatement, yet it is riveting and beautifully written.

For a review of the book from the Guardian, click here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/19/american-gods-neil-gaiman-book-club