Beloved

In the world of American literature, Beloved reigns supreme. Famous authors consider Toni Morrison's bestseller to be a masterpiece. It is taught in universities all over the world. Oprah Winfrey made a movie of it. But is this one of those cases where the hype is just too much? Is Beloved really this good? I've finished reading it and I can happily review it for you.

Beloved is concerned with the haunting presence of slavery over a black woman in Ohio after the Civil War. This haunting presence takes the form of a mysterious girl who shows up at Sethe's door one day, a mysterious girl who may or may not be Sethe's deceased third child. The arrival of this girl disrupts Sethe's small family, made up of the youngest child Denver, and a fellow former slave Paul D who has taken to Sethe. But who is this girl and what does her arrival mean?

It's obvious to see what Morrison is preoccupied with by the first twenty pages. This is a novel concerned with memory and our relationship to the past. The horrific crime of slavery is personified with a literal ghost that haunts the main characters of this novel. The mystery of who is the girl is completely peripheral to the unraveling of the characters' memories.

A lot has been said about the structure of the novel. Like the last book I reviewed, Possession, Beloved is a structuralist's dream. Alan Moore couldn't have created a more beautiful artifice upon which to hang a plot. Beloved works like a spiral almost - we're given bits of information about events. This revelation works in a circle, going back and revealing more about each event, going deeper in detail each time, until we get to the heart of Sethe and her story.

Even if this novel just had the fine structure, I would have liked it. But we're treated to Morrison's sumptuous prose as well. Her sentences are lush and descriptive; her similes and metaphors are ingenious.

A perfect example of this is the address of the house in which the present day action happens. The number of the house is 124. This number visually emphasizes the missing third child by omitting the number three. That's absolutely genius.

Another way that Morrison reinforces her themes is through the characters' speech. These are former slaves who aren't very well educated. Sometimes they make errors. One of these errors is extremely significant. Instead of saying "remember", Sethe says "rememory" which perfectly highlights the cyclical nature of the story. You have memory, and you have rememory, where you revisit the past atrocities and crimes committed against you.

The ghost of slavery looms over this entire novel. The reader is bombarded with images and details of the awful things these poor folk have put up with. The major event of the plot is a very bloody crime.

Spoiler warning for the next paragraph. Don't read this unless you want the entire novel ruined for you

Beloved is a Greek tragedy almost. At the centre is Sethe's murder of her third child. Faced with the possibility of her children going into slavery, Sethe chooses to take their lives, to show them the mercy they won't get while in chains. She only successfully kills the one, but that crime haunts her figuratively and literally for the rest of her life. In Greek drama, murder of kin is the most heinous of all crimes, with the Furies chasing you until the ends of the earth because of it. Murder of kin reverberates through generations with Greek tragedy. Morrison does her own version of this by highlighting the three generation of women in this house, and how the murder echoes through them. It is a brilliant effect.

This revelation is revealed slowly and methodically, and when it is finally shown to the audience it is with a sharp strong shock, like the act itself. Morrison's prose floats and stings depending on the content. A perfect synthesis of method and form.

Beloved is a fascinating novel with absolutely marvelous storytelling power. Morrison's skills at structure and sentence construction are masterful. I really enjoyed reading this novel, and I'm glad I did. I'm not necessarily convinced of its dominance of American literature of the past 25 years like TIME Magazine dictates. While the novel is technically impressive, I found the conclusion to be too sparse. We find out what happens after the fact, from a secondary character. This robs the denouement of its emotional impact.

One misstep does not undo a novel. I heartily recommend Beloved for lovers of fine fiction, and students of history. This novel brings to mind Quebec's slogan of "Je me souviens". I will not forget. I will remember. Beloved is deserving of its status in the canon and should be taught in schools.

Fallout New Vegas teaser trailer

Fall 2010 comes one of my most anticipated video games of the year... Fallout: New Vegas. Here's the teaser - very enigmatic, and yet revealing at the same time.

I wish we could have the old Dan Simmons back

Dan Simmons used to be one of my favourite authors. His quartet of Hyperion novels stand as some of the best space opera I've ever read, and the Ilium/Olympos novels are fun metatextual sci-fi epics. He's also written a handful of hardboiled crime novels, a bunch of horror novels and some efficient if plain thrillers. Just the fact that he's written successfully (or at least competently) in a whole variety of genres raises his profile in my esteem. It's just an awful tragedy that Simmons is preoccupied with absolutely tedious boring historical novels right now.

It started with 2008's The Terror. It's the fictionalized story of the lost voyage of a couple ships through the Arctic in the 19th century. A very long and powerful novel, The Terror wears down the reader with endless descriptions about the cold, about the conditions, and about the mysterious creature that's picking off crew members. I liked The Terror. I didn't hate it. I just thought it was too long, and that I wasn't really intrigued by the mystery. 

Unfortunately, Simmons followed it up with Drood, a fictionalized story of Dickens' final years as he wrote The Mystery of Edwin Drood and whatever bizarre mystery inspired him. It's narrated by Dickens' friend and contemporary Wilkie Collins, author of the fantastic Woman in White. It's too bad that Simmons' Drood, attempting to emulate both authors, fails completely to engage this reader. The novel is overly long, boring, and filled to the brim with stilted overwrought prose and a plot that creaks loudly as it goes through the motions. I never finished reading it. I hated it so much.

I read about a week ago that Simmons has a new novel coming out. It's called Black Hills, and I was ever so disappointed to read the synopsis:

In the author's retelling of Custer's last stand at the Little Big Horn in 1876, the dying general's ghost enters the body of Paha Sapa, a 10-year-old Sioux warrior who's able to see both the past and the future by touching people. The action leaps around in time to illustrate the arc of Sapa's life, but focuses on 1936, when, as a septuagenarian, he plots to blow up the monuments on Mount Rushmore in time for a visit to the site by FDR to atone for his role in constructing the stone likenesses. In his ability to create complex characters and pair them with suspenseful situations, Simmons stands almost unmatched among his contemporaries.

Ugh, this sounds awful. At least the page count isn't nearly as bloated as his previous snorefests. Black Hills is around 500 pages while the godawful Drood is a punishing 800 pages.

It's not like the combination of history and fiction hasn't been a staple of Simmons' oeuvre. In fact, quite the contrary. Both the Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympos works rely heavily upon a vast amount of great literature. The former uses Keats while the latter uses the Iliad and The Tempest. In both cases the use of the canon is inspired and comes from the plot, rather than being a gimmick to hang a creature-feature on. 

You combine these terrible books with Simmons' bizarre and baffling Islam-ophobia and you've lost this reader. Until Simmons returns to a semblance of his former self, I'm staying away.

Possession: A Romance

I've always been a fan of stories about stories. Metafiction and postmodernism are great friends of mine. No better example of this is the winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, Possession by A. S. Byatt. This ingenious novel also features on the TIME Magazine list that I posted about a couple days ago. So what of this postmodern Victorian novel? Does it deserve the praise that's been heaped upon it? Let's take a look.

Possession is the story of two academics studying the love affair between their respective areas of scholarship, specifically two Victorian poets that seem completely unrelated until the discovery of a series of love letters. It is also the story of the love that grows between both scholars while researching this new development, and it is also the story of the rival scholars.

This is an extremely complex and rich novel made up of regular narration, letters, poems, epigrams, excerpts from books, and everything else. It's like this novel is an old dusty box of documents and the reader gets to sift through all the history. 

It's subtitled "A Romance" for a reason. Possession is at its heart, a Romance as in a type of story, not as in a love story, ie a Romance and a Novel used to be Victorian terms for types of story. There's all the cliched elements of Victorian novels such as a Will at the last moment that changes everything, grave robbers, a chase, love affairs and detailed histories. The plot that the scholars are engaged in resembles a Victorian plot, even though they're studying a Victorian love affair. 

This refraction is focused through the title. Possession refers to the possession of the letters, possession of the story of the love affair, possession of the poets themselves, possession as in "possessed by something" and possession as in the arcane euphemism for sex. On and on, this theme is hammered home. Since it's a postmodern novel, the scholars even comment on the "determinism" at the heart of the plot.

The use of epigrams is inspired as well. Taking a note from George Eliot's Middlemarch, Byatt prefaces each chapter with a bit of poetry from the two fictional Victorian poets. Each epigram focuses indirectly on the following bit of narrative. It's quite clever.

However, now we arrive at my major problem with the novel. There's a reason why I don't read Victorian romances. Frankly, they're tedious. The prose is gilded and overwrought I find. With Possession, the reader is treated to pages upon pages of seemingly-authentic Victorian letters... which I found to be extremely dry. The aforementioned epigrams? Sometimes they last pages. I just don't find Victorian poetry to be that interesting. 

This is mostly an issue of taste, rather than of quality. Byatt's verse is good, I guess, but I'm not a critic of poetry. Her simulations of the Victorian style of journal, letter or what-have-you is fairly seamless. Again, I just found it to be dry.


I would say that the poetry, letters, etc takes up about 35 percent of the novel. The other 65 percent? Gorgeous supple prose that's engaging and essentially a literary detective novel but with a cast of scholars.


I really liked most of this book, but by the end I was tired the obvious uses of the word and concept "possession" - sometimes it was in the form of a groan-inducing pun. 


All of my criticisms aren't substantial enough for me to outright dismiss the novel. As an exercise in postmodernism and Victorianism, I found it to be excellent, if a little dry. The scholars and poets were well-drawn and the dialogue to be spot on. Overall, Possession is a great novel and I would definitely seek out more of Byatt's work.

TIME Magazine's 100 Best Novels: UPDATE

TIME Magazine's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century is a huge list, brimming with some safe and obvious choices and a couple daring choices. When I last catalogued the list, I had read only 31. Now that's it's been a long time, I'm going to details the books I have read since I posted the list. This post has some shared content with some other posts, so bear with me. You can read all three posts about the catalogue here, here and here.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

(I read the first three books of twelve, that counts, right?)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Light in August by William Faulkner

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Possession by A.S. Byatt

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

So good for me, right? I read 6 more on the list. That brings me up to thirty seven percent completion. As well as more books that I've read, I found out about most of the books, and whether or not I would be interested in reading. My endeavour to read all the Booker Prizes will do double duty as a bunch of Booker Prizes show up on this list.

While on the flipside, my Booker Prize quest allows me to see the facetiousness of both lists. These are such arbitrary lists. The Booker Prize leaves behind massive literary icons such as Robertson Davies while giving prizes to some minor works by major authors such as The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis (it should be Lucky Jim) and In A Free State by V. S. Naipaul (it should be A House For Mr Biswas). On the other hand, this TIME Magazine list is ignoring huge talents such as J. M. Coetzee, Richard Powers, John Irving, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stegner, Peter Carey and a bunch of others. 

Bias seems to be the pervading theme. Bias for their home country and bias for safe writers. Only one African author appears on the TIME Magazine list: Chinua Achebe, whereas he has only been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And again, this same complaint I raise, where is the literature of South Africa, New Zealand or Australia? 

Well, we can't always win. Maybe once I've finished both lists, and conquered a couple other lists I will divulge my top fifty novels of the 20th century. Maybe.

 

The Great Gatsby

Shocking revelation forthcoming. Set your faces to stun! Here it is: I've never finished reading The Great Gatsby. Well, that is until last night when I read it in one mammoth sitting. Did you also know that The Great Gatsby is considered one of the greatest novels ever written? Often considered the quintessential Great American Novel? Well, I did. I felt it was my duty to read this book, and I'm upset with myself that I had avoided it for so long. Why? No reason in particular; I was always more concerned with other books and other literary movements. Modernism and I haven't always been the best of friends.

For those of you who don't know, this book is the story of Jay Gatsby, a young and rich party-thrower, as told by our narrator, Nick Carraway. Nick watches and records and promises not to judge as Gatsby has an affair with Daisy, a young rich woman that Gatsby knew before she was married. As the characters move from mansion to hotel to party, the affair comes to the light and Daisy's husband, Tom figures out the truth, leading to a disastrous conclusion. 

The novel is a searing indictment of the materialism and excess of the "Roaring Twenties" as Prohibition helped raise the caliber of organized crime, and money for everybody. It is also a blistering critique of the American Dream, the self-made man, and the manifest destiny inherent in a lot of American art.

This book is essentially critic-proof. It's a perfect novel. Once I had finished the novel, I understood why it is so highly regarded. Fitzgerald's unreliable narrator, the use of symbols, the use of language, the careful dialogue, everything.

I was reminded a lot of Ralph Waldo Emerson's highly influential essays, "Nature" and "Self-Reliance", both of which I had to study in depth when examining early American literature.

In "Nature", Emerson lays out the idea that the new continent is free from history's long stretch, that we can appreciate nature with new eyes, that it's a blank slate. "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe" he writes. In "Self-Reliance" the themes pertaining to The Great Gatsby are even more apparent. Emerson writes, 

"These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence."

This is a perfect summation of what Gatsby is trying to do.

Gatsby is the self-made man. He changes his name, which in literature is always synonymous with changing identity. He changes his history - his-STORY - and makes his own way in the world. Gatsby is the American Dream now, but it comes at a price. 

He stands aloof at his own parties, constantly an outsider, a voyeur to all that happens. The "old rich" are rude to him and ostracize him based on the idea that he's "new rich". He experiences paradigm shifts in his estimation of his own possessions in light of what others say. Jay Gatsby is a blank slate. He's beating back the steady movement of time, for there is nothing worse to Gatsby than the ticking of a clock.

If The Great Gatsby were only about Gatsby, then it would still be good, but not perfect. What makes this novel absolutely perfect is that the story is refracted through Nick's narration. He tells us right at the outset that he is not here to judge. He prides himself that he is one of the few honest people out there. 

But he's an unreliable narrator. The novel is full of small phrases such as "I suppose" or "I think" or "Perhaps". He's consistently making the observant audience second-guess him. Nick is proud of himself for giving Jay a compliment, "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." He tells us after this that he has always disapproved of Jay on moral grounds. This is definitely in stark contrast to his promise not to judge.

However many times Nick tells us that he doesn't approve of Gatsby, it's obvious that Nick adores him. After all, Gatsby is the quintessential American Dream.

Another thing that holds this book up is the plot's reliance on accidents. The conclusion of the book hinges on an automobile accident, but not only that, many of the relationships and friendships only start due to an accidental meeting. What's interesting is that accidents are the antithesis of the concept of the "self-made man", of the self-reliance, of the manifest destiny of the American Dream. A person who has created himself in a new image, and has created a new story for themselves can't have accidents and coincidences running amok. Accidents are messy; self-made men are neat and tidy.

I could go on and on and on and on about this book. There's just so much going on: the use of colours, the images of the moon and of the clock that Gatsby almost accidentally drops, the dialogue, the narration. This is an endlessly rich novel.

I often ultimately judge a book by how well it could be taught, that is to say, how much a teacher could get out of the book for a classroom full of students who are not all readers like I am. Definitely, The Great Gatsby is a book that I could form a whole course around. It is a perfect example of the American Novel.

As an aside, I purchased this book in the new Penguin Modern Classics imprint, the new design that Penguin's rolling out to replace the stark and beautiful blank imprint. Here's the two books I picked up by Fitzgerald:

Aren't those nice? I also got Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf in the same design. I absolutely adore Penguin Classics. I have a whole bunch, in different designs and different sizes, but they always look nice on a shelf, and the introductions are often fantastic. 

Thanks for reading.

Books read in 2009

This is an incomplete list of books I read in 2009, starting sometime in April and finishing with January (yes, of 2010, I know). I've posted the previous post and this with the full intention of getting back on the blogging horse. I've figured out what I'm going to do with my life, and it's only a matter of time. In the period of waiting for my real life to begin (after Colin Hay), I will be mounting a few endeavours, including reading all the Booker Prize winners, and perhaps perhaps perhaps, tentatively beginning a long-gestating novel. So without further delay, the incomplete list of books I read (in random order) interspersed with some comments.

The first part includes the Booker Prize winners:

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

-very overrated, I found this disappointing - worst of the Booker

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

-this was an absolutely fantastic read... possibly one of the best novels I've ever read in my life

Paddy Clarke Hahaha by Roddy Doyle

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The Gathering by Anne Enright

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

-I would place this high on a list of Best of the Booker

The Life and Times of Michael K. by J. M. Coetzee

-unbelievably awesome

The Sea by John Banville

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Last Orders by Graham Swift

In A Free State by V. S. Naipaul

-Undeserving of the Booker; definitely a minor work for Naipaul

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

-I felt wholly ambivalent of this work. Perhaps it's because this is the third part of a trilogy that I hadn't read the first two parts

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

-extremely difficult work that reminds me of Gaddis mixed with Coetzee

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

Holiday by Stanley Middleton

-a very British work that reminded me strongly of Yates

The rest of the list:

Swan Song by Robert McCammon

Last Night at Twisted River by John Irving

-shockingly amazing. I couldn't believe how good this was

Until I Find You by John Irving

-terrible.

Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

Age of Iron by J. M. Coetzee

Last Night at the Lobster by Stuart O'Nan

Songs for the Missing by Stuart O'Nan

Under the Dome by Stephen King

-not bad. definitely the mark of an expert plotter

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

Masks of God Volume One Primitive Mythology by Joseph Campbell

Masks of God Volume Two Oriental Mythology by Joseph Campbell

Child in Time by Ian McEwan

Saturday by Ian McEwan

The Progress of Love by Alice Munro

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick

The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

-I should have read this years ago

A Tragic Honesty: The Life of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey

Clockers by Richard Price

Light in August by William Faulkner

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

-I have a difficult relationship with his prose. I can never get past the cold surface and enjoy whatever the world loves about his work

Soul Circus by George Pelecanos

The Way Home by George Pelecanos

A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis

-hilarious

Freedomland by Richard Price

Samaritan by Richard Price

The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Wiseblood by Flannery O'Connor

The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester

-perfect

Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates

Babel-17 by Samuel R Delany

Empire Star by Samuel R Delany

-this is one of the best science fiction works I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith

Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

-decent

The Penultimate Truth by Philip K Dick

The Crack in Space by Philip K Dick

Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

-heartbreaking, graceful, beautiful, and almost fragile in its exquisite prose

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

-not sure why critics are so divided on this... I loved it.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
-fantastic!

Here's what I've got on my plate for the next couple weeks:

Possession by A. S. Byatt; Saville by David Storey; Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey; The Gold-Bug Variations by Richard Powers; Beloved by Toni Morrison

I will attempt to review these as best as I can. Looking forward to seeing you again at a lay of the land...