January book reviews
Tree of Codes - Jonathan Safran Foer (poetry) (***)
It feels fateful that I received this book as a gift on the same week that I finally moved Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions off my to-read shelf (and onto my GTFO-of-my-life shelf), deciding that I am not the type of person who can be bothered wrangling meaning from an epic, free verse poem written from two contradictory perspectives about a time traveller.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes is similarly gimmicky: Foer has cut extraneous material out of his favourite book, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, in order to create something new. And by “cut out”, I mean literally cut out. It’s a gorgeous book to handle, the shredded pages transforming something mundane into something deeply tactile and strangely exciting.
I’ve always liked books as objects. It’s probably the reason I still don’t have a Kindle. I’m one of those people who went through a phase of ordering the books on her shelves according to the colour of their spines, rather than by author or genre. I’m also drawn to art involving books. (At UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library, there’s an amazing ‘flying books’ sculpture, which I always found made heading down into the school’s bowels for a study session a slightly less arduous experience.)
Tree of Codes can happily take its place as book-based art, but when read for meaning, there’s simply not much to it. It’s poetry - and lovely poetry at that - but would anyone be quite as interested if Foer had simply published a ‘straight’ volume of poetry?
There’s a thin line between postmodernism and gimmick. I found Everything Is Illuminated wonderfully postmodern; Tree of Codes feels more baldly like a gimmick.
(Key difference between this and Only Revolutions, though: at least it didn’t annoy me.)
For My Lady's Heart - Laura Kinsale (fiction, romance) (unfinished)
This is actually the first bonafide romance novel I’ve ever read. (I know! Shocking.) I gather from various reviews that Laura Kinsale is “the romance novelist that even ‘regular’ readers like”. However, based on For My Lady’s Heart, I’m afraid I can’t agree. When I tried to view the book as a regular novel (and not merely as a set of genre tropes), I found it fairly frustrating.
Set in the middle ages, For My Lady’s Heart concerns the cold and calculating Princess Melanthe, whose icy heart is melted by the stoical knight, Ruck. Fair play to Kinsale, because the novel incorporates Old English dialect in a way that is entertaining without being distracting. Though the premise is a little silly, I think I might have enjoyed a breezy, fast-paced ride through The Ruck and Melanthe Story.
However, Heart is neither breezy nor fast-paced. What brings the novel down is how much of a muchness there is to it. Why make a scene three pages long when you can make it 30 pages long? This seems to be the guiding principle of Kinsale’s writing. Structure, action, even heartfelt declarations simply get lost among all the wordage.
Heart also differs fundamentally from ‘regular’ historical novels because its perspective is so limited. Kinsale may introduce various historical themes - notably, the Plague that continues to ravage England, leaving destruction in its wake - but she doesn’t develop them. The Plague feels strangely remote from the action of Heart; Kinsale seems reluctant to stray from her young lovers for long enough to capture the terror of the Black Death.
I completely understand the desire to slip into a rose-tinted romantic world - I watch all kinds of terrible TV in the name of escapism - but, ultimately, I found the worldview in Heart troublingly limited. Romance is great, but it's served up to us in life alongside strife, banality, friendship, ridiculousness. I like that cocktail of experience, and I like the novels I read to try and reflect it.
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen - Christopher McDougall (non-fiction, sports) (****)
Born to Run’s unwieldy subtitle reflects the book’s hard-to-describe subject matter. Obviously, in simple terms, it’s a book about running. But what kind of book about running is it? Well, in fact, it’s every kind of book: part memoir, part journalism, part anthropology, part history, part running manual, part nutrition guide…
Whew. With such a digressive style, it’s no wonder I found the first few chapters hard to get into. (So hard that I almost gave up on it completely.) It actually takes almost half the book for Christopher McDougall to reach the “story” at the heart of Born to Run. McDougall accompanies a rag-tag group of endurance runners - among them: world-record-holder Scott Jurek; crazy motormouth Barefoot Ted; 21-year-old party animals, Billy and Jenn; enigmatic Caballo Blanco; and an assortment of tribe members from the “Running People” or Tarahumara - as they compete in a dangerous ultra-marathon in the wilds of Mexico.
Despite my initial reservations, I ended up loving this book. With its aforementioned digressions, Born to Run is not a book that takes kindly to being put down and not picked up again for a few days. (You’ll forget what on earth is going on.) But that’s okay, because once you get into the flow, you’ll want to read it all in one go, anyway.
Though McDougall’s writing style is more rough-n-ready than I’d like, prone to slipping into the type of grammatical mistakes that plague journalists (he uses the phrase “I could care less” multiple times, *teethgrind*), he does have a knack for bringing to life the book’s cast of characters. He also imbues each race with a sense of breathless urgency, turning the book into an unlikely page-turner.
Now for the kicker:
I am not a runner. Never have been.
And, though this book makes a compelling case for barefoot running, I’ll probably remain a yoga-and-aerobics kind of girl. *ducks*
But damn. If even I can get so much enjoyment out of this book, I feel confident in recommending it to absolutely anyone.
Room - Emma Donoghue (fiction) (***)
This book made Dora the Explorer seem deeply poignant to me.
While I am disinclined to agree with all the Greatest Book Ever reviews of Room, the heartbreaking poignancy with which Emma Donoghue manages to imbue Dora and Boots means I do agree that there’s something there.
Told from a 5-year-old boy’s perspective, Room details his life imprisoned with his mother by a Josef-Fritzl-type character. The narration - by a wide-eyed innocent - is the novel’s USP, if you will, but it’s also its greatest liability. Because, no, it’s not really possible to suspend disbelief that 5-year-old Jack would have such a sophisticated command of the English language.
I was reminded of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, another novel that hinges on its unique (and flawed) narration style. I’m still nettled by the holes in both Room and Time’s Arrow, but I can concede that they’re interesting enough that it’s worth overlooking their flaws. Jack is undeniably charming, and Donoghue does well to capture the flighty, emotionally-labile energy of a small child.
However, I can’t shake the feeling that Room falls slightly short of being a truly compelling narrative. This is partly because it feels overlong in places and, as far as plotting goes, very little actually happens (and there is some contrivance thrown in for good measure). This is really a mood book. And the mood? Is one of almost unbearable sadness. Ultimately, I feel the same way about Room as I did about Dear Zachary, a documentary I watched recently:
It was good, it was worthy, but does anyone really want to spend two hours crying?
The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields (fiction) (***)
In The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields takes on the tricky task of making an ordinary, even boring, woman’s life story feel poignant and important. Surprisingly, she not only succeeds, she succeeds magnificently. (Give the woman a Pulitzer! …oh, wait.)
Stone is, at times, perfectly written, rife with beautiful, thoughtful observations about life. Shields imbues with significance tiny, everyday moments; makes banality into romance. Parts of the novel are truly breathtaking. It’s fair to say that the plot, what little of it there is, simply doesn’t matter; it’s the quality of Shields’ description, the strength of her characterisation that power the story forward.
Well, they power the story forward for about half the novel, anyway.
I read Stone in about a week. On Monday, I would have told you it was amazing and you should read it immediately. On Friday, I would have said, nahhh, forget it.
When protagonist Daisy reaches mid-life, the narrative turns to dissatisfaction, depression, illness and, finally, death. This bracing realism is tough to handle if you’re looking for escapism. The characterisation begins to dim, too, as numerous children and grandchildren crowd into the picture, none of them exceptionally well drawn. The shift of setting from early-twentieth-century Canada, with its interesting period detail, to a bland, sun-bleached Florida is also vaguely disappointing. Like watching Downton Abbey and suddenly seeing Thomas wander into a gay bar on Canal Street.
I’ll say again: a truly wonderful first-half of a novel, but Stone became a chore for me in the end.
It feels fateful that I received this book as a gift on the same week that I finally moved Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions off my to-read shelf (and onto my GTFO-of-my-life shelf), deciding that I am not the type of person who can be bothered wrangling meaning from an epic, free verse poem written from two contradictory perspectives about a time traveller.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes is similarly gimmicky: Foer has cut extraneous material out of his favourite book, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, in order to create something new. And by “cut out”, I mean literally cut out. It’s a gorgeous book to handle, the shredded pages transforming something mundane into something deeply tactile and strangely exciting.
I’ve always liked books as objects. It’s probably the reason I still don’t have a Kindle. I’m one of those people who went through a phase of ordering the books on her shelves according to the colour of their spines, rather than by author or genre. I’m also drawn to art involving books. (At UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library, there’s an amazing ‘flying books’ sculpture, which I always found made heading down into the school’s bowels for a study session a slightly less arduous experience.)
Tree of Codes can happily take its place as book-based art, but when read for meaning, there’s simply not much to it. It’s poetry - and lovely poetry at that - but would anyone be quite as interested if Foer had simply published a ‘straight’ volume of poetry?
There’s a thin line between postmodernism and gimmick. I found Everything Is Illuminated wonderfully postmodern; Tree of Codes feels more baldly like a gimmick.
(Key difference between this and Only Revolutions, though: at least it didn’t annoy me.)
For My Lady's Heart - Laura Kinsale (fiction, romance) (unfinished)
This is actually the first bonafide romance novel I’ve ever read. (I know! Shocking.) I gather from various reviews that Laura Kinsale is “the romance novelist that even ‘regular’ readers like”. However, based on For My Lady’s Heart, I’m afraid I can’t agree. When I tried to view the book as a regular novel (and not merely as a set of genre tropes), I found it fairly frustrating.
Set in the middle ages, For My Lady’s Heart concerns the cold and calculating Princess Melanthe, whose icy heart is melted by the stoical knight, Ruck. Fair play to Kinsale, because the novel incorporates Old English dialect in a way that is entertaining without being distracting. Though the premise is a little silly, I think I might have enjoyed a breezy, fast-paced ride through The Ruck and Melanthe Story.
However, Heart is neither breezy nor fast-paced. What brings the novel down is how much of a muchness there is to it. Why make a scene three pages long when you can make it 30 pages long? This seems to be the guiding principle of Kinsale’s writing. Structure, action, even heartfelt declarations simply get lost among all the wordage.
Heart also differs fundamentally from ‘regular’ historical novels because its perspective is so limited. Kinsale may introduce various historical themes - notably, the Plague that continues to ravage England, leaving destruction in its wake - but she doesn’t develop them. The Plague feels strangely remote from the action of Heart; Kinsale seems reluctant to stray from her young lovers for long enough to capture the terror of the Black Death.
I completely understand the desire to slip into a rose-tinted romantic world - I watch all kinds of terrible TV in the name of escapism - but, ultimately, I found the worldview in Heart troublingly limited. Romance is great, but it's served up to us in life alongside strife, banality, friendship, ridiculousness. I like that cocktail of experience, and I like the novels I read to try and reflect it.
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen - Christopher McDougall (non-fiction, sports) (****)
Born to Run’s unwieldy subtitle reflects the book’s hard-to-describe subject matter. Obviously, in simple terms, it’s a book about running. But what kind of book about running is it? Well, in fact, it’s every kind of book: part memoir, part journalism, part anthropology, part history, part running manual, part nutrition guide…
Whew. With such a digressive style, it’s no wonder I found the first few chapters hard to get into. (So hard that I almost gave up on it completely.) It actually takes almost half the book for Christopher McDougall to reach the “story” at the heart of Born to Run. McDougall accompanies a rag-tag group of endurance runners - among them: world-record-holder Scott Jurek; crazy motormouth Barefoot Ted; 21-year-old party animals, Billy and Jenn; enigmatic Caballo Blanco; and an assortment of tribe members from the “Running People” or Tarahumara - as they compete in a dangerous ultra-marathon in the wilds of Mexico.
Despite my initial reservations, I ended up loving this book. With its aforementioned digressions, Born to Run is not a book that takes kindly to being put down and not picked up again for a few days. (You’ll forget what on earth is going on.) But that’s okay, because once you get into the flow, you’ll want to read it all in one go, anyway.
Though McDougall’s writing style is more rough-n-ready than I’d like, prone to slipping into the type of grammatical mistakes that plague journalists (he uses the phrase “I could care less” multiple times, *teethgrind*), he does have a knack for bringing to life the book’s cast of characters. He also imbues each race with a sense of breathless urgency, turning the book into an unlikely page-turner.
Now for the kicker:
I am not a runner. Never have been.
And, though this book makes a compelling case for barefoot running, I’ll probably remain a yoga-and-aerobics kind of girl. *ducks*
But damn. If even I can get so much enjoyment out of this book, I feel confident in recommending it to absolutely anyone.
Room - Emma Donoghue (fiction) (***)
This book made Dora the Explorer seem deeply poignant to me.
While I am disinclined to agree with all the Greatest Book Ever reviews of Room, the heartbreaking poignancy with which Emma Donoghue manages to imbue Dora and Boots means I do agree that there’s something there.
Told from a 5-year-old boy’s perspective, Room details his life imprisoned with his mother by a Josef-Fritzl-type character. The narration - by a wide-eyed innocent - is the novel’s USP, if you will, but it’s also its greatest liability. Because, no, it’s not really possible to suspend disbelief that 5-year-old Jack would have such a sophisticated command of the English language.
I was reminded of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, another novel that hinges on its unique (and flawed) narration style. I’m still nettled by the holes in both Room and Time’s Arrow, but I can concede that they’re interesting enough that it’s worth overlooking their flaws. Jack is undeniably charming, and Donoghue does well to capture the flighty, emotionally-labile energy of a small child.
However, I can’t shake the feeling that Room falls slightly short of being a truly compelling narrative. This is partly because it feels overlong in places and, as far as plotting goes, very little actually happens (and there is some contrivance thrown in for good measure). This is really a mood book. And the mood? Is one of almost unbearable sadness. Ultimately, I feel the same way about Room as I did about Dear Zachary, a documentary I watched recently:
It was good, it was worthy, but does anyone really want to spend two hours crying?
The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields (fiction) (***)
In The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields takes on the tricky task of making an ordinary, even boring, woman’s life story feel poignant and important. Surprisingly, she not only succeeds, she succeeds magnificently. (Give the woman a Pulitzer! …oh, wait.)
Stone is, at times, perfectly written, rife with beautiful, thoughtful observations about life. Shields imbues with significance tiny, everyday moments; makes banality into romance. Parts of the novel are truly breathtaking. It’s fair to say that the plot, what little of it there is, simply doesn’t matter; it’s the quality of Shields’ description, the strength of her characterisation that power the story forward.
Well, they power the story forward for about half the novel, anyway.
I read Stone in about a week. On Monday, I would have told you it was amazing and you should read it immediately. On Friday, I would have said, nahhh, forget it.
When protagonist Daisy reaches mid-life, the narrative turns to dissatisfaction, depression, illness and, finally, death. This bracing realism is tough to handle if you’re looking for escapism. The characterisation begins to dim, too, as numerous children and grandchildren crowd into the picture, none of them exceptionally well drawn. The shift of setting from early-twentieth-century Canada, with its interesting period detail, to a bland, sun-bleached Florida is also vaguely disappointing. Like watching Downton Abbey and suddenly seeing Thomas wander into a gay bar on Canal Street.
I’ll say again: a truly wonderful first-half of a novel, but Stone became a chore for me in the end.