Book Log - September -  December, 2007

Once more unto the courseload, most reading dates approximated, free-time reading up top:

Ukridge - P.G. Wodehouse - Increased appreciation for this as one of Wodehouse's deftest, most underappreciated series (insofar as there's some miscellaneous stories floating around I still need to corral, like the ones in Lord Emsworth and Others): I'd now rank this just below Jeeves and Wooster, alongside the best of the Mike & Psmith series, and well above the Blandings gang. In James Corcoran, Wodehouse created one of his most interesting narrators, a perpetually hard-up writer who values Ukridge seemingly as much for his demanding friendship as for the narrative material he provides. Left to his own devices for long stretches of narrative while Ukridge perpetrates mischief elsewhere, Corcoran — ostensibly the more colorless of the two (though he's got nothing on the bulldogish, dull Mike — uncoincidentally, the closest Wodehouse ever came to a written self-portrait) — more than sustains interest, pettily musing on some of Wodehouse's favorite set pieces: the political meeting that seemingly inevitably erupts into mass disorder, the peculiar etiquette and ritualistic qualities of boxing matches, terrifying encounters with intimidating butlers. (Also, the older I get and the further down the free-lance career path I go, the more I appreciate stories about how much being a free-lancer sucks.) They're a true duo, rather than a colorful figure and his secretary. Also includes one of the funniest, most incoherent letters in literary history, an insane jumble of clashing cliches: "I take my pen in hand to tell you that I can never be yours. You will no doubt be surprised to hear that I love another and a better man, so that it can never be. He loves me, and he is a better man than you. Hoping this finds you in the pink as it leaves me at present. Yours faithfully..."
(Oct. 17-18)

The Floating Opera - John Barth - Exuberant, spritely, occasionally fatiguing and obnoxious, The Floating Opera is probably my favorite novel from the sporadic tour of pre-David Foster Wallace pomo lit I've been conducting sporadically over the years. Oddly enough, I started that tour with Barth, getting all pissy about The Sot-Weed Factor back in 2003; I don't think I was wrong, exactly, but I can see how Barth might have wanted to get the hell out of New England by any means necessary. Among its many virtues, The Floating Opera is a paean to small-town Maryland life, but it's also clearly restless, reluctant to become a "regional novel"; you can almost see Barth looking for an exit (in his debut novel!), not just from conventional form but from being tied to any particular genre or location. Like DFW, Barth's true concern in the pomo sweepstakes is finding the moment when paralyzing, endless self-analysis — which can be interesting, clever and sincerely meant without being remotely helpful — comes up against a moment of emotional honesty: the realization that death is frightening, that you've treated your friends like shit when you thought you were better than them, etc. Barth had me from the moment he explained the metaphor: "It always seemed a fine idea to me to build a showboat with just one big flat open deck on it, and to keep a play going continuously. The boat wouldn't be moored, but would drift up and down the river on the tide, and the audience would sit along both banks. They could catch whatever part of the plot happened to unfold as the boat floated past, and then they'd have to wait until the tide ran back again to catch another snatch of it, if they happened to be sitting there. To fill in the gaps they'd have to use their imaginations, or ask more attentive neighbors, or hear the word passed along from upriver or downriver. Most times they wouldn't understand what was going on at all, or they'd think they know, when actually they didn't. Lots of times they'd be able to see the actors, but not hear them. Need I explain? That's how much of life works: our friends float past; we becomes involved with them; they float on, and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we must renew our friendship — catch up to date — or find that they and we don't comprehend each other any more." Yes. It's shocking, over 50 years later, how well the endless self-questioning works. If the constant gusto seems a bit forced, it captures the hysteria leading to an emotional breakdown and re-building. Essential; I'm doing poorly at explicating this book. Just read.
(Oct. 22-26)

The Grifters - Jim Thompson - I'd assumed from Stephen Frears' straightforward adaptation that Thompson's main asset was pared-down prose and nasty-minded plots thrust into the foreground without much nuance. What I got instead was the work of a frustrated intellectual who constantly talks down to his characters even while articulating their thoughts brilliantly — "She thought about it, not thinking in those words, of course" — and smuggles in content the average pulp reader probably didn't see coming: the sudden transition into concentration-camp memoir is brilliant, and the way it affects our anti-hero's sex drive pitilessly honest. Focus on LA geography evocative even to the non-resident. Great stuff; a reminder, along with Chandler, that I really shouldn't hastily dismiss the idea of mid-20th-century pulp as great literature as just so much hipster posing.
(Dec.)

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon - I read this a long time ago, probably about age 13; I remember liking it, but I can't fathom why. Then, even more so than now, I was dead-set against prose that was self-consciously in love with its own rhythms; straightforward lucidity was at a premium. I was also completely unaware of post-modernism; I just had the vague feeling that Pynchon was Important, in the same way as Dickens or Balzac. I must surely have been shocked by all the drugs and sex, wondering if adults were really like this; I was raised to think of adults as responsible, sexless people who struggled diligently on the straight-edge path to success. Things have changed, of course: nascent maturity has brought me to the realization that both my parents and school lied to me about that. Very much a '60s book in its casual acceptance of the lust of 30somethings for teen girls as an unpleasant reality, the casual LSD dropping, Beatles- and jazz obsession, World War II references as a meaningful and contemporary frame of reference, etc. A hugely enjoyable comic novel — and it is comic, from its spot-on parodies of academic prose ("unless we accept the rather unorthodox though persuasive argument of J.K. Sale that the line is really a pun on 'This trystero dies irae....' ") (but I don't know what I made of that either, being too young to be exposed to the pedantic trivialities of too much academic study, which never really change) to the brilliant scene where a rogue hair-spray can destroys a hotel room. But the sense of free-floating paranoia — that the world is driven by conspiracies that aren't necessarily malignant or even important, but which certainly exclude you (and is it because they're malignant or just indifferent, and is it by design or on purpose? All those possibilities seem awful) — is something I couldn't articulate back then. A remarkable book, one for which Pynchon's self-contempt seems thoroughly undeserved; while not as rich as V., it's also not as wearisome in the actual process of reading it.
(Dec.)

Inspector Ghote Breaks An Egg - H.R.F. Keating - Especially interesting to read another installment of one of my all-time favorite mystery series after a semester of Indian, largely post-colonial lit; I was wondering if, now better informed, Keating's outsider perspective wouldn't play worse. But the book plays as well as it would've before (even better, considering I'm now better informed about the Jain sect): the focus here is village corruption, neatly depicting the flipside to Gandhi's conception of village India. Here, hunger strikes are a mendacious tool used to stir up unthinking villagers into reflexive revolt. Very neat, as always.
(Dec.)

Intro To Comparative Politics:
Dunno if I've mentioned this before, but NYU has the rather pleasing implicit assumption that film majors are either so monomaniacal in their desire to make movies that they should be burdened with as few non-film classes as possible, or the far more cynical but perhaps more likely assumption that film majors are all illiterate and should have the pain of outside classes minimized. Either way, film majors — which is what I entered college as, English being my 2nd if preferred major — are only required to take two science classes over the course of their entire time at NYU, far from the traditional heavy line-up of chem labs associated with the stereotypical college experience. (Aside from some token electives, you can spend virtually the entire four years cocooned in film production if you wish.) And "science" is defined so loosely as to mean I never, ever have to take a math or hard science class ever again in my life, which suits me just fine: the previous semester, I took a course in linguistics (which is bullshit, for the record), and this semester I rounded out the quota with "Intro to Comparative Politics," whose main focus was on the transition from command, communist economies in post-totalitarian societies to democratic free markets (basically, post-Cold War economic transitions in the '90s). Since I have nothing but good things to say, I'll actually use a professor's name for once: Joshua Tucker is an engaging lecturer, and he got bonus points for, at one point, introducing a term with the qualification "But what is this? It just sounds like jargon." The vast majority of political science literature (I had a $70 course packet!) is no more poorly written than most academic prose, although there's two particularly weird tics: authors are only referred to by their last names regardless of whether or not they've been previously cited (creating a weird feeling of instant canonization for all referred to), and what anyone in literature would politely refer to as a cliche is put in quotes if used, the idea apparently being that anything even straining for non-empirical metaphor needs to be safely set apart as a "legitimate" term. Hence, something really not worth setting aside normally — e.g. repeatedly referring to democracy as "the only game in town"— is repeatedly quoted, just to protect the authors from the presumably devastating claim that they were being less than literal-minded for even a second. Cliches become jargon building blocks, which is just sad. I learned a lot, and I'm not unhappy that I took the class, though I still think the effort taken to create many different typologies is stupid; there's too many exceptions to each one. Only individual case studies really work.

The Magic Lantern - Timothy Garton-Ash - Zippy British journalism at its best, never aspiring to a comprehensive, pseudo-objective overview of the four Communist overthrows it covers (Poland, Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia), instead offering up a perspective that's neither completely that of an outside witness nor an important participant's, but somewhere in-between. Never pretending he wasn't openly rooting for the revolutionaries, Garton-Ash was allowed to watch and, occasionally, to speak: "I was not a camera," he notes dryly. "A camera would not give an election speech in a Silesian coal-mine." Casually negotiating the mushrooming factions of each country, Garton-Ash emphasizes the continuity and chain-reactions, offering up an epitaph for Communism's end: "Nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it." A decent time capsule, and eminently readable.
(Sept. 13-14)

Poland's Jump to the Market Economy - Jeffrey Sachs - Forceful if super-dated argument for shock treatment as a transitional strategy for countries moving from a command economy, Sachs using as Exhibit A the happy 3-year turnaround Poland experienced as the result of following his advice. Useful for better understanding the complicated dynamics of such a transition (and, given the book's 1993 date, it's an instant time capsule of the kind of thinking going around then rather than a still usable blueprint), though I find Sachs' realpolitik equal parts refreshing and distasteful; his unambiguous proselytizing in favor of barely-regulated free markets is kind of high-handed, and its ostensibly benevolent, disinterested motives at least a little suspect. Also, other countries didn't all experience the same happy success. Peter Murrell's critique of this strategy is far more persuasive — and, perhaps non-coincidentally, his constant Tolstoy quotations reveal experience with ideas outside the sole preserve of political science/economics, and hence a less myopic, deterministic viewpoint. Even if willfully comparing yourself to Edmund Burke in this day and age is just asking for it...
(Nov.)

Southeast Asian Anglophone Literature:
Translation: Indian/Pakistani literature, written either there or elsewhere in English. Interesting, though marred by the heavy presence of non-English majors who constantly required basics explained to them (e.g., Modernism). I want to take a class with people who are better informed than me for once.

Twilight In Delhi - Ahmed Ali - They don't make 'em like this anymore. Thank god. I'm all for respecting alien cultures and angrily shaking my fist at colonialism's ugly legacy, but Ali's wistful elegy for a patriarchal, heartily masculine society strikes no resounding chord in me; good characters inevitably have something "rakish" in their appearance, while weak ones have something "somewhat effeminate" going on. Manly, manly men who inevitably feel the past was unimpeachable ("These were the men of 1857, and here were the men of 1911, chicken-hearted and happy in their disgrace") are the put-upon objects of sympathy; when they're not lying around in symbolic lethargy and sickness, they quote endless poetry. The same motifs are stressed over and over again: dust, decay, squabbling animals in the street. Kill me now.
(Sept. 10-15)

Untouchable - Mulk Raj Anand - Better than a mere polemic but too underdeveloped to sustain even a novella's length, Untouchable strikes an initially happy medium between social realism (meticulous descriptions of the rituals of cleaning latrines, queuing up for water, etc.) and interior psychology. Eventually ends up repeating itself over and over (unhappy outcast bucks himself up, is insulted again, bucks up; repeat) until a late-novel short-circuit appearance from Gandhi reveals the novel's true purpose, our hero given purpose and meaning through Pan-Indian politics. Two side-notes: as above, this is one of the novels that got all its attention from the endorsement of E.M. Forster, which is always curious. (A Passage To India is nothing if not problematic for post-colonial kids; personally, I think Forster got the critique/evocation-of-particular-society balance about as perfect as possible.) Also, I enjoy the colorful Indian curses way more than I probably should: "You annoy me with your silence, you illegally begotten! You eater of dung and drinker of urine!"
(Sept. 19-21)

Maximum City - Suketu Mehta - Now this is more like it. Mehta's book isn't the definitive Bombay chronicle it wants to be — in part, I suspect, because no matter how long you write, it's just too vast a subject (it would be like trying to write the definitive book about all five boroughs). Instead, Mehta zeroes in on several aspects that interest him — Bollywood and the underworld and their inextricable ties, religious ascetism, dancing bars (strip clubs without the nudity, basically) — and while I'm not entirely convinced by his claim that these things explain, in turn, everything else, it's certainly a useful at-the-moment portrait; read it, then watch John & Jane Toll-Free and I think you're halfway there. (Says the man who's never been to India.) Mehta is a dogged journalist, hunting down revealing interviews and inserting himself into the narrative as necessary; the results are evocative, riveting, and hard to put down, even if I felt slightly underwhelmed by the end (like the Inspector Ghote cycle, it feels like something to be developed in a series over the years, not digested all at once in a single book). The funniest sustained passage is a virtuoso recap of a movie called Jai Shakumbhari Maa, which I want to see right now. "The plot, like the Lord, moves in mysterious ways," Mehta notes, before arriving at the movie's climactic anti-pre-marital-sex speech: " 'This is India,' the virtuous wife responds, and delivers the following peroration in furious Bengali-accented English: 'What do you think to play with the chastity belt? Is it the culture of any country? Show me one of the university which educates and encourages to this type of vulgar and sinful deed!' I laugh very hard at this, till I notice that none of the old ladies sitting in the theater are amused and I have to put my hand over my mouth and bite hard. The audience for this movie is not cynical; they have no notion of irony or camp." Guess I better not pay a visit then. The single best primer to a country I've ever read.
(Oct. 6-12)

Love And Longing In Bombay - Vikram Chandra - Five loosely connected short stories; the narrative-within-narrative structure isn't particularly productive, unless you're a grad student and reflexively get off on the idea of unreliable narrators. The first three tales are varying degrees of excellent: "Dharma" is a well-executed political ghost story that puts the del Toro factory to shame; "Kama" is a detective procedural with broad swathes of research on the porn/sex-swapping industry in India that makes for better reading than the wonky character psychology. The real gem here (read it without any of the connective tissue, it doesn't make much difference) is a poisonous gem of social satire and ladder-climbing. Sheila, the protagonist of "Shakti," is a gorgeous make-her-own-destiny type; "next we heard that she was going to be a hostess with Air France, it all made sense, I mean who else would you imagine pouring champagne for a movie star in some Frenchly elegant first class cabin or running down the steps of the Eiffel Tower, holding her white stilettos in one tiny and graceful hand." Chandra succinctly evokes the past presumed glamor of commercial air travel better than the entirety of Catch Me If You Can. Unfortunately, Chandra's style gets soggier and soggier as he moves along; the last story aims for the lyrical, which is always iffy. Modern short stories have an easy formula for lyricism: unexpected adjective + mundane trait + gerundive verb, ad infinitum. Witness: "I want to praise. ... The kindness of postmen, their long walks in the summer sun, their aching feet. The mysterious and generous knowledge of all those who cook, their intimate and vast power over us." Absolutely not.
(Oct. 13-16)

Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - Like many an epic-length picaresque (see also The Sot-Weed Factor), Midnight's Children's irrepressible exuberance can get exhausting at times: "I have been a swallower of lives," narrator Saleem Sinai promises, "and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well." There's a definite sense of Rushdie at all times self-consciously demonstrating his virtuosity: his range of locales, characters, ability to make endless descriptive lists and come up with fresh metaphors. Sometimes you wish for a breather passage of the kind of literary white noise — the odd clunky A-to-B passage that conveys information without elegance — most novelists have to at least briefly succumb to. But it is, admittedly, a very impressive novel, and a remarkably entertaining one as well, considering that its subject matter is basically India's fall from promised grace. I'm afraid I blew all my commentary on a term paper, so that'll have to do.
(Nov.)

Such A Long Journey - Rohinton Mistry - So skilled I didn't foresee its eventual slide into miserabilism for its own sake. The opening third is a pleasure — the delineation of life within Khodadad Building, a typical Indian apartment complex with its lack of privacy and eccentric neighbors, is a blast. The opening chapter indicates we're in the hands of someone whose deceptively traditional prose can play buried havoc with structure: it goes backwards from the starting point without ever losing you. Time, place and character are all conveyed evocatively, but I eventually grew tired of the relentless pummeling of the protagonist and his family. I may look into more Mistry at some point; apparently he's Important.
(Nov.)

The Blue Bedspread - Raj Kamal Jha - Here's how little I care about evaluating this book carefully: I'm lying in bed, quite comfortably. The book is in the living room, in a small stack of stuff I intend to sell back to The Strand. I can't be bothered to walk 8 feet to pick it up. Instead, I went on Amazon and looked at the available excerpt of this novel about incest inexplicably compared to Raymond Carver, apparently because it has a lot of domestic abuse and lower-class misery. Sample: "With you, the baby in my bedroom, on the blue bedspread, no taller than my arm, your tiny figures curled up, the night resting like a soft cloud on your body." Like a soft cloud on your body. Gah. If this appeals to you — and you want to see these obtuse metaphors applied to appalling stories about brothers and sisters having sex and daddy raping son and daughter and etc., be my guest. Pick up my copy at The Strand.
(Dec.)

Intro To Post-Colonial Studies:
Still lots of Indian lit (+ other nations of course), but also a lot of essays and theory I won't comment on (along with most of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, though curiously not the whole thing, a gap I should make up at some point, although you look like a douchebag reading it in public). Interesting up to a point — but no one involved seems to have any sense of humor, and overwrought pieties are frequently rewarded over formalist literary merit. (Even a statement like that would, of course, be massively problematic in the context of the field: who gets to determine merit you Eurocentric bastard etc.) We will be returning to the traditional Western canon for my final semester, sorry fans.

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe - Certainly readable enough, and I have no quibbles with Achebe; his essay takedown of Heart of Darkness is an unassailably well-balanced assault. Dude can unquestionably write in whatever register he chooses. The prose rhythms here are, according to everything I've learned in class, supposed to capture oral story-telling rhythms; at first it seems stilted, but I sunk into the spell. The real question is if I really think that's the intent; I mean, I guess. This kind of stuff (the cinematic equivalent is roughly Ten Canoes, I guess) always leaves me sort of cold; I can't really believe in sketchy form as a political choice which in turn justifies itself aesthetically.
(Sept. 7-9)

Kanthapura - Raja Rao - Pretty goddamn interminable. Gandhi-ism comes to a village; controversy ensues, plus endless passages where the British kick some native ass and everyone cries. See above re: comments on orality. I really have nothing to say about this stuff.
(Sept. 23 - Oct. 3)

Cracking India - Bapsi Sidwha - "Poetic," "lyrical," etc. Lots of sentences with asyndeton, vague general questions that are supposed to raise more issues than they explicitly pose but just come off terminally windy ("Is that when I learn to tell tales?" I dunno: what does Storytelling — I'm sorry, the Question of Storytelling — mean? Who gives a flying fuck.). Symbolism painfully blunt — every character represents an ethnic/religious faction, at one point our heroine pulls apart a doll and is upset when the stuffing comes out (= partition). Please. Carrying around an oversized paperback with a pink cover didn't help my mood at all. If an endorsement from Salman Rushdie helps sell what would otherwise be a (in this case justifiably) marginalized text by a lesser known Indian/Pakistani writer, does that make Rushdie, with his quasi-celeb status, the new Forster?
(Oct. 4 - 6)

Season Of Migration To The North - Tayeb Salih - Easily the most intriguing book of this class, even if it's really only 2/3 there. What's most striking is how fresh all the metaphors are, to me anyway: this is, sadly enough, the first Arabic book I've read, and all the images seemed startlingly clear. Coming back to Sudan after completing grad school in England, our hero feels "as though a piece of ice were melting inside of me, as though I were some frozen substance on which the sun had shone." Complicated plotting teases and reveals secrets with dexterity, both repudiating tradition's more loathsome aspects and liberal thinking about neo-colonial problems (this is the kind of book that would be impossible to write without an academic background, but it's never weighed down by that either). Unfortunately, the central metaphor — sex as violent hatefuck/payback, the East and West desiring nothing so much as the literary sexual equivalent of the final scene of Almodovar's Matador — isn't completely convincing. Well worth a look though, and a brisk read, well under 200 pages. For once, a seemingly marginal work canonized in academia for the sake of representativeness pays off.
(Oct. 19 - 22)

Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade - Assia Djebar - I did not finish this unreadable piece of shit. The theoretical discourse of outraged feminism: cities as women waiting to be raped by the patriarchy etc., all rendered in excruciatingly "poetic" prose. Whatever.
(Oct. 28 - hell)

Three Days In That Autumn - Pak Wan-So - A nasty but engagingly lucid look into the mind of a self-loathing abortion doctor. "For me it's more important to know that a man is capable of rape than to know his last name." Wow. Given the movies of Kim Ki-Duk, this may just be true in Korea though.
(Oct. 29)