What are you reading?

I´m making my way through Story - its tongue-twister subtitle is (I´ll just catch my breath) Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting - and it´s a fascinating read. If you´re interested in knowing why some films break your heart and others leave you cold - or even worse fidgeting until there´s a moment when you can decently leave the cinema - this book is for you.

Speaking of bailing out before the ship has even left the harbour, I didn´t get very far with All That Follows by Jim Grace, usually such an inventive and rewarding writer. Life´s too short, and certainly the summer is too short, to spend time with a sad jazz musician past his prime, bringing breakfast in bed to his disagreeable wife. ¨ Each day provides a further chance to love his wife and make love to his saxophone.¨ Jim! What were you thinking?

Likewise, David Mitchell´s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet left me (or I left it) underwhelmed. The friend who lent it to me admitted that he only really liked finding out all about the Dutch East Indies Company in Japan in 1799 and Mitchell has certainly done his homework. But that´s the problem. The endless exposition, every line stuffed with facts and learning, the writer´s research in fact, soon becomes distracting and tiresome. I much prefer the lighter touch and the inventiveness of Ghostwritten.

So I turn instead, time and time again, to Iconostasis of Anonymous Saints by the poet Yannis Ritsos which seems to me nothing short of astounding. Short titled pieces, full of observation, detail, reflection and imagination, make up a novel or a memoir or an autobiography. But as in the case of Colette or Fernando Pessoa, the Ariostos who observes and narrates both is and is not Ritsos. Ritsos/Ariostos blends the mundane and the sublime with perfect pitch and inspires this reader with a sense of wonder that outlasts the reading. The only thing I can even slightly compare this book to is Clarice Lispector´s Chronicles. After reading one of these pieces, which range from less than a page to three pages, I see with fresh vision, stepping out onto the street with a new awareness of the complexity of living, the constant balancing between the internal, thoughts and feelings, and the external, noticing a spent pale pink balloon nudging a car wheel, the exact wounded tone of a neighbour´s exclamation. In paying such close attention to his own life and the lives of those around him ( ¨Beyond their ordinary use, all objects have their secrets and their private lives: chairs, beds, glasses, knives and forks, sheets, towels, toothbrushes, combs.¨) Ritsos teaches us to pay attention to our own, moment by moment.

I see with delight that there are two more volumes to this series, but then, crestfallen, the words ´´ still to appear in English.´´ But quickly turning to the publication dates to check the first printing of this edition, I see 1996, what joy! There´s every chance that the subsequent volumes are now available.

I leave you with these lines from One Evening:

¨I peek through the opening between two houses. High up there, a tiny star is coughing, all shrivelled up next to a cloud. I think of the children, who weren´t given their favourite toy from the Christmas tree. Why so much repentance in the air, prior to the sin?¨¨

Happy reading and have a great Summer!

Summer reading...

Summer Books
Just what is a summer book, anyway? Does it have to be a big, fat, juicy page turner to earn the right to be packed away in the luggage (or downloaded on the e-reader) and taken along on vacation? We put that question to several book reviewers. After all, they make make their living reading books, so what do they take with them when they go on a road trip, fly overseas, or hunker down in the country?
John Freeman, editor of the literary magazine Granta, thinks our collective idea of summer reading may be too narrow. He likes to read all kinds of things when the weather gets warm. Big novels are great on the beach, but later, when sitting on the porch or settling down for the night, he'll pull out a more slender volume: essays perhaps, or even poetry. Salon book reviewer Laura Miller also reads essays in the summer, but she really loves a novel that carries her away to a far off place where she can get lost, even when she's not on vacation. And Slate reviewer Troy Patterson, who says he's more of a hammock reader than a beach reader, likes the extra time summer allows to linger over a book, reveling in the language as well as the plot. So here are a few of the books these three reviewers say will make for some good "summer reading" this year.
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Recommended By Laura Miller

Under Heaven
By Guy Gavriel Kay, hardcover, 592 pages, Roc Hardcover, list price: $26.95
Miller calls this epic adventure story "completely transporting." It is set in an imaginary country based on China during the Tang Dynasty, complete with a culture full of poetry, art and plenty of palace intrigue. The hero, a general's son, is given a gift of 250 perfect horses by a foreign princess. It's a gift with consequences as he gets caught up in the schemes of the emperor's favorite concubine, a legendary and cunning beauty. Miller says the book combines the best of historical and fantasy novels to create a great read where "you don't know what could happen next." (Read about Kay's hero, the soldier-slash-poet Tai, as he prepares for a new day — which he will spend burying casualties of war.)

The Good Son: A Novel
By Michael Gruber, hardcover, 400 pages, Henry Holt and Co., list price: $26
No summer reading list would be complete without an international thriller that takes you to exotic places. And this one, says Miller, combines a great plot with such wonderful writing that you don't feel like you "just ate a bag of potato chips" when you are finished. It's a smart thriller about a U.S. special forces solider raised in Pakistan whose mother gets kidnapped by militants in Afghanistan. He devises a way to trick the Army into rescuing her while she desperately bargains with her captors for the lives of her fellow hostages. Miller says the novel has lots of action and suspense but is also thought-provoking in its examination of the differences between modern Western culture and a tribal way of life. (Read the book's mysterious opening, in which our narrator is awakened in the middle of the night by a call from his mother — who, despite being under a fatwa, is about to jet off to Pakistan.)
Also recommended: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman. "A hilarious collection" of essays and travel stories about people who obsess about Russian novels. Miller says even if you can't get through a Russian novel, you'll find something to laugh about in this book.
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Recommended By John Freeman

Parrot And Olivier In America
By Peter Carey, hardcover, 400 pages, Knopf, list price: $26.95
This historical novel is based on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, famous for his 19th century study of American society, "Democracy in America." In Carey's fictional account, Olivier, the character based on de Tocqueville, comes to America with his companion, Parrot, a young English printer who has been in and out of prison. The story is told in both voices, and because they come from such different backgrounds they have very different impressions of America and its young democracy. As the two hit the road, argue and fall in love, they develop something of a "bro-mance." And though the novel is sophisticated and beautifully written, Freeman says it is also a page turner and quite simply "one of the best novels I've read in the last few years." (Read Olivier's witheringly arch description of his childhood home and his beloved, maddening, long-suffering mother.)

The Best Of It: New And Selected Poems
By Kay Ryan, hardcover, 288 pages, Grove Press, list price: $24
Summer, says Freeman, is not just about page turners. He argues that novels are like the "big meal," whereas smaller books of poems or essays are more like palate cleansers. For those moments when you're looking for a book that you can pick up or put down when you want, he recommends this book of poetry by the nation's poet laureate, Kay Ryan. Freeman says Ryan has a "well-carpentered, deeply intelligent, plain-spoken American voice" that harks back to Robert Frost. (Read three wistful, poignant poems by Ryan about the passage of time, and the "dreamy wading feeling" of relief.)
Also recommended: For another "palate cleanser," Freeman recommends film director John Waters' book of essays, Role Models, which he says is very funny, sometimes dirty and "sort of like an intellectual autobiography through collage."
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Recommended By Troy Patterson

Hitch-22: A Memoir
By Christopher Hitchens, hardcover, 448 pages, Twelve Books, list price: $26.99
Hitchens, the acerbic pundit known for blistering attacks on his political and philosophical foes, shows a softer side in this memoir that Patterson says is more like "a great raconteur telling stories about his own life." Here, Patterson says, Hitchens is in "armchair," not "lectern," mode, and perhaps the best stories in the the book involve his longtime friends such as Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. In fact, Patterson says the book emerges as something of a tribute to friendship itself. (Here, Hitchens describes his mother, Yvonne. He writes, "It makes a great difference to have had, in early life, a passionate lady in one's own corner.")

The Pregnant Widow
By Martin Amis, hardcover, 384 pages, Knopf, list price: $26.95
Perhaps it's not surprising that Patterson would also like this novel by Hitchens' pal Martin Amis. Patterson calls Amis "the best living English-language prose stylist" and says he returns to form after some disappointing books in recent years. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of 20-year-old Keith Nearing, who is spending the summer of 1970 in Italy with two girls. An English major, Nearing is immersed in reading about old-fashioned notions like virtue just as as the sexual revolution of the '70s is getting under way. In the end, it proves to be "an erotically decisive summer" for Keith. (Four days into his summer in Italy, Keith describes the experience like "living in a painting ... with its cadmium reds, its cobalt sapphires, its strontian yellows." In this excerpt, he strolls through the streets, flanked by two young beauties, Lily and Scheherazade.)
Also recommended: Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney by Marion Meade. Though the publicity material describes this as a story of star-crossed lovers, Patterson says it is really "two life stories with a love story at the end," and each of the life stories is interesting in its own right.

Review of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke´s huge first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, astounds with its sheer originality, tremendous pacing and brilliant attention to detail. Its greatest merit lies, however, not in the author´s ability to bring the past to the reader but to transport the reader into the past and keep him or her there for the duration. The novel juggles a convincing 19th century England with its magical counterpart, with characters moving between the two worlds, sometimes, but not always, by choice. The reader, however, undergoes the same experience willingly, as if spellbound by the very magic that is the subject of the novel...

The novel opens in 1806 in an England exhausted by the war with Napoleon´s France. The golden and silver ages of magic are long gone: magic has become an academic subject now only studied by ´gentleman magicians´ - ´who had never harmed anyone by magic – nor ever done any one the slightest good.´ Only one practical magician remains, the suspicious, mean-minded recluse, Mr Norell, who is piqued into a display of his abilities by the challenge of a group of scholars. Fêted in London society but ignored by the Government to whom he wishes to lend his services, he sees his opportunity when the young wife of an influential Government Minister dies. Secretly conjuring help from other worlds to bring her back to life, he sets unpredictable and malevolent forces in motion.

Strange, his young assistant, is everything that Norrell is not – daring, impatient, imaginative and brilliant. He soon outstrips his master and when the conflict between them becomes a struggle for the future of magic itself, all bets are off.

¨Unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years. It´s funny, moving, scary, otherworldly, practical and magical, a journey through light and shadow – a delight to read¨ Neil Gaiman

Reviews of The Historian

Amazon.com Review

If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.

As well as numerous settings, both in and out of the East Bloc, Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight--one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi's student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972. The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula's beleaguered homeland--sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union.

Although the book is appropriately suspenseful and a delight to read--even the minor characters are distinctive and vividly seen--its most powerful moments are those that describe real horrors. Our narrator recalls that after reading descriptions of Vlad burning young boys or impaling "a large family," she tried to forget the words: "For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth." The reader, although given a satisfying ending, gets a strong enough dose of European history to temper the usual comforts of the closing words. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.


From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Considering the recent rush of door-stopping historical novels, first-timer Kostova is getting a big launch—fortunately, a lot here lives up to the hype. In 1972, a 16-year-old American living in Amsterdam finds a mysterious book in her diplomat father's library. The book is ancient, blank except for a sinister woodcut of a dragon and the word "Drakulya," but it's the letters tucked inside, dated 1930 and addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," that really pique her curiosity. Her widowed father, Paul, reluctantly provides pieces of a chilling story; it seems this ominous little book has a way of forcing itself on its owners, with terrifying results. Paul's former adviser at Oxford, Professor Rossi, became obsessed with researching Dracula and was convinced that he remained alive. When Rossi disappeared, Paul continued his quest with the help of another scholar, Helen, who had her own reasons for seeking the truth. As Paul relates these stories to his daughter, she secretly begins her own research. Kostova builds suspense by revealing the threads of her story as the narrator discovers them: what she's told, what she reads in old letters and, of course, what she discovers directly when the legendary threat of Dracula looms. Along with all the fascinating historical information, there's also a mounting casualty count, and the big showdown amps up the drama by pulling at the heartstrings at the same time it revels in the gruesome. Exotic locales, tantalizing history, a family legacy and a love of the bloodthirsty: it's hard to imagine that readers won't be bitten, too.

Review of Absurdistan

. Misha Vainberg, the rich, arrogant and very funny hero of Shteyngart's follow-up to The Russian Debutante's Handbook, compares himself early on to Prince Myshkin from Dostoyevski's The Idiot: "Like the prince, I am something of a holy fool... an innocent surrounded by schemers." Readers will more likely note his striking resemblance to John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius Reilly. A "sophisticate and a melancholic," Misha is an obese 30-year-old Russian heir to a post-Soviet fortune. After living in the Midwest and New York City for 12 years, he considers himself "an American impounded in a Russian body." But his father in St. Petersburg has killed an Oklahoma businessman and then turned up dead himself, and Misha, trying to leave Petersburg after the funeral, is denied a visa to the United States. The novel is written as his appeal, "a love letter and also a plea," to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to allow him to return to the States, which lovingly and hilariously follows Misha's attempt to secure a bogus Belgian passport in the tiny post-Soviet country of Absurdistan. Along the way, Shteyngart's graphic, slapstick satire portrays the American dream as experienced by hungry newborn democracies, and covers everything from crony capitalism to multiculturalism. It's also a love story. Misha is in love with New York City and with Rouenna Sales, his "giant multicultural swallow" from the South Bronx, despite the pain they have caused him: a botched bris performed on Misha at age 18 by New York City's Hasid-run Mitzvah Mobile, and Rouenna running off with his stateside rival (and Shteyngart's doppelganger), Jerry Shteynfarb (author of "The Russian Arriviste's Hand Job") while Misha is stuck in Russia. The ruling class of Absurdistan is in love with the corrupt American company Halliburton, which is helping the rulers in a civil war in order to defraud the U.S. government. Halliburton, in turn, is in love with Absurdistan for the money it plans to make rebuilding Absurdistan's "inferstructure" and for the plentiful hookers who spend their nights and days by hotel pools looking for "Golly Burton" employees to service. And everyone is in love with America—or at least its money. Everything in Shteyngart's frustrated world—characters, countries, landscapes—strives for U.S.-style culture and prosperity, a quest that gives shape to the melancholy and hysteria of Shteyngart's Russia. Extending allegorical tentacles back to the Cold War and forward to the War on Terror, Shteyngart piles on plots, characters and flashbacks without losing any of the novel's madcap momentum, and the novel builds to a frantic pitch before coming to a breathless halt on the day before 9/11. The result is a sendup of American values abroad and a complex, sympathetic protagonist worthy of comparison to America's enduring literary heroes. (On sale May 2)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

When you land in Russia these days, you are likely to see this sign: "Rossiya strana vozmozhnosty" ("Russia is the land of opportunity"). And then, amid the expected shabbiness, you see Hummers and Rolls Royces. Russians exceed even Americans in their taste for size, status and ostentatious wealth. The situation lends itself to parody, and Gary Shteyngart's new novel, Absurdistan, does a marvelous job of satirizing the new Russian oligarchy, as well as the American lifestyle and the two countries' shared megalomania, consumerism and appetite for exploiting small countries.

The narrator, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, is Misha Vainberg, a 30-year-old "incorrigible fatso" with an unrestrained appetite for whiskey, women and sturgeon. He was sent to the United States "to become a normal prosperous American at Accidental College." But during a trip back to Russia, his Mafioso father is charged with having murdered an Oklahoma businessman and then assassinated himself. Under those circumstances, Misha can't obtain a visa to return to his beloved USA.

In desperation, he buys Belgian citizenship and a passport in Absurdistan, a new country being forged out of a staged war between the Sevo and Svani peoples in a small territory between Iran and Russia. The founding fathers of Absurdistan are gangsters working with a large American corporation called Golly Burton (say it out loud -- Russian mouths tend to turn h's into g's). Together they devise a scheme in which the U.S. government will pour billions of dollars into their country. The war is orchestrated from the top of the Hyatt hotel, where hired Ukrainian gunmen bomb sections of Gorbigrad in front of an international crew of TV journalists.

But the performance gets out of hand. "The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake," Misha notes, "a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared." There are 3,000 dead and hundreds of U.N. tents with tens of thousands of starving refugees, which makes Misha a little uncomfortable while dining at the expensive hotel. The whole situation is beautifully absurd, reminiscent of Catch-22, and offers a provocative critique of oil wars and war profiteering.

Despite Misha's education in multicultural studies, he spews out sardonic comments about anything ethnic. He doesn't spare Judaism, although he is Jewish. (Drunken Hassids in Brooklyn botched his circumcision badly when he came to the States as a college student.) While making love to his young stepmother, Misha lectures her on religion: "Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it's just a codified system of anxieties. . . . You should pay particular attention to the character of the Hebrew God and His utter contempt for all things democratic and multicultural."

Misha even derides America, despite his proclaimed love for it, and especially American colleges: "A surprising number of graduates," he notes, "went on to raise organic asparagus along the Oregonian coast." They "mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck."

Shteyngart makes fun of everything, even himself. He appears as a minor character, Jerry Shteynfarb, a writer aspiring to become the Jewish Nabokov. He immigrated to the States at the age of 7 and made his fame by writing The Russian Arriviste's Hand Job. (Shteyngart emigrated at the age of 7 and in 2002 published a hugely successful novel called The Russian Debutante's Handbook, which made him a literary sensation.)

One risk of relentless irony and humor, though, is that we might lose the drama. Like many comic novels, this one is light on suspense. The ridiculed characters come off as caricatures. With his barrage of ridicule directed at others and himself, we can't worry much about Misha, his grotesque love affairs (rendered in full detail) or his quest for Belgian citizenship. Everybody is a crook of one stripe or another, and that induces a certain degree of predictability and monotony. Nearly everybody Misha meets in the new country offers the same formulaic greeting: "When you are in Absurdsvani, my mother will be your mother, my wife your sister, and you will always find water in my well to drink." Funny the first two times, not so much the 10th. Several other jokes are repeated, too, with diminishing returns.

However, the exuberance of Shteyngart's language keeps us engaged. Misha describes himself as "an American impounded in a Russian body." Energetic wit shines through every page. Seeing one of the women he's interested in, Misha says, "Gone was her usual Leather Lyuba motif; in its place, a blouse and skirt of dark contemporary denim fastened by an oversized red plastic belt with an enormous faux-Texan buckle. It was very Williamsburg, Brooklyn, circa right now."

The novel is grounded in a noble literary lineage. You can hear echoes of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, with its glorification of size and appetites. Misha is a man of leisure on the order of Goncharov's Oblomov, who spends most of his time in bed. Although it's not written with as much compassion as A Confederacy of Dunces (justifiably so -- do we need to sympathize with the oligarchy?), Absurdistan exhibits a similar sense of humor mixed with sharp insights into the absurdity of the modern world.

Reviewed by Josip Novakovich