2014 read #61: A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro.

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
183 pages
Published 1982
Read June 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I could never make a living reviewing books. Too many books leave me adrift, at a loss for anything definite to say, as if I were trying to drive nails to hold down melting snow. The more literary a book is, the lighter an author's touch, the more left unsaid, the harder it is for me to convert my subjective experience of the book into my own words. Part of this (most of this) is laziness on my part. I've gotten into the habit of noting out a quick paragraph before hitting "Publish" and going into the other room to eat ice cream or whatever. That hasn't helped my critical faculties.

Anyway. Massive spoilers ahead, though as it's a literary book, it's an open question whether my interpretation of what happened, "happened."

So, Etsuko seemingly killed the little girl Mariko -- in my estimation, out of a sort of somber compassion for her, but a case could be made that she did out of a more twisted sort of compassion for Sachiko, the girl's mother, a case built from several of the book's through-lines (Niki's repeated avowals that no one, not even parents, should suffer a boring, unfulfilled, meaningless life; every character comments on how unhappy Etsuko is during her pregnancy; the brief mention, never repeated, that this is Etsuko's fourth pregnancy). It's less likely that Etsuko committed the prior child-murders in her neighborhood. It would seem Etsuko merely took some kind of cue from them. But anyway. I didn't care for this Etsuko-kills-Mariko ending (if that's even what was implied). The child-murders were the least interesting through-line for me, and when I got to the end of the penultimate chapter, when Etsuko (in a doubled memory) approaches Mariko with (presumably) a rope, my reaction was "Oh. It's one of these endings." Perhaps if I hadn't read The Trial of Elizabeth Cree just a few months ago, I'd be more floored. As it is, it just feels like one of those fashionable tricks literary authors like to toy with.

Aside from the ending, I thoroughly loved this book. I love how Ishiguro's characteristic style once again molds itself into the confused, hesitant reminiscences of someone with perhaps something she's hiding from herself. It's remarkable, really, how unchanging Ishiguro's style is, in these three books of his I've read, yet it always gives life to such distinct narrators. His environments and supporting characters are wonderfully vivid. And the emotions he breathes into being, as I said at the start, are exquisitely difficult to nail down in words of my own.

Edit: A friend points out my interpretation of the ending was, ah, hilariously off-base. I'm not so good at lateral thinking (I suck at logic puzzles too). Just thought I'd note this for posterity.

2014 read #60: After Dark by Manly Wade Wellman.

After Dark by Manly Wade Wellman
184 pages
Published 1980
Read from June 28 to June 29
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Stripped of proper nouns and set dressings, this could almost be a duplicate of the first Silver John novel, The Old Gods Waken. Silver John a-rambles into a new tucked-away bit of the hill country. A gentle, well-read old hillbilly -- instantly impressing John with his practical, sensible, courageous, straightforward, no-nonsense good ol' boy nobility -- offers basement hooch from fruit jars. There's a young woman introduced with a significant talent (folklore and magic lore in Old Gods, guitar pickin' here), but she gets mushy and spends the rest of the book canoodling with a competent, no-nonsense man. That man is relieved that Silver John has a sweetheart far away, and trusts him implicitly now that the shadow of rivalry dries up between them. There's an "unchancy" menace in the hills roundabouts, a race predating the incursion of Native Americans from Asia. The old white man's comfortable hill cabin, and his land, falls under siege as the ancient creatures send down-low, no-good human agents against him, and it's up to Silver John -- and a sidekick who just happens to have knowledge of the creatures they face -- to cast a few counterspells and help the old man out as the ancient menace escalates and comes for him in person in the middle of the night.

Given that scarcely a year separates the two books, that sort of fill-in-the-blanks template is inexcusable. It's not like this is a huge series that exhausted the possibilities of its milieu. It's not like Wellman himself seemed to lack imagination; the tiny hints of Silver John's past adventures all sound more interesting than this, by a long stretch. All the more reason to lament the fact that Suffolk County doesn't have any copies of the Silver John short story omnibus.

I have to give After Dark some credit for its climactic chapter, which had the measured, repeating rhythm of a good ghost story or fairy tale, something I'm always keen on when done well.

2014 read #59: The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer.

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer
782 pages
Published 2007
Read from June 1 to June 28
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

A year ago I read the sequel to this book, The History of the Medieval World, and even though it was the usually tedious sort of "kings and wars" history that eschews analysis of social trends and the experiences of anyone who lacks "Emperor" before their name, I found myself impressed by the breadth of Bauer's coverage. A kings and wars history, yes, but one that dug its way into Korea and medieval Japan and other cultural areas usually ignored by such histories. This was enough to get me to shell out some $30 for my own copy of this volume, and imagine having the whole three-volume set ready to hand in my future library.

I've only now gotten around to reading this installment. (My reading pace has slowed considerably from last year, and 800-page history tomes don't ease their way into my rotation quite like they did.) While I'm not entirely discouraged from (eventually) reading The History of the Renaissance World, this book was a let-down. Sniffing about the lack of known personalities in social history and archaeology, Bauer insists upon kings and wars almost to the exclusion of all else; the charming or bloodthirsty or charmingly bloodthirsty anecdotes sprinkled through the later volume are thin on the ground here, while the first half or so of Ancient World relies to a disconcerting degree on legends and holy texts, often stripped down to their barest outline but otherwise presented with little correction.

Worst of all, thanks to Bauer's disdain for mere archaeology, the fascinating scope of her World is restricted to the usual suspects: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, a tiny bit of India, a lot of Greece, and a whole lot of Rome, following the long-outmoded "ladder" of civilizations (with modern Western Europe, as a general rule, found on top). Once the Punic Wars begin, Bauer seems to shrug off the existence of any part of the world outside Rome and China: addressing Pontius or Parthia or India only in reference to movements from those two centers, skipping centuries of amply documented history in Egypt and Greece, presumably because they'd passed on the torch and weren't so relevant to the glorious path of progress. It's an ethnocentric approach at odds with the title and with the subsequent volume.

The only help for it, though, would be to add something like another 700 pages and producing a separate volume in the series, A History of the Classical World or some such. Presumably an editor or publisher (or a fit of pragmatism) nixed that possibility. What we're left with in that absence, though, is a tremendous amount of material sped through with little to hold one's interest, undeserving of the title of a "world" history.

2014 read #58: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett.

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
355 pages
Published 1989
Read from June 25 to June 27
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

This is my first Pratchett book. Well, I did read Good Omens last year, but Pratchett only co-wrote that one, and it had Gaimain's Nebbishy Hero and Über-competent Pixie fingerprints all over it. Aside from that I've only read Pratchett's short story "Troll Bridge," which I found "really cute, and quite enjoyable." Guards! Guards! is likewise cute, and generally enjoyable, but after the first hundred pages or so Pratchett's single joke ("These fantasy cliches are pretty silly when you play around with them!") wears thin. The conceptual high point is reached in the dedication, for crying out loud. Well, to be fair, that isn't his only joke -- there's also the constant patter of puns and wordplay -- but after a while that gets too cutesy and precious for my tastes. Not to the point where I start to actively dislike it, and there were occasional flashes of hilarity that pierced even my joyless heart, but I'd say this was an average read at best.

2014 read #57: The Tropic of Serpents by Marie Brennan.

The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan
331 pages
Published 2014
Read from June 23 to June 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Two books in, the relative novelty of Lady Trent and her world is not as fresh. Brennan's narrative keeps chuffing away like the determinedly retro adventure engine it is, propelling mild amounts of entertainment but stopping short of anything surprising or really new. (Well, one of the characters is specifically revealed to be asexual, which is still pretty rare in genre fiction, so I'll give Brennan that point.) This book wasn't worse than A Natural History of Dragons, but as it was more of the same, it began to bore me toward the middle. Perhaps because I'm reading it so soon after the first book. This series might be best read as it's released, rather than marathoning it in one go.

2014 read #56: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
335 pages
Published 2007
Read from June 20 to June 22
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

I've stared at the empty text box here for a while, trying to unpack my impressions into something approaching a "review." Wao is, to put it mildly, an ambitious novel, tracing three generations of a Dominican family and the curse (figurative or literal) left on them and their country by the Trujillo dictatorship. I went into it expecting a comic but moving tale of an obese Dominican fantasy writer in Jersey, so the flashbacks within flashbacks -- brilliantly constructing the Sophoclean tragedy of the de Léon family against national horrors that can only be described in terms of Sauron and comic book villains -- took a while to sync with me. It is a novel of the Third World, of proxy imperialism, of the lingering residues of exploitation and tyranny. It is also, in the character of Oscar, a rehash of old junk about "friendzoning" and wearing women down through obsessive stalking. The various pieces of the story cohere beautifully, though, seeping together after you turn the final page and put the book down.

2014 read #55: A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan.

A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan
334 pages
Published 2013
Read from June 18 to June 20
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

There has been some minor effusion surrounding this series; io9 recently squeed itself over the "realistic" natural history underlying the books, apparently part of a newish direction in fantasy fiction. Reading this book, however, I was struck not with its supposed postmodernism but with how deliberately and determinedly retro it was. Speculative natural history is pretty much the foundation of what we would call science fiction today. This could easily have been a work of Verne's, or one of Doyle's Professor Challenger novels, with of course some differences in style and ideology (few modern writers seem to attempt the broadly satirical, larger than life characterization endemic to Victorian sci-fi, while Brennan's narrator is, of course, a woman trying to escape her socially defined role to pursue most unladylike ambitions).

The speculative natural history is delicious, but it comprises far too little of this book; the bulk of its second half dawdles along with a simplistic smugglers-and-corrupt-nobleman plotline straight out of a 1930s boys' novel, the type of old-fashioned pulp which never evolves beyond mildly entertaining. Even the whole "It's a story that usually has a boy character, but this time it's a girl!" idea hasn't been novel since the early 1990s, though of course it's certainly welcome now, in a time when, as a culture, we seem to be backsliding away from diversity, inclusiveness, and tomboys. There's potential here -- and at the very least I would keep reading this series for more of the same -- but it isn't nearly as groundbreaking and innovative as the internet would have you believe.

2014 read #54: Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd.

Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd
234 pages
Published 1987
Read from June 14 to June 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Themes of forgery, reproduction, plagiarism, emulation, influence, and inspiration are the through-lines of this novel. It's easy to see why the real life story of Thomas Chatterton -- poetical wunderkind and forger whose medieval pastiche helped inspire the Romantic movement, the "marvellous boy" who apparently suicided at 17 -- would appeal to the sensibilities of Peter Ackroyd. This makes two consecutive books that left me glad I read his Albion, this time because digesting that volume tipped me off to Ackroyd's preoccupation with artistic lineage, the recurring genetic elements of English wordcraft, how history and inheritance are the pulse and pulp of artistic creation in any age. The image of a later poet, posing for a portrait, becomes the face of Chatterton, and the death of another character duplicates the truth in that fiction. "I said they were fakes," one character says. "But that doesn't mean they aren't real."

The clearest emblem of this idea comes in the form of Chatterton's central MacGuffin, a painting which appears to depict a middle-aged Thomas Chatterton, but which (major spoilers!) turns out to be a later forgery applied upon several different other layers of portraits on the same canvas. Chatterton's poetic heirs paint their own images over the faces of those who came before, but the painting dissolves entirely before the original image is seen.

This thematic feast is, however, the main attraction of Chatterton. Ackroyd populates his novels with eccentrics, vividly -- even grotesquely -- depicted, here becoming a mass of clutter like the interior of a junk shop whose proprietor feels a pang at the thought of letting anything go. Charming at first, the concretion of peculiarities and madmen and barbed witticisms eventually grows wearying. Two or three moments of genuine emotion emerge unexpectedly from all this surface detail, but ultimately the impression is more arabesque than Romantic.

2014 read #53: Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton.

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton
332 pages
Published 2003
Read from June 12 to June 13
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

A Victorian novel of manners, populated entirely by dragons -- a charming, high-concept basis for a story, no? Victorian novels are an appallingly large gap in my reading history (you know, along with Classical texts, medieval writing, early modern works, 20th century classics, and basically everything before and after as well as during the Victorian era), but I've gotten enough of a gist from summaries and parodies to have a sense of the expectations and rhythm of such novels. Here I find a neat bit of cross-pollination from a previous read, Albion by Peter Ackroyd. One may reject his fanciful and ill-defined genius loci hypothesis while still recognizing inherent qualities in English works, such as the oft-mentioned emphasis on superficial detail at the expense of deeper emotion and meaning, which was a helpful insight into how this sort of novel is supposed to work. Walton has fun complicating the plot and setting the characters careening off one way and another to create a pleasingly complex design, but even as parody or satire Tooth and Claw never digs deep. Brisk, entertaining, and an inspired conceit, but never more than a charming bauble.

2014 read #52: An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro.

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
206 pages
Published 1986
Read June 11
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I'm fascinated by how Ishiguro's characteristic style -- narration written as if drawn from unreliable memories, full of asides and interjections like "Now, he may not have used those exact words" and "Perhaps I am confusing it with another conversation we had" -- can perform so adeptly for radically different characters. The soft, naive, yet perceptive narrator of Never Let Me Go could hardly be further removed from the quietly arrogant, nostalgic old artist of Floating World, yet the prose itself hardly seems to vary between the two books, separated as they are by almost twenty years of Ishiguro's career. The biggest advance in Ishiguro's craft seems to be structural. Never Let Me Go was constructed with aching delicacy, wavering just above the surface of horror and tragedy. Floating World is similarly airy, letting its emotional beats pass unsounded beneath Ono's rambling recollections, but the symmetry of the narrative is just a tiny bit too blunt, I thought. Which is not to say I didn't find it clever, just that the narrative structure here is just that tiny bit less assured than in Never Let Me Go.

2014 read #51: As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann.

As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann
565 pages
Published 2001
Read from June 4 to June 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I can't remember the last book I read that could be described as a love story -- a book which, if I were asked to summarize it in one sentence, I would say "It's about the romantic or sexual relationship between these two characters." As Meat Loves Salt explores a detailed and well-researched depiction of Civil War England, full of class conflict, pamphleteering, utopian projects, land enclosures, and hardline religion, but the main thrust (heh) of the story is undoubtedly the unstable, abusive, yet movingly depicted love between the violent, jealous, seemingly schizotypal narrator and a sensitive pamphleteer and utopianist. I'm generally not a fan of characters who hear voices in their heads -- it's a lazy crutch or cliche represented far more often in novels, seemingly, than in the real life population -- and the structural supports of the plot can get rickety at times, relying on highly unlikely coincidental meetings not once but twice. But the emotional meat (heh) of the story is rich, at turns swooning and heartbreaking, and McCann artfully elicits a startling amount of sympathy for her narrator. I'd love to find more historical romances as emotionally true and historically meticulous as this.

2014 read #50: West with the Night by Beryl Markham.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham
294 pages
Published 1942
Read from May 30 to June 3
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

A girl grows up in colonial East Africa, hunting boar with a spear and a dog, finding her way into piloting aircraft and running a bush air service based in Nairobi, before becoming the first person to fly the Atlantic east to west from England to Nova Scotia. There's no way such a tale should be boring, and much of Markham's autobiography is absorbing in a quaint sort of way, but she spends so much time dwelling on horse training and patronizing affirmations of noble African purity and extended commentary on the perfidious nature of Italians that any given chapter is equally likely to inspire yawns. It comes with the time period, I suppose. I would have appreciated far more anecdotes about her colonial childhood or the bush piloting.