Category Archives: Prize Winner

January 20, 2014 · 3:18 pm

Conspiracy of Paper: Cheque that

The trouble with me is that I’m an arrogant reader. Particularly when I’m reading a mystery. I think that because I’m paying attention I’ll sort out the mystery and so this post might otherwise be titled “chagrin.” Chagrin because I thought I’d solved the mystery in David Liss’s brilliantly enjoyable *A Conspiracy of Paper* : a mystery set in London in the 1710s as the stock market is developing and the first (ever!) stock market crash takes place. Around page 300 (of a rough 450) I’d decided that I had it all worked out and so I resolved to make it through to the end to have my conclusion validated by the book. ONLY TO BE WRONG. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, realizing I’d misread the signs. Though our protagonist Benjamin Weaver – a former boxer, turned private detective/thug – isn’t entirely sure by the end of the book that the murderer/conspirator/mastermind really is who he thinks he is. So! Maybe I’m right after all?

And this is the delight of the well wrought mystery. The unravelling of threads reveals not a single person behind the curtain, but rather a set of societal conditions that allowed such crimes to take place that anyone (perhaps) could have been the perpetrator given the right opportunity. That is to say, one person pulled the trigger, but a hundred could have. Moreover Liss’s novel is brilliant for showing how easy it might be for anyone of the characters to have slipped into pulling the trigger, that we are all but a hairs breath – or an opportunity – away from being thieves and killers. That with proper motivation and opportunity we’d all easily fill the role. That the line between virtue and crime is as easily crossed as it is misapprehended.

So the book gives you a host of suspicious characters – lovers, family, friends and supposed enemies – and has each of them vacillate between trustworthy and unreliability. Our protagonist himself, towards the end of the novel, falls under the reader’s suspicion in a masterful play of the unreliable narrator. The story is, after all a first person memoir recounted at many years distance, and this reader couldn’t help but wonder if the usual shades of self-aggrandizing truth that ought to be suspected in a first person narrative weren’t being underdrawn in suspicious ways.

The one way I wasn’t arrogant in this reading is that I am entirely ignorant of all things stock market, and moreover intimidated by economics, investments, stocks, etc.  In another brilliant move Liss anticipates this (potential) discomfort with the stock market among his readers and so positions his protagonist as similarly ignorant and so a suitable surrogate to ask the obvious and naive questions. Through Weaver we explore the history of the stock market without the burden of overly technical or alienating facts or details, instead we get repeated explanations of the significance of such and such an event or practice through his Uncle or best friend. This gentle introduction to the history makes it both enjoyable and accessible, to the extent that I think I have a decent grasp of not only the emergence of the stock market, but a confidence enough to translate the historical circumstances to the present to ask questions about the abstraction of currency: talk to me about Bitcoin! I have thoughts now. Maybe.

Oh and I should say, too, that the narrative is written – as you’d expect – in the (supposed) diction and phrasing of eighteenth century London. So I learned some new words and had to catch myself as I started inserting ‘countenance’ into everyday conversation: always a joy.

All this to say an entirely enjoyable read – captivating mystery, thoughtful pacing and introduction of historical details and compelling (enough) characters.

 

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December 31, 2013 · 10:14 pm

The Circle: May it be Unbroken

Here is the good thing about Dave Egger’s *The Circle*: the premise. And what’s the premise? A tech company “The Circle” in the not-so-distant future *cough Google cough* has saturated the market to the point where it controls access to all information and uses this ‘power’ to control all spending, government, actions, individual thought. Protagonist Mae begins the novel indifferent to the power of the Circle, but becomes increasingly infatuated and then utterly committed to the ideology of the Circle – “all must be known” and “information is a human right” and “privacy is theft.” She is intended to serve as a reader-surrogate so that the reader might recognize the ways in which her current unconcern or apathy about the reach of global information conglomerates could readily bleed into a) total obligation to and investment in the conglomerate, b) an inability to think independently or to be alone and c) the totalitarian endgame of one entity (re: company) controlling all aspects of a citizenry. That is to say this is a book with a partisan message: start thinking seriously about the power of Google, start actively questioning reasonable limits of information access/sharing, start protesting the erosion of privacy and public space.

And that’s where the good in the novel ends. The premise is executed with a clumsiness and heavy-handedness that made me suspicious of Egger’s trust in the intelligence of his readers. And in the clumsy and heavy-handed I was left with a book that was still brilliant in its idea, rich in its setting, but entirely frustrating to read.

George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” posits that one of the principle reasons for writing is to articulate and argue a political position. It isn’t, I don’t think, a terrifically trendy way to write or read fiction in 2013. And so perhaps it’s the decidedly aggressive political argument of *The Circle* that rubs me the wrong way – not the message itself, rather, the heavy-handed way the novel goes about making its argument. It lacks elegance, subtlety or complication. In its rush to make sure the reader gets the allegory and adopts the position of protecting privacy the novel risks negating the potential disruption of the allegory itself. I became less unsettled by the message (and at first it really was compelling) and more annoyed by how little Eggers trusted me to get the idea without Being Showed It In Capital Letters: ALLEGORY.

This heavy-handedness is most obvious (and annoying) in the character development of Mae. We’re supposed to – I imagine – see her casual decline into full acceptance of all things Circle. We’re supposed to see the semi-climactic scene where she’s in a room with one of the Wise Men (really. did I mention it’s heavy-handed?) getting a lesson on the selfishness of secrets and the rationality/generosity of open and unfettered access to individual actions, thoughts and beliefs as some kind of moment of revelation and change. Except all this reader could concentrate on was how *obvious* the whole thing was. The move from dependence on the company – excellent health care! fancy workplace! prestige! – to acceptance of its doctrines for pragmatic reasons – I’ll tweet and email because I’m told to! – to an adoption of the dogma because people are unthinking and pliable enough to assume any ideology if exposed to it long enough.

So while I’ll recommend *The Circle* because I think the (albeit grossly heavy-handed) message is worth considering, I do so with the caveat that if you’re already suspicious of the influence of Google then go ahead and skip this one. However, if you were – like me (and I’ll admit it) – apathetic about questions of surveillance, privacy, access-to-information, public space then do read it. Or at least, do read the first 75 pages. It makes a compelling – if also tenacious and indefatigable – argument well worth considering and acting upon.

 

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December 19, 2013 · 3:11 pm

The Family Fang

Oh I loved Kevin Wilson’s *The Family Fang*! Funny, whimsical, smart. The premise: two performance/conceptual artists have two children A and B who they raise as part of their art. The children and parents perform their disruptive, chaotic art as the children grow-up. Once grown, the children abandon their parents/the art to pursue their respective lives as an actor and writer. A split timeline allows the reader to follow the present of the two children (Annie and Buster) as they grapple with failures in their lives and the disappearance of their parents as well as the past lives of their art pieces/growing up.

The interwoven scenes and the unfolding plot let the reader explore – through humour, the absurd and a reworking of the classic take on the modern American family – what it means to make art, what constitutes commitment and trust, what we owe our parents/children and the limits of familial love.

A terrific read.

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December 19, 2013 · 3:05 pm

We Need New Names: Lingering

                     you should*

I’m two books behind on blogging in part because I wasn’t sure how to review Noviolet Bulawayo’s *We Need New Names.” Not that I wasn’t sure whether it was a great book – it is  – but because I wasn’t sure how to capture its complexity and subtlety. I haven’t come any closer to figuring it out, but I ought to do my best before my classic E. memory loses the details. Though it’s been over a week and the narrative lingers, so perhaps that’s a telling enough quality. 

The book follows Darling as she immigrates from an unnamed African country to America. (Though we might suppose from the details of its political history that the country is Zimbabwe, except in some senses trying to ‘figure out’ the country takes away from the message in the book that African countries are imagined by Western audiences as uniform and interchangeable.

The book opens with rich scenes of her childhood at home: the bonds among her friends, the tensions among her community, the NGOs that service it and the white inhabitants of the town. These scenes are then contrasted with Darling’s arrival in America where the refuge she seeks and the prosperity she imagines is complicated by the American problems of minimum wage, eating disorders, porn and alcoholism. She arrives in her oft imagined DestroyedMichigan, or Detroit – one of the most masterful elements of this book is the way Bulawayo plays with and comments on language. Through the manipulation of words on the page she demonstrates the thematic question she explores through her characters about the power of English, the limitations of language to express real affect, trauma and dislocation and the ways in which mastering/mimicking English is imagined as a parallel to gaining mastery over one’s self and world.

Unfolding in her journey are questions for the reader about inequality, resource management, international relations and concomitant questions about exploitation (of the poor, the environment, other countries). But for me the most disturbing questions were around relativism of suffering. Darling’s life in America certainly reveals the many ways in which the “Paradise” of the West is fraught with its own traumas and suffering – not the least of which is the irreconcilable sense of an identity that is neither American nor of Zimbabwe. But these traumas are diminished by Darling for not being *as* terrible as those experienced at home. Her hometown in Zimbabwe is named Paradise – a perhaps too-obvious irony and invitation to question where the “true” Paradise might be located: no where. And if the book argues that the so-called traumas of American life are insignificant in comparison to those suffered abroad, what does that do to the reader who must – on some level – identify with and experience the “injustices” of Western life? How can the individual reconcile their specific experience of suffering with the recognition that elsewhere the causes/sources/experience of suffering is exponentially worse? 

I suppose I (perhaps unfairly) wanted the book to offer some explanation or solution to the question of the relativism of suffering, some way to mitigate guilt or self-recrimination? maybe. or perhaps a way to think about inequality in a way beyond the level of recognition. A way, too, for Darling to make sense of her stuck-between identity. That any emotion she has she must always reimagine in light of what she has been spared. She doesn’t allow herself to feel lonely because it could be so much worse. Where does this refusal of suffering leave Darling? or the reader?

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