THE WATERWORKS, by E. L. Doctorow

The Waterworks is a strong effort in a genre familiar to readers of Doctorow. Set in New York, in the post-Civil War era of "robber barrons", the story is a thriller that leads readers through the piecing together of a bizarre set of circumstances surrounding the disappearance of a freelance jounalist and the mysterious "resurrrection"  of a dead captain of industry. The story is almost Hawthorne-like in its gothic qualities and in the narrator's language style; "The Birthmark" comes to mind as sharing the theme. The two most interesting aspects of the novel are the narration and the setting. The story is narrated as a retrospective tale told by a retired, hard-edged New York journalist with an interesting personality including a believable set of flaws. The 1870s New York setting is  vividly portrayed, but it is not a pretty sight. The reader has the feeling that the city, and particularly, the era,  is a major character in the story. For those who like Doctorow's style of historical fiction, done so beautifully in novels such as World's Fair, Loon Lake or Ragtime, Waterworks will not disappoint.

For a review of the book by  NY Times, click here: http://www.symbaloo.com/?sethomepage=1&t=1372381700562#

THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD, by Nadine Gordimer

Stumbling upon a Nobel Prize-winning author for the first time is always interesting. I found Nadine Gordimer's short novel The Late Bourgeois World , written in 1966, to be a good book. It's very spare  yet nicely narrated with a strong sense of character, particularly the narrator. The mid-1960s world of Gordimer's South Africa, seen through the eyes of a sympathetic liberal white woman is very vividly portrayed. And it's got to have one of the all-time great titles of any book anywhere. Gordimer's an author worth reading, and had a story worth telling. I appreciated the open-endedness of the book, and her restraint as a writer to not wrap-up the story too neatly. The strategy fits the theme perfectly.

For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/1966/09/11/books/gordimer-bourg.html?_r=0      

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