Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Monday, February 12, 2007
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I've just finished a book by Jonathan Safran Foer called "Extermely Loud and Incredibly Close", which I found very moving. I was on the tube as I got to the end of the book and I could feel tears coming. Reviewers have criticised the book for its whimsicality and there are elements of that, but overall I thought it was a great read.
I'd read Safran Foer's previous book "Everything is Illuminated" and found it interesting but mixed - he tells the story in several different voices, not all of which are so easy to read. The main voice is a very entertaining one though, a young, naive "translator" (that's what he calls himself) called Alex.
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" uses some of the same devices as the earlier book - various voices, some of which are heavier going than others and a foreground character who this time is a clever young boy with apparently autistic tendencies. In the first book Safran Foer dealt with Holocaust survival and in this one his main character's father dies in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Oskar (the young boy) describes his grief as "heavy boots" and he thinks up inventions in order to stop himself thinking of bad things. At one point he has the idea that there should be a channel under everybody's pillow to drain their tears to the reservoir in Central Park. Each morning a special report would tell everyone the emotional state of the city and occasionally, on the worst days, everybody would be called upon to bring sandbags to shore up the banks of the reservoir and stop it from overflowing. If you think that kind of metaphor is silly or cloying, don't read this book. I found it lovely.
In "Everything is Illuminated", the author himself appears, looking for the person who saved his father from the Nazis. There is a parallel in the later novel (perhaps there being so many close similarities is a weakness, well, let's see if the next one is the same); Oskar goes on an impossible quest in search of the lock which fits a key he finds in his father's closet. He has many wonderful adventures which in the end seem to have become therapy for Oskar and when he comes to the end, he realises that the search made him feel closer to his father than reaching its conclusion.
Dealing with the trauma of the aftermath of 9/11 is obviously very hard for a novelist and I guess it's inevitable that writers will do it obliquely (for instance by using the voice of an autistic child). One scene that I thought benefited from this was where Oskar gives a talk at school about the experience of people in a Japanese city hit by an atomic bomb. His schoolmates are grossed out by the horrible details while Oskar enthuses over technicalities. We see Oskar's isolation from his schoolmates and in the process a question occurs; how do we feel about 9/11? Because there were no survivors and hardly any remains, there are no similarly gruesome stories for 9/11, just the haunting phone messages and the images of falling bodies. Oskar has his own reactions to both these motifs.
Many people will find this book too trite to handle its subject, and the author crass for turning 9/11 into entertainment, but as I say I found parts of it very moving. Oskar is sent home from school on the fateful day and plays five messages from his dad on the answerphone. He replaces the answerphone with an identical one so that he can protect his mum from the messages, but feels compelled to keep playing them. Later we hear that the fifth message was his father repeating "Are you there?" eleven times. Oskar was in the house and heard his father leaving this message, but was unable to answer the phone. he carries a burden of guilt for that. You finish the book wondering whether he would shed that burden.
I'd read Safran Foer's previous book "Everything is Illuminated" and found it interesting but mixed - he tells the story in several different voices, not all of which are so easy to read. The main voice is a very entertaining one though, a young, naive "translator" (that's what he calls himself) called Alex.
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" uses some of the same devices as the earlier book - various voices, some of which are heavier going than others and a foreground character who this time is a clever young boy with apparently autistic tendencies. In the first book Safran Foer dealt with Holocaust survival and in this one his main character's father dies in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Oskar (the young boy) describes his grief as "heavy boots" and he thinks up inventions in order to stop himself thinking of bad things. At one point he has the idea that there should be a channel under everybody's pillow to drain their tears to the reservoir in Central Park. Each morning a special report would tell everyone the emotional state of the city and occasionally, on the worst days, everybody would be called upon to bring sandbags to shore up the banks of the reservoir and stop it from overflowing. If you think that kind of metaphor is silly or cloying, don't read this book. I found it lovely.
In "Everything is Illuminated", the author himself appears, looking for the person who saved his father from the Nazis. There is a parallel in the later novel (perhaps there being so many close similarities is a weakness, well, let's see if the next one is the same); Oskar goes on an impossible quest in search of the lock which fits a key he finds in his father's closet. He has many wonderful adventures which in the end seem to have become therapy for Oskar and when he comes to the end, he realises that the search made him feel closer to his father than reaching its conclusion.
Dealing with the trauma of the aftermath of 9/11 is obviously very hard for a novelist and I guess it's inevitable that writers will do it obliquely (for instance by using the voice of an autistic child). One scene that I thought benefited from this was where Oskar gives a talk at school about the experience of people in a Japanese city hit by an atomic bomb. His schoolmates are grossed out by the horrible details while Oskar enthuses over technicalities. We see Oskar's isolation from his schoolmates and in the process a question occurs; how do we feel about 9/11? Because there were no survivors and hardly any remains, there are no similarly gruesome stories for 9/11, just the haunting phone messages and the images of falling bodies. Oskar has his own reactions to both these motifs.
Many people will find this book too trite to handle its subject, and the author crass for turning 9/11 into entertainment, but as I say I found parts of it very moving. Oskar is sent home from school on the fateful day and plays five messages from his dad on the answerphone. He replaces the answerphone with an identical one so that he can protect his mum from the messages, but feels compelled to keep playing them. Later we hear that the fifth message was his father repeating "Are you there?" eleven times. Oskar was in the house and heard his father leaving this message, but was unable to answer the phone. he carries a burden of guilt for that. You finish the book wondering whether he would shed that burden.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Book Review: "On Beauty" by Zadie Smith
I recently read this and enjoyed it a lot. The main thing I liked is that the characters are engaging and believable. It's about two families, one mixed race and one black, the fathers / husbands of which are both college professors. These two guys are at opposite ends of the political and critical (they are both art historians) spectrum and are involved in some kind of arguement, but the best bits of the book are not about them or their squabble; the best bits (and most of the book) are about the family of the white guy his mixed race family and a young rapper they come into contact with.
The book is about middle class black families living and working in a university town, and probably some people will find their lives a little easy. These people don't have real problems like some of the people they meet; they are protected from trouble by their wealth, but I still found Kiki, Zora, Levi, Jerome and Howard (the father) compelling, even when I was wincing at the things they put themselves through. Howard in particular, even though he's obviously a very intelligent guy, does some very stupid things, apparently designed to hurt those he loves and by proxy himself. Howard blunders around the book like a big bear, taking whatever is close by. There's a scene where the family are at a funeral and Howard decides he can't take it anymore, so he leaves the church and goes to visit his father, who he has not seen for several years. The two men can't communicate and in a very well observed scene Howard soon loses patience and walks out on his dad.
Zora and Levi are the two younger children and a lot of the book is about them and how they struggle with their contradictory lives. Levi wants to be a cool bro'. He meets some young haitians selling pirate dvds on the streets and soon he wants to bury himself in their cause, but he can't admit to them where he's from and pretends he's from the poorer part of town. Zora wants to be respected for her equality politics but her father is the professor. She campaigns for a young local black rapper to be allowed to attend the same poetry course as her, but she herself has been allowed on the course by means of political machination.
What makes all this such a great read is the understanding with which it's written. I felt these people could really exist and Zadie Smith had been living with them for months at a time, sharing their private thoughts and even when they made their stupid mistakes I could feel with them.
For the first few pages I wondered whether I was just going to find the book a flat farce about ridiculous people at university (it vaguely remined me of the Wilt books), but it soon got going and proved to be a lot better than that. We could have had more sympathetic treatment of Professor Kipps, Howard's reactionary nemesis, and his attractive daughter Victoria, but the one I would like to have heard more from was Jerome, Howard's christian son, who has gone to live and work with Professor Kipps and fallen in love with Victoria (thus a double betrayal of his father). Perhaps it's the false tone of the emails at the start of the book that let the book down to begin with, but I never got to feel for Jerome in the way that I did for the others; a pity, since the tension setup by his "betrayals" sets up the first great scene, where Howard shows up at the Kipps residence in an effort to sort the sorry business out. I get the feeling Zadie Smith doesn't empathise with christians very much, perhaps her talent led her to conjure up Jerome too easily - a stronger Jerome would have given the Belsy family more depth I feel. This is only a slight criticism of a very good book, which made me want to go back and read her others as soon as I can.
The book is about middle class black families living and working in a university town, and probably some people will find their lives a little easy. These people don't have real problems like some of the people they meet; they are protected from trouble by their wealth, but I still found Kiki, Zora, Levi, Jerome and Howard (the father) compelling, even when I was wincing at the things they put themselves through. Howard in particular, even though he's obviously a very intelligent guy, does some very stupid things, apparently designed to hurt those he loves and by proxy himself. Howard blunders around the book like a big bear, taking whatever is close by. There's a scene where the family are at a funeral and Howard decides he can't take it anymore, so he leaves the church and goes to visit his father, who he has not seen for several years. The two men can't communicate and in a very well observed scene Howard soon loses patience and walks out on his dad.
Zora and Levi are the two younger children and a lot of the book is about them and how they struggle with their contradictory lives. Levi wants to be a cool bro'. He meets some young haitians selling pirate dvds on the streets and soon he wants to bury himself in their cause, but he can't admit to them where he's from and pretends he's from the poorer part of town. Zora wants to be respected for her equality politics but her father is the professor. She campaigns for a young local black rapper to be allowed to attend the same poetry course as her, but she herself has been allowed on the course by means of political machination.
What makes all this such a great read is the understanding with which it's written. I felt these people could really exist and Zadie Smith had been living with them for months at a time, sharing their private thoughts and even when they made their stupid mistakes I could feel with them.
For the first few pages I wondered whether I was just going to find the book a flat farce about ridiculous people at university (it vaguely remined me of the Wilt books), but it soon got going and proved to be a lot better than that. We could have had more sympathetic treatment of Professor Kipps, Howard's reactionary nemesis, and his attractive daughter Victoria, but the one I would like to have heard more from was Jerome, Howard's christian son, who has gone to live and work with Professor Kipps and fallen in love with Victoria (thus a double betrayal of his father). Perhaps it's the false tone of the emails at the start of the book that let the book down to begin with, but I never got to feel for Jerome in the way that I did for the others; a pity, since the tension setup by his "betrayals" sets up the first great scene, where Howard shows up at the Kipps residence in an effort to sort the sorry business out. I get the feeling Zadie Smith doesn't empathise with christians very much, perhaps her talent led her to conjure up Jerome too easily - a stronger Jerome would have given the Belsy family more depth I feel. This is only a slight criticism of a very good book, which made me want to go back and read her others as soon as I can.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
"Guns Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond
I picked up Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel" a few years ago because I liked the title and the cover and then I got interested in the blurb. It's basically about why advanced civilisations developed in certain areas of the world and not in others. I don't have the book with me now because I lent it to someone and they lent it on, but I've often thought about it since I read it and I think it's a great book.
The basic thesis of the book I think is that there were specific circumstances which led to advances which people were able to build on and which created the environment for future opportunities. One crucial point that I remember was the development of hunter-gatherer societies into farming societies. Once that has happened a society has a chance of producing a surplus food supply and will be able to devote time to other needs. A hunter-gatherer society is more fragile (more likely to suffer shortages, less likely to be able to store food to tide them over lean times).
Diamond proposes (as I remember) that the necessary conditions for the development of wide scale farming were domesticated crops and animals that could be used for farming (i.e. for work and for food). Horses and cows lived in Africa, Europe and Asia, but not America. Another very interesting point he makes is that the general orientation of continental land masses made it more possible to transfer crops and animals across Europe, Middle East and Asia (because they exist at similar latitudes and therefore have somewhat similar climates) than from North to South America and vice versa, so that the number of crops and animals domesticated in one part of Middle East - Europe - Asia and transferred to another is much higher than what could be transferred up / down the American continent. Another crucial difference arose from the domestication of animals, because close contact with those animals exposed the people from Europe and Asia to new diseases to which they developed some immunity. When these diseases were transported to new countries by the people and animals, the indiginous people of the new countries were suddenly exposed to the diseases with dire effects.
I think Diamond sees the main purpose of his book as being to counter the racist argument that the reason for the disparity in development between the Eurasian-originating peoples and the African and American - originating peoples is genetic; that you can account for the differences using IQ comparisons. Diamond says there are other reasons for the disparities, which he describes in his book.
The basic thesis of the book I think is that there were specific circumstances which led to advances which people were able to build on and which created the environment for future opportunities. One crucial point that I remember was the development of hunter-gatherer societies into farming societies. Once that has happened a society has a chance of producing a surplus food supply and will be able to devote time to other needs. A hunter-gatherer society is more fragile (more likely to suffer shortages, less likely to be able to store food to tide them over lean times).
Diamond proposes (as I remember) that the necessary conditions for the development of wide scale farming were domesticated crops and animals that could be used for farming (i.e. for work and for food). Horses and cows lived in Africa, Europe and Asia, but not America. Another very interesting point he makes is that the general orientation of continental land masses made it more possible to transfer crops and animals across Europe, Middle East and Asia (because they exist at similar latitudes and therefore have somewhat similar climates) than from North to South America and vice versa, so that the number of crops and animals domesticated in one part of Middle East - Europe - Asia and transferred to another is much higher than what could be transferred up / down the American continent. Another crucial difference arose from the domestication of animals, because close contact with those animals exposed the people from Europe and Asia to new diseases to which they developed some immunity. When these diseases were transported to new countries by the people and animals, the indiginous people of the new countries were suddenly exposed to the diseases with dire effects.
I think Diamond sees the main purpose of his book as being to counter the racist argument that the reason for the disparity in development between the Eurasian-originating peoples and the African and American - originating peoples is genetic; that you can account for the differences using IQ comparisons. Diamond says there are other reasons for the disparities, which he describes in his book.
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