Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
Also: Quiet by Susan Cain; Water Margin by Shī Nài’ān; and Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Life of an Amorous Man: A Novel of Love and Desire in Old Japan by Ihara Saikaku
A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
Letters from a Seducer by Hilda Hilst
A Double Barrelled Detective Story by Mark Twain
Lessons by Ian McEwan
The Torrents of Spring by Ernest HemingwayMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
If you like suspenseful science-fiction, humor, and are fascinated by science, you must read this book. I’m not kidding.
The premise is a simple cast-away story, except that it takes place on Mars—an environment in which a human can’t last for seconds without a lot of properly functioning technology. Astronaut Mark Watney is left for dead when a severe storm blows in, impaling him with a piece of metal, knocking out his vital statistics monitor, and blowing him into a drift. Having lost visual contact with Watney, showing no vital statistics, and facing the toppling of the crew’s escape vehicle by high winds, the mission commander decides that she can’t risk the lives of the entire crew to cart Watney’s body back home. The thing is; Watney isn’t dead.
The book is a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows associated with events that nearly kill Watney—either in an instant or by making his long-term survival impossible. The botanist / engineer must figure out how to survive for four years (until the next Mars mission is due—if it doesn’t get cancelled) with less than six months of supplies. (The mission was supposed to be one month but was aborted in the first week, but there were five other crew members whose rations were left behind.) If you think Tom Hanks had it bad in Cast Away, imagine having to produce food on Mars.
This book taps into the visceral feeling that works so well in the movie Gravity (but Weir does more homework on the science.) For tension, it’s hard to beat being adrift in space, utterly isolated from one’s species—or any species for that matter–and knowing you will die when your resources run out.
The main character, who is the only character for the first six chapters or so, is intensely likable. Mark Watney is funny, intelligent, self-deprecatingly humble, and can confidently problem solve in the midst of any crisis. If there’s a critique of the realism of this story (as sci-fi goes it is extremely realistic), it’s that Watney is preternaturally skilled at adapting to complete solitude. However, I don’t deduct for this, because if it showed him at the depths of despair that someone in his circumstance would inevitably go through, it wouldn’t be nearly as pleasing a book to read. If you’ve read a lot about sensory deprivation and / or what happens to prisoners over long stints in solitary confinement, I’d suspend the disbelief that might come from that knowledge and just accept that Watney is exceedingly good at saying, “Pity-party over. It’s time to make this work.” In short, humorous Watney is just a lot more fun to read than would be a despondent astronaut.
I think I’ve been clear that this is an outstanding book, and everyone should read it. I guess if you absolutely hate science (of any kind–because there’s botany, biology, physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. all rolled up into this book), you may find that it’s hard to stick with the glut of scientific / engineering discussions coming at you. Still, you shouldn’t hate science that much—what the hell is the matter with you. Weir writes in a readable style and the reader doesn’t get awash in minutiae. (For example, Watney even names the unit kilowatt-hour/sol [sol=a Mar’s day] the “Pirate-ninja” to make it more palatable and humorous.)
Read it. You’ll like it. Also, don’t wait because the movie is supposed to come out in the Fall.
The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Coroner’s Lunch uses a popular and intriguing technique of setting a crime novel in an unconventional landscape. Like Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels (most famously Gorky Park), James Church’s Inspector O novels (e.g. A Corpse in the Koryo), or Laura Joh Rowland’s Sano Ichirō samurai detective novels, Cotterill’s book places a protagonist staunchly devoted to the truth into a sea of ideologues who value appearances more than facts and who will do anything to maintain their precarious grasp on power.
This approach appeals for a couple of reasons. First, it maintains a line of tension in terms of the world against the protagonist on top of whatever other plot conflicts may exist (criminal against investigator.) It also allows us to recognize the virtues that we find appealing amid a people that we think are a world apart.
While crime fiction is plot driven, this particular variant requires strong character development. We must have a lead character that stands out against the bleak landscape of the authoritarian regime that employs him. However, at the same time, the character mustn’t stand out by being bold and defiant in the manner we might expect of a crime novel set in New York City. Such a character is unbelievable amid totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union, North Korea, feudal Japan, or—in Cotterill’s case—Laos, circa 1975. We can’t believe such a character wouldn’t be killed by leaders who have people summarily executed on a regular basis. So the character must be clever, adroit at manipulating the system, and a quiet anti-ideologue.
Cotterill’s Dr. Siri Paiboun largely fits the mold, but is a little more irreverent than usual. The old doctor is drafted into being Laos’ national coroner because most of the educated class has fled the country–this despite the fact that Paiboun’s medical expertise is not in forensics. The ultimate source of his bold demeanor is that he is an old man, and he figures that there’s not much that they can do to him. If he were to be executed he wouldn’t lose much longevity over his natural lifespan, and if they sent him to camp, it wouldn’t be as foreboding as the places he has once been. Additionally, he has a highly placed friend, and—beyond that–they can’t replace him in short order. Making Paiboun disappear as Communist regimes were known to do is not an option. Still Siri is clever and does know how to ride the line without tipping across it.
The plot revolves around two crimes. The first is the death of the wife of a high-ranking Party official. The second is the discovery of three Vietnamese government agents in a lake in rural Laos. Both of these cases are high-profile and create incentives to keep truth from coming out.
One element of Cotterill’s novel that is outside the mold for this type of book involves supernatural activities. It seems that–like The Sixth Sense’s Macualay Culkin—Dr. Paiboun sees dead people. Perhaps this device was added to set the novel apart from others in the aforementioned class. For me, this approach seemed superfluous and disadvantageous. Siri’s “gift” kind of detracts from his strength of character because it’s not so much his brilliant mind that is solving murders as the victims giving him hints.
I will say that this supernatural element is introduced in a great way and that it could have been used throughout the novel to a much better effect. When the dead people first visit him, it’s in the form of a dream. At first we don’t know whether his subconscious worked out the solution or whether there is something supernatural going on. However, the author adds a manipulation of the material world so that we know this is supposed to have really happened and later this becomes abundantly clear. I think it would have been better to maintain the ambiguity. People reach solutions to difficult problems through sleep all the time, but we don’t live in a world in which the physical is manipulated supernaturally. Not that there is anything wrong with supernatural fiction (I read a lot of it.) However, crime fiction works best in a realistic world, as does historical fiction. This novel straddles those two genres, and throwing in supernatural events muddles the setting a bit.
Overall, I thought the book was well-written and the main character was humorous and intriguing. If you liked the kind of books I mentioned in the first paragraph, I believe you’ll like adding this to the mix.
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist is Orhan Pamuk’s theory of the novel, and is based on a series of lectures given by the Turkish Nobel Laureate in 2009. It’s a brief work, consisting of less than 200 pages written across six chapters plus an epilogue. Pamuk explores just a handful of concepts, but he elaborates on each with examples from literature. Having said that, Pamuk has the novelist’s gift for strategic ambiguity, and there are some ideas–such as the “secret center of the novel”–for which the author leaves much for the reader to interpret.
In the first chapter, Pamuk explores what occurs in the mind of a reader as they consume a novel. He proposes nine mental activities that one engages in over the course of reading a novel. These activities range from the essence of reading, such as observing scene and narrative arc, to less essential acts such as self-congratulatory narcissism. A central theme is the novel as a visual medium in that the mind converts words into images and those images are what are experienced in reading. The final action is search for the novel’s “secret center,” an important element of Pamuk’s theory and the topic of the book’s final chapter.
The title subjects are also introduced in the first chapter, i.e. naïve and sentimental novelists. Pamuk borrows this concept from Schiller, who used it to describe poets. The naïve novelist writes spontaneously and with confidence that he or she is capturing reality in the work. The sentimental novelist is much more uneasy about the degree that his work will convey something true. While an oversimplification, this idea corresponds somewhat to the much more commonly known division of writers into outliners and non-outliners, i.e. some writers can’t get started until they’ve done extensive research and outlining, but others begin with—at most—a vague outline in their heads and let the words stream from deep within.
The second chapter discusses the reader’s inability to accept that the novel is complete fiction—and, conversely, what truths a novelist reveals in the process of writing a purely fictitious work. (It should be noted that while Pamuk refers throughout to the “novel,” he’s really referring to the “literary novel.” Much of what he has to say isn’t relevant for either commercial or genre fiction.) Pamuk points out that it’s not just gullible yokels who believe that what he’s writing is autobiographical. Sophisticated readers who work in the publishing industry have been known to think he is living the life of one of his characters. On the other hand, when an avid reader suggested that they knew Pamuk so well because they had read all his books, he found himself being embarrassed. This embarrassment wasn’t because he felt they had learned any details of his life, but that they had developed a psychological insight.
The next chapter is on character, plot, and time. As one would expect, character is the most important and substantially addressed topic. I say that not because it’s listed first, but because we are talking about literary fiction—a medium in which character is of the utmost importance and plotting is loose to optional. However, the portion of the chapter that I found most interesting was the question of time in novel. Time stretches, compresses, and can bounce non-linearly in a novel. The protagonist’s time is on display in the novel, and that can be done artfully or not.
The fourth chapter is the one that most deeply delves into the topic of novel as a visual media, one which is more closely related to painting that to the media to which the novel is more frequently compared. Here he divides novelists not into the naïve and the sentimental, but into visual versus verbal writers. Pamuk suggests that the novel is a series of frozen moments as opposed to a continuous running of time—and thus its connection to paintings. Of course, Pamuk was a painter before being a novelist, and thus may be more prone to see that connection than most
The penultimate chapter is a comparison of novels to museums. No two things might seem farther apart at first blush, but a museum is a themed collection of artifacts that hopefully serve to tell a story—story here being used not as fiction but as a narrative that could contain fact, fiction, or mythology. This discussion really continues on the theme of the visual aspect of the novel. It suggests that those artifacts that are seen or manipulated in a novel convey a great deal of what the author wants to get across and help to create a more real fictional world. Pamuk elaborates on the connection by using three points to connect museums and novels that are all related by pride.
The final chapter elucidates the “center” of the novel. This is a concept that Pamuk has written around since the beginning of the book without providing a clear conceptualization. The first line of the last chapter defines the center as: “…a profound opinion or insight about life, a deeply embedded point of mystery, whether real or imagined.” The idea of a center, we are told, separates literary fiction from genre / commercial fiction. Readers and authors of genre fiction may find themselves becoming miffed with Pamuk for saying that such works either don’t have a center or have one that’s painfully easily found. He does make explicit exceptions for works by Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem, and one would expect that works of speculative fiction by the likes of Vonnegut, Murakami, and LeGuin would meet his approval as well. However, the presence of a tight story arc—one of the factors that makes work salable—is part of the reason genre fiction tends to have a readily discovered center. For Pamuk, the name of the game is writing a work that has a center that isn’t easily discovered, but neither is so deeply hidden as to remain forever beyond the grasp of most readers. He suggests the novel should be a puzzle, which is solved to reveal the center.
The epilogue includes some autobiographical insight and elaboration on what Pamuk was attempting to convey in this work.
I’d recommend this book for writers as well as serious readers of novels. Obviously, it’s well-written, but beyond that it offers insights that make the reader do some of the work—just what Pamuk proposes a novelist should do.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 