Lit

 Lit by Mary Karr is a lively, impressionistic memoir of addiction and recovery. She bounces around, but most of Lit chronologically covers the two decades or so when Karr met her husband, deepened her alcoholism, had a baby, got sober, got divorced, and found Catholicism. At its best, the memoir captures Karr's interior turmoil in AA meetings and attempting to connect with God. This is true and vulnerable and interesting. Other parts of the memoir are so hazy (college, her husband) as to feel unnecessary when balanced with the rest of the book.

One of the blurbs on the cover of my edition praises Karr for being "unable to write an uninteresting sentence" (or something to that effect). That's an accurate review. A poet, Karr packs more into each clause than most writers. Something about that impulse, coupled with her gritty Texas aphorisms, didn't quite work for me. I found the voice taxing, especially during the vaguer sections of Lit. This criticism is subjective: I can see how many would appreciate Karr's commitment to originality. While my own taste bends toward the simplicity of Rachel Cusk or my boy Karl Ove Knausgaard, I would still recommend Karr's nonfiction, and let the reader decide. 

Ivanhoe

 Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott is a rollicking, fast-paced adventure novel set in the late Twelfth Century. The title character is a Saxon knight having returned from the Crusades back to his native England, a country still reeling from the Norman invasion in 1066. But Ivanhoe isn't really the focus of the novel. It's more about a kaleidoscope of characters that evoke one of my favorite Disney movies: Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, King Richard, and Prince John. They, along with other notable villains and damsels, converge in a variety of conflicts and rescue missions, battles and sporting events. It's an exciting read. Written in 1820, the prose is cumbersome at first: Scott wants to scaffold in a lot of historical context. But once the characters begin making decisions, it flies by. I'm only familiar with a few writers from this century, most notably Dickens and Hardy. Ivanhoe is much more exciting than those two, much more plot-driven. I don't know if it's better--many critics consider it genre fiction compare to Scott's earlier, more serious histories--but it was a joyous, engaging read.

The Third Realm

 The Third Realm by my boy Karl Ove Knausgaard is the third in his Morning Star series. I have not yet located online how many books are expected to be in this series, nor am I sure that Knausgaard himself knows. They are translated from Norwegian and appear every year and a half or so. The first, The Morning Star, was a dazzling read: apocalyptic references, horrific events, preternatural characters, and everyday life twisting into persistent dread. The second, The Wolves of Eternity, was a far-too-long prequel that explored lived experience to the point of mundanity. This book was somewhere in between the two of those. It went back to some of the main characters of the first book--with some good suspense and horror mixed in--though it intentionally never achieved a payoff or answered any of the many questions posed.

Knausgaard's novels are long, strange reads. There truly is no formula. I never really know what to expect with a character, a scene, a meditation. He's never followed conventional structures, and he blends genre frequently. While at times this is frustrating (you'll be almost done with a book and still not have an idea what it's about), ultimately I enjoy the experience. It's like a literary answer to the digital age. He plays with time and attention, stretching our limits of engagement, ignoring a dopamine-dependent audience, wandering around theme and plot and tone and form to the very limits of their expression.

Squinting at the Past

 Of all the good historical fiction I've read this year, John Ehle's The Land Breakers is the best. It's a gripping, comprehensive saga of the early Anglo settlement of an Appalachian valley in present-day North Carolina. It reads like Little House on the Prairie, only for an adult audience. Ehle doesn't spare complicated details like slavery, sexual tension, and colonization. He also doesn't moralize: the colonists' behavior ranges from inspiring to deplorable. Somehow, the narrative effectively drifts around, shifting close third-person perspectives, to encompass a large group of people while also giving us one sympathetic protagonist: the remarkable Mooney Wright. Highest recommendations for this tremendous novel.

One of the most popular books in the decade I grew up in was John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I hadn't read it until last month. It's a true-crime story set in Savannah, Georgia. Like its spooky title, the text is redolent of the Southern Gothic genre: full of gentility, ghosts, and decay. While undeniably entertaining, this book pushes through the limits of "nonfiction." In the afterward, Berendt freely admits to changing the order of events, and (some of) his long-winded characters attest that his account is (more or less) true. This is clear throughout the text--a lot of the dialogue is crafted exposition that no real person would ever actually say. Despite that, the book is flowery and decadent, colorful and depraved. I quickly read the story, interested in its outcomes, but it felt a bit empty, and manipulative, on the whole.

The Pueblo Revolt by David Roberts, on the other hand, feels very real. Here we have a fascinating writer (Jon Krakauer's old professor and mentor) doing his damndest to make sense of a historical aberration. In 1680, the Puebloans of New Mexico coordinated a single-day revolt that drove all Spanish colonists out of their land. For the next twelve years, they lived free from European occupation. This type of indigenous power had never--and would never again--been exercised in North America. Despite its notoriety, historical records are notoriously sparse about the details of this event. Roberts travels throughout the region--examining pueblo ruins and trying to ingratiate himself with remaining tribes--only to encounter silence. For understandable reasons, modern Native Americans are tight-lipped about sharing their oral tradition with outsiders. Somewhere, there is a rich, complex narrative about the Pueblo Revolt, but Roberts was never able to actually attain it. I sympathize. I picked up the book at a visitor center about 20 miles south of Taos, on a recent trip to New Mexico. An Anglo outsider, I am deeply moved by the landscape and history of the Land of Enchantment. But due to its persistent violence and exploitation (the descriptions of the Spanish are harrowing), I have not inherited a right to those stories. 

 

Meet Me in the Bathroom

 Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City (2001-2011) is an oral history compiled by Lizzy Goodman. Despite two good bookending essays, Goodman's words aren't part of the long book, which is, I suppose, how most oral histories are written. It was an entertaining read. The subject matter--a renaissance of sleazy garage rock after the trends of the 1990's--was mostly lost to me at the time: I had started college and dropped out of following music trends. Only later have I been introduced to, and enjoyed, bands like Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Walkmen, and the National. According to the book, the most influential of these is the Strokes, and while I'm not as taken by their music, I'm convinced now that they were perhaps the last great rock band before the internet changed music forever. Indeed, much of the landscape of the music scene and music industry is explained thoroughly by Meet Me in the Bathroom. I feel I understand the world better. I also know more bands, whose catalogues are now two decades old, but whose music--to me at least--still feels raw, fresh, and vital. 

I, Claudius

 I, Claudius by Robert Graves is another historical fiction novel I've read this summer (I've been into historical fiction for some reason). Narrated by the title character before he becomes the fourth Emperor of Rome, the novel is deliberate and craftsmanlike. It carefully establishes important figures and events in Claudius' periphery as he grows into adulthood, overlooked by almost everyone else in the royal family. The narrative perspective is fascinating: he will underplay off-scene atrocities and focus on seemingly bland details. This lulls the reader into accepting the slow progression of history until the final quarter of the novel, when it all explodes during the reign of Caligula, Claudius' nephew. Caligula was monstrous, a narcissistic sociopath that very nearly killed everyone around him. We become relieved that in a violent coup, our narrator inadvertently takes the throne. There's a sequel to this book, Claudius the God, which details his actual reign. I look forward to reading it, as I suspect that Graves maintains the narrative perspective--often unreliable, full of blind spots, and deeply rewarding to careful readers.  

The Fraud

The Fraud by Zadie Smith is an engaging historical novel. Her first in the genre, the story tells of multiple, real-life "frauds" that lived in her neighborhood of Willesden, in north-west London, in the nineteenth century. The chapters are short and brisk--it's a quick read. The characters' concerns range from the banal (literary celebrity) to the devastating (slavery in Jamaica). Holding these in tension, the overlapping storylines and perspectives are rooted in real events, and the connections are complicated and often surprising. The Fraud is a labor of love for Smith, fascinated as she is by her London roots and its history. Just like White Teeth, just like NW, just like Swing Time, this novel mines multicultural London for true glimpses into its humanity.

Smith is one of our great writers, and this novel was often funny, often troubling, and always absorbing. It never broke pace, sometimes to a fault. Her short chapters kept me turning the page, but some of the more difficult subjects--relating to slavery and colonialism--felt underdeveloped. The chapters set in Jamaica were too hurried. In my final judgement, the tremendous scope of The Fraud kept it from feeling as balanced as Swing Time or NW, Smith's excellent two previous novels, set as they are on smaller stages. Still, I admire good old Zadie Smith for her rare willingness to write across genres, and across time periods, and maintain terrific characterization, wit, and empathy. 

The Kammerzelt List

 The New York Times recently released a list of the 100 best books of the 20th Century. That list is  . . . fine. I like some of the books, haven't read many of them, and am only outraged by a few omissions. 

But I like lists. And their exercise prompted me to create my own "Best of," which is only 30 entries. Here is the authoritative, Dan Kammerzelt, list:

The Best Books of the 21st Century

30. A Time for Everything -Karl Ove Knausgaard

29. War & Turpentine -Stefan Hertmans

28. Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff -Anthony McCann

27. Political Fictions -Joan Didion

26. Ducks -Kate Beaton

25. Like You'd Understand, Anyway -Jim Shepard

24. The Quick and the Dead -Joy Williams

23. A Book of American Martyrs -Joyce Carol Oates

22. Battleborn -Claire Vaye Watkins

21. The Morning Star -Karl Ove Knausgaard

20. The Son -Philip Meyer

19. NW -Zadie Smith

18. The Road -Cormac McCarthy

17. The Human Stain -Philip Roth

16. We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland -Fintan O'Toole

15. Whereas -Layli Long Soldier

14. The Marriage Plot -Jeffrey Eugenides

13. Shadow Country -Peter Matthiessen

12. Between the World and Me -Ta-Nehisi Coates

11. The Year of Magical Thinking -Joan Didion

10. The Netanyahus -Joshua Cohen

9. Wolf Hall (trilogy) -Hillary Mantel (Unlike the Times, I grouped collected works. In this case, the last book--The Mirror and the Light--is the best of the three.)

8. Swing Time -Zadie Smith

7. The Argonauts -Maggie Nelson

6. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius -Dave Eggers

5. Gilead -Marylinne Robinson

4. The Books of Jacob -Olga Tokarczuk

3. Stay True - Hua Hsu

2. My Struggle (1-6) -Karl Ove Knausgaard

1. Outline (trilogy) -Rachel Cusk

Honorable Mention: Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, Just Kids by Patti Smith, Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, The Best of It by Kay Ryan, Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang

Trask

 Trask by Don Berry is a paragon among Oregon novels. It isn't Sometimes a Great Notion, but it's a terrific story of European settlement and Indigenous resistance that makes me, an Oregonian, view the foothills around my house with a new sense of gratitude and wonder. Elbridge Trask, a (real, historical) mountain man lives in the coastal plains south of Astoria. He feels an inchoate desire to explore the interior--the thick forested regions south down the shore. To do this, he needs to recruit local Clatsop tribesmen to help him navigate the many obstacles and negotiate with the wary Killamook tribe. Their journey is meticulously detailed and fraught with tension. The collapse of Trask's optimism and the subsequent conflicts lead to an ending that is shocking, original, and transcendent. 

One of the joys of Trask is its reality: the landscape is familiar to anyone whose visited the north coast of Oregon, from Seaside to Ecola State Park to Short Sands and beyond. They aren't called that in the novel, of course, but the shore is accurately portrayed as it would exist without Anglo settlement. The landscape itself is a major character, at times benevolent, often hostile. Trask is a book that stays with you, and visits to the Oregon Coast--which happen about three times a year for me--will forever be altered by this powerful text.

The Leopard

 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is widely considered one of the great historical novels. His only work of fiction, The Leopard describes the family life of an Italian prince (with the titular nickname) during the shifting allegiances of the Risorgimento. Jim Shepard considers this a top work, which is what drew me to it, and I enjoyed it. Tomasi was a real Sicilian nobleman and prince. His novel is skillfully written, with engaging characterization, and a perspective that only can come from a certain position in a certain historical moment.

That perspective is interesting. I'm fuzzy on 19th-Century Italian politics, but it essentially describes the decline of the aristocracy through the eyes of the aristocracy. In that way, The Leopard reminds me of J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur. Farrell's novel tells of the fall of British colonialism, in India, from a colonial perspective. Those two narrative voices--aristocratic and colonial--are certainly out of favor today. But both novels are successful, perhaps because they're so authentic. Farrell and Tomasi aren't apologists for the oppressors; they simply understand that culture better. The strength of both novels comes in the periphery of the action, where history is surging and infringing on the daily manners of out-of-touch protagonists. 

Always Coming Home

 Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin is a feat of world building. The book describe a future civilization in the Napa Valley of California called the Kesh. Set many centuries after an environmental catastrophe, the landscape and human genetics of the world still bear damage. There's an inland sea covering the Central Valley. The life expectancy is short; birth defects are common. Interestingly, there's a self-sustaining AI computer system remaining that's mostly ignored. The Kesh are a simple, matriarchal, agrarian people with elaborate rituals that evoke Native American archetypes and practices.

"Novel" is probably the wrong term for the text. It's a huge collection of narrative, poetry, songs, "researched" descriptions, charts, maps, interviews, and myths. It's the most comprehensive fictional world I've ever encountered, and since it's Le Guin, it leans heavily on anthropology. She concocted a whole language, cosmology, and social hierarchy. It's a rich, copious read. I'll admit that while Le Guin is a master writer, I skimmed the poetry after a while and ignored most of the glossary. I admire the effort behind Always Coming Home, and there was a lot to enjoy, but after 500 pages, I didn't feel the need to read every word. 

Paradise

 Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah is a strange, disturbing, tragic novel. Set in Tanzania during a period of political turmoil and colonization, the story focuses on an innocent named Yusuf. Because he's provincial and naïve, and because it's a close-third person of his travels, the reader doesn't really understand what's happening in the periphery. The narrative becomes increasingly dark. Part of the unease of this text is how wholly alien this world appears to me, a reader in 21st-Century America. In that way, I was reminded of Soul by Andrey Platonov. That book, set in Uzbekistan, seemed like from another planet. But while Soul was peaceful and hypnagogic, the ironically titled Paradise was unsettling and nightmarish. 

Trust

 Trust by Hernan Diaz is a brilliantly written, multi-dimensional, Pulitzer Prize–winning, mystery novel. Told through four perspectives, the novel centers on a gilded-age financier and his reclusive wife. The degree to which he is responsible for various calamities, public and private, becomes an essential question. Driven by this riddle, Trust is a quick read, and a good one. Diaz is a talented writer. The multiple genres of this unspooling narrative are artful, funny, crystalline, humane, and often beautiful. There are many high points in the text, things I will think about for a while.

The best line comes from a dying character, after a visit from a  priest: "God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions." I think what she means is that, to an unbeliever, "God" provides a trite explanation of the ambiguous, the unknown, the eternal, the horrific. It's too easy, even lazy, to fall back on religion. Implied in this statement is the elevation of "interesting questions." And it's here that I part ways from Diaz. Because there are several interesting questions posed in the first half of Trust. There are questions of economy, of society, and of human agency in history. I love interesting questions in fiction. It's one of the great strengths of the form. But this novel actually answers them, or most of them anyway, in a late reveal. In some ways that feels satisfying, and it's probably why Trust is so popular and why I generally enjoyed the book. But on a deeper level I take Joan Didion's stance in The White Album: we tell stories because we feel the need to impose a narrative on our actual reality, which is just a "shifting phantasmagoria" of disparate images. The most accurate fiction acknowledges our inability to find the truth. Therefore, despite the artistic  enjoyment of well-crafted story, fundamentally I don't trust Trust.

Trouble Boys

 Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr is an exhaustive, and exhausting, account of a hard-living eighties band. I am just now getting into the Replacements, and reading this provided more than enough context for their music. Mehr is a clear and competent writer, and the book was long but went quickly: I read it in class alongside my freshmen. The Replacements almost made it big, and that brush with fame, thwarted by their drunken self-sabotage, provided enough tension to maintain reading momentum. The band members spent the entire 1980's inebriated. They never graduated high school, never got driver's licenses, never had a radio hit. What they did was rock. They flared up and burned out like a Neil Young cliché. I have become a big fan of their music, driven in part by a new reissue of Tim and Trouble Boys. While musically they have some limitations--it's not hard to see why mainstream radio didn't acquiesce to their humor and primitivity--they are very good on their own terms. By my reckoning, the Replacements are the best bar band of all time. 

My First Summer in the Sierra

 My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir is a chronicle of his time at a dream job--vaguely attached to a commercial sheep-herding outfit--in 1869. Muir is a celebrated conservationist and an underrated writer. His account is pure joy. It's inspiring and energizing and envy provoking. It's also a feat of word-smithery, to describe the same emotion in different ways, in daily journal entries, over four months. Only in September does he run out of new ways to describe the exultant beauty of the mountains. Along the way, his odes are interrupted by caprices of the wild: dramatic bear predation on the sheep herd, for example, and vertigo from the rim of Yosemite Falls that haunts him for several nights afterwards. Another time they run out of bread for more than two weeks and had to live on just mutton. These setbacks would break the spirit of most others, including his co-workers, but Muir redirects the narrative energy back to euphoria. Imagine the most positive Psalms, over and over, in an unbroken flood of gratitude and wonder.

Stay True

 Stay True by Hua Hsu is one of the great memoirs of this era. A terrific book. I carved out extra time to read it--changing routines and ignoring obligations--so moved was I by story, the setting, the characters. I hesitate to divulge too much in this review, but know that the subject includes friendship, 90's music, grief, college, identity, California, authenticity, and the immigrant experience. Anyone who lived through the 1990's will find countless familiar references within this slim volume. Hsu is a brilliant observer of meticulous detail. He infuses so much specificity in his paragraphs that you feel as though you're cataloging the moment in real time, standing at his side. 

It's difficult to express how powerful the blend of authentic human emotion combined with crystal-clear craftsmanship is maintained in Stay True. It recalls the best elements of other great memoirs. Evoking the pathos of Crying in H Mart, the erudition of The Year of Magical Thinking, and the accurate nostalgia of Just Kids, it's an immersive experience. In my eager first reading (I will definitely reread this book), I was brought to to the edge of real tears, while also marveling at the perfect--perfect--structural composition. Stay True is glacier-fed water: sparkling and cold, pure without blemish, and bright in the sunlight.

Reign of Terror

 Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman is a vital, if depressing, read. Most of the book is a horrific litany of American overreaction to the 9/11 attacks, at home and abroad. Hauntingly, the prologue documents the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 and the responses the government did not take: no expanded surveillance, no torture, no mass suspicion of an entire group of people. Ackerman claims the difference in blunt--and convincing--terms, arguing that Timothy McVeigh was white. The "Forever War" that we're still living in, decades since 9/11, is coldly described in chapter after heartbreaking chapter. No president escapes blame, especially not the last two who've been publicly critical of the War on Terror. I've lived in this reality my entire adult life, and I remember much of the events described in Reign of Terror, but it's sobering to read them in an unsparing historical account.

The "thesis" of Reign of Terror is explained in the subtitle, but I don't know how clearly the line from 9/11 to Trump is presented. It's more a quietly outraged critique of a global war against a vague concept, "terror," and how destructive that lack of clarity can be. Late in the book, Ackerman describes the "endless nightmare" of the war. "In response to 9/11," he writes, "America had invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others for years, killed at least 801,000 people--a full total may never be known--terrified millions more, tortured hundreds, detained thousands, reserved unto itself the right to create a global surveillance dragnet, disposed of its veterans with cruel indifference, called an entire global religion criminal or treated it that way, made migration into a crime, and declared most of its actions to be legal or constitutional. It created at least 21 million refugees and spent as much as $6 trillion on its operations. Through it all, America said other people, the ones staring down the barrel of the War on Terror, were the barbarians."

Pedro Páramo

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo is one of the most influential works of Latin American literature. The edition that I read, translated by Douglas J. Weatherford, was a surreal novella that was at times inaccessible. I don't think the translation was the problem: Rulfo himself said that Pedro Páramo should be read three times before it can be understood. I found it baffling and beautiful, best read at a pace that ignores certain details while keeping a leery eye on the title character.

The novella begins with a narrator returning to the place of his birth to find his father. Within pages, the narrative voice changes and other characters begin storytelling. The blending perspectives cross into the afterlife as well--and a sense of time, as well as who is dead and who is alive--is all blurred in this collage of voices. It probably takes a few more readings to make sense of it all, but the story does seem to take shape in its final third. The ending is strange and satisfying. Given its links to Modernism and early Magical Realism, as well as interesting 20th-Century Mexican revolutions that flare up in the periphery of the main story, Pedro Páramo is deserving of the multiple readings that it requires.