26 Books

This is considered a classic of hardboiled crime fiction. It’s also the only book that I’ve continued to search for after I bought a copy. That’s because it took me a long time to realise that The Hunter and Point Blank, two much-recommended crime novels, were in fact the same book. There are also three film versions: Point Blank, Full Contact and Payback.

Point Blank (Parker 1)

Richard Stark
ALLISON & BUSBY 2008, Paperback, 288 pages, £6.99

Published in 1962, the book is the first in a series of more than 20 novels about Parker, a professional crook. Its author, Donald Westlake wrote more than 100 novels under many pseudonyms. The Parker novels were all written as Richard Stark. In summary, both the novel and its author go by many different names.

Anna Funder’s first book, Stasiland, was a non-fiction work that explored life in East Germany during the Cold War. Her new book is a novel but one based very closely on real events.

All That I Am

Anna Funder
Viking 2011, Hardcover, 370 pages, £16.99

All That I Am tells the story a group of German activists during the 1930s as they try to warn the world of the threat from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

This trilogy was recommended to me about 20 years ago. It’s taken me a while to get around to reading it, clearly. That’s a shame because all three books are excellent and reading them has made me keen to read more by Davies.

The Deptford Trilogy

Robertson Davies
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 832 pages, £15.99

Robertson Davies was one of Canada’s most distinguished authors and most of his novels were grouped in trilogies: the Salterton, Deptford and Cornish trilogies. He died before completing the third book in what his publisher speculates would have become the Toronto Trilogy.

Not long after the success of Thomas’s The End of Mr Y, PopCo appeared in the shops, complete with a similar looking cover. I assumed it was her next novel but in fact PopCo was published first.

PopCo

Scarlett Thomas
Canongate Books Ltd 2008, Paperback, 464 pages, £8.99

That shows once you start to read it. PopCo is less sophisticated than Mr Y and Thomas either has trouble marshalling her material or has simply not yet developed a sense of how to balance a novel.

This is one of those books that could be considered to be a novel or as a series of interconnected short stories, in which certain characters drift from key roles into bit parts and back again. I lean slightly towards the former but I can imagine people making the case for it being a short story collection. It doesn’t matter all that much.

A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan
Corsair 2011, Paperback, 368 pages, £7.99

Most of the chapters are connected to Bennie, a record producer, or his assistant, Sasha, but there are some that centre on characters whose connection to the ongoing story is unclear, at least at first.

A tiger roams the streets of Manhattan, destroying entire buildings on its rampage, the whole of Downtown is obscured by an unexplained grey fog and a fad is developing for mysterious vases, called chaldrons, that sell for extraordinary prices on eBay.

Chronic City

Jonathan Lethem
Faber and Faber 2011, Paperback, 560 pages, £7.99

Against this odd background Jonathan Lethem sets the lives of his main characters. Chase Insteadman is a former child actor who still lives off the royalties from the hit sitcom in which he starred. These days he is more famous for his relationship with Janice Trumbull, an astronaut trapped in orbit on a space station.

These two books make up the other half of the Library of America volume collecting Roth’s work between 1986 and 1991. While The Counterlife and Deception explored the boundary between fiction and fact from one side, these two books approach from the opposite direction.

Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991 (Library of America)

Ross Miller (Editor)
Library of America 2008, Hardcover, 767 pages, £30.00

The Facts is Roth’s autobiography and, despite its title, it’s prefaced by a letter from the author to his character Nathan Zuckerman, asking for feedback. ‘The Facts’? Yeah, nice try Roth.

Last year, I read four Philip Roth novels – the first of his Zuckerman series, anthologised by The Library of America as Zuckerman Bound. This year I read the next Library of America volume, which collects the four books Roth wrote between 1986 and 1991.

Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991 (Library of America)

Ross Miller (Editor)
Library of America 2008, Hardcover, 767 pages, £30.00

Two are works of fiction that Roth dares us to view as autobiographical and two are non-fiction but Roth teases us with the possibility that he is not telling the truth. I’m going to look at the first two in this post.

This is the fifth and final book of my short run of experimental and post-modern fiction. This one is perhaps the most radical of the five but, though it’s an interesting experiment, it’s not really one that engages.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress

David Markson
Dalkey Archive Press 2006, Paperback, 248 pages, £9.99

The book is a stream-of-consciousness narration by a woman who is, or believes she is, the last living person in the world. She doesn’t explain how this situation arose but she does detail her travels across the world in search of another survivor.

The third book in my brief sojourn into experimental fiction, this is Ben Marcus’s second book. I tried very hard to appreciate his intentions but I have to admit that I hated it.

Notable American Women

Ben Marcus
Vintage Books 2002, Paperback, 243 pages, £6.99

Set in Ohio, Notable American Women is the story of one Ben Marcus, a young man being raised by a strange female cult called the Silentists. Ben’s dad has been banished from the house and is quite possibly buried in the back yard.