What I'm Reading
Not so long ago, I picked up Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, and found it a delicious read. I put it in the category of "books about characters who live by ideas." One of my favorite kinds of books, a penchant begun long ago, when I was a pretentious teenager devouring George Eliot, and half not getting it, but loving books about characters that aspire to live by ideas. There are great hazards to such books, especially when characters become simple mouthpieces for BIG ideas. But authors who have a kind of ease with the intellectual class can produce marvelously observed renditions of their lives. In fact what I love about such books is they are both celebratory of the life of the mind and yet critical and insightful in this lovely, winsome way.
There are contemporary authors such as A.S. Byatt and Zadie Smith (interesting that I keep picking the Brits--another bias of mine). In Messud's case, and I guess I would say she has some of the Brit sensibility I like, she's not as zany as Zadie Smith, and thus it doesn't fall prey to some of the antic satire. Hers is a more measured exploration of characters who see themselves on the verge greatness, and I like that she manages to be both highly realistic and yet she also does so with a bit of a gimlet eye, too.
Another book I recently finished is The Secret River, by Kate Grenville, which was rumored to be the favorite for the Booker, though Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss won. I became intrigued with the book because it is about ex-convicts inhabiting North Wales, Australia and their clash with the aboriginals. I'm working on an historical novel myself, which shifts to a colonial setting, and I'm always looking for literary novels that "reimagine" history in artistically and intellectually interesting ways. (Caryl Phillip's Cambridge is an excellent example of this--highly recommended) I think what Grenville does so well is both take us inside a very intense point of view of William Thornhill, the main character, and yet, the insight and perspective carries the weight and knowledge of the impact of this history and this brutal clash with another people. This is very hard to pull off, but it is exactly what I want from a literary re-imagining. I don't just want the recreation--that's all well and good. I want our current understanding or perhaps meditation on this history to inform the atmospherics of the novel. To balance that with a realistic portrayal of those characters' point of views, is really an artistic feat.
By the way, I quite liked Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss, too. I feel I need to read it again--I recall it as a very intense pleasure as I was reading it--though as it moves towards it painful end, I found it difficult to read. But I've had a hard time pinning down the impact of the book on me. I think that for some reason, I was very intent on reading her sentence by sentence, as her sentences have this kind of crooked fascination, and she builds a story in an unusual way. Thus I was less able to discern the overall architecture and ideas propelling the story in the ways that I could in the books I was just writing about. I suppose, bottom line, I'm speaking of a slightly less conventional approach that might need another read.
Next up, I think, is Doctorow's The March. I must confess I read the first two pages and cringed at the slave's voice, as it sounded so tired and familiar. But he's such a gifted writer, I know there has to be more ...
There are contemporary authors such as A.S. Byatt and Zadie Smith (interesting that I keep picking the Brits--another bias of mine). In Messud's case, and I guess I would say she has some of the Brit sensibility I like, she's not as zany as Zadie Smith, and thus it doesn't fall prey to some of the antic satire. Hers is a more measured exploration of characters who see themselves on the verge greatness, and I like that she manages to be both highly realistic and yet she also does so with a bit of a gimlet eye, too.
Another book I recently finished is The Secret River, by Kate Grenville, which was rumored to be the favorite for the Booker, though Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss won. I became intrigued with the book because it is about ex-convicts inhabiting North Wales, Australia and their clash with the aboriginals. I'm working on an historical novel myself, which shifts to a colonial setting, and I'm always looking for literary novels that "reimagine" history in artistically and intellectually interesting ways. (Caryl Phillip's Cambridge is an excellent example of this--highly recommended) I think what Grenville does so well is both take us inside a very intense point of view of William Thornhill, the main character, and yet, the insight and perspective carries the weight and knowledge of the impact of this history and this brutal clash with another people. This is very hard to pull off, but it is exactly what I want from a literary re-imagining. I don't just want the recreation--that's all well and good. I want our current understanding or perhaps meditation on this history to inform the atmospherics of the novel. To balance that with a realistic portrayal of those characters' point of views, is really an artistic feat.
By the way, I quite liked Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss, too. I feel I need to read it again--I recall it as a very intense pleasure as I was reading it--though as it moves towards it painful end, I found it difficult to read. But I've had a hard time pinning down the impact of the book on me. I think that for some reason, I was very intent on reading her sentence by sentence, as her sentences have this kind of crooked fascination, and she builds a story in an unusual way. Thus I was less able to discern the overall architecture and ideas propelling the story in the ways that I could in the books I was just writing about. I suppose, bottom line, I'm speaking of a slightly less conventional approach that might need another read.
Next up, I think, is Doctorow's The March. I must confess I read the first two pages and cringed at the slave's voice, as it sounded so tired and familiar. But he's such a gifted writer, I know there has to be more ...
