The Summer Book

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson, belongs to the genre of literary fiction where characters work through grief. Usually, the loss is barely mentioned, as it is here. Usually, the characters behave strangely and sometimes destructively, often unable to articulate their sense of dislocation. The Catcher in the Rye is a good example of this genre. In Jansson's novel, a small girl and her grandmother deal with the loss of the girl's mother on an island in the Sea of Finland. The girl's father is present but ghostly, given almost no space on the page and often preoccupied with some kind of "work." So in their own way, the two generations-spanning women forge a unique sense of family and understanding, all against a spectacular natural backdrop. 

The Summer Book is written in a skein of small vignettes. Often hypnotic and preoccupied with natural things, like birds and seaweed, the novel drifts through the title season, making the landscape its protagonist. Minor characters, when they emerge every two chapters or so, don't feel real, as if they were under water or out in a deep fog. What's interesting is the book's persistence on strange metaphors, like an excellent late meditation, by the small girl, on earthworms separating and still living. This is as close as the reader gets to a clear theme, the sense that emotionally shattered people will fixate on the minutiae at the edge of perception, hoping to find truth. 

Against Everything

Against Everything is a collection of essays by Mark Greif that is, well, against everything. He criticizes reality TV, exercise, the Iraq War, pop music, consumerism, and so on. Two of the sixteen essays were great--one on Octomom (connecting her vilification to the 2008 financial crisis), and one on modern warfare (with heroic, mythological soldiers fighting in one-sided campaigns that cannot be considered war). As Greif is an English instructor at Stanford and an editor at a literary magazine,  his essays are well written and rooted in theory and philosophy. That said, I had a funny response to the book: I found Greif overly sensitive and alarmist (against exercise? really?), and yet the strength of the writing and his surprising connections buoyed the reading overall. In other words, I disagreed with most of the book, and also liked most of the book. 

The root of my disagreement with Greif is right there in the preface. He is inspired by Thoreau. He grew up near Walden Pond. Though it's implicit, he considers himself Thoreau's spiritual descendent. I'm more of an Emerson man myself. To me, Thoreau is every affluent teenager judging those with less privilege. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," Thoreau claims, with no basis, and then continues his hippie, freeloading condescension. Since Mark Greif aligns with Thoreau philosophically, I find many of his conclusions incorrect. But purely as a writer, I would much rather read Greif than the famous--sententious--transcendentalist.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway is much, much longer than The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms, and yet it covers a shorter time period, only about four days. The effect of this is that we seem to encounter every action, spoken word, and even private thought of those days. This is deliberate, as one of the themes is that a lifetime can be condensed into important events that last less than a week. The novel is more plot-driven than other Hemingway texts I've read, and the outcome of those four days is an important question that emerges early.

I really like Hemingway. By my estimation, The Sun Also Rises is a rare perfect novel. The short story collection In Our Time is right there as well. Some of his later work varies in quality a bit, and while For Whom the Bell Tolls may not be perfect (a little too much plot, some awkward dialogue/translation choices), it's still one of the best books in all American literature. A secondary character named Pilar is among the great voices in Hemingway's work, and her storytelling contains some of the most beautiful and challenging vignettes I've ever read.