Hmmm. A Young Adult book. About Teens with Terminal Cancer.
This is not the kind of book I would normally buy. But I did, and I read it (in a couple ofHmmm. A Young Adult book. About Teens with Terminal Cancer.
This is not the kind of book I would normally buy. But I did, and I read it (in a couple of sittings), and I cried like a baby at the end (like I was supposed to), and for a brief moment I felt confused that maybe I had learned a valuable life lesson from the precociously witty heartbreaking zingers of Hazel and Gus. But I'm not sure that it was any more of an emotional breakthrough than my reaction to the death of Ali McGraw in "Love Story".
Terminally ill children *are* heartbreaking. Writing on the topic in a way that is not emotionally manipulative seems almost impossible. John Green doesn't avoid the trap entirely. Given the subject matter, this book was much better than I had anticipated. Which is to say that Green writes with a charm that almost balances out the component of emotional manipulation. But not entirely.
Ah. What the heck. Read the damn book. You'll laugh. You'll cry.
I think very highly of William Gibson. I've been vastly entertained by three of his novels and can't wait to get my hands on more of his fiction. But I think very highly of William Gibson. I've been vastly entertained by three of his novels and can't wait to get my hands on more of his fiction. But this collection of non-fiction pieces, written over a span of several decades, is a disappointment, likely to be of interest only to diehard Gibson fans.
Don't get me wrong. There's nothing here to change my impression that Gibson is smart, and a fundamentally nice guy. But pieces like the 1993 essay about his impressions of Singapore for "Wired", or two essentially similar 2001 pieces about the futuristic appeal of Tokyo as a setting for his fiction were probably only modestly interesting when first published and have not improved with age. As coiner of the term "cyberspace", Gibson is probably doomed to suffer a lifetime of being asked to write pieces that try to predict the future. Does reprinting such efforts really address some deep-seated need among the reading public? I doubt it.
To his credit, Gibson adds a little coda to each such dated piece, in which he signals his own embarrassment at serving it up again. One senses this book was the brainchild of some enthusiastic soul working for his publisher. It is a fundamentally misbegotten effort.
If you have yet to discover the fun to be had in reading Gibson, try "Neuromancer". Or "Pattern Recognition". Or "Spook Country". Or any of his fiction. But give this collection a miss....more
There are flashes of charm in this book, counterbalanced by some very tedious patches indeed. Elif Batuman is apparently well-connected enough to haveThere are flashes of charm in this book, counterbalanced by some very tedious patches indeed. Elif Batuman is apparently well-connected enough to have Roz Chast do the artwork for the book cover. She also seems to have a remarkable talent for self-promotion. This book has generated a considerable amount of buzz, and some near-hagiographic reviews.
I don't quite understand why. If one wanted to view things uncharitably, Ms Batuman spent seven somewhat aimless years as a graduate student in comparative literature at Stanford without ever really figuring out why she was there. She did prove quite adept at ferreting out travel grant money, which she used to make various trips to Russia and other former Soviet republics. This book is essentially a travel memoir - the record of those trips. Like most travel memoirs, it is interesting only in spots. Two of the book's seven chapters are quite well-written and manage to sustain the reader's interest (the author's attendance at a conference about Tolstoy held at the Tolstoy estate, a trip to Saint Petersburg to visit a reconstruction of an ice palace first built in the reign of Catherine the great).
But that's as good as it gets. Ms Batuman once spent a dismal summer visiting Samarkand. Inexplicably, she insists on telling us all about it. In excruciating detail, spread over three chapters. It takes up almost half of the book and is indescribably tedious. As a general rule, other people's travel memoirs are most interesting when things go wrong, but Ms Batuman's account of her summer in Samarkand almost made me stick pencils in my eyes, just to make it stop. Fortunately, the Kindle has an off switch. Two other chapters, the author's ruminations on Dostoyevsky prompted by a trip to Venice and an account of a conference devoted to Isaac Babel that she helped organize at Stanford, were readable, but not particularly interesting. Ms Batuman, or her editor, should have realized that departmental gossip, though it might be catnip for graduate students, is of almost no interest to anyone else.
One point needs to be addressed. Elif Batuman does not want you to think of this book as just a collection of travel pieces. Seven years in graduate school have apparently given her higher aspirations. So she places this really bizarre section at the end of her introductory chapter, in which she essentially seems to be claiming profundity by association. This kind of thing:
What if you read "Lost Illusions" and ... you went to Balzac's house and Madame Hanska's estate, read every word he ever wrote, dug up every last thing you could about him - and then started writing? That is the idea behind this book.
Say what now? Is Ms Batuman suggesting that simply attending a conference on Tolstoy held at the Tolstoy estate will provide deep insight into his work, or magically improve the quality of one's writing about Tolstoy? This seems charmingly naive, not to say stupid. Or is she just trying to assign some kind of retrospective meaning to her seven years at graduate school?
At any rate, the book is studded throughout with Batuman's assorted drive-by thoughts about various authors, most of them Russian. These are largely innocuous, with the exception of her "analysis" of Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed", which is an embarrassment from start to finish. A plodding, blow-by-blow summary that stretches for pages, is followed by a summary of what her Stanford professor told the class about it, leading in to her infatuation with charismatic classmate Matej, a smouldering Croatian cliche straight from central casting whose "narrow glinting eyes and high cheekbones" cause her to lose control altogether:
"a long-limbed, perfectly proportioned physical elegance, such that his body always looked at once extravagantly casual and flawlessly composed".
Matej alternates between smoldering and brooding, reducing his classmates (male and female) to a state of drooling concupiscence, eventually triggering some kind of epiphanic advance in Batuman's understanding of "The Possessed" (was the trigger his two-pack-a-day habit, the discovery that his great-uncle was a cardinal, or just the shock of finally landing him in bed?) It's to Batuman's credit that her discussion of "The Possessed" avoids the usual mind-numbing academic jargon -- an unfortunate side effect is that its utter banality becomes impossible to conceal.
I cannot agree with those more enthusiastic reviewers who suggest that Batuman offers particularly keen insights. She clearly enjoys reading, but is not especially adept at engaging the reader's enthusiasm. Unless you have a particular interest in obscure Uzbek poets, or the tedium of life in the former Soviet Union, this much-hyped book is likely to disappoint you. ...more
So. How to review an anthology of this scope, without simply parroting a list of its contents? I suppose by considering how well it meets its objective. When the book was published, in 1992, Dermot Bolger's aim as editor was "to reflect the cutting (changing) edge of contemporary Irish literature, focusing purely on fiction published in the previous quarter century". Elsewhere in his introduction, he explains that he wanted to break down existing stereotypes (Irish writers as "masters of the short story", still writing in "post-colonial" mode, in constant rebellion against the censorship that was prevalent through the mid 60's, just an "Anglo-Irish" tributary to the mainstream of British writing, focused primarily on the gaping wound in the Irish body politic that the "troubles" in the North represented, and so on).
Does he succeed? Without a doubt. The writing by the 50 writers selected for inclusion in this anthology is so broad in its scope that it completely demolishes the absurd notion of a single "type" of Irish writer. As Carlo Gebler of the Daily Telegraph blurbs on the back cover (slightly paraphrased):
"The message of this marvellous collection is that ... on the island of Ireland there live both men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, Catholics and Protestants, Nationalists and Unionists, Communists and Fascists, people who think of themselves as Irish and those who think of themselves as British.."
A bit long-winded, and not particularly elegantly articulated, but the basic message is, there are plenty of Irish writers whose work deserves to be taken seriously. And yes, they have met, and overcome, the challenge of working in the shadow of their literary antecedents - Joyce, Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O' Brien, and Beckett.
There are two flaws which prevent me from giving this book five stars, which I will mention briefly, before going on to discuss some of its considerable virtues. The first is that, well, 50 writers is a lot. Even in my most chauvinistic moments, I wouldn't argue that the crop of genuine literary talent working in Ireland today is that big. Bolger's claim that "they selected themselves" is a little disingenuous, and it's hard to avoid the (admittedly cynical) impression that there wasn't just a hint of mutual literary backscratching going on when he made his selection. A slightly skinnier volume, with the number of authors cut down by half, might have been a more interesting undertaking. This is, in the scheme of things, a minor criticism. The other point I dislike about the book (and my reason for placing it on my "structurally flawed" bookshelf) is that Bolger does something which I personally dislike in anthologies of this kind, namely he includes sections taken from full-length novels. Fully seventeen of the fifty pieces included represent selections from longer works by the authors in question. While I understand his reasons for doing this, it's just something that doesn't work for me personally. Your mileage may vary.
With that out of the way, how can I possibly complain about a book which introduces the reader to the work of:
Sean O' Faolain Jennifer Johnston Mary Lavin Patrick McCabe William Trevor Molly Keane Neil Jordan Bernard MacLaverty Edna O' Brien Roddy Doyle Dermot Bolger Colm Toibin Benedict Kiely Sebastian Barry Brian Moore Joseph O' Connor Dermot Healy
all writers whose work I was previously familiar with, and had admired enormously. Damn! I really wanted to resist resorting to the list of authors - let's just say those are the ones I consider in the top third. Oops! I forgot, there's that opening 4-page piece by Beckett, but it really didn't do a whole lot for me, and I reckon you all have heard of him already. One of the pleasures I got from the book was adding another seven or eight writers to that list. I could include them here, but why don't you read the book for yourself and make your own selection.
One note of warning, though. Incomprehensibly, in what can be termed his only obvious lapse from sanity, Mr Bolger has chosen to include a "story" by one Clare Boylan. Possibly one of the least interesting writers alive today, Ms Boylan apparently once experienced some kind of abortive romantic interlude while holidaying abroad on a package trip to Benidorm. Or possibly Torremolinos. She has been writing about it ever since. Don't say you weren't warned.
But, other than that single Costa Del Sol lapse into Cosmopolitan-worthy chick-lit, this is a completely awesome anthology. It may not be easy to find, but if you do come across it, you should definitely give it a home....more
I bought this book from Amazon, which was a mistake. If I had had the opportunity to inspect it physically, I would have rejected it out of hand. NothI bought this book from Amazon, which was a mistake. If I had had the opportunity to inspect it physically, I would have rejected it out of hand. Nothing to do with Sir Victor, but they have done something in this selection which I abhor, namely included excerpts of several of Pritchett's novels. I simply cannot understand the point of this, and it makes me terminally ill-disposed towards this volume.
If I want to read a novel, I procure a copy of the novel. This bastardization by excerpt has an appalling Reader's Digest feel to it, and I think it sucks.
Now that I've got that off my chest, I'll go read the short stories that are included. Predictably enough, there is considerable overlap between the stories included in this selection and those in the previous collection I've read "The Essential Stories". Which is another reason to steer clear of this kind of selection in future*.
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