To Relax and Enjoy The Show.

I’m a bit of an Australophile. I’m not exactly sure why, considering I’ve never been there, but a blurb on the back of this book says “If you haven’t been to Australia, read Illywhacker. It will give you the feel of it like nothing else I know.”

So I read it, and if that blurb is true, Australians are loud and brash (but endearingly so), with a fondness for asserting their independence and telling comically exaggerated stories. Which is pretty much exactly the stereotype I already had of them. But Carey’s playing with the stereotypes—his protagonist is a personification of the country—so the whole thing comes across as a gentle mocking of Australians and the way the rest of the world perceives them.

“Illywhacker,” so says the all-knowing back cover of the book, is an Australian slang term for a con man at a country fair. It also brings to mind something like a jabberwocky, and it almost sounds obscene.

It’s a perfect title for a sprawling, surreal book that feels like a carnival.

Illywhacker is the story of an unprincipled swindler, Herbert Badgery, who cons his way through decades of his life in Australia, living to an astoundingly old age. But Badgery is likable. He’s good at what he does. His explanations for his actions always seem disarmingly logical, even when they’re not.

Badgery comes into the story as an old man (139 years old, to be exact), narrating his past, which starts as he’s a young man crashing an airplane outside Melbourne in 1919. Soon he’s raising money to build an airplane factory (the first Australian one), which never materializes, and ends up marrying the daughter of his biggest backer. That episode ends, and he’s wandering around the outback with his children, befriending cabaret dancers and Communist organizers. There’s the greatest pet store in the world (supposedly.)

The story spirals off in multiple directions, focusing on Badgery’s son Charles for a good part of the narration. Charles is quieter and more awkward, but as Herbert periodically points out, he’s inherited his stubbornness. Eventually, the story comes together as neatly as can be expected.

I don’t know if there’s a name for this kind of book, but it’s a kind of book I like. It’s a big, sprawling, messy, picaresque family saga that stretches over decades—in this case, the 1910s through the 1960s, and possibly beyond. Carey’s writing and subject matter kept reminding of other books I’ve read, but I could never quite put my finger on it. After a while I gave up on analyzing it and just let Illywhacker entertain me.

As Badgery says as the very beginning: “My advice is not to waste your time with your red pen, to try to pull apart the strands of lies and truth, but to relax and enjoy the show.”

The Life That Has Already Been Set Out For You.

I saw this trailer recently and found it unsettling. There something ominous about the trailer, and while it hints at the students’ fates without elaborating on them, leaving me desperate to know just what these characters are in for.  Since I’d read one of Ishiguro’s books before (When We Were Orphans, which I remember loving in high school), I read Never Let Me Go in anticipation of the film.

Taking place in the late 1990s in an alternate version of England, 31-year-old Kathy spends her time caring for other people, while anticipating the time when she’ll make her first “donation.” Most of the time, she looks back at her childhood, which she spent at boarding school called Hailsham, an idyllic place where doting teachers (called “guardians”)encourage the students to keep themselves healthy and create art. Hailsham students are completely cut off from the outside world until the age of 18, when they were released into the world, to spend a few years caring for fellow boarding school graduates before starting their own “donations.” Then, as one of the teachers warned in the trailer, their lives would be over.

The trailer basically gives away most of the film/book, but this isn’t a plot-driven novel. (Still, stop reading here if you don’t want to know exactly what happens.)

It’s more a collection of anecdotes that build to a deeply disturbing conclusion. This slowly reveals itself as Kathy recalls her days at Hailsham: they knew from a young age that they were clones, being raised for their organs. They have no parents and they can’t have children. Because this was the only life they had ever known, it never occurred to them that they could do anything else. It’s not until they’re out of Hailsham that Kathy realizes she loves Tommy, though their friend Ruth threatens to get in the way. Kathy and Tommy hear rumors that there might be a way for them to live together for a few years before they start their donations, and they try to find their old Hailsham teachers to ask them.

The outside world is difficult for the Hailsham students to navigate—while the rest of the population is grateful to them for their medical help, they have trouble confronting the donors and carers because of the dubious morality of the whole thing. Are they human? Do they have souls? Is this whole business ethical? People, Kathy knows, want as little to do with it as possible, preferring to think that their organs appeared neatly from nowhere.

Kathy’s narration is winding and colloquial, and while it makes her seem more real and believable, it can be frustrating. She meanders through anecdotes, pausing, hinting at things that will happen in later chapters, and, sometimes maddeningly, not elaborating on them. She says things like “But that’s not really what I want to talk about right now.” All she knows about society is her role in it, a role she accepts almost unquestioningly. And perhaps the biggest problem with the book was that I never got a clear sense of why or how she fell in love with Tommy. It’s true, love isn’t usually that simple, but for all Kathy’s rambling, I never got a clear idea of her romantic feelings.

Even though I never quite connected with Kathy, it’s still devastating to read about her and her friends as they head toward their deaths. (Maybe I wasn’t meant to relate to her—I’m just as bad as the rest of society who doesn’t view her and the other Hailsham students as fully human.) It raises ethical questions, both specific ones about bioethics and vaguer ones about living the life we’re planned to live. But despite its limitations, this is a jarring, haunting book, and it’s one I’m looking forward to seeing on film.

*My original title for this review was When We Were Organs, which, while punnier, gave away a little too much about the book.

The Main Thing Was, You Fought Back.

Every Man Dies Alone is interesting for its back story alone. Hans Fallada (real name Rudolf Ditzen) wrote it in 1946 in a German mental hospital. He died shortly afterward. It was published in German the next year, but the book wasn’t translated into English until 2009, when critics heaped praise on it. They were right in doing so—this is a moving, tragic, entertaining book, and it’s a valuable historical account. It’s also messy and flawed, but it’s still worth reading.

The opening pages set up the entire book—the postwoman trudges up the stairs in a Berlin apartment building to deliver a letter to the middle-aged working class protagonists, Otto and Anna Quangel. The letter contains bad news. The Quangels’ son has been killed fighting in World War II, and that’s what spurs the Quangels to start their own miniature resistance movement against the Nazi government. (This is based on a true story—in 1943, Otto and Elise Hampel were arrested for distributing hundreds of anti-government postcards around Berlin over a period of years. The vast majority of the cards were immediately turned into police, rather than passed around as the Hampels hoped.)

But beyond the first few pages, Every Man Dies Alone gets confusing, with a diverse cast of characters all connected through the Quangel’s building. The first few chapters are overcrowded, and it’s hard to find exactly how everything fits together—there are the Quangels, the postwoman, a family of ardent Nazis, a retired judge, an elderly Jewish woman whose husband has disappeared, and various drunken gamblers on the periphery. But it’s not fair to dismiss all these characters, because in that one building, Fallada has created a microcosm of wartime Berlin. The details, combined with Fallada’s unpolished prose, made the story very urgent and very real.

Still, it’s a relief when Fallada strips down the story and focuses on the Quangels. What’s most interesting about them is that they’re not typical revolutionaries. We’re used to hearing inspiring stories about people who stand up to oppressive regimes, but usually we hear about their political ideals and their strong beliefs in equality and their incredible courage. Fallada doesn’t do that with this couple. The Quangels are utterly ordinary, almost boring. They’re apolitical and uneducated. But when they suddenly decide to start writing anti-Nazi postcards and distribute them throughout Berlin, they’re aware that what they’re doing it dangerous. Fallada writes: Anna Quangel felt herself trembling. Then she looked over at Otto again. He might be right: whether their act was big or small, no one could risk more than his life. Each according to his strength and abilities, but the main thing was, you fought back.

That’s all they do: they write postcards with anti-Nazi messages and drop them in stairways in office buildings. It’s such a small gesture, and it’s no surprise that their efforts aren’t successful.

They eventually write hundreds of them, one or two or three at a time. The Gestapo catches on quickly, and starts tracking them, deciding that the postcard writer must be a single elderly man whom they’ve nicknamed “The Hobgoblin.” The book is great when it focuses on the Quangels, but Fallada’s Nazi characters are uneven. For the most part, they’re standard-issue scary Nazis, but sometimes they’re mind-bogglingly stupid. (One of them impulsively decides that the Hobgoblin must be work for the tram system, and when the Quangels are first arrested, he demands that they be let go because he’s too egotistical to admit that his theory was wrong.) Maybe they’re supposed to seem more human, but it feels as though Fallada’s walking the line between realism and satire and isn’t quite sure which way to go. It would be so much more powerful if the Nazis were banally and casually evil, the way the Quangels are banally and casually good.

The book starts and ends tragically—no surprise, given the title. But it gets better and better (and sadder and sadder) as it rushes toward the conclusion. Fallada strips away all the extra characters, all the unnecessary details, and leaves us just with a tragic love story, and the awful brutality of the Nazi “justice” system. If the entire book were like that, this book would be breathtaking. But as it is, I didn’t quite love it.

The writing style is alternately flowery and sparse, and there too many awkward, clunky sentences. (I don’t know if it’s Fallada’s writing or Michael Hofmann’s translation.) The other, larger problem is that it’s too messy, too flabby, too crammed with extraneous characters. Somewhere in here is a smaller, heartbreaking story of love and courage, but it’s lost in the shuffle. I feel guilty for criticizing Fallada because of the circumstances in which he wrote it, but I wish someone could have trimmed the story down. It’s valuable as a historical document and as a gripping story, but it doesn’t quite hold up as a literary achievement.

Addendum: I have one complaint to the publishers—the British version is called Alone In Berlin, while the North American edition is Every Man Dies Alone. I admit that the North American title is more evocative, and apparently closer to the sense of the German original, but it’s also sexist. Everyone Dies Alone works just as well.

A Change In The Weather Is Known To Be Extreme

Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.

Even though it’s a slightly awkward sentence, it may be one of the most intriguing opening openings I’ve encountered. The rest of Rivka Galchen’s delightful Atmospheric Disturbances does not disappoint.

Galchen’s 2008 novel follows the protagonist, Dr. Leo Liebenstein, from the moment his wife disappears. A wealthy, middle-aged Manhattan psychiatrist, Leo can’t understand where his wife, Rema, has gone, and why “the simulacrum” is in his apartment.

Leo wonders if Rema’s disappearance is related to the way he’s been treating Harvey, one of his patients. Harvey is schizophrenic, and is convinced that he can control the weather. Running out of other treatment options, Leo and Rema decide to pretend to be meteorologists from the Royal Academy of Meteorology, and “hire” Harvey for some top-secret missions. Rema pretends to be academy member Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, and feeds Harvey his instructions (the goal being to keep him in New York, occupied and out of trouble.)

More and more disturbed by the simulacrum living with him, Leo takes a trip to Buenos Aires, Rema’s hometown, and tracks down her estranged mother, Magda. Leo has never met her before, but she welcomes Leo, believing him to be one of her daughter’s friends. Magda hasn’t heard anything from Rema, and Leo ends up emailing Dr. Gal-Chen to see if he knows anything. Gal-Chen responds, and they start a correspondence about weather phenomenons, Leo asking Gal-Chen for more information. But there’s a catch: Leo discovers that Gal-Chen died in 1994, and he doesn’t understand who he could be speaking to. Still claiming to be a meteorologist, Leo accepts a job in Patagonia, where he’s supposed to research radar. Harvey follows him, as does Magda and the substitute Rema, and the whole mystery seems like it’s about to be wrapped up.

This isn’t a book with easy answers. As the book went on, I became more and more skeptical of Leo’s sanity, and started wondering if Rema hadn’t been replaced at all. Is this a mystery, or a meditation on falling out of love? Is Leo, who’s spent his life treating the mental illnesses of others, developing one of his own?

Maybe the whole book is about the failure of science to explain some of the mysteries of daily life. Leo is a psychiatrist who’s become tangled up in meteorology—he’s accustomed to logical, scientific explanations and solutions, but there isn’t one for his relationship with his wife. (The whole book—the writing, the themes, the setting—is all heavily influenced by Borges, and at times, it also reminded me of Haruki Murakami, another writer I’ve read recently.) And on top of all that, it’s a moving remembrance of Galchen’s father. I avoided looking him up until I had finished the book, in case it spoiled anything, but Tzvi Gal-Chen really was a meteorologist, really did die in 1994, and really was Rivka’s father.

This is a beautiful, surreal book. It’s heartbreaking and it’s funny, and while Galchen occasionally incorporates photos, diagrams and lists into the book, it never seems twee. It’s also short, but it’s not the sort of thing that can be rushed through. Galchen, as of yet, hasn’t written any other novels, but she’s published short stories and essays that I’m eager to check out, and she’s already shown herself to be a promising writer. This may well be the best love story about mental illness, South America and Doppler radar ever written. But in all seriousness, it’s worth reading.

Dealers Who Said They Were Through With Dealing Every Time You Gave Them Shelter

Maybe it’s because I’ve actually been to Girl Scout camp (and hated it), but Jayne Anne Phillips’ novel Shelter was one of those books that dragged me in and made me feel like I was actually there. It’s the story of four girls, aged around 12 to 15, attending a camp in rural West Virginia in 1963, and the older men who live on the fringes of the camp. In many ways it’s a coming of age story, but the book’s description hints at a violent event, which casts an ominous feeling over the whole book.

The book focuses on 12-year-old Alma and her best friend Delia, and Alm’a older sister Lenny and her friend Cap. Lenny and Cap, with their boyish nicknames (their real names are Lenore and Catherine) are more impulsive and adventurous, and they’re the ones who lead the two younger girls into a dangerous situation near the end of the book.

Phillips alternates between different points of view—chapters focus on Lenny, Alma, a drifter named Parson, and eight-year-old Buddy, son of the camp cook. Lenny and Alma are typical middle-class teenage girls, concerned with boys and gossip and worried about their relationships with their best friends (Alma is awkward around Delia because Delia’s father recently died, and Lenny is worried that Cap is going to leave West Virginia for boarding school.) Buddy is terrified of his drunk, unpredictable father. And Parson is the wildcard—he had an abusive, religious upbringing, escaped from prison, and is now doing construction work near Camp Shelter. His motives are completely unknown, and while he fights with Buddy’s father, it’s unclear what role Parson will serve in the book.

Phillips does well stretching the suspense out throughout the book. I started reading with the terrible anticipation that something would happen, but it doesn’t—at least not for most of the book. The girls have several late-night escapades in the woods, but nothing shocking happens until the story is almost over. The characters are all ambiguous enough that the climax comes as a surprise.

In some books the pacing would be a problem, but Phillips manages to keep the reader interested. Her prose isn’t always easy to get through, but her dense, oppressive style sometimes reminded me of Faulkner. Her writing is descriptive and evocative of the time and place—she lingers on small details, and does such a good job with it that I could almost feel the heat of the West Virginia summer. Like this:

She could hear them falling asleep to the right and left of her, going out like glowlights across the narrow aisle between teh cots. The metal springs stopped their minuscule, responsive squeaking. Just at full dark a lone bulb would come on outside with a buzz and a click.

I hadn’t heard of Phillips until recently, but I’m going to make a point of reading more of her books. This is a great warm-weather read: it takes a common experience like summer camp and turns it into something darker and more memorable. And while it’s not always easy to get through, it’s always engaging.

How Strange It Is To Be Anything At All.

This is a book about everything and nothing.

Haruki Murakami takes two storylines and presents them side-by-side, rather than weaving them together. There are connections between them, but they function separately. The first, taking up the odd chapters, tells the story of Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway from Tokyo who travels to the smaller city of Takamatsu, on the island of Shikoku, and ends up living in a library. He runs away because he hates his father, a sculptor who insists that Kafka will kill him and sleep with his mother

and sister, who left the family years earlier, an Oedipal idea that’s never fully explained, though Kafka constantly searches for his mother and sister.

The even-numbered chapters start with a U.S. military report of a strange event that happened to a group of Japanese schoolchildren during World War II. One of them, Nakata, grows up unable to read or write, but with the ability to speak to cats. The aging Nakata starts wandering, and ends up in Takamatsu, where Kafka is. Both Kafka and Nakata make friends along the way—Kafka with Oshima, the androgynous library assistant, and Nakata with Hoshino, an uneducated truck driver who feels strangely compelled by Nakata’s journey.

It’s a surreal, dreamlike book, and Murakami had me totally engrossed for the quick amount of time it took me to read it. It’s filled with talking cats, fish falling out of the sky, and the dead walking among the living. There are World War II soldiers, still young and still fighting, in the forest. Even more strangely (maybe because they’re more plausible), there are characters who emerge in dark alleys dressed like Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker. The reader accepts all this, because it’s so neatly weaved into the stories of Kafka and Nakata. Murakami does a good job of grounding it in our own world, or at least the seemingly surreal world of contemporary Japan.

Others have complained that Murakami used too many commercial references, cramming the book with Pepsi and Mazdas and Volkswagens and Nike logos. This never bothered me, because I don’t think he’s shilling for any company. Murakami has an eye for detail—he’s one of those writers who manages to describe every detail of the characters’ physical appearance and surroundings without getting boring. Murakami’s such a good writer that I was happy to let him tell me everything that a character was wearing. These are the moments when nothing important happens—how Kafka eats, how Oshima drives. But their banality makes them both startlingly familiar and strange, because most writers don’t bother with descriptions like this. The details make it real.

And it’s packed with more highbrow details, too. Most obviously, there’s Kafka’s adopted name. Kafka is urged on in his journey by The Boy Named Crow, his more adventurous alter ego. (Kavka, the origin of Franz Kafka’s family name, means crow in Czech.) The book’s title comes from a song written decades ago by Miss Saeki, the librarian at that the library that Kafka moves into. There are many more references crammed into the book, from the traditional Japanese literature in the library where Kafka lives to a prostitute who talks about Hegel. All this makes it seem as though the book is stretching for some grander meaning. Maybe it’s deliberate, maybe it’s the translation, but the dialogue didn’t always seem realistic—while it’s clear that Kafka’s intelligent, some of the lines he says are improbably eloquent and self-assured for a high school student.

Even though I enjoyed reading Kafka On The Shore, it wasn’t a book that stuck with me afterward. I finished it about three weeks ago and I’m having a hard time remembering the details, but I do remember loving it. Murakami said the key to understanding the book is to read it multiple times. I don’t know if I will. While I enjoyed it, I didn’t read it for clues toward unraveling it. There are many, many themes running through it—Shintoism, absurdism, dreaming, reality, identity, sex, pop culture— but I read it for the beautiful little details that it’s so full of. And I think that’s why I feel that way: even though it might be reaching for a broader significance, it works best as an account of all the little things, real and fanciful, that make life wonderful and weird.

A Fantasy For Cynics.

We’ve all thought about it.

At some point or another, we’ve thought about how useful it would be to be a magician, and use it to go to a more interesting school, or travel to another world, or just use it to play a trick on someone. But how would we act in those situations? That’s what Lev Grossman has done in The Magicians—taken a bunch of bored, disinterested teenagers, and instead of making them heroes, thrown them in way over their heads in unfamiliar magical worlds.

It’s a little too easy to describe The Magicians as “Holden Caulfield in Narnia,” or “Harry Potter with sex and drugs,” but that’s selling it short. Though the magical worlds are derivative, that’s what makes it work. Grossman has taken mundane, relatable characters and thrown them into the fantastical worlds we already know about.

Quentin Coldwater, a depressed, brooding high school senior, thinks he’s going to a Princeton interview when he gets sucked from a Brooklyn alley into a school for magicians. He’s offered admission there, and the magicians at the school convince his parents to let him attend. Brakebills, the school seems like a good fit for Quentin, since he grew up loving books about Fillory, a magical land of magicians. He trains as a magician, graduates, and gets let loose back in New York with his magician friends, until they get a chance to actually go to Fillory.

It took me a while to get into this book, mostly because it takes a while for the plot to get interesting. At first I found it too slow, and too Harry Potterish. (The Harry Potter books do exist in the world of this book—a character jokingly refers to Welters, a game played at Brakebills, as Quidditch.) It’s necessary to set up the story, but Grossman spends a couple of hundred pages on Quentin’s Brakebills education. It’s fun and detailed, but he didn’t need to provide this much set-up.

But The Magicians gets a lot darker (and better) toward the middle: after graduating from Brakebills, Quentin and his classmates travel to Fillory, the Narnia-like world they read about as children. They set out to find a character from the Fillory novels who disappear, but end up fighting in a war against the evil forces that have taken over.

Fillory isn’t even the darkest (or best) part of the novel. That would be the ennui that Quentin and his classmates feel after graduating, when they’re living bored, privileged lives in New York and partying way too hard. Despite the unlimited potential open to them (they’re magicians!) they’re doing drugs, sleeping with each other, and struggling with existential angst and boring corporate jobs. The book works because the characters are from the world as we know it, and because Grossman has done a good job fleshing out Brakebills and Fillory with details. Plus, the book is full of pop culture references, and even the fact that Brakebills is in upstate New York makes it all hilariously mundane.

Even though it’s a book about magic, a lot of it is about the world that we live in. There aren’t any clear answers, but one of the biggest questions it asks is whether it’s possible to balance imagination and magic with adulthood and responsibility—a question that applies even to non-magicians. Quentin’s a cynical, depressive character, but Grossman works a balance between his deadpan tone and a childlike sense of wonder.

Quentin and his friends sometimes feel like characters from a teen movie: they’re a little too neatly pigeonholed into their roles, and they rely too heavily on stereotypes. (There’s the chubby, friendly, slacker; the pissy, temperamental gay guy, and the loud, brash daughter of Hollywood agents.) But since the worlds of the book aren’t incredibly original either, the characters work. Everything seems sort of familiar, so it’s best to just go with it and enjoy the ride.

The biggest problem with the book is that it’s uneven. Surprisingly, the fact that it’s partly about a school for magicians, partly about overfunded New York hipsters and partly about Narnia doesn’t work against it—it’s hilarious to see what happens when the worlds collide. The problem is that it’s just too slow to get going (with the descriptions of Brakebills) and then the Fillory adventures, which happen almost out of nowhere, seem rushed and tacked-on. But Grossman’s good writing moves the book along and keeps anyone who’s secretly wanted to be a magician entertained.