Category: Book reviews

Orfeo by Richard Powers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I feel ungenerous for not liking this novel more, but I struggled to wade through all the metaphors and find a human heart at the center of the story. Peter Els, the composer and suspected bioterrorist at the center of this story, is sympathetic in his old age, but reads as befuddled and consistently out of step with his present moment, even as a young man. Which is no crime. Plenty of us feel disconnected from the modern age—it’s often how art gets made. But in Els’ case, I wanted to see him embrace iconoclasm fully, or abandon his composing dreams and launch into another career. Instead he seems to play it safely down the middle, shucking off relationships and obligations along the way, and then playing hurt when he realizes he’s alone. The character study felt like a prop to get him to a point where DHS is sending a pack of storm troopers to his suburban home-cum-bioweapons lab. Sure, Orfeo highlights our hair-trigger, overkill response to fear in the modern age, but I couldn’t buy it.

My hat’s off, though, to Powers for writing as well as he does about musical compositions and performances. I did learn a bit—especially about the revolutionary ways of listening introduced by Cage and his contemporaries. I think these passages (with young Els, Maddy, and Richard all excited and scheming) were my favorite.

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Hell by Kathryn Davis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Rich, luscious, and almost entirely without signposts along the way. A mesmerizing novel in some ways (I’m thinking especially of the 1950s domestic drama), and nearly inscrutable in others (the story of Edwina Moss, for one; Benny Gold, for another). But what’s happening here takes second-place to the atmosphere of tension and real horror, and for that I’ll follow along. A brilliant passage describing a state dinner at Napoleon’s Malmaison is a highlight. Also, I enjoyed seeing techniques that would be put to better use eventually in The Thin Place, like the sentience of animals, for instance.

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Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novella is spare and fast-moving in its narrative of Makina crossing borders and navigating the worlds on either side. I like the way this book gives voice and humanity to the often faceless idea of the people who cross borders. And Makina’s story moves from a simple mission to a supernatural-tinged netherworld, elevating the story into a universal realm. I didn’t like some of the translation choices (I’m thinking especially of “versed” used throughout), but by the end it started to gain some traction for me. Mostly, though, I wanted more story. Which probably says more about me than the book itself.

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Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An intriguing portrait of two friends—Meadow Mori and Carrie Wexler—who come of age in the 80s in L.A. and both become filmmakers. Meadow’s art tilts toward the experimental while Carrie’s leans commercial, adding tension to their friendship over the years. And intermingled with their stories is the story of a third woman—Amy/Nicole/Jelly—who is an artist of a different sort, an auditory artist.

Innocents and Others is constructed from autobiographical essays and short chapters, with each character presenting a public face that hews close to the truth—or perhaps the cinematic truth—of their lives. At a moment when we’re focusing more attention on women filmmakers, this book seems remarkably prescient in telling the story of two ambitious filmmakers who pursue very different projects. I just wish the story had dug a little deeper into their motivations or past histories. With both Meadow and Carrie I felt like I wasn’t getting far past their own projected images to learn something true about each of them. Which might be exactly the point.

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Golden Hill by Francis Spufford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve enjoyed several of Spufford’s books (I May Be Some Time and Unapologetic and now Golden Hill, though all for different reasons. What each share is Spufford’s energetic prose, wit, and adventurous spirit.

To those qualities, Golden Hill adds on a dose of early colonial American currency, social practices, old Dutch New-York names (Breuckelen, anyone?), and all the myriad details that bring a city to life. But the novel is Smith’s story. A man of mystery, Smith arrives on a mission and manages to keep it a secret from everyone (including the reader) till the very end. What unfolds is a classic picaresque that feels a bit like a modern man dressed in colonial garb. Which I appreciated! The language may be dated, but the sensibilities are pretty current. And rather even-handed in its treatment of American sentiments toward England in a pre-Revolutionary War moment.

An enjoyable, quick read, and funny throughout.

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To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Exquisite! It took me a few pages to get into the voice and Woolf’s style of fluidly shifting from one perspective to the next. But once I was immersed, this slender book carried me all the way to the end. Each of the three parts is so wonderful, emotional, and revelatory, I felt almost a part of this house and the family, and buoyed along by Woolf’s prose like that little boat out on the distant water. And for my money, Lily Briscoe’s meditations on painting are the most accurate description I’ve read of the writing act, something at once heartbreakingly beautiful and infuriatingly elusive.

Reading To the Lighthouse I had an immediate sense that I would re-read this book many times, and that gives me a great sense of pleasure for my future reading self.

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When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was my second time through When We Were Orphans and I needed reminding of how effortlessly Ishiguro can frustrate the expectations of his readers. Sweeping from Shanghai to England and then back to Shanghai, we follow the eminent English detective Christopher Banks as he attempts to uncover the mystery of his parents’ long-ago kidnapping and reunite with them. Along the way we’re introduced to Akira, his boyhood friend in Shanghai’s International Settlement, and Sarah, the woman he protests too much not to be fascinated by. Only loosely a detective story, and partly because Ishiguro’s fascination is less with the crime and more with the stories that Banks tells and retells himself as he narrates his own childhood. The mystery, perhaps, is how Banks has avoided the truth all these years. And though we eventually learn of one crime, the criminal is more an apparition than a person. The corruptibility of memory seems like the true culprit.

It’s not my favorite Ishiguro novel, but I do love the section where Banks travels through the war-torn neighborhood of Shanghai as he tries to reach the house in which he believes his parents are still being held. Everything about this is maddening and masterful—the gossamer-thin clue that Banks relies on, the dreamlike way he moves through the battlefront oblivious of the danger around him, and the long refusal to face the truth of what happened to his parents. It feels like a hint of things to come in The Unconsoled.

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The Sellout by Paul Beatty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Sellout is hard to describe, but easy to recommend. It’s a little like crashing someone else’s party. Or a bit like laughing at a joke the moment before you realize the joke was actually an indictment. It’s an outrageous, entertaining, jam-packed story that satirizes the progress of race relations in modern-day America. I think of it as a literary Bamboozled that digs deeper into the protagonist’s psyche and foibles.

On one level, the story of one man’s attempt to return home. On another, a skewering of sacred cows left and right. It feels like a picaresque even if our narrator doesn’t exactly leave his neighborhood. It is a journey. I laughed, I cringed, I was entertained, and I believe this is a story that will linger in my mind for a long time.

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Old Filth by Jane Gardam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first read Old Filth years ago, but it popped into my head recently and I wanted to re-read it and see if it was as good as I’d remembered it. The answer is yes and no.

Jane Gardam drops us into the interior thoughts of Sir Edward Feathers, a barrister from Hong Kong, who’s returned from a long career and retired in a quiet English village with his wife, Betty. Feathers (Old Filth for “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong) seems a model of the British stiff-upper-lip school, but when he’s unmoored from his contemporary life (by an event that may be a bit of a spoiler) he starts traipsing down memory lane and finds it’s less pleasant than he might have once made out. A childhood in Malay as the son of a widowed English civil servant, then whisked back to England for an education, a stint in the Army during the war, and then a return back to the East for his professional career. It’s a success by many measures, but Filth feels hollow and can’t quite pin down why his emotions no longer follow his mind’s orders.

The novel is a graceful, honest, intimate portrait of a life lived as well as one could manage, and there are surprises on nearly every page. The biggest surprise is reserved for an event that’s hinted at early on, but not disclosed till the end. And though this event has clearly affected every day of Filth’s life, it’s too late to completely undo the buckles that bind his emotions. Though they do loosen a touch.

Reading this a second time, I was surprised by how much I was drawn in to the way Filth describes his school years and studies, and the strictures that governed that world. Maybe it’s just me, but I suppose Empire does have its allure. I found myself less enamored of the coincidences that seem to pepper the novel—life details that are meant to suggest to the reader obliquely that Filth was really something more substantial than he himself would let on. But it seemed unnecessary to me. I think Gardam has drawn such a crystalline portrait of the man that I’m satisfied without the overlay of coincidences meant to impress.

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Big Machine by Victor LaValle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Loved it! I didn’t expect this book to tackle so many stories and themes—race in America, cults, addiction, slavery, terrorism, and more—and remain increasingly compelling through to the end. The story: Ricky Rice, a janitor in his middle years, is recruited to a secretive organization that tells him little about his task and then sends him on a wild adventure to save the organization from imminent doom. Along the way we learn of Ricky’s childhood and adulthood, and what brought him to the moment where he made a silent promise that somehow, magnificently, he is being called to account for.

Fast-paced, intriguing, funny, truly frightening in parts, Big Machine takes in the whole world, churns it up, and delivers a story that is human and essential.

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