50 Book Pledge #15: James Joyce—Finnegans Wake

Regular readers might remember my original plans to offer regular updates on my trek through Joyce's final and most abstruse work, Finnegans Wake. But as soon as I set to work on that, the book dove so deeply into incomprehensibility that to even attempt to summarize what I'd read would consist of nothing more than Skeleton Key summaries. Unlike Ulysses, with its connected but distinct chapters offering unique perspectives and pleasures at every turn, the Wake varied as its sections are, flow together with such abandon that I got nowhere trying to parse individual elements of the book/

It was only when I stopped trying to get a handle on the book, to even get a basic footing of where I was, that I even began to get into the Wake. Around that time, however, the book started to make some kind of sense. Based around Viconian cycles, the Wake is, narratively speaking, easy to figure out. After all, Joyce repeats the story ad nauseam, of the protagonist's social rise and subsequent fall from grace over a lewd encounter in a park and his irrepressible guilt. The same characters appear to reenact the basics over and over, each time as new figures with new, gnarlier paths to the same outlet. And in HCE's all-pervasive sense of guilt is the guilt of Ireland past and present, an anthropomorphic realization of the suffocating cloud of Catholicism that hovers over Joyce's ex-pat recreation of his homeland. The only deliverance comes through the water form of HCE's wife, ALP, whose mysterious letter has the power to wash away her husband's sins (or her husband entirely). But ALP, like Joyce's best women characters—Molly Bloom, Gretta Conroy—exists outside her husband's hopeless encasement in Ireland's moral carbon monoxide. ALP's chapter, filled with river names and the constant burbling of water imagery, is perhaps the most poetic, liberated passage Joyce ever wrote.

Other aspects of the story slowly coalesced around these relatable touchstones. The twin sons of HCE, each representing a half of his personality, although not split along the lines one might expect. Shaun, the twin with the capacity for public leadership, is also the one who is insecure, petty and conservative. Shem, disdained by all, is not only the intellectual force that could give that leadership weight but is also the sexual curiosity that will ultimately lay HCE low (the kind of curiosity that can turn to depravity if repressed by the uptight forces of Shaun). Shem, naturally, is meant to be Joyce, which is both deceptively humble self-aggrandizement and, in the case of the chapter that brutally, hilariously castigates Shem, the purest self-flagellation of this guilt-besodden novel. But again, he's really the hero of his own book. Perhaps the cleverest aspect of the entire book, Shem slowly teaching his oblivious brother about sex via the geometrical representation of their mother's vagina, plunges into new depths of sexual morass, but this also reveals the triumphant humanity of this figure when he forgives his infuriated, eroticized and scandalized brother's subsequent outburst.

Entire chunks of the Wake are a mystery to me and shall likely remain so for years, if not my entire life. To even recognize a reference, historical or lingual (or both), in one of Joyce's polyglot puns marked a victory. The only way to get through it was to read it aloud, where the flow of the language barreled over its insensibility. But this also brought out the real hook of the novel, its incessant ability to get a laugh. Anthony Burgess rightfully praised this facet of Finnegans Wake, and regardless of how much one understands of the chapter of the kids doing their homework, or of the nightmarish collage of stories and media at play in HCE's tavern (a prescient bit of attention-deficit sensory overload), this is one of the funniest, cheekiest books ever written.

Already, I see the Wake everywhere I turn. So deliberately obscure, its depths can lure the reader into solving its dream puzzles at the expense of ignoring the surface-level delights that are so dense and ahead of their time that modern works can be tied to them. When I saw David Lynch's Wild at Heart and, even more recently, Lost Highway, the former's pan-temporal existence of all pop culture at once and the latter's Möbius-strip, transfiguring structure instantly called to mind Joyce's magnum opus. I see fragments of it in other films, music, literature and art, and some of its puns even seem to anticipate more modern phrases or events. I have never been so routinely dejected while reading a book, but as each absurdity or deft bit of idioglossia kept me going, my appreciation for this masterwork grew and grew. And if it is so regularly bewildering, that is only because nothing can be said to be like it, even though everything before and after it seems to lead to and issue forth from its oneiric, river language.

50 Book Pledge #16: Laurent Binet—HHhH: A Novel

If two things in this world have been done to death they are the WWII historical novel and glib, self-referential postmodernism that sidesteps narrative for telling the audience how hard it is to write a narrative. But by God, Laurent Binet managed to throw these things together and wind up with the best new book I've read in years. Binet's digressions, though routinely amusing and occasionally a bit grating, add to the overall effect of Binet's attempt to lionize the Czech and Slovak assassins who killed Reinhard Heydritch, possibly the most dangerous Nazi under Hitler and the true architect of the Holocaust. Binet manages to turn all of his story-interrupting tics into reflections of our continuing (possibly endless) quest to make sense of the horror of Nazi policy, and he also increases the tension of the stranger-than-fiction events he recounts with his interruptions and tics. Translated with terrific informality by Sam Taylor, HHhH is a fleet but unexpectedly powerful account of one of the few tales of WWII not covered to death, despite it being one of the most crucial events of the whole war.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #14: Simon Reynolds — Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984

The post-punk era of music charted in Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again constitutes my favorite period of popular (sic) music of the last century. Reynolds' broad overview gives a fair encapsulation of why that is: he persuasively argues that the punk movement quickly reduced itself to regressive rock riffs and a simplistic, unadventurous rebellion that actually reinforced the rock it was meant to destroy. Post-punk, on the other hand, delivered on the promise of their '76 and '77 forbears. Reynolds displays an admirably open appraisal of the various forms of music produced during this six-year period of explosive creativity, lending equal artistic credence to the extreme noise pollution of industrial and just plain out-there bands as well as androgynous, image-conscious synthpop bands. Reynolds finds certain links between all these offshoot genres, noting the intellectual, even Brechtian approach to pop that defined some hit-makers looking to corrupt the machine from within and without, or the debt owed to producers like Giorgio Moroder and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Compared to the purist tone of so much punk writing, Reynolds almost verges on the anti-rockist, and he puts forward the case that Donna Summer had as much impact on this fertile period as the Velvet Underground or Can.

The book falters in its lack of focus, suffering the typical overview's flaw of giving just enough information to intrigue the reader before moving the next group of scene. And if Reynolds critiques so much of punk's values and value judgments, he is not so unlike them in his routine estimation of a group's first work as their best. Not only does he cease exploring this kind of music at the 1984 mark, he rarely even makes vague reference to what some groups did after this cutoff. For example, he speaks of Depeche Mode's early promise without ever touching upon its true creative peak at the end of the decade. Nevertheless, Reynolds at least differs in his appraisal of the early peaks of punks vs. those of the next wave: where punk bands generally fell apart because they could only muster enough energy and spark for one statement, so many post-punk bands assembled out of such varied tastes and intellectual goals that they collapsed from too much artistry, not too little. I added more than a dozen groups to a list of bands to check out reading this book, and I've already discovered some great gems from it. Recommended

50 Book Pledge #13: Alan Greenberg—Every Night the Trees Disappear

A Werner Herzog film shoot is an invariably absurd, harrowing thing, and few matched the intensity and insanity of the production of Heart of Glass. At least, that's the impression I got from Every Night the Trees Disappear, a revised edition of the making-of book written by Alan Greenberg, one of Herzog's early admirers, friends, and witnesses. Greenberg packs his diary with stories of Herzog philosophizing madly, controlling his actors through hypnosis and fear, and treating a pile of dead flies with more reverence and respect than human life. It's a mad tale, but also one that reveals a great deal about how Herzog works, and how he thinks.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #12: Patrick deWitt — The Sisters Brothers

FINALLY getting back to reading after a busy end to my internship and then a week of just being out of it. I took a break from my Finnegans Wake reading and my tear through the Song of Ice and Fire series to check out this highly recommended dark-comic Western. I absolutely loved it. Clearly drawing on Cormac McCarthy, deWitt realizes he cannot capture McCarthy's almost Russian gift for human profundity in minute observation and instead strives to tell a more intimate story of two brother hitmen out on a task routinely interrupted by bleak oddities. It starts off hilarious, twisting that McCarthy style into deadpan humor with greater aplomb even than the Coen brothers' take on No Country for Old Men. Yet the closer it gets to its destination, the more The Sisters Brothers becomes an affecting, insightful view onto filial bonds, strained by differing, sometimes diametrically opposed, personalities and ambitions yet unbreakable and endlessly supportive. Even the sideplot about Eli's put-upon horse Tub is oddly touching, each new indignity suffered by the poor beast a fresh blow. I cared about that pathetic creature as much as I did the protagonists, which is an impressive feat in its own right given their reprehensible lives and the sad banality of Eli's inner narration. This book has been a huge hit lately among a lot of people I follow on Twitter, and I can see why they raved about it. One of my favorite contemporary reads.

50 Book Pledge #11: George R.R. Martin — A Storm of Swords

My favorite aspect of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, judging from its first three installments, is its respect for consequences. A Clash of Kings compounded an instantly complex series by charting the outcomes of A Game of Thrones' actions as they rippled out across Westeros and realms beyond. Fortunes rose and fell, and new players emerged to capitalize upon the deaths and victories, while others were instantly doomed by same. A Storm of Swords packs more into its hefty length than both its predecessors combined, but it maintains the series' sense of unstoppable inertia, of each action provoking reactions that have the effect of making horrible situations even more ghastly. I would say it also means that the uplifting moments spread out too, but nothing good seems to happen in Westeros these days.

A Storm of Swords travels down some shocking narrative paths—even for this grisly, no-one-is-safe series—but what makes it so wonderful (easily the best of the ASOIAF books I've read so far) is how skillfully it maintains character growth and how farsighted it is in its plot upheavals. Even when characters don't get as much to do, Martin clarifies them like never before; Catelyn Stark, for instance, spent most of book two and the start of this installment getting on my nerves. Impetuous and internally guilting her son for not listening to her every word when he replaces his father as Lord of Winterfell, Catelyn does little in the aftermath of A Game of Thrones, and what does is typically stupid, ill-planned and ultimately disastrous. Yet Martin, without forcing the point, subtly casts Catelyn as a reflection of Cersei Lannister. Cersei is not a POV character, so she's typically been defined up to this point by people who hate her, which has only been slightly balanced by Jaime becoming a POV character this time. But having to put up with Catelyn consistently doing the wrong thing out of concern for her family helps clarify some of Cersei's behavior, especially as she finds herself in over her head back at King's Landing.

Martin continues to excel with his outcast characters: Arya Stark's struggle to escape various forces continues to toughen her, while the bastard Jon Snow faces temptations out in the wild that force him to decide who he really is. Sansa's growth from an infuriatingly naïve twit to a disgusted, all-too-world-weary young woman trapped by decorum and the violence underneath it have transformed the series' worst character into one of its most compelling. Sansa does the least of any character, but that is because she is powerless to move, and the rosy chivalry of her thoughts in A Game of Thrones has given way to unending terror and a hatred she can only just suppress. But, as ever, the star is Tyrion, who rose so very high in A Clash of Kings and now falls so very low because of it. His act of bravery at the climax of the previous book should have won him accolades and acceptance. Instead, it incapacitated him long enough for his considerable progress at King's Landing to be entirely reversed. It all goes to hell for Tyrion in this book, and by his final POV chapter I don't know whether to feel pity for what his resentful family has foisted upon him or scared to see what he'll do next.

Martin leaves space between his climax and his denouement, and never more so than here, where the grisliest, most stunning action occurs just past the halfway mark. But if the shocks more or less abate by the end of A Storm of Swords, the story certainly doesn't, and the sense of dread that hangs over this series has never been more pronounced. The last two books ended on dour notes, but typically a few characters still held out hope. A Storm of Swords ends in near-total despair, where even the one character who enjoys a small victory is still left to the enormity of his situation. A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings pushed Westeros nearer and nearer to the brink, but the wholesale slaughter of A Storm of Swords appears to have finally pushed this series over the edge. I am both eager and terrified to see where it lands.

50 Book Pledge #10: Geoff Dyer — Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room

I received a review copy of this for Spectrum Culture, which I requested the second I heard about the book's existence. It didn't disappoint: Dyer's incessant rambling and personal anecdotes actually capture the spirit of Tarkovsky's masterpiece more readily than a more deconstructive monograph might have done, connecting with the film on an emotional rather than intellectual level. Tarkovsky would have approved. I'll have more to say on the subject in my forthcoming review but, for now, know that I highly recommend it, despite the occasional bit of superior dismissal on Dyer's part (not for Stalker, but seemingly for everything else ever made in the world).

50 Book Pledge #9: Suzanne Collins — The Hunger Games

I feel toward this book and its subsequent adaptation the way I do about Jurassic Park: both have amazing conceits and advantages unique to each form of the story, yet neither fully succeeds. The film cuts a lot of the book's waffle, but it fails to further develop, or even just reflect, the book's lack of celebration in the Games and its disgust with the waste of life to sate the rich and maintain order. On the flip side, Collins' longer novel utterly fails to clarify the layout of her imagined world, and her use of first-person perspective seems a way to avoid having to define anything outside Katniss' narrow experience. The excess of the novel has barely anything to do with character or environment, instead wasting pages on useless anecdotes, even in the midst of the games where Katniss' survival instincts are momentarily cast aside to let her dreamily reminisce.

Nevertheless, the book's worth reading for Katniss, who pushes back strongly against the "Bella-fication" of young female characters. Collins does give in to a vague love triangle, with Katniss thinking of her friend Gale and dealing with Peeta's maybe-not-so-fabricated-as-it-seems infatuation with her in the arena, but her concern for both boys comes secondary to her independence and willpower. I'm sad that I found an only marginally more interesting world in the text than I did in the film, but I imagine I'll keep reading to see more of this striking character.

50 Book Pledge #8: George R.R. Martin — A Clash of Kings

A Game of Thrones ends with enough cliffhangers that the other six entries in this still-unfinished saga could each be merely a continuation of one of the key threads introduced in the first book. But A Clash of Kings quickly makes clear that Martin is only getting started. The first half of the 730-page novel simultaneously expands and shrinks the scope of the narrative, venturing into uncharted realms of a region so thoroughly mapped in the first book that I presumed we'd already charted everything. Yet Martin also pulls back from the action to reconfigure narrative foci, introducing new POV characters and honing established ones with new character insights and growths.

Some characters who experienced so much upheaval in the first book find themselves somewhat stagnated, their dreams and desires muted by hard reality. Three of my favorite characters thus far—Arya, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen—all experience huge setbacks and perils that force them all to mature even faster than they already have. Meanwhile, the best character of the series, Tyrion Lannister, undergoes bold changes that make him even more endearing and likable even as he fights for the good of his loathsome family. The dynamic between him and his sister, Cersei, now chafing as Queen Regent of a dangerously belligerent son and further stressed over her twin's captivity, is magnificent. The two plot against each other incessantly, and the series of miniature victories each enjoys over the other is as compelling in its own way as the civil war ripping apart Westeros.

Amazingly, A Clash of Kings ends on an even more ambiguous note than A Game of Thrones, with utter chaos sweeping the land and every POV character placed in precarious positions, and all of them displaced from their homes. It's at the point where one wonders what glory any of the contesting kings would take in ruling the Seven Kingdoms, as whomever triumphs stands only to inherit a scorched earth and maimed smallfolk. If A Game of Thrones was unsentimental, A Clash of Kings is almost mercilessly bleak. But that only makes it more gripping to see these people still carrying on, even if in folly.

50 Book Pledge #7: George R.R. Martin — A Game of Thrones

I'd never heard of Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series before the HBO show was announced, news that didn't make me rush out to read it any faster. I love The Lord of the Rings, but I've never been one for the fantasy genre. I find too much sunniness in it, too much wide-eyed, Arthurian belief in the nobility of the Middle Ages. Good and evil are defined in stark terms, and codes of honor replace thick webs of politics. What a load.

All the more unfortunate, then, that I should have ignored Martin's series for so long. A Game of Thrones is so perfectly catered to what I like and dislike about fantasy that it almost seems made for me. Modeled more after historical fiction than anything, A Game of Thrones is so viciously unsentimental in its travelogue of scheming, intrigue, brutality and rape that it almost comes as a shock when the occasional flash of magic enters the picture. Yet Martin also avoids easy cynicism; his characters are flawed, some to the point of nearly pure evil, yet he contextualizes everyone so well that even the Lannisters have their moments of charm, and not just the sly dwarf Tyrion. There's a clear desire on Martin's part for the chivalry and nobility he casts out of the genre; it's simply that he cannot place it within this world and make it fit. And that is why the only character who truly lives up to the morally absolute, honor-bound standards of typical fantasy cannot even make it all the way through this book, the first of seven, without dying. It's a testament to Martin's skill that he satiated my thirst for more grim, realistic fantastical fiction even as he, for the first time ever, made me truly long for the simplistic goodness of a highborn warrior lord to triumph.

I also love that Martin understands that climaxes need not come in the last five pages and that falling action can be as powerful as saving all the good stuff for the end. This structure makes for a series of shocking twists rather than merely one, and it also helps Martin slowly push the scope of the narrative outward, never settling on any one character or story arc, not even that of poor Eddard Stark. By the end of A Game of Thrones, I couldn't wait to continue on in the series because it so effectively hinted at bigger stories (and not merely bigger action, which is over all too quickly). Highly recommended.

50 Book Pledge #6: Philip Pullman — The Golden Compass

Having seen and quickly forgotten the decent 2007 adaptation of this book, I never got around to its source material, which is a shame because I would have treasured this as a teenager. An accessible fantasy book warning against religion, The Golden Compass could have helped my rough transition into atheism by giving me a storytelling backup, not merely the boring den of facts. And I must say, it's a fantastically swift read, even taking into account I'm an adult and this book can be easily read by children. The narrative momentum never falters in this first installment, and I more or less plunged headlong into the next installment the second I finished.

50 Book Pledge #5: Albert Camus — The Stranger

A short novel, but the way Camus writes, it'd breeze by at six times the length. His spare style nevertheless burrows deep into his cryptic protagonist, to the point that it contains ideas well beyond existentialism. A clear absurdist streak marks the meaningless progression of events that occur to Monsieur Meursault, who nihilistically recognizes their meaninglessness despite the occasional, wistful desire to connect with something. Matthew Ward's translation is, I believe, now the standard (for such a relatively recent translation, it is ubiquitous as the default English version), but it's easy to see why. He Americanizes much of the text while still leaving a few crucial words untranslated, especially "Maman," which he rightly ascribes a significance that "Mother" would not convey the same way. I had no excuse for not reading this, and it delighted me through the depression it gave me. In that sense, it's not unlike Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, a (dis)similarly bleak novella that manages to capture a multifaceted worldview and nuanced emotional palette with scarcely more than a hundred pages.

50 Book Pledge #4: Robert K. Massie — Catherine the Great

I can't really talk about this at present, as I'm meant to review this intriguing but occasionally narrow-minded biography for Spectrum Culture. Suffice to say, Massie's enthusiasm for Russian history is clear even without prior knowledge of his other books on various Russian leaders, and I am always both amused and deeply troubled to see just how eerily history constantly repeats itself in this vast, tortured country. Massie routinely compares Catherine's rule to the other "great" tsar, Peter, but he could just as easily have linked elements of her reign and some reactions to it to the Bolshevik revolution, even Stalinism. I'll have more to say about the book later, but for now I'll just leave you with a timid endorsement. I'll make my reservations (and compliments) plain near the end of the month.

50 Book Pledge #3: Martin Amis — Money

Like a Bret Easton Ellis novel as written by John Kennedy Toole, Martin Amis' Money is a savage gutting of the Reagan era as seen through the eyes of a clever but myopic and narcissistic glutton. John Self may not be as fat as Ignatius J. Reilly, but his appetites are more varied and vulgar, as his primary love is money, the root of all evil that allows him to trace his way along several crass desires. As Self gets deeper and deeper into the movie production from hell, everything slowly tilts off its axis until the detestable man is almost rendered sympathetic by the orgy of self-absorption and ego-stroking that surrounds him. I've yet to read a better takedown of the movie industry and celebrity, and the moralistic comeuppance that collapses on the narrative in the final chapters is so uproarious and insane that Amis narrowly avoids preaching for the ghastly hilarity of it all. I'd previously known of Amis solely as Christopher Hitchens' best friend, but now I'm eager to delve into the next book of his I can get my hands on.

50 Book Pledge #2: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — A Study in Scarlet

BBC's simply fantastic Sherlock series inspired me to revisit the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I was happy to stumble across some great new hardcovers from Barnes & Noble that collect all of Doyle's Holmes books into two volumes that cost only $8 apiece. I started, naturally, at the beginning, with Doyle's debut Sherlock novel, A Study in Scarlet. Man, it's amazing he ever built an iconic series out of this book, as it awkwardly ports over the mystery of Edgar Allen Poe (who is namechecked unflatteringly) without carrying over much of the suspense. It hardly even qualifies as a detective novel, with Holmes solving the case almost instantly and Doyle dragging the thing out by suddenly diverting into a strange flashback that uses inaccuracies about Mormons to paint an unintentionally hilarious "sinister" portrait of the religion. Doyle would go on to make one of the most well-known characters in literary history, but you'd never know it just by reading this.

50 Book Pledge #1: Vladimir Nabokov — Pale Fire

Nabokov's Pale Fire may be even better than his Lolita. A total put-on of a work—consisting of a poem by one "John Shade" and a foreword and commentary by Charles Kinbote—Pale Fire almost immediately reveals itself to be a farce, with the foreword so self serving on Kinbote's part that even the praise he lavishes upon his "dear" friend John is, on some level, all about him. The poem itself is neglected, a beautifully structured poem of unabashedly prosaic subject matter, speculating on life by way of the sights and sounds immediately at the poet's disposal. This style was anachronistic even when Nabokov published the book, but there's something charming about "Shade's" creation. That only makes Kinbote's resultant breakdown of the poem all the more hilarious. Vividly skewering the ability of critics to read anything in a work of art, especially if it conforms to some preconceived notion they have going into a piece, the notes flagrantly ignore the sensual (in the literal sense) quality of the poem to speculate about Shade's supposed allusions to the country of Zembla, which Kinbote may or may not have ruled before being deposed. There's not a single page of these notes that didn't make me laugh, even when it delved into darker realms of black comedy. Nabokov loved his pranks and jokes, and Pale Fire is his most immaculately crafted gag.