26 Books

Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian author who has lived in America since 1992 and written in English since 1995. He’s frequently compared to Nabokov and Conrad, two other authors who wrote their most celebrated works in English, rather than their first language.

The Lazarus Project

Aleksandar Hemon
Picador 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, £7.99

The Lazarus Project takes the true story of Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant to the US who was shot dead by the Chicago chief of police in 1908, and combines it with the fictional story of Vladimir Brik, a Serbian novelist living in Chicago.

Julian Barnes is a wonderfully elegant writer, and one never finds a sentence of his with even the slightest flaw in it. In Nothing to be Frightened of, he brings his precision of prose and of thought to bear on his own life, on art, on family, and, most especially, on death.

Nothing to be Frightened of

Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape Ltd 2008, Hardcover, 250 pages, £16.99

Barnes’s brother is a philosopher, while Barnes himself is a novelist. These are related but wholly different genres of thought and writing. Their exchanges on death and other matters that litter this book are a wonderful way to appreciate the difference. Where Barnes wants to find the poetry in everything, to shape the narrative of his life into a novelistic whole, his brother looks for patterns of logic, and for ways of classifying phenomena in terms of the philosophical canon.

What’s also a great pleasure is that the book itself has been beautifully made and bound, with actual sown binding and everything. This was also true of Barnes’s Arthur and George, but of so few other books published today. If Barnes can persuade his publishers (Jonathan Cape) to produce such lovely objects, why can’t other authors of similar stature?

This is a fascinating, discursive book full of reminiscences, aphorisms and asides. It feels like a random ramble through a writer’s brain, but in fact is a carefully controlled piece of work. It’s one of the most beautifully poised memoirs I’ve ever read.

There are so many histories of the Third Reich that it’s impossible for the common reader to have read even a small proportion of them. Although there is a great body of work, important research continues into many aspects of Nazism, and a general history like this is the only way one can stay reasonably up to date.

The Third Reich at War is the final part of Evans’s monumental three part history that has emerged over the past few years or so. This is by far the largest volume, and covers the period from the Germans’ invasion of Poland to their final capitulation in Berlin. One of the areas that he devotes more time to than most historians is the T4 euthanasia programme, and there are compelling individual stories brought to the surface, including intended victims who were saved due to courageous interventions by their families and others.

The Third Reich at War

Richard J. Evans
Allen Lane 2008, Hardcover, 912 pages, £30.00

Many aspects of the narrative are of course very familiar, but what is new, to me at least, is the wealth of individual testimony that Evans brings to the surface. I’ve not read a general history of Nazi Germany that spends such a great deal of time dealing with the effects of the war on Germans themselves. He doesn’t stint on military detail – quite the opposite – but he’s at his best when using the particular to inform the general.

His account of the military campaigns, from Barbarossa to the Ardennes is impeccable. Again, we are given a view of the life of the German solider as well as the macro-history of the war. As with so many aspects of the war, it is in the sheer numbers of people affect and lives lost that the true story lies. Although we can learn from individuals’ accounts, we must never lose sight of the immensity of the catastrophe.

While the account of the fighting is of course central to the book, it is the account of the Holocaust that is most memorable and harrowing. In particular, I will particularly remember – with utter horror – Evans’s account of the Operation Reinhard camps (i.e. Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek) and the sheer industrial scale of the slaughter. These camps accounted for a third of the Holocaust’s victims, yet they operated for only a little more than two years. Unlike Auschwitz they did not have a work camp attached to them – at its height, Auschwitz was the size of a large town – and thus were conceived solely for the purpose of extermination.

Evans’s descriptions of these camps are precise, and to the extent that this is possible, resist hyperbole. The problem is that the scale and monstrosity of the crime is such that even stating the plain facts is enough to stupefy one. Even a familiarity with the facts of the Holocaust does not prepare one for reading about it. It is a subject that we must never lose site of, or stop studying, no matter how distasteful such study is. Once learned, the sheer depravity, cruelty and barbarism that was possible under cover of war never leaves one’s memory. Evans’s account is the most powerful, wide-ranging and accurate account I have read.

This being a book by a British historian, one was keen to know how he treated the terror bombing of German cities in late 1944 and early 1945 – in particular the bombing of Dresden. He provides some anecdotal evidence that these raids had their desired effect of destroying morale, undermining faith in the Nazi leadership still further and driving workers from their factories. But there can be no doubt that the Allied raids were themselves a war crime, and a brutal scar on the moral superiority of the victorious powers. It’s shameful that the bombings still find their apologists in Britain, and while Evans goes further than most British historians, he is still rather dilatory in criticising Bomber Command and the Allied leadership. He seems content to relate the story in terms of statistics, which are horrifying enough, but is unwilling to back them up with outright condemnation.

This one criticism apart, this is an exemplary account of the Nazis at war, and the catastrophe that engulfed the whole of Europe and beyond. It is both detailed and sweeping, using specific contemporary accounts to balance the larger scale military context. It serves as an excellent general history for both experts and the general reader alike.

There is a rather disconcerting sameness running through this collection of Lorrie Moore’s stories. In a preface she explains that they are ordered in reverse chronological order of their publication, and also in descending order of quality. This, disappointingly, turns out to be true: there is a noticeable drop-off in quality as the collection progresses.

The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore
Faber and Faber 2008, Hardcover, 656 pages, £20.00

That said, there are some very fine stories here. Obviously, they were not designed to be read as if they were a novel, all at a stretch. But the effect of reading them end-to-end is somewhat deadening, as the parade of young, sensitive, melancholy, broken women continues story after story.

Moore is never flashy, and her style is somewhat spare, although entirely familiar from any number of other American short story writers. There seems to be much less stylistic freedom in short story writing than there is in longer fiction. Moore’s new novel, A Gate at the Stairs was published in the UK recently, so it will be interesting to see how her style expands to fill the larger form.

The Collected Stories is a fine collection, but one that I wish I had read at a more leisurely pace, perhaps reading just one story a week or so. As it is, the homogeneity of subject matter, setting and characterisation becomes too repetitive, and one’s attention begins to wane, which is a pity because there are many little details that make the stories telling, real and whole.

I felt a lot of pressure to consider this a masterpiece. After all, that’s how almost every critic has described it and James agreed. I can see why it is so highly regarded. It’s unusual, for example, for a novel of more than 900 pages to get better the longer it goes on.

2666 is very good indeed but I’d stop short of calling it a masterpiece. In fact it’s not even clear that it’s a novel. It could easily be viewed as five interlinked novellas.

A brief word about editions: though 2666 is now available in paperback, I recommend the three-volume paperback set linked below. It’s a lot easier to read on the move and has some great artwork.

2666 Set

Natasha Wimmer (Translator)
Farrar Straus Giroux 2008, Paperback, 912 pages, £20.34

The first of 2666’s five books follows a quartet of academics as they search for a writer, Benno von Archimboldi, who has written a series of incredible books but about whom little is known. A love triangle develops between three of the academics and they travel to the Mexican city of Santa Teresa where, rumour has it, Archimboldi has been sighted.

The second book focuses on a Spanish academic in Santa Teresa who lives with his daughter and appears to be having some kind of breakdown. He appeared briefly in the first book and his daughter will play a part in the third, which is about an American journalist who travels to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match but finds himself more concerned about the large number of women being murdered in the city.

Bolano turns his attention to the murders in the fourth book. The killings, based on the real murders in Ciudad Juarez, where more than 400 women have been killed over the last 15 years, are detailed in cold, relentless detail. There are a couple of stories threaded through this book – about a police inspector having an affair with a psychologist and another about a young policeman learning the basics of detection – but really this is about the murders.

While hack thriller writers (and more of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in a later post) use serial murders as a prop with almost fetishistic glee, Bolano achieves the nearly impossible: he makes each death matter. The weight of sadness accumulates as the story goes on. But there are few solutions, just as there aren’t in Ciudad Juarez. Bolano can do nothing other than observe and report.

While the first three sections are good, with frequent passages of writing that are quite dazzling, it wasn’t until book four that things clicked into place for me. However, the fifth section, in which we finally meet Archimboldi, is the highlight of the novel. The character Bolano gives us is fully realised and fascinating. He takes us through the writer’s life in Germany, his time in the war, his attempts to build a career as a novelist and, eventually, his journey to Santa Teresa.

It’s a wonderful piece of writing and I didn’t want it to end. It even goes some way to resolving some of the stories from the previous sections. There aren’t many resolutions to be found here, just hints at them, but that’s not a problem. Bolano isn’t concerned with stories particularly; throughout the five books here he throws away more good ideas than the average novelist has in a lifetime.

Instead Bolano is interested in authorship and the way stories pass through society. It’s fundamentally a book about writing but it doesn’t have to be read that way. There are love stories, war stories, detective stories and more to be found here. All beautifully written.

So why don’t I think it’s a masterpiece? It has too many extraneous parts. It lacks the clarity of purpose and vision that I would expect from a masterpiece. It’s a matter of taste, admittedly. It’s possible that the novel would be stronger if the various parts were merged into one narrative. Even then the first three parts are not essential to the whole.

Quibbling aside, this is a great work of fiction. It’s challenging, rewarding and passionate. Read it.

You wait for years for Edinburgh-based augmented reality crime fiction, then two come along at once.

The Edinburgh here is not as far ino the near future as The Night Sessions and the motive isn’t religion, it’s money. A robbery takes place in a thinly-disguised World of Warcraft, baffling the police and the auditing company brought in to investigate.

The consultants bring in their own consultants and the cast of characters expands. There’s an interesting narrative device where each chapter is told from the perspective of a differet character in the second person, so there’s a kind of rota of yous who act out the events. It sounds confusing but I rather liked it, it felt absorbing. Imagine If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller with computer games.

There are a lot of film noir elements, so there’s a patsy programmer brought in, supposedly by a recruitment consultancy who scan a company’s internal correspondence to identify needs, then scans the web to find matches in online CVs (I’ve heard far worse ideas for digital start-ups), but in fact there are more sinister groups in the background.

Interests and partially-revealed facts rise and fall through the pages, pushing forward only to be shown to be a mask for something else or a dead end on the deductive path. The robbery itself becomes secondary to the real crime, the one over there that’s only exposed thanks to the first crime. I need Humphrey Bogart to deliver a long speech while driving a car to explain it all properly.

The setting has a lot of technology in it (in short, the independent Scotland of the future has a lot of mobile phones in it that do most of what we use computers for, data analysis is a big thing and taxis that are driven by remote control from call centres) but the motives are ancient. They’re just a lot bigger than they first seem.

It’s enormously enjoyable, although it was a bit strange to jump straight from one future Edinburgh to another without any reality in between. God knows how people who read more science fiction than I do manage it.

Benjamin Black is the pen name of Booker Prize winning novelist John Banville. What’s slightly odd about this is that the disguise is made plain by being highlighted on the front cover. Banville says that the reason for this is that he wanted to write genre fiction, but didn’t want his literary readers to be disappointed when they realised that the books were not literary ones.

Fair enough, I suppose, only Banville wants not only to have his cake, but to eat it too. He claims that there is no such thing as genre fiction, and that the only worthwhile distinction to make in literature is between good writing and bad writing. If this is true, then there’s no need to write under a pen name, and readers shouldn’t feel aggrieved to find that they’re reading a thriller.

The Lemur

Benjamin Black
Picador 2008, Hardcover, 192 pages, £12.99

The real problem is that Banville’s claim that there is no such thing as genre fiction is let down by the fact that The Lemur is a cliché from start to finish. Thankfully it’s a short book.

It’s a theme of my reading at the moment that all of a book’s characters are unsympathetic, and The Lemur is no exception. It’s set in New York, among the financial elite. John Glass, erstwhile world-famous journalist for the ‘Sunday Times of London’ is afraid of heights, but sits in his office way up in his father-in-law’s skyscraper preparing to write the old man’s authorised biography. And here comes the cliché: he’s afraid of heights, but really he’s out of his depth.

He hires an investigator to help him probe his father-in-law’s past, but almost immediately the investigator turns up dead. We’re treated to Banville’s riff on the New York police precinct, and the hard boiled cop in search of coffee, then to Glass’s unhappy affair with a local artist, to his even less happy marriage and to his strained relationship with his hawkish, ex-CIA father-in-law Bill Mulholland who is now some kind of Bill Gates figure (Banville tries to deflect this comparison by having ‘Big Bill’ say that he’s bigger than any other philanthropist, Bill and Melinda Gates included).

Despite being set in New York, there’s very little sense of place, the real place rather than the celluloid view of it we’re used to seeing in the cinema. The Lemur is a deeply disappointing book. Let’s hope that Banville’s forthcoming The Infinities marks a return to the form of his brilliant Booker winning The Sea.

‘Write about what you know’ is the advice routinely given to first-time novelists and that’s what John Niven has done here. Like his protagonist, Steven Stelfox, Niven was an A&R man during the Britpop years and draws on his experience to for this satire of music industry shallowness, cynicism and greed.

Kill Your Friends

John Niven
Vintage 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, £7.99

The story follows Stelfox through 1997 as he visits Cannes, Miami and Glastonbury on his quest for a hit record. Unfortunately all he has to work with are a Spice Girls-clone girlband and a drum ‘n’ bass artist called Rage, a thinly-disguised Goldie.

To underline how nasty the music business is Niven makes Stelfox racist, sexist, homophobic and misanthropic in the extreme. His interest in music is purely financial – he has a drugs and prostitute habit to support, after all – and, lacking critical judgment, he has to rely on guesswork if he’s to find a hit. Oh, and halfway through the book he turns, somewhat unconvincingly, into a psychopathic murderer.

It’s like South Park meets American Psycho without the wit or intellect of either. Stelfox is barely even a two-dimensional character and the best Niven can do to take us inside his head is to say it’s like a TV control room with a series of screens showing ultra-violence and hardcore porn. It’s desperately unimaginative. Niven might argue that Stelfox is two-dimensional and desperately unimaginative, which may be true but it’s still the author’s job to make him interesting and he’s failed utterly here.

Worse is the fact that Niven has nothing to say. The music industry is shallow and cynical? Anyone who’s tuned in to an episode of X Factor could tell you that. Otherwise, all Niven has to offer are the observations that traffic in London is often bad and all the pretty women seem to come out in sunny weather. In comparison, Nick Hornby is a giant of cultural analysis.

In Niven’s defence he can craft very funny insults, which gives Stelfox’s opinions some humourous zing. But it feels overdone and palls after 100 pages or so.

You can find better things to do with your time.

Budai, a linguist on his way to a conference in Helsinki, arrives by accident in a strange city whose residents speak a language that is both unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Unable even to find his way back to the airport, he tries to make sense of the city and its language before he runs out of money and is evicted from his hotel.

Metropole

Ferenc Karinthy
Telegram Books 2008, Paperback, 279 pages, £8.99

Budai’s best hope is Epepe, the hotel lift operator who is the only person patient enough to attempt to communicate with him. The language remains impenetrable despite her efforts but the pair form a relationship of sorts.

Written in Hungary in 1970 but published in English only last year, Karinthy’s novel is frequently described as Kafka-esque. For me, the resemblance is superficial, though I’m hardly a Kafka expert. In the little Kafka I’ve read, there’s a sense of persecution, as if the world itself is somehow working against the protagonist. That’s absent here. Karinthy’s city, an over-crowded, faceless metropolis, is simply indifferent to Budai.

This creates a different dynamic. In Kafka, one feels that the more the protagonist struggles, the tighter the ties around him become. In Metropole, one feels that Budai might be able to escape his trap if only he can figure out how. The problem is that he has nothing at all to go on. His various plans, ranging from buying a map to getting himself arrested, come to nothing.

Things take a strange turn towards the end when Budai finds himself caught in some kind of armed insurrection. It’s an odd sequence and one that makes me wonder whether the novel is really about language, as it seems to be to a contemporary Western reader. Was Karinthy drawing a parallel between Hungary’s communist regime and this city where violence erupts out of an inability to communicate? I don’t know enough about Hungary or Karinthy to be able to say.

In these days of the internet, GPS and mobile phones, Metropole is less plausible than it would have seemed in 1970 but it remains an intriguing novel.

Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker and here, over the course of 600 or so pages, he leads us through the story of classical music in the 20th century. Beginning with the premier of Strauss’s Salome in 1906, Ross covers the decadence of the Twenties and the depression of the Thirties before considering music under the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin and the post-war avant garde.

As someone who knows little about classical music I was fascinated by Ross’s narrative. His enthusiasm for his subject is clear and infectious. As a writer myself I was impressed by his skill. He describes so many works and composers and yet manages to keep his descriptions fresh and engaging.

The Rest is Noise

Alex Ross
Fourth Estate 2008, Hardcover, 624 pages, £25.00

The pre-war sections are the most interesting, perhaps because there’s a lot more to tell. Classical music slipped out of the mainstream after the war with the rise of popular culture and that’s reflected on the page. The post-war years are dealt with in just a third of the book.

Though the jacket claims that Ross covers “music, from The Rite of Spring to the Velvet Underground”, the book isn’t about popular music at all. One chapter nods towards jazz, or at least Duke Ellington, and the Velvet Underground receive about two pages.

Ross deals with each style of music or school of thought by focusing on one composer. This is a good idea but its success depends on the composer chosen. I found that the chapter on Benjamin Britten dragged but I was more interested than I expected to be in Jean Sibelius and Charles Ives.

Although the book is organised chronologically, Ross frequently jumps backwards or forwards in time to make connections elsewhere. It’s an effective technique and one that mirrors the music Ross describes.

However, while the writing is good, the editing is shocking. The book is littered with typos: avant-garde is spelled “avant-grade” on at least three occasions and grandiose appears as “grandoise”. Another page has Ross saying that “the Berlin Wall was broached in 1989…” instead of breached, one assumes.

Worse are embarrassingly bad sentences such as this one: “Three years before he was born, Transylvania became part of Romania, and Ligeti went to study at the conservatory in Cluj…”

I read the book in hardback so perhaps someone has fixed those howlers for the paperback edition. As it is they undermine the seriousness of an otherwise exemplary exercise in criticism.