Kindle. Billed as a spy thriller but really it's a discursive research dump. Quite often I wanted to throw the Kindle across the room as I waited for it to get good. It didn't; the final 10% or so does get moving but by then it's too late, and the concluding farce can't make up for what came before.
Our Californian narrator "Sadie Smith" bills herself as a spy. She's more of an agent provocateur though. The task which she chose to accept was to infiltrate a pseudo-kibbutz in the Guyenne region in southwestern France via the pants of a minor Parisian film auteur in ballpark 2010. Her actual job is to bore us witless at length with trivial observations about early hominids and excessive but inconsequential drinking. Does she (or Kushner?) really think that archeologists and anthropologists are so stupid that they do not understand survivorship bias? Everyone knows that left-wing French politics has been dead boring since 1968, and there's a lot of glory but not much substance in theory; I mean, it's just free association.
The early flashback structure demonstrates that Kushner put more value in finding homes for her research/notes from a holiday in France than in telling a good story; I tend to feel that if the narrative and characters have any strength then they can be presented linearly, from start to finish. If they don't, no amount of faux intellectualism is going to save things.
While chugging through this (in lengthier bouts as I realised there was nothing memorable in the offing) it struck me as mostly derivative of other works. Fundamentally there's Adam Johnson's Parasites Like Us but without its humour or actual erudition, and the entrapment of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. The tendentious and shallow concept of a person's "salt" struck me as a pale imitation of Persig's grappling with quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Perhaps, like in Gone Girl, someone found the sex sexy, maybe even including the repugnant bits. Ultimately I couldn't tell if Kushner was patronising her readers or actually intended her narrator to present as patronising and stupid. Or was it all an accident?
Widely reviewed. Like me, Brandon Taylor was completely unimpressed. Reading his article now, after the book, I see my beefs are a subset of his. The vacuity is laid bare by how "Sadie Smith" chooses to spend her retirement, by doing nothing much of anything. Dwight Garner gushed and also liked the bit about cave-dwelling Bruno getting head lice from a dead German soldier during the occupation of France. And so on. Hats off to the marketing team once again.
Kindle. George Mackay Brown's first novel. He certainly wrote about what he knew. Set in a fictional town (Greenvoe) on a fictional island (Hellya) in the Orkneys, he ably documents a dying way of life in an isolated community. The characters and their proclivities are closely and sympathetically observed. I got the feeling he split his own into a few people here. He does not shy away from the ugly things in life but greets them with gentleness. The nested and shifting story frames are smoothly and deftly handled. The writing is quite fine and the specialised vocabulary is a necessary part of the requiem. Far more engaging than you'd expect from what is structurally a soap opera.
As with Fankle-the-cat the outro here rails against the destruction of nature and deep history, the displacement of the locals, for expedient and withheld reasons. (Just what was Black Star?) It comes with a rush and a change of style and voice, a simplification of language, like he's explaining himself to a bureaucrat from London.
Goodreads. Calm, entertaining, thoughtful. Mystical. Robert Crawford on Mackay Brown.
Kindle. Inevitable after Andrina. Billed as stories for kids, and indeed the writing is direct and fine but the vocabulary requires an adult. The cat of the title is black (of course) and comes to live with a young school girl on an island in Orkney. The stories are in the vein of Oscar Wilde: gentle moral fables garbed in fantasy and magic realism. We visit ancient Egypt, imperial China, a pirate ship and the island itself in the present time. Fankle hates the snow. The coda is an acerbic take on man's relationship with creation.
Kindle. It's been more than a decade since Pham released A Theory of Flight and even longer since he has had a book traditionally published (Catfish and Mandala, The Eaves of Heaven). This is pitched as his first novel ("... a work of fiction inspired by some events in the life of the author's maternal grandmother") but of course he has been spinning yarns all the way along.
The story is set in paradisaical Phan Thiết, one of Việt Nam's fish sauce capitals, a common place for post-war refugees to depart from (in fact, fiction and memoir) and Pham's birthplace. The Japanese have displaced colonial power France in 1942 which allows for social mobility amongst the Vietnamese before the occupiers cause famine and chaos as their war machine becomes chaotically rapacious. Main character Thuyet therefore oscillates between wearing silk gowns to supper clubs in Sài Gòn and poverty and ultraviolence by being married first to a football star and then Japanese Major Takeshi who is often unaccountably absent, especially at critical moments. The latter pairing leads, perhaps inevitably, to a shallow take on the blood and soil trope.
There's some effective foreshadowing through dreams but things are a bit overdetermined, and some plot moves needed more development; for instance, why does Tuyet's Aunt Coi want Tuyet's daughter Anh to return when she's (presumably) safe and thriving in the rebel (genericised as "Viet Minh") camp? There are also some loose threads: Tuyet's palm implies she'll have another two children but her trauma and the abrupt ending makes that seem unlikely. More bemusing is the incorrect geography: tourist mecca Chợ Bến Thành (market) is nowhere close Ga Sài Gòn (railway station), southeast of Phan Thiet is sea, and so on.
It's a page turner, a rollicking romance in the mode of Doctor Zhivago. The punchy Hemingway prose with lots of action begs for a movie deal. It does not try to be clever like The Sympathizer or get bogged in analysis like The Moon of Hoa Binh but instead flounders in the rapid exposition of actual events that provide temporal anchors. My grasp of history was not up to it — while I knew the Japanese in the south surrendered to the British after World War II I did not know about the Japanese-induced famine that killed a million people (Pham asserts) in 1944/1945. Perhaps it is time I read David Marr.
Violet Kupersmith at the New York Times. Briefly noted at the New Yorker. Goodreads. Pham in Sihanoukville recently.
Kindle. I've had a soft spot for Theroux since reading his Dark Star Safari a long time ago and more recently about his gaggle on Hawaii. I was wondering what he would do with George Orwell's early life after Dennis Glover's take on the other end. I haven't read Burmese Days and have long forgotten the famous essays about shooting an elephant and hanging a man.
Theroux does a decent and unsentimental job of showing how Blair may have survived and passed his time in Burma as a policeman but there are many loose threads. What motivated him to join the imperial police service in the first place? Did he have a choice of destination? How did he get into Eton and how did that affect his social relations? Most perplexing to me was how his Uncle Frank could spend a lifetime in Burma and not realise how socially unacceptable (Theroux asserts) his Eurasian daughter is.
As you'd expect it's mostly well written but there are a few bits that needed another round of editing and tightening up. It's mostly engrossing; the repetition and sense of going nowhere evokes tedium quite effectively. Some themes — the half-castes, the commercial morality of the British Raj, a loneliness assuaged only by sex (and later writing) — are overdone. It's not entirely clear why Blair needed to experience the pointy end of colonialism to understand its essential bankruptcy or what exactly caused him to pivot from complicit servant to critic. The concluding segue into the slums of Paris and London made far more immediate sense. I struggled with Blair's mortification at not participating in the Great War: surely he was too young.
William Boyd at the New York Times. Darcy Moore, more critically, nails down what's fact, what's fiction and what's erroneous. Lara Feigel: let's hear from the minor/marginalised players. Goodreads. Orwell has roared back into the cultural consciousness since (at least) 2016 and there's no sign of a let up yet.
Kindle. Prompted by Francine Prose's review in the New York Review of Books.
Briefly Iranian-American poet Cyrus Shams goes from his squalid bedroom in an Indiana college town to NYC in the hope of drawing artistic inspiration from a terminally-ill Iranian-American woman's dying-in-public installation. Unfortunately there's just too much repetition, too much unnecessary fleshing out and recycling of well-known-from-the-internet tropes (e.g. the Overton window, Marina Abramović's performance art). It's very much of the U.S. East Coast: art galleries, openings, pan sexuality, addiction, everyone everywhere pining for NYC. We're shown a woman on a plane that is shot down by the USA but we later realise that this was only for the purpose of actively misleading us. The pivotal loss of cabin pressure is ineffective when it comes; the critical moment is blown by excessive preceding dithering and would've been better left ambiguous. Too many assertions are tendentious and weak: "a meaningless life meant a meaningless death" is feebly proffered and immediately retracted. I guess it sounded too good to be killed.
I did enjoy this one specific observation (leaving aside its crass inaccuracy):
The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don't lie, don't cheat, don't fuck or steal or kill, and you'll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not.
The other two involve keeping the sabbath and honouring one's forebears. Arguably only the latter has a liveness aspect and the rest are safety properties.
Prose was far more forgiving of Akbar's structure and writing, positing "we have probably not been reading Martyr! for its mysteries and its plot [...] but rather for the immersion in his enjoyably hyperactive sensibility." Goodreads. I'm still waiting to extend the addiction lit canon beyond Trainspotting and White Out. Humour is key.
Kindle. Inevitable after listening to Pendulum's Coma too many times. One day I'll get around to watching Coming to America.
Not what I expected. It seemed to echo Swift by satirising utopianism in the style of early earnest scifi (e.g. H. G. Wells). I thought it'd be more incisive. Defending the production of high art by pointing to Shakespeare as the English zenith made no sense as it implies nothing of significant value was created between 1616 and 1932, and if that's the case it cannot motivate getting off the happy-masses path. Huxley's take on man's relationship with God is crap, mere reductive teleology. Most of the scenarios are so shallowly drawn I couldn't think of it as a dystopia. The characters' emotional infantility is appropriate but also a cop out.
The book sits strangely high on many best-novels-of-the-twentieth-century lists and is more interesting to read about. Wikipedia: there were many charges of plagiarism, the moving-picture adaptations all suck, it got censored (obviously for the sex; the call-to-arms as such is inoffensive pap), how it compares to George Orwell's timeless 1984.
Kindle. Towles's followup to The Lincoln Highway. The writing is often as elegant as his earlier efforts but none of these shorts are fantastic. In order:
- The Line. Queuing was a big part of life in Moscow after the revolution and looking at how people queue can tell us a lot about a society. (Similarly for toilets and therefore for toilet queues.) Things get confusing as the bloke eventually waits multiple days for an exit visa interview and somehow communicates with the bloke he's in the queue for which presumably calls for another placeholding queuer. (Initially Towles takes care of these kinds of details but steadily loses resolution as Manhattan approaches.)
- The Ballad of Timothy Touchett. Poor behaviour in the NYC rare books market. The resolution involves Paul Auster who died recently.
- Hasta Luego. Community-supported alcoholism in NYC.
- I Will Survive. A prolix domestic drama with a very minor payoff; at 20% of the length it would've been punchy. This is perhaps Towles expressing some permissible doubt about the totalitarianism of human centricity (in cities).
- The Bootlegger. Social mores come unstuck and a moralising/OCD Wall St money man gets some comeuppance at a concert series in Carnegie Hall. Bach's Cello suites star; these had a moment a few years back.
- The DiDomenico Fragment. An American dynasty has been parting out a DiDeminico masterpiece (of the Annunciation) for generations until one member decides it's time for a heist.
The hard-boiled novella Eve in Hollywood (a mild reworking of what I read previously) is superior to the shorts. I conclude Towles is better at length and just maybe his new stuff is not as good as his old stuff.
Hamilton Cain at the New York Times. Goodreads.
Kindle. Some days you just want to read a competently-executed airport novel and instead you pick up a sequel significantly worse than its predecessor. Ackerman is deep into negative rewards now.
I've forgotten the specifics of what happened in 2034 but that turned out not to matter. What's at stake in 2054 is more-or-less what's at stake in 2024: a presidential assassination sets off January 6 militia activity and the military fragments along ideological lines. Kurzweil and his one-man creation of "The Singularity" are mentioned regularly but not analysed. Its use as a plot device is woefully underbaked. A major character from 2034 presents as Wintermute and these authors have all the problems William Gibson faced in the early 1980s: cyberspace can be accessed from everywhere but these guys only understand zooming around in meatspace. Just go read Permutation City already.
Perhaps it's supposed to be more about the themes or what isn't explicitly spelt out; they make and repeat many assertions unsupported by argument. The "blood and soil" trope is deployed to explain the recruiting of an ethnic Chinese/American citizen corporate woman by the Chinese Communist regime via a redundant Nigerian cutout and yet the same essentialism does not apply to the American or Indian characters. This isn't plausible for people whose parents were killed or bullied by the state — just look at the huge Chinese diaspora, especially the departure of so many from Hong Kong over the last 30 years, the Irish, the Russian emigres, the Poles and Nordics. Consider the name Hendrickson! In any case there's a far more sophisticated take on national and political loyalties in The Sympathizer. Are the authors demonstrating the inability of America to understand Asia or learn from history?
Their history is all key man, that there are a few choke points that can control the application of knowledge. At scale this may be so (developing nuclear technology for instance) but as the army of digital nomads and the hackers working for nation-states well know, much can be done remotely with widely distributed teams and hardware. The future may have no locus to nuke, no individual or tractable group to assassinate, no Assange to serve as a warning to the others. Perhaps that's what happens in 2074.
Their solution to America's problems is to install a wise military man (an Eisenhower?) for a limited-duration reset and (literally) marry China and move to Vermont. (The whole process is undemocratic but somehow placates the various mobs.) The Supreme Court is totally absent and they don't explain how the power-mad institution was tamed between now and then. The veteran in a wheelchair is an obvious nod to Oliver Stone (a plea to direct the movie version?) and Ron Kovic. The rising country of India (so important in 2034) does not feature. There's some Herzogian madness on the Amazon ... and a touch of The Boys from Brazil as they approach their heart of darkness/enlightenment. The gambling is tiresome.
Hari Kunzru at the New York Times did say it wasn't much chop. Goodreads was generally disappointed.
Dashiell Hammett: The Collected Dashiell Hammett (1929 to 1951)
Tue, Apr 16, 2024./noise/books | LinkKindle. Having read all his novels it was time to plough through the shorts and these proved as addictive as I expected. The Continental Op ones did get a bit shallow at times but you have to admire his stamina. The final The First Thin Man ends on a cliffhanger which makes complete sense when you read at Wikipedia that's it an early draft of The Thin Man.
Most anomalous is the short Tulip apparently first published in 1966. Hammett put all his styles into it and something new; the scattered autobiographical elements, the sharp observations and lack of sleuths suggest an attempt at renewal that didn't eventuate.
Dick Locthe in 2000. A lengthy biography by Claudia Roth Pierpont in 2002: beyond the well-known stuff much is disappointing.
Kindle. Private dick Nick Charles retires to San Francisco upon marrying sassy west-coast lumber heiress Nora but returns to NYC to dodge Christmas social obligations. There, of course, old entanglements suck him into a murder mystery and you've got to wonder if these people are any better than those the couple were avoiding. Hammett uses very effective first person narration and gets in some cracking lines. Nora is a fun interlocutor but I felt her character could've been rounded out some more. I'd say it's the best written of his novels but that might be sacrilegious as it's not in his signature hard-boiled style. It struck me as wildly inventive at times and then I remembered The Maltese Falcon.
Having completed his novels I took a look at his biographical details at Wikipedia. I'd just say I didn't see a lot of politics in these books.
Goodreads. I saw the contemporaneous film a decade ago but don't remember a thing. Roger Ebert gave it four stars as a "great movie". Apparently it has five successors.
Kindle. Again Hammett adopts and is more successful with third-person narration. This time around the main character, always addressed by his creator using his full moniker "Ned Beaumont", is a political svengali / consigliere who outsources the private dickery. His boss Paul Madvig runs a city somewhere not too far from NYC. There's some extreme violence in and around the speakeasies of the day. The central thread — the killing of a Senator's son — seems tepid in comparison to the other events and its resolution is icy cold. He gets off the odd cracker of a line but I wish he'd found room for an interlocutor as he did in The Dain Curse; we get a bit too much mouthing off by drongos.
Goodreads. Wikipedia tells me the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing drew on it.
Kindle. The second and last of the "Continental Op" series, inevitable after Red Harvest.
Our private-dick first-person narrator stays local to San Francisco for the first two thirds and then relocates to Quesada which Google Maps suggests is a long way south. It's a bit more Holmes and Watson with an interlocutor who presents as smarter than our main man. He gets off some snappy lines. There's also the Doyle-ish (and unconvincing) theme of a family or blood curse that centres on a young lady of odd appearance; I didn't know what to make of her pointed lobeless ears, small teeth and pastiness. Was this some image of a demon? One might expect that to make her less effective as a femme fatale but Hammett has it otherwise.
There's a bit of everything here: the lethal cults of California, the drugs, the guns, the vapid lifestyles, the Mexicans — it feels so modern! There's even a Trainspotting-esque relinquishing junk (morphine) sequence. Hammett must've felt the plot got away from him as he spends a final chapter explaining it all back to us. Be that as it may he didn't obfuscate the perp too well as I picked them out by about the halfway point without much effort.
Kindle. I found it a bit strange. Having been hired out of San Francisco to investigate a murder, our unnamed first-person narrator decides for reasons unknown to clean up Personville (or in a Looney Tunes accent, Poisonville) which is apparently not too far from Ogden and Salt Lake City in Utah. It has all the tropes: the busted police department, the mob, the godfather, the gamblers, boxers, a solitary femme fatale, many shootups/outs, love triangles and so on. There are a few elements of Basic Instinct. Despite terminal issues with their operation the mob doesn't send help. As far as I remember Hammett doesn't develop a few of his named, notionally central characters: Lew Yard for instance.
The narrator always seems to know more than he's told us and that gets annoying. The episodic resolutions reflect its serialized form and suggest that Hammett made it up as he went along; the ultimate ending is nothing very special. I think his use of the third person and tighter control of the overall narrative arc in The Maltese Falcon was more successful.
Goodreads. The source of many a movie.
Gutman smiled benignly at him and said: "Well, Wilmer, I'm sorry indeed to lose you, and I want you to know that I couldn't be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but — well, by Gad! — if you lose a son it's possible to get another — and there’s only one Maltese falcon."
Kindle. Prompted by the Bogart adaptation and the lack of promise in anything newer on the stack. First time around with Hammett. It's mostly a novel-length character study of Sam Spade which is more show than tell; I guess these were the days before things got so psychological. He doesn't do much more than show up, cogitate (we don't get to hear his thoughts) and provoke other people to tell him more than they want to — in other words it's essentially a script for a talkie. There's a lot of detail in the descriptions and apart from the incessant smoking all of it points away from casting Bogart. Set in San Francisco.
Immediately afterwards I read Hammett's Spade shorts A Man Called Spade, Too Many Have Lived and They Can Only Hang You Once. None are as good as the novel but all passed the time. Hammett is addictive but perhaps not that satisfying.
Kindle. Not as good as For Whom the Bell Tolls. As the tin says Hemingway takes us autofictionally to the Italy v. Austria front of World War I. The first-person narrator is an Italian-American ambulance driver/organiser who doesn't get much driving in. He's keen on the ladies and gets an English rose interested; initially he puts up a fight emotionally (let's just get physical) but the nurse's self-deluding/abnegating chatter and submissive willingness wears him down. (She regrets not having got it on with the now-dead love-of-her-life.) After Hemingway exhausts us with lengthy and recurring bouts of the idleness and boredom of war, they end up in Switzerland, eventually Montreux. This isn't something I'd usually wish on anyone but the parts adjacent to Italy and France do sound civilised. It's readily affordable if you have a family that keeps sending you money to feed your alcoholism and obliviousness. There's a touch of Samuel Beckett in his self talk.
Goodreads. Yep, the girlfriend was a doormat, which made me expect more parallels to be drawn with Twilight. Not a love story. The connection the narrator has with Doctor Rinaldi is well drawn.
Kindle. Notionally an autobiography / bibliography by New York Times books man Garner with a side of food. I remain thankful for his pointers to Paul Beatty, Atticus Lish and especially Francis Spufford but since 2015 he's given me mostly bum steers, and so it goes here: after an amusing introduction things rapidly bog down in gobbets engineered for short attention spans.
Perhaps the central flaw for me is that a lot of it falls into the uncanny valley of having been almost read before: much of the material (quotes and opinions) appeared in his New York Times reviews. He tends to return to the same authors a bit too often, specifically on the topic of Asian cooking where he leans heavily on Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer, The Committed — where's that final entry in the trilogy?). I guess Garner's project here is very similar to Andrew X. Pham's A Culinary Odyssey: My Cookbook Diary of Travels, Flavors, and Memories of Southeast Asia which (at least) has healthier aspects. As far as I remember African cooking isn't mentioned. Australia is represented by Les Murray.
He is similarly limited in his account of coffee: too many words are spilt on Starbucks. I saw no mention of the best of the South: the soups (I have fond memories of jambalaya and gumbo). I wanted to hear more about growing up in West Virginia and Florida. There's no posturing with typewriters or fountain pens — it appears his book duties are hard sedentary labour. He remains an unabashed fan of Chistopher Hitchens. There's a bit too much social and dinner party chaff, characterization-by-product.
Jennifer Reese had the thankless task of reviewing it for the New York Times. Goodreads.
Kindle. Standard Ebook edition. Perhas the third time around with this classic. The ambiguities, inspecifities and vagueness bothered me less though I still got stuck on such basics as whether Marlow was specifically commissioned to remove Kurtz — we're not exactly told but that's all he does. I was a bit more prepared to accept Conrad's game of personifying extractive European colonisation in the Congo and therefore was less put out by all the claims made about Kurtz that are not substantiated, such as his oratory powers.
There's also the question of locations and routes. Obviously we start on the Thames and Marlow proceeded down the west coast of Africa, past the erstwhile French colonies, and up the Congo River to the Belgian outposts that were accumulating ivory. I expect the sepulchral city was and is Brussels. I was at a loss as to where his boat left from, it being French: Brussels, or perhaps Marseilles? It struck me that the company he worked for was overly dependent on other organisations and people for getting dirty work done.
The Orson Welles broadcast from 1938 is available at the Internet Archive. I'd forgotten that Patchett's State of Wonder is a reimagining.
Kindle. Second time around. I couldn't help noticing how much William Gibson cloned for the last two-thirds of the Neuromancer trilogy. Apparently this belongs to the genre of social science fiction.
Kindle. Two years on from Light Perpetual: he's speeding up!
Spufford tries his hand at holistic world building, taking us to a 1920s America which is essentially the same noir as everyone else's (prohibition, racial divisions, the Klan, ... jazz ...) but bent in one specific way: Cahokia is a large Native American city on the Mississippi. (He explains the counterfactual fracture in an afterword which really should have been an introduction or, more Spufford-ly, stuffed into a character's mouth in the main text.) This and actual Utah are not-quite republican states: here there's a hereditary monarchy of the Sun and the Moon, of Aztec undercurrents fused with Catholicism by the actions of farsighted men and women. This functions just fine as mythmaking if only because it is so far beyond what is possible in the actual here and now.
The plot (murder, what else) moves slowly and sometimes unsatisfyingly, often finding excuses to explore his construction; the tone is didactic (Spufford can't help himself): this is how you do a recap! — but we needed a few more recaps. That's how you introduce an invented language! — just like Tolkien. Drop your clues like this! What, you think that coincidence was too much? That's just how it goes for this character, it's fate. Did I just lift a bit too much from The Godfather? Pay no mind to the man behind the curtain!
Spufford's bursts of Christianity feel less forced here (c.f. Unapologetic) but stinking things up are the transactional relationships (which is most of them; the ladies all want leading man Burrows but never on his terms), the cold calculational utilitarian vibe, the forced symmetries. Sometimes he can't keep his characters in character: their speech patterns become too playful.
It's lengthy and cinematic which invites the question of when he's going to get a film deal. (I'm now trying not to think of it as Spufford's Wakanda.) I felt it was well-researched — his hinge of history was as plausible to me as any story he told in Red Plenty — but could've stood more analysis. Clearly much of it is inspired by the topical breakages in present-day society though it is not reassuring that he has the idiocy of the Klan save the city at a critical juncture. As always I'll take what I can get.
Widely reviewed. Most are summaries. Much thoughtful criticism at Goodreads. Could've used an edit. It bears the scars of a sprawling pandemic project.
