Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

The Caustic Cover Critic recently had a brilliant post entitled “How to Make a Chinese or Japanese Book Cover”. The elements include dragons, fans, blossoms (preferably cherry), ninjas if you’ve got ‘em, and so on. Obviously, these elements sell books or, I assume, they would not be so nearly ubiquitous on the covers of books relating, in some way, to China or Japan. As The Caustic Cover Critic noted, many of the covers are quite attractive despite the cliches.

Burnt Shadows opens in Nagasaki just before the city is demolished by an American atomic bomb on August 9, 1945. Kamila Shamsie was born in Pakistan; the novel’s main action takes place primarily in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the United States. But it opens in Japan and Hiroko Tanaka is important throughout the remainder of the novel, so the publishers had their excuse.

Blossoms? Check. Fans? No, but a kimono serves the same purpose. Dragons? Not that I could find, but there are cranes. Female neck? Check. Amy Tan, Ha Jin, and Huraki Murakami (whose covers serve as examples for The Caustic Cover Critic’s post) would be proud to sport this cover on their next book. They might also be proud of the underlying novel. It is quite good.

Hiroko Tanaka is a Japanese woman with an enviable aptitude for learning languages. In 1945, she lives in Nagasaki and, despite being a teacher, works in a munitions factory. She has a close friendship with Konrad Weiss, a German-born man.

[Konrad] had believed the promise of the photographs and felt unaccustomedly grateful to his English brother-in-law James Burton who had told him weeks earlier that he was no longer welcome at the Burton home in Delhi with the words, “There’s property in Nagasaki. Belonged to George – an eccentric bachelor uncle of mine who died there a few months ago. Some Jap keeps sending me tlegrams asking what’s to be done with it. Why don’t you live there for awhile? As long as you like.” Konrad knew nothing about Nagasaki – except, to its credit, that it was not Europe and it was not where James and Ilse lived – and when he sailed into the harbour of the purple-roofed city laid out like an amphitheatre he felt he was entering a world of enchantment.

Konrad’s tendency to flee is a common trait of the book’s characters. The characters tend to be pushed more than pulled to new countries, but they almost all adopt their new homeland with passion. Of course, in 1945 Japan, Konrad Weiss is an outsider. Foreigners generally are suspect in wartime Japan and the Germans have surrendered, so the locals do not trust Konrad or anyone who associates too closely with him. Hiroko and her family are careful, but do not turn their backs on Konrad. Hiroko’s and Konrad’s friendship develops into romance.

[Konrad] picks up his pace, runs through memories of her: the gate through which she walked in search of him as soon as Yoshi’s nephew delivered the letter he had written, asking if she’d be interested in translating letters and diaries into German for a negotiable fee; Megane-Bashi, or Spectacles Bridge, where they had been standing, looking into the water, when a small silver fish leapt out of Konrad’s reflected chest and dived into her reflection and she said, “Oh,” and stepped back, almost losing her balance, so he had to put his arm around her waist to steady her.

Minutes before the atomic blast, the romance culminates in a marriage proposal. Their love affair, beautifully rendered by Shamsie, has consequences through several generations, culminating in another outsider being arrested in Canada as a suspected terrorist.

Kamila Shamsie has ambitiously attacked some very large political and moral issues while crafting a beautifully intimate novel. War, private security firms, racism, nationalism, history, and the war on terror all cross her sights. While her attempts on explicitly political targets are not wholly successful, she does manage to drive some important themes and ideas home. The successes are due to her ability to capture intimate personal scenes, not unlike the one I have quoted above. While ostensibly about Konrad Weiss, we learn a great deal about James Burton in that scene.

James is a very reserved and impeccably mannered Englishman. While he is a very respectable man and, for a stuffy Englishman who has internalized the social and class prejudices of his country, a good man, his failures of character are central to the book. Konrad’s move to Japan, for instance, was motivated and facilitated by James Burton. James Burton is more loyal to England and English ideas than to family or friends. James’s wife, Elizabeth, tries to adapt to his manner and values, she even changes her name from Ilse (Weiss, she is Konrad’s sister) to Elizabeth to erase her German connections. By the time we formally meet the couple, they have grown distant, even antagonistic.

Family connections are a central concern of this novel. The Weiss and Burton families are connected by marriage. Through Konrad’s proposal to Hiroko, the Tanaka family is connected as well. There is one more family, the Ashrafs, who play a prominent role.

James Burton is an attorney who practiced in Delhi, but has taken a break due to health issues. Sajjad Ashraf is James’s loyal and very bright assistant. Sajjad plans to become an attorney with the assistance of James Burton. By the time Sajjad enters the story, James has healed but still has not returned to work. This hampers Sajjad’s career plans, but he sticks it out, playing chess with James waiting for a return to law.

Hiroko Tanaka ends up in Bungle Oh!, a place just outside of Delhi, after the destruction of Nagasaki. Shamsie’s sure and subtle touch in illuminating the intricacies of relationships is on display when Hiroko goes out into the back yard for the first time.

Everything was colour, and the twittering of birds. It was like walking into the imagination of someone who has no other form of escape. So beautiful, and yet so bounded in. She sat down on the chair James had pulled out for her, and said yes, she would love some tea.

Whether the garden tells us something about the English, James, or Elizabeth is not immediately evident. A page later, we are inside Elizabeth’s head.

So much for those demure Japanese women of all the stories she’d heard. Here was one who would squeeze the sun in her fist if she ever got the chance; yes, and tilt her head back to swallow its liquid light. At what point, Elizabeth wondered, had she started to believe there was virtue in living a contrained life? She clicked her heels against the floor in impatience at herself. Virtue really had nothing to do with it.

Burnt Shadows is filled with these delightful little foreshadowings, intimate portraits of romances blooming and dying. Shamsie does human interactions exceedingly well. In a single paragraph, she can reveal lay a character bare, as here, where James and Hiroko are talking.

”Have you come from Nagasaki?” She seemed far too . . . whole, to belong in any of those photographs that he still didn’t see the point of publishing in magazines that people’s children might get their hands on. As eight-year-old Henry had. Daddy, did Uncle Konrad look like this when he died? the boy had said, pointing to something barely recognizable as human in a magazine that Elizabeth had stupidly brought into the house.

As I said, the novel is full of enchanting vignettes linked by supple prose. This novel is a success on many levels, but it is not perfect. The cast is relatively small and thoroughly known by the reader, so the surprises are not entirely surprising. The more political sections lack the same insight and punch of the warmly personal scenes. Post-9/11 politics are difficult, as evidenced by so many failures by prominent novelists, to handle without falling into banal sloganeering. Shamsie avoids that, but the end of the novel, where her characters speak in explicitly political terms, is the weakest of the whole.

Despite the relative weakness of the ending, the whole of the novel does make some moral and political points with penetrating grace. The structure of the narrative and the intricacies of the characters’ relationships work together to create an impressive whole. There is so much to appreciate about this novel, the shortcomings are forgivable. Even the cover.

Miles From Nowhere by Nami Mun

This is a book detailing how the sins of a father and mother are visited upon a young Korean-American girl. Joon’s father is an abusive alcoholic; her mother suffers from a mental disorder of some type. These damaged adults abuse and abandon Joon, each in their own way. The result is a young girl starved for love, alone, and wandering the streets.

When the book opens, Joon is in a shelter for homeless girls. After another resident takes Joon’s shoes, Knowledge, streetwise, tough, and lesbian, forces their return to Joon. A friendship is born. Knowledge convinces Joon to “escape” from the shelter, though they are free to leave whenever they want. In leaving, they lose their spot. Knowledge treats it like a jail break, creating a diversion so Joon can run for it. A boy interested in Joon meets them out on the cold streets and they head off for mischief.

And with the snow hitting my eyes, my fingers almost numb, I suddenly felt like one of those people who walked the streets as if something good were waiting for them.

Joon is slow to learn from her mistakes. Each decision seems to deteriorate from the last as the pages flow by. She has a relationship with a grown man who works as a security guard at a skating rink.

I fell in love with him because he had brown eyes that always looked wet.

Joon is still in her early teens. The relationship does not end well.

There is some difficulty in writing from the perspective of an emotionally damaged, poorly schooled, homeless girl. I recognize that. Despite the difficulty, Mun produces some excellent scenes. For instance, Joon tags an old man as her thwarted savior.

But the black man – he hadn’t budged. He was still facing me. Even his mop hadn’t moved. That’s when I knew he was God. He’d come for me but the baby had gotten in the way.

She accepts this setback as she accepts most of her setbacks. She remains hopeful in the face of her grim reality. When she looks for God again, he isn’t there:

God didn’t show that day, but one of his angels did. She was maybe five years old with lemony hair, and she sat alone, three seats to my right. That was how I knew she was special. Five-year-olds in Sunday dresses didn’t sit in the back of the bus by themselves. That, and she held in her hands an egg timer, the kind that looked like a mini sundial.

The angel is no more helpful than God himself. The small gems Mun produces, however, are too few and too loosely linked. Mun takes a few easy and unnecessary political punches, like this one at abortion protestors:

The protestors had a tall wastebasket filled with eggs. They handed them out to everyone on the street, except the homeless.

Despite the often wonderfully timed humor and twists, these missteps mark Mun as a rookie novelist. Miles From Nowhere feels like a first book, but from an author with promise.

She has only produced a good novel, certainly not a great one. The narrative arc feels more like that of a misery memoir than a novel. In addition, though often conceived nicely, too many of the scenes feel written rather than lived. I realize this statement is somewhat counterintuitive given my last statement and that this is a largely autobiographical novel. The statement is true though. Despite the emotional pull of the subject matter, I had some trouble becoming fully invested. In my view, it read like a story, rather than like a life. I did not fully enter Joon’s world because I was never fully convinced the world was real. It was not a book in which I could lose myself, despite some touching humor, some nice lines, and a little daring.

The book is enjoyable and worth reading, but never coalesces into a fully accomplished work of art.

My Favorite Lit-Blog Things: February 4, 2010

The Economist reveals what you can do for free. (Book boom in India)

Tony shares: “My Own List of Best Australian Novels“

His list in in response to the Australian Book Review’s poll which you can read about here (Whispering Gums).

Speaking of Australia, ANZ LitLovers LitBlog has an enticing review of Ransom by David Malouf.

If you have never browsed them, I direct you to the delightful reviews of Tuscan Whole Milk, 128 Fl. Oz. over at Amazon.com. Opening lines:

“Once upon a mid-day sunny, while I savored Nuts ‘N Honey,
With my Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gal, 128 fl. oz., I swore
As I went on with my lapping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at the icebox door.”

“After a long hard week full of days he would burst through the door, his fatigue hidden behind a smile. There was an icy jug of Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz in his right hand.”

“Has anyone else tried pouring this stuff over dry cereal? A-W-E-S-O-M-E!”

“This milk worked well when I first got it, but within a few days it wouldn’t hold a charge.”

“I normally drink Venetian Whole Milk exclusively but last night my grandma poured me a glass of Tuscan Whole Milk to go along with her holiday cookies.”

Finally, a reminder that I will be running some type of contest related to the 2010 Tournament of Books. I am still working on details. This is one of my favorite things.

[Update: And I forgot to mention: THANK YOU, Whispering Gums. I have a blog subscription button on the top of the right sidebar. Never miss a post again......or something like that.]

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

The Tournament of Books snubbed this novel, but I am glad to have read it anyway. While Chronic City will not become a favorite novel of mine, likely will ultimately not make my Final Four of 2009 (as in published in 2009), Lethem is an incredibly talented author and refreshingly original. He packs intelligence into every paragraph and, for that reason alone, is worth reading. This is a decidedly minor work in his oeuvre, however.

Chronic City feels like a tip of the hat to Pynchon and The Crying of Lot 49. The characters have names like Chase Insteadman, Oona Lazlo, Perkus Tooth, Laird Noteless, Strabo Blandiana, and Georgina Hawkmanaji (“The Hawkman”). Marlon Brando is a key (offstage) figure. The novel Obstinate Dust by Ralph Warden Meeker is quite important. The main characters become enthralled by chaldrons, a “gargantuan escaped tiger” and nesting eagles wreak havoc on the island (Manhattan), a minor character earns his money in “Yet Another World” (a virtual reality game ala Second Life), the Friendreth Society has set up an apartment building housing (officially) only dogs including a pit bull with a chronic case of hiccups, and one or more of the characters may or may not be a target, a fake, a dupe, a mark, an actor, or something else entirely. Puzzles, cultural references (both veiled and explicit), inside jokes, and questions about reality permeate the underlying story. If you like Pynchon, you will like this book. If not, maybe not.

I can only guess at how many cultural references I missed. Some are easy: Ralph Warden Meeker and his opus Obstinate Dust is an obvious reference to David Foster Waller and his opus Infinite Jest. The Gnuppets are the Muppets. Others take a little more digging: Florian Ib directed The Gnuppet Movie in Chronic City, while Frank Oz directed The Muppets Take Manhattan in what we call reality. And, of course, some references passed by me entirely unnoticed. It is a well-done and detailed literary Where’s Waldo?

Lethem is not content to simply pack the book with cultural references, silly names, and bizarre occurrences, he has something more to say. And he says it well. Lethem’s skill with a pen is unquestionable. The book is filled with beautiful lines, perfectly attuned to the story, such as this from a subway:

Riders sat with coats loosened, nodding in rhythm to earbuds or just the robot’s applause of wheels locating seems in ancient track.

The book opens with Chase Insteadman, the primary narrator, describing his first meeting with Perkus Tooth. For the astute, the warnings come early:

I first met Perkus Tooth in an office. Not an office where he worked, though I was confused about this at the time. (Which is itself hardly an uncommon situation, for me.)

Perkus is a reclusive former rock critic who used to put up broadsheets all around New York. When Chase meets him, he lives in a cramped apartment filled with books, videotapes, and miscellaneous detritus. He has a ready and regular supply of pot. He will often go on long rants about directors and films and conspiracies. He has a wandering right eye. Cluster migraines plague him, but he is also blessed by what he calls periods of ellipsis, or moments of extreme clarity.

Despite his oddities, Perkus has collected a number of loyal friends. Some, like Chase, follow. Others, like Richard Abneg, act as protectors. Chase, the former child star, is drawn into Perkus’s world and glimpses the sublime beauty of paranoia:

I once heard Perkus Tooth say that he’d woken that morning having dreamed an enigmatic sentence: “Paranoia is a flower in the brain.”…Yet I hadn’t understood what the words meant to him until now…That was when I saw the brain’s flower. Perkus had, I think, been trying to prepare me for how beautiful it was.

The question, of course, is to resolve the problem of who is paranoid and who is onto an actual conspiracy. The bulk of the novel is told by Chase and, therefore, we are limited by his own lack of knowledge and awareness. But Perkus is the charismatic center of the novel. The reader, no less than Chase, is drawn to him. The man is very bright, but possibly unhinged. Chase is both in awe and protective.

When confronted with “simulated worlds theory” by Oona Laszlo, Perkus is at first miffed. He does not like being one-upped in intellectual conversations. He discounts the theory as the common philosophical idea that “we could be living in a gigantic computer simulation unawares”. Oona is undeterred, pointing out that it is a virtual certainty that “we’re just one of innumerable universes living in parallel”. Which, of course, brings to mind The Fabric of Reality (a book I must review now) and the theory of the multiverse.

Oona goes on to suggest that the computing power required to run infinitely regressing simulations would require too much energy and, at some point, whoever was running the simulation would shut it down. Perkus eventually follows the logic down a Leibnitzian rabbit hole, concluding:

If…the simulators only trouble to put stuff where we’re going to look at it, then the amount of effort and energy is exactly the same.

Perkus, then, believes there is nothing inside a book in the library, for instance, until someone picks it up and starts reading it. Everything is illusion and only becomes real when a conscious being interacts with it. This side discussion is a minor detail, except to the extent that the primary theme of the novel is separating fiction from reality. You need not be current on your theoretical physics, but Lethem is smart enough to interest you if you are.

The mystery, the chaldrons, Perkus are the draw. The characters are the ones concerned with determining whether life is an infinite jest or if we are all merely obstinate dust. Or perhaps there is no difference between those choices.

My Favorite Lit-Blog Things: January 29, 2010

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy (a legal blog), Orin Kerr asked for Bad Names of Legal Blogs (hypothetically speaking). My favorites (as in most funny and actually kind of good) from his comments:
1. ThreeGenerationsOfImbeciles.com (from a Justice Holmes Opinion)
2. TheFertileOctogenarian.com (every law student learns about these in trusts & estates, you have to assume an 80-year old woman might have children, basically)
3. NakedRestraints.com (a term from antitrust law)

Any suggestions for bad (or funny) book blog names are welcome, encouraged in fact, in the comments.

Sarah of “Sarah’s Books” fame has renamed her blog: “A Rat in the Book Pile“.

What Makes a Great Teacher?

The Death of Fiction? (The title should be: The Death of Literary Magazines?)

Least favorite things:

J.D. Salinger has died at the age of 91. (Paper Cuts; Rolling Stone;

Slow week here, busy in the outside world.

I have been very busy with work this week, so posts are light to non-existent. I will have new posts, including My Favorite Lit-Blog Things, possibly starting tomorrow, but definitely by Saturday.

In the meantime, enjoy perusing the blogroll and the archives.

Cheers.

Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

I opened the book expecting brilliance. Coetzee writes with a penetrating clarity that is refreshing and mesmerizing. Having thoroughly enjoyed Boyhood, I pragmatically and eagerly skipped Youth for Summertime. I will circle back to Youth and everything else I can find by Coetzee, but I am not sorry to have jumped ahead. It gives me an additional reason to read this one again. The first reason: Summertime is brilliant.

I cannot allow you to rely solely on my own enthusiasm for this work. After all, I am a huge fan of Coetzee. So, please, go read John Self’s excellent review, then Kevin From Canada’s also excellent review. They will more than adequately summarize the structure, introduce you to the characters, and encourage you with beautiful quotes. Because I cannot improve upon the reviews that have been written, I will merely try to contribute something to the conversation.

John Self and Kevin both discussed Coetzee’s use of others to criticize himself and question his life’s work. Being a fan of novels that ask existential questions (see, e.g., Camus, The Fall), I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of Summertime. In addition to examining the writer’s intrusion into the lives of those close to him, Coetzee questions the enterprise of writing itself. One of the fictional Coetzee’s lovers recounts the following dialogue:

‘Do you really believe that?’ he said. ‘That books give meaning to our lives?’

‘Yes.’ I said. ‘A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us. What else should it be?’

‘A gesture of refusal in the face of time. A bid for immortality.’

‘No one is immortal. Books are not immortal…..’

‘I didn’t mean immortal in the sense of existing outside time. I mean surviving beyond one’s physical demise.’

‘You want people to read you after you are dead?’

‘It affords me some consolation to cling to that prospect.’

‘Even if you won’t be around to witness it?’

‘Even if I won’t be around to witness it.’

‘But why should the people of the future bother to read the book you write if it doesn’t speak to them, if it doesn’t help them find meaning in their lives?’

‘Perhaps they will still like to read books that are well written.’

‘That’s silly. It’s like saying that if I build a good enough gram-radio then people will still be using it in the twenty-fifth century. But they won’t. Because gram-radios, however well made, will be obsolete by then. They won’t speak to twenty-fifth-century people.’

‘Perhaps in the twenty-fifth century there will still be a minority curious to hear what a late-twentieth-century gram-radio sounded like.’

‘Collectors. Hobbyists. Is that how you intend to spend your life: sitting at your desk handcrafting an object that might or might not be preserved as a curiosity?’

He shrugged. ‘Have you a better idea?’

You think I am showing off. I can see that. You think I make up dialogue to show how smart I am. But that is how they were at times, conversations between John and myself. They were fun. I enjoyed them; I missed them afterwards, after I stopped seeing him. In fact our conversations were probably what I missed most. He was the only man I knew who would let me beat him in an honest argument, who wouldn’t bluster or obfuscate or go off in a huff when he saw he was losing. And I always beat him, or nearly always.

This dialogue is delicious, so exquisite it sounds made up, polished. There are so many levels to this excerpt. “You think I make up dialogue”, but all the dialogue is made up by J.M. Coetzee for the characters talking to John Coetzee’s biographer. “In fact our conversations were probably what I missed most.” Ouch.

But the philosophical discussion is interesting. Will anyone be reading books, even “well-written” books five hundred years hence? She, the former lover, thinks John Coetzee lost this particular discussion, brags to the biographer about it. And yet her argument is flawed. As John Self pointed out with respect to descriptions of John Coetzee’s “cold, ill at ease, ’stalled’” personality: “such self-effacement can itself be a form of vanity.”

Here, the proud former lover thought she won, but did she? Surely the logically sound comparison with the content of books would not be a gram-radio, but the music carried by a gram-radio. The failure of John Coetzee the character to seize on this is striking. J.M. Coetzee must see the defect. John Coetzee, while cold and ill at ease, “The Wooden Man” another character suggests, has a tenderness which he wields gently, subtly. He lets his former lover “win”, though she has won nothing. John is not merely magnanimous, he is caring. No other man, she claims, will allow her to win. John does when he need not. Even in this sometimes brutally self-mocking book, J.M. Coetzee slips in one of his virtues among the many shots at his flaws.

The philosophical point is made too. Books may not be read the way they are now, but there is little reason to believe that Bach and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Cervantes will become irrelevant anytime soon. Simply “well-written” work will not survive to be read by more than dedicated “hobbyists”, but great work likely will. John was (and J.M. is) striving for greatness. They are talented enough that they do have a chance at that immortality.

J.M. Coetzee, in Summertime, goes further than questioning whether “well-written” books are worth the effort. He attacks the very concept of truth in storytelling. At The Asylum, John Self pointed out several places where the biographer or his interviewees questioned whether a written work could capture some objective truth. Perhaps, this is J.M. Coetzee’s theory of the relativity of human relationships. The scientific analogy springs to mind not only because it seems apt, but because the language and imagery of science are prominent in both the reviews to which I have referred. KFC discussed how the act of a writer’s observing “impacts the observed”, an excellent summary of one aspect of quantum physics (which aspect led some to adopt the Copenhagen Interpretation). At The Asylum, you can read the quote describing John Coetzee as “like an abstracted scientist”.

The relativity of human relationships, or the human essence, is crucial to the Summertime project. An autobiography provides only one aspect of the man, an author’s work another, a biography another. There remains the question of how one person can ever know another. Through a conversation between John Coetzee’s biographer (in italics) and a former colleague of John Coetzee’s with whom he had a “liason”, J.M. Coetzee raises these questions:

Mme Denoel, I have been through the letters and diaries. What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record – not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity. As documents they are valuable, of course; but if you want the truth you have to go behind the fictions they elaborate and hear from people who knew him directly, in the flesh.

But what if we are all fictioneers, as you call Coetzee? What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives? Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any worthier of credence than what he tells you himself?

Of course we are all fictioneers. I do not deny that. But which would you rather have: a set of independent reports from a range of independent perspectives, from which you can then try to synthesize a whole; or the massive, unitary self-projection comprised by his oevre? I know which I would prefer.

The answer here is far less than satisfactory. The biographer has made his choice, but his certainty suggests error. The multiple perspectives method certainly works for this book. We see John Coetzee in ways that we could not see him had J.M. Coetzee chosen any other method to tell his story. The fact that people are not only seen as different but, in important ways, are different in different relational contexts is fascinating. But is the multiple perspectives method superior, or simply a good one in this case. It remains the fact that none of the people interviewed seem to know or care a great deal about the fictional John Coetzee’s artistic work. This is simply another way to know him, but not a better way.

I have neither the competence nor the space to provide any convincing answer. I do find the question fascinating and this book is an excellent exploration of that and other themes. And the other themes are all enjoyable too. Even the imagery and the portrait of South Africa at that time make the book worthwhile. As Kevin From Canada said: “Summertime is only 266 pages long but it is a novel…of incredible complexity.” It is also a joy to read.

My Favorite Lit-Blog Things: January 21, 2010

Laura Miller has an early review of “36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction”.

Reading notes on one of my all-time favorite novels: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.

Moscow and their stray dogs. Very interesting.

Eva, at a Striped Armchair, has written a very thoughtful and thought-provoking post entitled “Reading in Colour”. She has sparked a quite a conversation in her comments.

Over at The Millions: The Problem with Prizes

A well-expressed sentiment: “how lovely to know that such a hero had fucksy commas too!”

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Colum McCann won the National Book Award for this book. The fact does not scream injustice. This is a very nice book. It is well-written; it has a serviceable central metaphor. I doubt more than a few have been offended by it. It is not controversial. It takes no real risks. This book does not feel like a walk on a tightrope, but seems firmly planted on safe narrative territory.

The collection of storylines is, as has been pointed out before, reminiscent of the technique used in the movies Crash, Babel, and Traffic. Each of the storylines is connected to Phillipe Petit’s tightrope walk between the towers in 1974 which is used as a metaphor throughout. In discussing the novel, McCann has stated “that the metaphor translates well into the real-life experiences of people everywhere, as he believes that all are in some sense walking their lives on a tightrope, with equally high stakes, only most people’s tight-ropes are not quite as sensational or dramatic, and are concealed to most, being only 1” off the ground.”

The stakes, though, are not the same for everyone. Some people really do play a game of higher stakes, others play it safe. Despite crafting the novel as a convergence on a single point, McCann takes no real risks here. He even gives prime real estate to a hooker with a caring heart, though she disclaims any such goodness:

Some of these assholes think you got a heart of gold. No one’s got a heart of gold. I don’t got no heart of gold, no way. Not even Corrie. Even Corrie went for that Spanish broad with the dumb little tattoo on her ankle.

She has a soft spot for her granddaughters, the priest, and the poetry of Rumi. She is extremely remorseful regarding her failures as a mother and tries to make up for those failings. Yes, it may be true that no one has a heart of gold, but Tillie is what people mean when they talk about the golden-hearted hooker. She means well. She makes bad choices, she has been a disaster as a parent, and she loves people. She is too damaged and flawed to make good choices, but she means to do right by those with whom she interacts. Perhaps to reassure the reader, she is more the victim than the perpetrator with respect to the central crime in her storyline. We see enough of her flaws not to groan, but neither is she a risky departure from the set type.

Throughout the novel, there is a failure to take risks with characters. The computer hacker is nerdy and awkward with women; the artist is a flaky narcissist; the judge is a supercilious striver; the grieving wealthy mother and the grieving working class mother fit their roles in familiar ways. In short, while the characters are not simply stereotypical caricatures, neither are they particularly original. Partly, this is a consequence, no doubt, of the fact that most people are not terribly original. Partly, it is a consequence of McCann keeping his tightrope close to the ground.

My own lack of enthusiasm for this otherwise fine novel may be due to having recently read: The Vagrants which questions on a much deeper level the issue of whether caring intentions, unbending principles, or pragmatism are ever properly labeled “good” or “evil” outside of context; Summertime which delves deeply into a single character through multiple perspectives with much more originality; and Pnin, the language of which outshines McCann’s very fine but not breathtaking prose. In each of these works, the authors mixed in the unexpected and took risks, quite successfully in at least two of the three. McCann’s revelations slide into place smoothly but not surprisingly.

For instance, inspired by a photo of the daredevil, McCann writes:

A man high in the air while a plane disappears, it seems, into the edge of the building. One small scrap of history meeting a larger one. As if the walking man were somehow anticipating what would come later. The intrusion of time and history. The collision point of stories. We wait for the explosion but it never occurs. The plane passes, the tightrope walker gets to the end of the wire. Things don’t fall apart.

There are nice touches here such as the multiple layers to the sentence starting “One small scrap…” Even so, there is no jolt, no epiphany. Mostly, this book is an elegant statement of things we already know and, mostly, know we know.

The tricks McCann pulls on his low slung tightrope are skillful and entertaining. Kimbofo at Reading Matters and Kevin of KFC fame both pull representative quotes that demonstrate some of the beauty of McCann’s language. In all, this is a good book. It is nice. It is enjoyable. It is not a book for the ages. Kevin accurately summarized the feeling of having read it when he described it as “2009’s version of Netherland”.

2010 Tournament of Books Shortlist

The shortlist (and a somewhat lengthy explanation of the rules and traditions) is now up.

The contenders:

The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood
The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker
Fever Chart, by Bill Cotter
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis
The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
Big Machine, by Victor Lavalle
Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore
Miles from Nowhere, by Nami Mun
That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo
Burnt Shadows, by Kamila Shamsie
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
Lowboy, by John Wray

I have read three of these and was hoping two would not make it. I had intended to read them all, but The Year of the Flood? I may rely on the excellent review by The Mookse and The Gripes.

Enjoy and stay tuned…