Category Archives: Book I’ll Forget I Read

July 16, 2010 · 12:18 am

Never Let Me Go: Great premise

                               As part of my great “find an amazing summer read that I can then recommend with good conscience to everyone I know” project, I played around with the website What Should I Read Next (www.whatshouldireadnext.com). You insert a book you liked reading and the site spits back a list of books you might like based on user-generated lists of books people like. The site suggested I might like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Never one to be immediately persuaded by an internet suggestion, I checked out some reviews and found that not only was it nominated for the Booker, but my mum liked it, too. Off to the library!

I did like the book. At first I really liked it. A lot. I had a few glimmering moments where I thought “yes!” But, as with so many things (icecream sundaes, for instance), the glory of the first few moments was not sustained through to the end. The premise of the book is really neat, and I won’t say much about it because part of the enjoyment of the first 1/3 is in trying to work out the “mystery.” That said, the “mystery” element is my chief complaint, if only because it seems Ishiguro has a fairly limited range of ways to introduce “mysterious” elements. The first person protagonist would drop some juicy information and then immediately say “but I’ll get to that later,” and then proceed to give the back-story. This sort of plot structure “tantalizing detail – extended back-story – bit of a reveal – repeat” continued throughout and became quite distracting. At a certain point the “mystery” stops being mysterious and should no longer be treated that way.

The protagonist, Kathy H, is also a bit of a whiner and yet oddly still a bit full of herself. I’m not sure I like to dislike the first person protagonist, or even if I was supposed to dislike her – but I did.

All by way of saying: great premise (kept me thinking about the ethics of the novel for days after I’d finished), but the form is repetitive and frustrating and the protagonist is sulky. I continue my search for the great summer read (happily tomorrow is my birthday and I am bound to get a least one new novel…).

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July 9, 2010 · 2:14 pm

De Niro’s Game: Not about the actor

I checked out Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game from the library because I had spent an hour or so checking out “best book lists” in an effort to overcome my recent spate of terrible reads. It showed up on several lists, and without reading a plot summary, I decided I’d give it a try. I think from the title I expected that the book would be about a game show, or maybe the actor – Robert De Niro. Wrong!

The novel centers on the first person protagonist, Bassam, as he tries to escape Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, and his best friend, George – who also goes by the name “De Niro” (one part of the title explained). The two begin the novel messing about with a casino – stealing money and what not – and so you might at first expect the titular “game” to be related to gambling. Not so! The game, as it turns out, De Niro’s game in The Deer Hunter: both Bassam and George literally and symbolically play Russian Roulette as the two try to navigate the politics of the Civil War and the psychology of having been raised as “hunters”.

I did enjoy the story, and I appreciated Bassam’s narrative voice – not an entirely reliable narrator, certainly not very sympathetic in his actions, and yet someone, I still cared about him and wanted him to be okay – but what I enjoyed most was the use of extended similes and metaphors. Scenes are described with one rich simile which is then compared to something else, and compared to something else, an on, until you’ve reached the end of a breathtaking sentence that really does wonderful work with the imagination and in conjuring the sensory and emotive registers of the scene (that sounds  a bit like an ad for perfume, but I do mean it – the similes are mind-blowing, and not in a Tom Robbins “what does this have to do with anything” kind of way, but in a melding of all kinds of different experiences). The metaphors – hunting, dust, cannibalism, games, smoking, the moon – carry throughout the novel and interweave with one another to a degree where I found it difficult to be sure what one alluded to, or whether the whole point was a collapse of clear meaning. In any case: full points for narrative style.

If nothing else De Niro’s Game  breaks the cycle of bad writing and reminds me that a good book can make you forget just about everything (including a heat wave of temperatures in the 40 degree Celcius range, a thesis that refuses to write itself) and if it doesn’t help you forget, it at least puts into perspective so-called “problems”.

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April 28, 2010 · 12:09 am

Albion’s Story: Better than it should be

                        Novels that rely heavily on Freudian and Lacanian references and images have no business being even remotely enjoyable (see: Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers). Likewise a first person narration of a violent, predatory, sadistic and narcissistic protagonist are, at best, an exercise for the reader in empathizing with the darker aspects of humanity (see: Nabokov’s Lolita), and done poorly, rewarding for the reader in the sense of self-satisfaction of never being like the narrator (or even believing that such a narrator could ever find a real, living equivalent) (see: the latter half of The Kindly Ones). 

So it is that Kate Grenville’s Albion’s Story is better than it should be, but still a long way off from good. The Freudian and Lacanian emphasis is repetitive and exhausting, but before becoming so (that is, in the first 50 pages) the narrator’s anxiety about his (sexual) maturation, virility and coherent identity are, somewhat, intriguing. What, he asks, does it mean to be a “whole” individual? what is required of man of reason and what is required of a man of nature? Unfortunately these questions continue to be asked throughout the novel, never gaining complexity, proposing a few answers.

The narrator is despicable. He rapes, degrades, and emotionally abuses every woman he encounters in the text, including his wife and daughter. His narrative voice repeatedly proclaims that the women “want” this kind of abuse; or, justifies abusive actions based on an innate feminine weakness of will/intelligence that requires his intervention. Such misogyny is taxing for any reader – even when these thoughts are made absurd by the sheer repetitiveness of their utterance. I was, therefore, surprised to find myself sympathizing, however briefly and reluctantly, with the narrator in the last ten pages of the narrative. I can only account for this sympathy by supposing that Grenville succeeds in temporarily separating Albion’s sadism from his desperate loneliness, traits that the narrative otherwise represents as begetting one another.

Reading Albion’s Story one cannot help but wonder whether the novel might have made an entirely successful short story. A compressed version would allow the reader to sustain a degree of openness to Albion’s character that the repetitive misogynist thoughts and actions negate. Likewise the heavy-handed layering of Freudian and Lacanian thinking might be parsed and focused. As it is, the gem of the last ten pages is not equal to the slog of the first three hundred.   

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March 7, 2010 · 7:18 pm

The Believers: Close, but not quite good

I picked Come, Thou Tortoise and Zoe Heller’s The Believers based on the Globe and Mail‘s recommendations for 2010. Come to think of it I also read The Believer‘s based on that list. Frankly, I’m coming to distrust their so-called “best” list. All three books have proved to be immediately engaging and with a definite “hook” that must make them marketable, but all of them fall flat, and none more than Heller’s The Believers.

Family dramas can be terrific, particularly if you’re into character (and we all know I’m into character). The Corrections, Songs in Ordinary Times, A Prayer for Owen Meany, I mean really, there are some great family dramas. But The Believers wants so. much. to be one of the “great” family dramas that it ends up over-selling all of the quirkiness of its characters, all of their dramas and their triumphs. The mother, Audrey, is a total pill to everyone around her and to the reader. The fat, no-self-esteem daughter, Karla, is a wet dishrag of no spine. The feminist, activist, now-religious daughter, Rosa, is without direction and intention. The drug-using, mother-using, lowlife, Lenny, is a drug-using, mother-using, lowlife. And in the final twenty pages Audrey repents and (surprise) turns out to be a bang-up lady, just misunderstood and victim to her husband’s career and desires; Karla stands up for herself, leaves her husband and runs away with  man who loves her because she is fat; Rosa follows her religious path with conviction; and Lenny is still a lowlife.

My difficulty is that while the novel gives a sense that these changes are taking place (though with a much limited sense of motivation – one sense is not enough to justify life changes), each character changes in isolation from one another. For a family drama there is a remarkable lack of change in the family dynamics, in the family member’s relationships with one another.

So. Close – slick writing, engaging plot. But not quite good – characters act in isolation and with limited motivation.

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