Book Ends 2010.
In an attempt to return to writing more book review-type posts on LJ, I thought I'd attempt a nutshell summation of my 2010 in books.
BEST BOOK READ IN 2010: I would probably have to give the nod to Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy (first collected in omnibus form in 1981; New York Review Books edition published in 2010), and specifically to the first book in said trilogy, The Great Fortune (1960). This is the first half of her Fortunes of War cycle -- I managed to snag an omnibus copy of the second half, The Levant Trilogy last November -- which is a loosely autobiographical account of the experiences of the author and her husband as British expats in Romania and Greece immediately before and during World War II. It's a fascinating (if, typically for the time in which it's set, smugly generalizing and judgmental with regard to the different nationalities and ethnicities) look at civilian life during the run-up to and the outbreak of war: Harriet married her husband Guy Pringle after a whirlwind (and off-page) three week courtship in England and accompanies him back to Bucharest where he's an instructor attached to the British Council; she slowly learns that some of the same qualities of Guy's personality that so strongly appealed to her in the first place -- his gregariousness, his open-handed generosity to strangers and acquaintances, his love of the world and all mankind and his keen interest in bettering it -- may well ultimately make him unsuitable as a husband. The cast of characters is deftly sketched; Manning's masterpiece may well be the wheedling, scrounging Russian-Irish aristocrat on his uppers, Yakimov (or, as he almost unfailingly refers to himself, "your poor Yaki"), who is -- or should be -- a by-word of the type, just as Dickens's Micawber is the epitome of the ineffectual spendthrift with delusions of grandeur. The real testament to Manning's auctorial prowess is how interesting she makes the mundane details, not just the "big picture" events. And, if nothing else, The Great Fortune nudged me into reading another of Shakespeare's plays; even if it turned out to be my least favorite play of his thus far (Troilus and Cressida), anything that prompts me to read more Shakespeare can't be all bad.
HONORABLE MENTION: John Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974); if I'm somewhat chagrined that it took me this long to read something by Le Carré, I can console myself with the fact that there are rather a lot of his books that I have to look forward to. This is the first book in the Karla Trilogy, which deals with MI6's "fat spy," George Smiley, being called out of semi-retirement to attempt to ferret out the mole(s) planted by his opposite number in the KGB, Karla; the subsequent books are The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, and the three books have been collected in omnibus form as The Quest For Karla.
WORST BOOK READ IN 2010: Without a doubt the booby prize for the year just passed goes to Allen Drury's Advise and Consent (1959); how this thing won a Pulitzer for Best Fiction is beyond me. Advise and Consent is a door-stopper of a "novel" (760 pages in the mass market paperback edition that I read) that is concerned with the U.S. Senate's role to advise the President on and give consent to his cabinet appointments; the main plot involves the tortuous process of confirming a highly divisive figure, Robert A. Leffingwell, as Secretary of State, while the main subplot involves shocking revelations of the past of the young senior senator from Utah, Brigham Anderson. While I mostly enjoyed the 1962 Otto Preminger movie (in which Henry Fonda played Leffingwell and Don Murray played Anderson; it also starred Walter Pidgeon, Charles Laughton, Franchot Tone, Lew Ayres and Gene Tierney), which was based on the play that was based on the book, despite some reservations that mostly arise from the time in which it was made, the book -- the book! -- is a windy, prolix, flat, dull, singularly unconvincing bloviation on the glories of the U.S.Senate that is occasionally enlivened by scenes of interest (chiefly some of the political skulduggery, but also how the President is so abrasive, manipulative and double-dealing that he manages to alienate a substantial number of the senators from his own party). No one's political party is ever identified, and the President is never named -- he remains simply "The President" throughout the entire book -- but one can make educated guesses as to the major characters' party affiliation. (Given the time in which it was written and set, the party in majority is doubtless the Republican Party, while the opposition party, led by a wily Southern cliché named Seab [pronounced "Seb"; it's short for "Seabright"] Cooley, played by Charles Laughton in the film, is the Democratic Party, still strong in the South.) Drury was a former journalist, and one can see how he feels as though he's on a busman's holiday in Advise and Consent; for the novel to remain readable, however, he should've had an editor take him firmly in hand and slash the manuscript by at least a couple hundred pages. The character development is notable by its absence, the female characters are nearly non-existent and offensive to a modern reader when present, the ethnic stereotypes are so close to racist tropes that there's not a hair's difference between them, and Drury's abuse of the adverb nearly converted me to Graham Greene's abhorrence for same. That the conclusion is so obviously meant to be uplifting is farcical, utterly risible. In short, The West Wing it ain't. Wikipedia's entry for Advise and Consent reports: "The story is loosely based on the Hiss-Chambers and David Lilienthal controversies, and, according to comments by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Joseph T. Kelliher, on the Leland Olds nomination battle;" Drury also threw in a minor, though significant, character to stand in for Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, although, in the best Red-baiting fashion, he makes this character's weltanschauung the polar opposite of McCarthy's. (SPOILER ALERT: don't jump to Wikipedia's article if you want the story elements of Advise and Consent to remain a surprise, as it starts making with the spoilers in the very next paragraph.) Drury published five, count 'em, five sequels to Advise and Consent (two of which -- Come Nineveh, Come Tyre [1973] and The Promise of Joy [1975] -- are alternate endings: two different outcomes spun off from the ambiguous cliffhanger of 1968's Preserve and Protect); I'm happy to report that, contrary to my usual book hoarding practice, I own none of them, and I plan to read none of them. (I do, however, own a copy of Drury's novel about Akhenaten, A God Against the Gods (1976), which I bought before I bought Advise and Consent; it's gonna be a looooong while before I pick that one up, I'm afraid.)
DISHONORABLE MENTION: I could list a slew of collected comic books I've read via the library (and one trade paperback that I bought secondhand); but prose books? Nothing else comes close to Advise and Consent.
BEST NEW-TO-ME AUTHOR DISCOVERED IN 2010: This would be Kenneth Roberts, another former journalist, whose first novel, Arundel (1930; revised 1933), I reviewed here. I stumbled across him while browsing in a local library; I plan to read said library's only other Roberts book, Oliver Wiswell -- like Arundel, a historical novel of the American Revolution, but this time from the perspective of an English patriot -- sometime in 2011.
HONORABLE MENTION: This would be the 1926 English translation of Lion Feuchtwanger's 1925 novel Jud Süß, Jew Süss (subsequently retitled Power in the Modern Library edition of 1932, which also deleted the chapter numbers from the five "books" of Jew Süss), the nominal basis for the infamous 1940 anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda movie of the same name, directed by Veit Harlan, who would go on to be Stanley Kubrick's uncle-in-law. Jew Süss is loosely based on the life of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (1698-1738), "a Jewish banker and financial planner for Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg in Stuttgart. He was a nephew and stepson of the banker Samuel Oppenheimer, diplomat and Shtadlan to Kaiser Leopold of Austria." While it started out as a detached and cynical "big picture" narrative roughly comparable in tone to B. Traven's Jungle series (Traven was also a German author and a near contemporary of Feuchtwanger's), it turned into a melodrama in the middle of Book IV ("The Duke"), where Duke Karl Alexander causes the death of Süss's daughter Naemi by chasing her through her house, probably with the design of raping her. The melodrama was not quite to the level of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (although the implicit parallels in Book V between Süss and Christ are more of what Marlowe might've attempted, had the times in which he'd lived been even slightly more permissive), but it wasn't as broad or shallow as I'd feared. I would definitely be interested in a fresh English translation (Dedalus Books, I'm looking at you), and I wish that Feuchtwanger threw a few more dates into the narrative; I would love an edition with explanatory notes (such as whether "Swabian" really is a separate language or merely a dialect), background material on the Holy Roman Empire (and Swabia in particular) of the early 1700s, an essay on the titular character and his place within the Oppenheimer family (as well as an explanation why his last name is Süss and not Oppenheimer...), etc., etc. Feuchtwanger also wrote the Josephus Trilogy (Josephus [literal translation of the German title: "The Jewish War"], The Jews of Rome [lit.: "The Sons"], and Josephus and the Emperor [lit.: "The Day Will Come"; some English editions are titled this]), The Pretender (1936: about Terentius Maximus, the false Nero; the German title translates as "The False Nero") and Foxes in the Vineyard (a.k.a. Proud Destiny, about Pierre Beaumarchais and Benjamin Franklin in Paris from 1776). Feuchtwanger fled the Nazis in the 1930s, but has come under some criticism for soft-soaping Stalin's atrocities.
And finally....
MOST UNDERWHELMING NEW-TO-ME DISCOVERY IN 2010: Charles Portis's True Grit (1968), the basis for the eponymous movies of 1969 (directed by Henry Hathaway and starring John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn) and 2010 (directed by the Coen brothers and starring Jeff Bridges as Rooster). I'd stumbled across Portis's name while flipping through an issue of either Esquire or GQ in 2009: he was mentioned in a short, one- or two-paragraph item as "a writer's writer," and I'd been interested enough to keep my eyes peeled. What with the movie tie-in republication -- in trade paperback, with an afterword by Donna Tartt, no less -- of True Grit, and the republication of the rest of Portis's novels (The Dog of the South, Gringos, Norwood and Masters of Atlantis) by the same publisher (The Overlook Press, which first came to my attention as the publishers of books of movie criticism), this was suddenly possible. While I know just enough about writing to appreciate how much craft the deceptively straightforward True Grit conceals, I can't say that I was sent over the moon by it. Yeah, yeah, I get it -- the first person narrator Mattie Ross who, being just 14 in the events that she relates, is both more steely and capable than most people believe and more naïve and vulnerable than she believes; the inverted commas over any word or phrase that she prudishly deems "slangy"; the Twainian notes sounded in describing the farcical and brutal chicanery of the law enforcement and judiciary systems of the 1870s; the casually tossed-off references to biblical passages that are, as Stanley Fish pointed out in his "Opinionator" blog for the New York Times on Monday, 27 December, central to a full understanding of the religious underpinnings of the novel (though these underpinnings aren't in the "Jesus-as-good-buddy" mode currently popular in the U.S.) -- all these things point to a deep work of fiction that can be fruitfully plumbed, taught, and drained into dessication by swarms of literature professors and critics. (I would also submit that Mattie Ross is an unreliable narrator, but I'm sure that there are at least a few of True Grit's acolytes out there who would shout me down.) But, while I have more than a little intellectual sympathy for the bleakness and the mordant humor of Portis's creation, it just didn't grab me. I might well re-read it at a future date in the hopes of falling in love, but I'll probably find that I'll have to settle for respecting it, not loving it. I'll also likely try at least one more Portis book, but I'll likely settle for reading a library copy, not buying one.
BEST BOOK READ IN 2010: I would probably have to give the nod to Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy (first collected in omnibus form in 1981; New York Review Books edition published in 2010), and specifically to the first book in said trilogy, The Great Fortune (1960). This is the first half of her Fortunes of War cycle -- I managed to snag an omnibus copy of the second half, The Levant Trilogy last November -- which is a loosely autobiographical account of the experiences of the author and her husband as British expats in Romania and Greece immediately before and during World War II. It's a fascinating (if, typically for the time in which it's set, smugly generalizing and judgmental with regard to the different nationalities and ethnicities) look at civilian life during the run-up to and the outbreak of war: Harriet married her husband Guy Pringle after a whirlwind (and off-page) three week courtship in England and accompanies him back to Bucharest where he's an instructor attached to the British Council; she slowly learns that some of the same qualities of Guy's personality that so strongly appealed to her in the first place -- his gregariousness, his open-handed generosity to strangers and acquaintances, his love of the world and all mankind and his keen interest in bettering it -- may well ultimately make him unsuitable as a husband. The cast of characters is deftly sketched; Manning's masterpiece may well be the wheedling, scrounging Russian-Irish aristocrat on his uppers, Yakimov (or, as he almost unfailingly refers to himself, "your poor Yaki"), who is -- or should be -- a by-word of the type, just as Dickens's Micawber is the epitome of the ineffectual spendthrift with delusions of grandeur. The real testament to Manning's auctorial prowess is how interesting she makes the mundane details, not just the "big picture" events. And, if nothing else, The Great Fortune nudged me into reading another of Shakespeare's plays; even if it turned out to be my least favorite play of his thus far (Troilus and Cressida), anything that prompts me to read more Shakespeare can't be all bad.
HONORABLE MENTION: John Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974); if I'm somewhat chagrined that it took me this long to read something by Le Carré, I can console myself with the fact that there are rather a lot of his books that I have to look forward to. This is the first book in the Karla Trilogy, which deals with MI6's "fat spy," George Smiley, being called out of semi-retirement to attempt to ferret out the mole(s) planted by his opposite number in the KGB, Karla; the subsequent books are The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, and the three books have been collected in omnibus form as The Quest For Karla.
WORST BOOK READ IN 2010: Without a doubt the booby prize for the year just passed goes to Allen Drury's Advise and Consent (1959); how this thing won a Pulitzer for Best Fiction is beyond me. Advise and Consent is a door-stopper of a "novel" (760 pages in the mass market paperback edition that I read) that is concerned with the U.S. Senate's role to advise the President on and give consent to his cabinet appointments; the main plot involves the tortuous process of confirming a highly divisive figure, Robert A. Leffingwell, as Secretary of State, while the main subplot involves shocking revelations of the past of the young senior senator from Utah, Brigham Anderson. While I mostly enjoyed the 1962 Otto Preminger movie (in which Henry Fonda played Leffingwell and Don Murray played Anderson; it also starred Walter Pidgeon, Charles Laughton, Franchot Tone, Lew Ayres and Gene Tierney), which was based on the play that was based on the book, despite some reservations that mostly arise from the time in which it was made, the book -- the book! -- is a windy, prolix, flat, dull, singularly unconvincing bloviation on the glories of the U.S.Senate that is occasionally enlivened by scenes of interest (chiefly some of the political skulduggery, but also how the President is so abrasive, manipulative and double-dealing that he manages to alienate a substantial number of the senators from his own party). No one's political party is ever identified, and the President is never named -- he remains simply "The President" throughout the entire book -- but one can make educated guesses as to the major characters' party affiliation. (Given the time in which it was written and set, the party in majority is doubtless the Republican Party, while the opposition party, led by a wily Southern cliché named Seab [pronounced "Seb"; it's short for "Seabright"] Cooley, played by Charles Laughton in the film, is the Democratic Party, still strong in the South.) Drury was a former journalist, and one can see how he feels as though he's on a busman's holiday in Advise and Consent; for the novel to remain readable, however, he should've had an editor take him firmly in hand and slash the manuscript by at least a couple hundred pages. The character development is notable by its absence, the female characters are nearly non-existent and offensive to a modern reader when present, the ethnic stereotypes are so close to racist tropes that there's not a hair's difference between them, and Drury's abuse of the adverb nearly converted me to Graham Greene's abhorrence for same. That the conclusion is so obviously meant to be uplifting is farcical, utterly risible. In short, The West Wing it ain't. Wikipedia's entry for Advise and Consent reports: "The story is loosely based on the Hiss-Chambers and David Lilienthal controversies, and, according to comments by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Joseph T. Kelliher, on the Leland Olds nomination battle;" Drury also threw in a minor, though significant, character to stand in for Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, although, in the best Red-baiting fashion, he makes this character's weltanschauung the polar opposite of McCarthy's. (SPOILER ALERT: don't jump to Wikipedia's article if you want the story elements of Advise and Consent to remain a surprise, as it starts making with the spoilers in the very next paragraph.) Drury published five, count 'em, five sequels to Advise and Consent (two of which -- Come Nineveh, Come Tyre [1973] and The Promise of Joy [1975] -- are alternate endings: two different outcomes spun off from the ambiguous cliffhanger of 1968's Preserve and Protect); I'm happy to report that, contrary to my usual book hoarding practice, I own none of them, and I plan to read none of them. (I do, however, own a copy of Drury's novel about Akhenaten, A God Against the Gods (1976), which I bought before I bought Advise and Consent; it's gonna be a looooong while before I pick that one up, I'm afraid.)
DISHONORABLE MENTION: I could list a slew of collected comic books I've read via the library (and one trade paperback that I bought secondhand); but prose books? Nothing else comes close to Advise and Consent.
BEST NEW-TO-ME AUTHOR DISCOVERED IN 2010: This would be Kenneth Roberts, another former journalist, whose first novel, Arundel (1930; revised 1933), I reviewed here. I stumbled across him while browsing in a local library; I plan to read said library's only other Roberts book, Oliver Wiswell -- like Arundel, a historical novel of the American Revolution, but this time from the perspective of an English patriot -- sometime in 2011.
HONORABLE MENTION: This would be the 1926 English translation of Lion Feuchtwanger's 1925 novel Jud Süß, Jew Süss (subsequently retitled Power in the Modern Library edition of 1932, which also deleted the chapter numbers from the five "books" of Jew Süss), the nominal basis for the infamous 1940 anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda movie of the same name, directed by Veit Harlan, who would go on to be Stanley Kubrick's uncle-in-law. Jew Süss is loosely based on the life of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (1698-1738), "a Jewish banker and financial planner for Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg in Stuttgart. He was a nephew and stepson of the banker Samuel Oppenheimer, diplomat and Shtadlan to Kaiser Leopold of Austria." While it started out as a detached and cynical "big picture" narrative roughly comparable in tone to B. Traven's Jungle series (Traven was also a German author and a near contemporary of Feuchtwanger's), it turned into a melodrama in the middle of Book IV ("The Duke"), where Duke Karl Alexander causes the death of Süss's daughter Naemi by chasing her through her house, probably with the design of raping her. The melodrama was not quite to the level of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (although the implicit parallels in Book V between Süss and Christ are more of what Marlowe might've attempted, had the times in which he'd lived been even slightly more permissive), but it wasn't as broad or shallow as I'd feared. I would definitely be interested in a fresh English translation (Dedalus Books, I'm looking at you), and I wish that Feuchtwanger threw a few more dates into the narrative; I would love an edition with explanatory notes (such as whether "Swabian" really is a separate language or merely a dialect), background material on the Holy Roman Empire (and Swabia in particular) of the early 1700s, an essay on the titular character and his place within the Oppenheimer family (as well as an explanation why his last name is Süss and not Oppenheimer...), etc., etc. Feuchtwanger also wrote the Josephus Trilogy (Josephus [literal translation of the German title: "The Jewish War"], The Jews of Rome [lit.: "The Sons"], and Josephus and the Emperor [lit.: "The Day Will Come"; some English editions are titled this]), The Pretender (1936: about Terentius Maximus, the false Nero; the German title translates as "The False Nero") and Foxes in the Vineyard (a.k.a. Proud Destiny, about Pierre Beaumarchais and Benjamin Franklin in Paris from 1776). Feuchtwanger fled the Nazis in the 1930s, but has come under some criticism for soft-soaping Stalin's atrocities.
And finally....
MOST UNDERWHELMING NEW-TO-ME DISCOVERY IN 2010: Charles Portis's True Grit (1968), the basis for the eponymous movies of 1969 (directed by Henry Hathaway and starring John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn) and 2010 (directed by the Coen brothers and starring Jeff Bridges as Rooster). I'd stumbled across Portis's name while flipping through an issue of either Esquire or GQ in 2009: he was mentioned in a short, one- or two-paragraph item as "a writer's writer," and I'd been interested enough to keep my eyes peeled. What with the movie tie-in republication -- in trade paperback, with an afterword by Donna Tartt, no less -- of True Grit, and the republication of the rest of Portis's novels (The Dog of the South, Gringos, Norwood and Masters of Atlantis) by the same publisher (The Overlook Press, which first came to my attention as the publishers of books of movie criticism), this was suddenly possible. While I know just enough about writing to appreciate how much craft the deceptively straightforward True Grit conceals, I can't say that I was sent over the moon by it. Yeah, yeah, I get it -- the first person narrator Mattie Ross who, being just 14 in the events that she relates, is both more steely and capable than most people believe and more naïve and vulnerable than she believes; the inverted commas over any word or phrase that she prudishly deems "slangy"; the Twainian notes sounded in describing the farcical and brutal chicanery of the law enforcement and judiciary systems of the 1870s; the casually tossed-off references to biblical passages that are, as Stanley Fish pointed out in his "Opinionator" blog for the New York Times on Monday, 27 December, central to a full understanding of the religious underpinnings of the novel (though these underpinnings aren't in the "Jesus-as-good-buddy" mode currently popular in the U.S.) -- all these things point to a deep work of fiction that can be fruitfully plumbed, taught, and drained into dessication by swarms of literature professors and critics. (I would also submit that Mattie Ross is an unreliable narrator, but I'm sure that there are at least a few of True Grit's acolytes out there who would shout me down.) But, while I have more than a little intellectual sympathy for the bleakness and the mordant humor of Portis's creation, it just didn't grab me. I might well re-read it at a future date in the hopes of falling in love, but I'll probably find that I'll have to settle for respecting it, not loving it. I'll also likely try at least one more Portis book, but I'll likely settle for reading a library copy, not buying one.