Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (by Elena Ferrante)

Previously.

My friend aych, Ferrante-enabler, gave me the next volume of the Neapolitain novels and of course, once again, I devoured it. For her, the third was her favorite -- I think I still prefer the second, although the ending of this one is killer and being me, I did enjoy the explicit feminist themes throughout.

I love what Ferrante does with titles -- there is always a twist, where you think the title refers to one thing but at the end it refers to something else. She's good, that Elena Ferrante. And of course, as usual, the end of this one leaves me dying to know what happens next. Aych, where is the fourth volume please.

I feel like I don't want to say too much about this one because spoilers. But I will say that so far I'm really enjoying the series and recommend it to those on the fence about it.

Acceptance (by Jeff VanderMeer)

The pleasurable ookiness trilogy is now complete! The ending was ambiguous, as expected, and so I went down a rabbit hole of fascinating theories on Goodreads and I like it even more now.

I do admit the second and third did not match the page-turning creepiness of the first; Annihilation is still my favorite of the three. But I enjoyed the shifting perspectives in Acceptance, and I liked the final revelations about the biologist, the lighthouse keeper, and the psychologist, among others. I loved the final few images too.

So go in expecting not to have all the mysteries solved, and see what you think. If you like Annihilation, in my opinion, the trilogy is worth seeing through to the end.

Authority (by Jeff VanderMeer)

It took me a bit to get to the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy; you may remember I read Annihilation in March. This book shifts perspective from an explorer in Area X (known only as the biologist) to a member of the organization that sends people into Area X. He goes by Control, but we know his name; it's John.

Control's experience in Southern Reach is an extension of whatever bizarre force governs Area X, and the biologist (also known as Ghost Bird) is being interrogated to discover what she knows or remembers about their journey.

I had heard that we get frustratingly few answers in Authority, but honestly that expectation helped me to enjoy it -- I felt like I got plenty of answers, even if the central mystery (who or what is Area X) is more opaque than ever. And does it ever end on an action-packed cliffhanger! Totally not what I was expecting, but I'm in.

I downloaded Acceptance and started reading it at the gym this morning. More "pleasurable ookiness," shifting narrators (so far I've read chapters from Ghost Bird and two figures who are central to the first two novels but we haven't really "met" before) and I will go into it not expecting any answers at all. That probably means it will exceed my expectations.

Annihilation (by Jeff VanderMeer)

Sometimes the experience of reading a book becomes entwined with the book itself. So it is with Annihilation, which I read during a long sleepless night in the ER with an extremely sad-and-in-pain three-year-old. (She fell out of bed and broke her clavicle.) This felt appropriate.

This is book one of the Southern Reach Trilogy, a contender in the 2015 Tournament of Books, and a recommendation from my book besties Wendy and Chris. It was a compelling read, very tense, with a wonderful unreliable narrator. You know how I feel about unreliable narrators. Plus, the setup was basically The Andromeda Strain, a fun association, even if it went ultimately in a completely different direction (into what you might call sci-fi or speculative fiction).

It's so full of creepy moodiness, and the night at the ER was so unpleasant and exhausting, my reaction to this book isn't all that intellectual, it's just an overwhelming feeling of a sort of pleasurable ookiness. I've heard mixed reviews of the next two books in the series, but I will probably read them anyway, because I want more of whatever this experience was -- minus the ER stuff, of course.

For more cogent intellectual analysis, tune into the ToB tomorrow, where it is competing against An Untamed State. No idea how that would go; I think I would pick Annihilation.

An Untamed State (by Roxane Gay)

With this, I have read five books for the Tournament of Books. I may have time to squeeze in one more before the end of the first round; we'll see.

This book was difficult to put down and I tore through it in two days. It's the story of a Haitian-American who, on a visit home to her parents, is kidnapped and brutalized for two weeks. It flashes between her captivity, her relationship with her husband "before," and her attempts to deal with "after." It is not an easy book to read, as you can imagine.

Reading this immediately after Americanah, though, it suffered in comparison. I felt it lacked subtlety. I don't mean that the plot is too dramatic, but I mean in its depiction of the characters, who are never quite fully-realized, and its depiction of Haiti, which also feels somewhat limited. If I had read these two novels in the opposite order, I may not have felt this way.

The central relationship of the novel is that between Mirielle and her husband Michael. They seem to have a terrible relationship in every way--before she's kidnapped, it's just fighting (neither one comes across well) and sex. After she's kidnapped, it's like his assholishness reaches new heights. It's kind of cathartic, but it's also hard to care about him at all except that you kind of want him to suffer. Mirielle is seriously flawed too, but in compelling ways; she's a much better character.

The ending, too, I had some issues with, as it seemed a bit too pat in certain ways. Vague spoilers ahead, RSS readers. I found it difficult to believe in the whole Emma situation, and the scene at the restaurant wasn't exactly implausible but again was an example of the lack of subtlety I felt throughout.

I know I'm saying a lot of negative stuff about what is, in the end, a very powerful novel. But I'm just trying to put my finger on why, despite its raw power, it didn't fully work for me.

The Bone Clocks (by David Mitchell)

Another six-part masterpiece by David Mitchell, and in my opinion it's a return to form after Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which underwhelmed me somewhat. 

This time each of the sections moves chronologically forward in time, and each connects to our heroine, the sympathetic Holly Sykes. The point of view shifts to other people in Holly's life, including two somewhat narcissistic, Frobisher-esque characters Hugo Lamb and Crispin Hershey. (The central character is a woman, and there is some gender fludity later in the book, but there's a lot here that feels very blokey. Just an observation.) Mitchell also introduces some metaphysical elements in part one that don't truly pay off until 400 pages later, but definitely make Bone Clocks feel connected to a larger whole.

I've read a couple of reviews now (the New Yorker review being one) arguing that the metaphysical themes ultimately overshadow and render moot the human elements of the novel. After sleeping on it, I disagree with that assessment. Sure, the humans are treated in a sense as unwitting pawns in a great cosmic struggle. But what the Horologists are fighting for is humanity.  And it's the character of Holly Sykes, above all, that grounds this struggle and reminds us why humans are worth fighting for. The final scene, and our investment in the very human characters in that scene, belies this entire argument.

This is a contender in the 2015 Tournament of Books, and I'm excited to see how it does, though my gut tells me it's not going to win, I could certainly be wrong. I don't think it overtakes Cloud Atlas in my own personal pantheon (in contrast to Cloud Atlas, with its stark shifts in voice and genre, Bone Clocks feels all of a piece)  but it's still classic Mitchell, and it's a wonderful novel.

Dept. of Speculation (by Jenny Offill)

What a wonderful little gem of a book. This reads like a prose poem, but also tells an extremely compelling story.

“My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.”

I mean, right? It's spare, it's incisive, it captures parenthood perfectly and feels incredibly true. It's a slim novel that packs an amazing punch. Read it. You won't regret it.

All the Light We Cannot See (by Anthony Doerr)

A very buzzed about book, All the Light We Cannot See was on the New York Times Book Review list of best books of the year and got a special exemption so it could compete in the 2015 Tournament of Books. It's the intertwining stories of two teenagers during World War II, one a German orphan who is a genius with radios and is recruited to train in a special Nazi training academy, and the other a blind French girl who loves Jules Verne and whose father, a locksmith, may or may not be in possession of a cursed diamond. Their fates, of course, intersect.

This all sounds semi-ridiculous, but it's incredibly well written, compelling, haunting and wonderful. The characters are vivid and well drawn, the plot contrivances somehow never feel contrived--or at least, by the time they do, you're ready to forgive the novel anything. I was up until the wee hours finishing it, because I had to know how it turned out. It made me cry, it made me think, it has made me say to many people you must read this, it's so good, you will love it. I recommend it, is where I'm going with this.

Once again, the first book I read this year could well be the best. It will be hard to top.

Vacation Reads Roundup II

I went on another vacation, which means it's time for another vacation reads roundup! This time it's kind of an eclectic group of novels. I finished two in November (Middlesex, Through the Narrow Gate) and three in December (The Talented Mr. Ripley, What Alice Forgot, The Vacationers).

Middlesex was one of the books on my reading list for the year. I really liked The Marriage Plot and loved The Virgin Suicides, so I figured I should read his most well known novel. I enjoyed it, though not as much as The Virgin Suicides. I probably would have enjoyed this more if it focused more on Cal's story and didn't have the extensive family saga backstory, which felt like it could have been chopped way down and still gotten the themes across. (I mentioned this to Ian and he brought up Desdemona working at the Temple as a great example.) When Cal hits adolescence, though, the novel starts firing on all cylinders: the story, the intensity of first love, the beautiful writing. Glad I stuck it out.

Through the Narrow Gate is a nun memoir so come on, you know I'm all over that.  An interesting counterpoint to my beloved In This House of Brede. I kept thinking she wouldn't have become disenchanted with the nun life if she'd been at Brede Abbey instead. But an interesting exploration of how religious life stifled her intellect, and how she ultimately resolved the conflict. Enjoyed this enough to keep it rather than leave it behind at a Costa Rican hotel, which was my original plan.

The Talented Mr. Ripley is another classic that I thought might make for a fun vacation read. It has an unreliable narrator although it's told in third person omniscient, which was a change of pace. Ripley is extremely sexually repressed and sociopathic, so his brain is an interesting place to visit.  Actually, he seems like a cousin of Charles Kinbote. (I wonder, especially given Highsmith's own bisexuality, if this novel is less problematic than Pale Fire from a Queer Criticism point of view. Gay = evil, or repressive society = evil? Maybe I need to delve into some academic journals.) (Tangent over.) A nice tense read, super creepy, with an excellent anti-hero.

What Alice Forgot had such a great conceit that I had to read it: a woman hits her head and loses 10 years of memory. She remembers being self-effacing, pregnant and madly in love with her husband, hits her head, and suddenly she's a power mom of three in the middle of an ugly divorce. The way it unfolds (with bits and pieces of memory coming back to her as she works things out, makes incorrect guesses, gets to know her kids, observes how much her loved ones have changed and tries to figure out why) works really well. And Alice is such a likeable character who is easy to root for. A classic airplane read, but far above average. Recommended if you like the genre!

Finally, I read The Vacationers by Emma Straub, which I'd originally downloaded for my last vacation where my phone broke. I think this was one of those buzzy novels that I heard about in EW and other places. This novel is great. It's about a wealthy New York family that travels to Mallorca: two parents, a grown son and college-age daughter, the son's girlfriend, and a gay couple who is friends of the family. They all have their own agendas and alliances and secrets, and the perspective moves smoothly in and out of the minds of each of the core characters. Yes, a great vacation read, and also an excellent piece of literary fiction. Highly recommended.

Station Eleven (by Emily St. John Mandel)

This is one of those buzzy books that I've been hearing about here and there, a post-apocalyptic novel focusing on a traveling band of Shakespearean actors and musicians 20 years after a pandemic flu wipes out 99% of humanity. There's a new generation growing up who have never seen a world with air travel, electricity, or the internet.

The novel opens on an actor who dies of a heart attack (during a performance of King Lear) the same night the pandemic hits North America; many of the characters' lives intersect with his, and there are flashbacks and flash-fowards that cover the history of the characters, the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, and 20 years later. There's a dark period in the middle that, it is implied, was basically Cormac McCarthy's The Road and gave everyone PTSD which, if you've read The Road, is understandable.

The title refers to a series of comic books about Dr. Eleven, who lives on some type of planetoid space station and who has faced a similar apocalyptic event, so the ironic parallels abound, even though I never quite understood the concept of Station Eleven as well as I'd have liked. In flashbacks, we learn who created these and why.

I enjoyed many things about this novel: the lovely prose, the originality of the premise, the shifts in time, the strong female characters, and the meditations on modernity, on memory, on a world we take for granted. I also didn't mind all the intersections and coincidences; this was part of the enjoyment for me. I did have some quibbles: I wanted to understand Station Eleven better, I wanted a little more detail about why and how the Traveling Symphony was traveling, and I wanted a bit more characterizations of the members (we only learn about a handful). In fact, a number of the storylines and characters felt like I could easily have read twice as much about them. But that feels like a compliment to Mandel's storytelling more than a flaw.

Overall I enjoyed it and would recommend it.