2011 Booklist

I'm back again, with a new set of books to list. Isn't that great?

I bested my record AGAIN with 54 (count em) fifty-four books read this year.

Unfortunately, a lot of them were exceedingly short.

It's the usual potpourri of genres, though as I get older, the YA fantasy is getting cut out in favour of new directions in literature. No poetry this year, but I did read some 20th century playwrights, explore some rather frivolous subjects in non-fiction and get a small grounding in "modern" authors.

The list shall now speak for itself. I don't expect anyone to make it to the bottom without skimming.

1. The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe

I read most of this one in 2010, and despite its many flaws, I love it to pieces. The entirety of part 4 ruined the novel, but until then I found an incredibly sympathetic heroine, a page-turning plot even before her arrival at Udolpho and a compelling portrait of a horrendous society. Montoni wasn't half the villain I'd expected, Emily wound up marrying the WRONG man and Radcliffe let her own propriety get the better of her book, but I was well entertained.

2. The Monk - Matthew Gregory Lewis

Required reading if you've read Udolpho. This is a young man's answer to Radcliffe's genteel version of the gothic novel. In a word: pulped-up. Satanism, violence, murder, sex, depravity and damnation with religious hypocrisy thrown in for good measure. Some great scenes, some wacky dialogue, some tawdry shock value along the way. It was entertaining, yet it didn't linger with me the way Udolpho did.

3. Reading Like a Writer - Francine Prose

A non-academic's analysis of several components of writing. Things like dialogue, the telling detail, action and narrative voice were taken apart, helped along by examples from a variety of books. Technical, astute and appreciative. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

4. The Atlas of Literature - Malcolm Bradbury, editor

A set of short essays on the influence of place upon literature. Some were informative, some self-indulgent. Nice glossy pictures. I could have used fewer entries with more information.

5. Silent Night: The Story of the World War One Christmas Truce - Stanley Weintraub

A brief history of the 1914 Christmas Truce, an incident early enough in the course of the war to be possible. A madly detailed little account, but very moving to consider.

6. The Waiting Darkness - Willo Davis Roberts

When I need a break from the heavy stuff, a 70s gothic novel never fails me. This one was perfect. It had a plot I tore through frantically, an idiosyncratic choice of romantic lead (a bearded woodsman making his living on writing for the pulps) and, best of all, a sense of humour. Great little yarn.

7. In the Forests of the Night - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

The title may be the best thing about this tiny novella. Vampires in Concord out for revenge. The book made a splash when it came out for being written by a thirteen year old. To her credit, the writing's pretty good and she attempts some mature themes. Being thirteen really hampered her effort though.

8. Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder

A novel that attempts to tell the history of philosophy and be a postmodern looking-glass at once. The middle portion of the book was a triumph in these ambitions. Unfortunately, the set-up chapters were dull and the author could not find a way to satisfactorily finish the story. Also, the translation was...odd. Something about it was off. A middle-of-the-road experience.

9. This Baffling World No. 1 - John Godwin

Pithy and brilliant. Godwin assembled the facts and speculations in a variety of unexplained phenomena, including UFOs, the "devil's footprints" in Devonshire, the Man in the Iron Mask and the Oak Island Money Pit. Neither too credulous nor too skeptical and often sardonic.

10. The Case of Sergeant Grischa - Arnold Zweig

One of the best novels I've ever read, an underrated WWI story set on the Eastern Front. Rather than detailing the front lines, Zweig tells a story of the generals and pen-pushers, the war bureaucracy and its corrupt policies. It's the story of one man sentenced to execution, told through a vast tapestry of characters crucial to his case - some without knowing their involvement. Thoughtful, beautiful and heartbreaking.

11. Long Day's Journey Into Night - Eugene O'Neill

I got a huge stack of plays sometime in April and read this one on a whim. Literate and moving, so verbose that it gives the appearance of prose. Jamie Tyrone may be one of the great characters in 20th century drama.

12. The Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

The final work in last year's set of Harvard Classics, and the most dull. Twelve chapters of a Stoic emperor's musings. If it had been pared down to six, it would have been dynamite, but he reiterated his creed so often it got to be almost unbearable.

13. God's Little Acre - Erskine Caldwell

In April, I also rescued some prose works: Edgar Cayce, a bio of Red Skelton and two by Erskine Caldwell, a second-rate thirties writer whom almost nobody reads anymore. God's Little Acre is historically important for being a pulp fiction phenomena, selling some 6 million copies in paperback and getting dragged into court on suspicion of pornography. The plot? Hillbilly family digs for gold they think is on their property, hillbilly neighbour tries to get elected sheriff and a nearby milltown goes on strike. Along the way, everybody lusts after everybody else and an albino is abducted from the local swamps.... Might just be me, but I thought the whole shebang was hilarious.

14. This Baffling World No. 2 - John Godwin

More great accounts. Indian magic tricks, the Mary Celeste, the Coffins of Christchurch and some less interesting stuff on ESP...

15. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Edward Albee

Basically: two unhappily married couples get drunk, bitch and swear and humiliate each other and end up admitting to some of their dark secrets. How is this interesting? It shouldn't be, but it really is. The mixture of fact and fiction in the last act is fascinating.

16. The City - Frans Masereel

Other than a quote from Walt Whitman, this is textless. It is one hundred woodcuts of Berlin between the wars, showing everything - street scenes and interiors, factories and parties, poverty, loneliness, romances, suicide and murders. You see everything, public and private. There are street orators, beggars, whores, bankers, families, criminals, cats, dogs and car crashes. It's a masterpiece.

17. Zorro - Isabel Allende

A lightweight swashbuckler that didn't really stick with me in any way. A pleasant diversion, masked as literature.

18. A Morbid Taste for Bones - Ellis Peters

The first in the Cadfael series of medieval murder mysteries. Pleasant reading. It was the character of Cadfael that made it so good. One of the most likable, levelheaded detectives ever to grace the genre.

19. Joan of Arc: in Her Own Words - Joan of Arc

Stepping back from interpretation, the translator of this book chose to take only the records of what Joan is supposed to have said - much of it from the court case - and presented them in the fashion of a spare autobiography. There is also one account of the Siege of Orleans included at the end. I could have used a few more accounts to aid my understanding of what happened. Other than that, it was just fine.

20. Leviathan - Paul Auster

An intelligent pageturner. Awesome stuff. Unfortunately I think my enthusiastic reaction to this one is going to have a detrimental effect on the rest of Auster's output....

21. Women Who Run With the Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Started reading this back in 2010 and took a long break. Useful for completely lost young women. It helped me realise my feelings were not original. It was written in the oral tradition and therefore used paragraphs where sentences would suffice. It was good in its feminist way.

22. The Moon is Down - John Steinbeck

Propaganda for WWII! A good look at the results of enemy occupation on the minds of all the people involved. Grim little story where the situation becomes the main character. Though the Americans dismissed it, the book had an important underground life in occupied European countries.

23. The Hawkline Monster: a Gothic Western - Richard Brautigan

Brautigan was a cult writer in the 60s. Almost nobody reads him any more. He had many faults in his writing, but on the other hand his stuff sounds like no one elses. This one was better than In Watermelon Sugar by sporting a sense of humour. His stuff runs on a logic of its own, and I will repeat what I said about his earlier novel: weirdest book I ever read.

24. A House of Pomegranates - Oscar Wilde

Further explorations of Wilde's writing. A set of four ornate "fairy tales." They are closer to prose poems than anything else, beautifully written and sporting a grimly realistic view of life - money and appearances matter more to the crowd than any number of good deeds. The Birthday of the Infanta was the best of the lot.

25. This Baffling World No. 3 - John Godwin

Best of the three volumes, explaining the facts of Kaspar Hauser, "prophets" such as Nostradamus and Eric Jan Hanussen, the yeti, Houdini and Kudu Bux. Interesting from start to finish.

26. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

Auster's debut, where he lets his noir and baseball nerdiness shine through a set of wonderfully interesting, but emotionally dry works. It's a modern classic of postmodernism, but of course, it doesn't measure up to Leviathan. Tsk.

27. Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

One of those rare times when I'll call a book "genius." This was one amazing play. Amusing, tragic, chilling, experimental and thought-provoking. I think that's everything you could want in a play. I call it a prison-camp story without the prison-camp.

28. To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis

I read this thinking of Three Men in a Boat, but knowledge of that book is not so necessary as familiarity with P. G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers. Comedy of manners meets time travel meets Victorian nostalgia (you know what that is if you've felt it). Probably the most endearing book I read all year.

29. Endgame - Samuel Beckett

Not as much fun to read as Godot, a troublesome one-act play with a mime stuck at the end. Very dark and stripped down. This one reads like a post-apocalyptic old-age home. I'll have to re-read Beckett, Godot for further appreciation, this one to try and find what it's on about.

30. Rotten Rejections: A Literary Companion - Andre Bernard, editor

A quick read, compiling some choice quotes about various great/important works of literature from some remarkably callous or obtuse publishers. Someone turned down Anne Frank of all people! Someone told Faulkner "I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail." I was in stitches reading some of this.

31. Science Dictionary - Isaac Asimov

Sitting with a cat on my lap, I dug out the shortest book I could find from the stack next to me and read this boring kids' introduction to scientific terms, with photographs alongside. Dull. Dull. Dull.

32. The Portable Beat Reader - Ann Charters, editor

My introduction to the Beats. I was struggling to get through the deathly prose of Flaubert's A Simple Heart - I threw it down and picked up this compendium, immediately beginning to feel better. An excellent overview, though the quality of material varies extravagantly. Some of it was solid gold and some of it was unvarnished idiocy. A lot of it was just okay. But it made a great summer reading experience.

33. Essays, Civil and Moral - Francis Bacon

I usually like essays, but Bacon's were basically an advice guide for Elizabethan businessmen. Every now and again, he'd say something on the money, or quote Machiavel, but for the most part I was bored.

34. Andy Catlett: Early Travels - Wendall Berry

A friend gave me this one. A short novel with no plot - a nine-year-old boy goes to visit his two sets of grandparents in WWII. This reads like a memoir, and is mostly an observant picture of how people lived in rural America before the fossil fuel life had kicked in. Berry is the only author I've ever come across who seems aware/concerned about the current dependence on fossil fuels. An odd reading experience.

35. The New Atlantis - Francis Bacon

A vision of utopia. Better than the Essays, but, like all utopias, it sounds like a dystopia from first to last. It was most interesting when detailing how scientific discovery would work in Bacon's theoretical society.

36. Areopagitica & Tractate on Education - John Milton

This one rocked. I never thought I'd say that about a Harvard entry. Milton's pamphlet on free press - eloquent, intelligent, hard-hitting and brilliant. I read it in awe, and read it again. Wow. Milton was a rebel. I recommend the Areopagitica to everybody. As for the Tractate, it was well thought and a good view on educational standards of the time, but too short to remain in the mind.

37. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard

An homage to Hamlet and Waiting for Godot, two masterpieces. And amazingly, Stoppard pulls it off without falling short. This is a great play to read or watch. It's not quite genius, I suppose, but it's still superb.

38. Mistress of Mount Fair - Jane Gordon

Another of my romantic suspense excursions, this one featuring a heroine who knows guns and martial arts, thanks to being a cop's daughter. That makes a nice change from the usual pushovers, and makes her the most memorable part of the book.

39. Stand Still Like the Hummingbird - Henry Miller

I'm not sure whether these were essays or ramblings. Some enthusiastic literary recommendations mixed with musings on the state of the human race, mixed with self-justifications. There was also an amusing spoof of economics. I surprised myself by thoroughly enjoying this collection. Bonus: the first book I ever read published by New Directions, since become one of my favorite publishers.

40. Ombria in Shadow - Patricia McKillip

Among fantasy authors, McKillip is at the top of the list for style and imagination. This one was just beautiful.

41. The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

This is another on my short list of "genius." A ghost story that is also the best case of unreliable narration and obscured facts I've ever seen. This one stunned me. I analysed every word, trying to get beneath the smoke screen of the self-righteous governess' narration. And it can still horrify, as it's the story of two unprotected children at the mercy of a cast of negligent and sinister people.

42. Story of O - Pauline Reage

Turning eighteen lifted the lifelong ban on erotica I'd known, so I proceeded to read the scariest work in that genre I could find in the house. It stopped scaring me after I'd read it. It was the most unpleasant and intense reading experience I've ever had. It was also so French it was silly. It had genuine literary merit (which surprised my prejudiced mind) and even though I didn't enjoy reading it, I'm glad I did.

43. The Lime Twig - John Hawkes

A short book that reads like a dream. Amazing prose style. Three luckless people get involved in crime and prove easy pickings for a set of organized gangsters. Grimy visuals thread a plot propelled by the logic of a nightmare. Some of the scenes felt like visions - I saw this book more than I read it, if that makes sense.

44. Mary - Vladimir Nabokov

On a whim, I read Nabokov's first novel (without having read anything else by him) just to see how it struck me. It's a minor work for a reason, but a talented minor work. The flashback segment mixed overly-romanticized scenery with an incredibly unromantic love story (worst of both worlds), but the "present day" scenes were much better. A bunch of pathetic and crass Russian expatriates unhappily gathered in a boarding house fret their time away. The ending was more moving than it had any right to be. Minor...odd...but good.

45. The Happy Prince - Oscar Wilde

Wilde's second fairy tale collection, more accessible, but still with an odd cynicism lurking underneath. Of this set, my favorite was The Remarkable Rocket, the strangest and funniest tale.

46. Patriotism - Yukio Mishima

A fifty-four page short story in which a Japanese lieutenant decides to commit ritual suicide, and whose wife asks to accompany him. As disturbing as it sounds, but unforgettable. It's my first sample of non-western literature.

47. The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors - Laura Miller, editor

I read this in bits and pieces over the course of the year. A US-centric guide to contemporary English language authors. Opinionated write-ups on famous literati, infamous cult writers, bestsellers, obscurities and experimentalists. A handy grab-bag, but I wish it had been more even-handed and less focused on Americans.

48. A Moon for the Misbegotten - Eugene O'Neill

A sequel of sorts to Long Day's Journey into Night, focusing on the last months in Jamie Tyrone's life as alcoholism kills him. The first two acts were too Caldwellesque for my taste, but the last two were incredibly moving. Despite its flaws, an amazing work.

49. Icehenge - Kim Stanley Robinson

Uneven. Three novellas stitched together to form a meditation on time and archeology. Part one was good enough in a space opera way. Part 2 dragged on and on and on and on and on. Part 3 was fabulous, catching my imagination and boosting my opinion of the work, though not enough to save it from a 3 1/2 star rating. I admire it more than I like it, let's say.

50. Cane - Jean Toomer

Read this one twice. An experimental mix of poetry and prose focused on the lives of African Americans in rural Georgia and the jazz age cityscape to the north. Grim and powerful. It haunted me so much I had to read it again, and it was better the second time.

51. The Turret Room - Charlotte Armstrong

Another of Charlotte Armstrong's blend of suspense. Once it was all set up, it became a pageturner. Enjoyable stuff.

52. Counterculture Through the Ages - Ken Goffman

Non-fiction as candy. A fast, informative read.

53. Religio Medici - Thomas Browne

Made excellent time on this volume of Harvard. The last work in it was this set of thoughts Thomas Browne compiled, focused on his Christianity. A fancy prose style made it interesting. I didn't get a whole lot out of it, but Browne was an interesting fellow, enlightened in some ways, sadly blinkered in others.

54. The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams

The last of my 20th century plays this year. Depressing little experiment. Tom made for a boring narrator, but the female characters were memorable, and I had a lot of sympathy for Laura.

That's it, this year's list. A lot of good books, a few bad ones and I'm already eagerly anticipating what to read next.

But right now, I'm off to do something useful. Happy New Year!

The Letter A - The New York Trilogy

The first question on any of these posts is "why did I decide to read this one?" In the case of The New York Trilogy, it's easy to answer: it's Paul Auster's first and most famous work of fiction. Also, it's short (put together, only 314 pages) and what can I say, I like short books. After all, the sooner you can read a book, the sooner you can go on to something else, right?

The New York Trilogy is essentially a game. Each book starts as a loving, if disturbed, paean to the detective genre before spinning off into a postmodern quest for the meaning of language and the meaning of a character's actions. Auster's philosophical stance says knowing or communicating anything is impossible, therefore these quests leave the heroes in the grip of madness. At one point the hero of City of Glass writes in his notebook:

...I am supposed to do a job, one little thing, and I have said yes to it. If all goes well, it should even be quite simple. I have not been hired to understand - merely to act. This is something new. To keep it in mind, at all costs.

Unfortunately, Quinn does not keep it in mind. He is obsessed with understanding the nature of the madman Peter Stillman and in his pursuit he assumes identities, makes maps that he believes are secret messages and reads Stillman's book in a fruitless effort to get inside the man's head - eventually forfeiting his own identity to the process.

City of Glass is the most nightmarish of the trilogy. I can't spoil the various twists of the plot: suffice to say that this is a New York where anything can happen and where people often take the most inexplicable actions; where the only sane character happens to be self-satisfied and somewhat useless fellow called Paul Auster....

Ghosts is a novella set back in the forties, dealing in present tense with a detective known as Blue, hired by a man named White to watch a man named Black. The only thing is, White never gets in contact with Blue and Blue is stuck watching Black for years. For a brief moment, it seems a classic detective story is about to get going, but soon enough action is replaced with mimicry - if Black is seen reading a book, Blue will then find a copy for himself. And as this extroverted detective finds his old life vanishing behind him, and with nothing to do except watch Black sit at his desk writing every day Blue turns to introspection. An implosion is set to occur, and things really heat up when he begins breaking the rules and interacting with Black....

Lastly, there is The Locked Room, a first person narrative by a man who considers himself a talentless hack writer. Then the wife of Fanshawe, his friend from long ago, gets in touch to tell him Fanshawe has disappeared (presumed dead) and left instructions for HIM to deal with his unpublished literary legacy. The narrator steps into Fanshawe's life, publishes Fanshawe's work, marries Fanshawe's wife and adopts his son. Then there's a letter, a request for a biography and the narrator embarks on a quest to learn about the "real" Fanshawe, through eyewitness accounts. The portrait that emerges is of a brilliant, mercurial man hovering on the knife edge of madness....

There is a distinctly chilly flavour to these novels - only the final book really warms up; it's only then that the characters seem to live as something other than ciphers. I spent much of the first two stories wondering how Auster could have written something like Leviathan when he started out so callous. The character of Quinn is incredibly tragic, as is Peter Stillman the younger - yet in Auster's service, they never open up, they are merely vehicles for ideas or in Peter's case, a style of narrative. There's no heart; only brain.

In that way, The Locked Room can be considered the first mature work in Auster's fiction, the first one to tie into later works in any meaningful way. This is not exactly a criticism of the New York Trilogy - it is what it is, and that is consistently interesting. Madness and existential misery are not the only things on offer in these stories. Auster is the king of useless information and is happy to share it. So along the way you'll be treated to a whimsical dissertation of Don Quixote and far darker distortions of Milton and Carroll; you'll get a whole chapter dealing with true cases of neglected children, capped off with Kaspar Hauser; you'll learn which year it was that St. Christopher was decanonized and get a complete synopsis of the noir film Out of the Past (see below), not to mention the life story of Lorenzo Da Ponte. You'll swear he's making this stuff up, and the great glory is it's all true. His cabinet of curiosities is mostly for entertainment and colour, adding little by way of plot, but who needs plot on every page?

The real thing a book needs is resolution, and it's here that I have a real bone to pick with The New York Trilogy. There is no answer to any of the questions, as I may have made clear earlier. The problem is when Auster tries to link the stories together at the end by devoting one paragraph to the issue. This raises more questions than it answers and leads me to ask: was Auster trying to outfox his readers by way of a joke? What was the point of creating a character called Quinn in the third story who is obviously not the same Quinn from book one? If it was to highlight the meaningless fluidity of identity, that means The New York Trilogy had no deeper connection than shared themes, which means the attempt to connect the stories at the end is fake.

And this line of thought leads to the idea that Auster created a headscratcher to which there is no answer - meaning it likely didn't have one for him either. Which brings me round to the idea that the openended stories might stem just as much from writer's block, from him dreaming up fantastic scenarios without being able to find a satisfactory answer to questions raised - in which case he is remarkably similar to his characters and his readers, which is a touching and amusing thought. What better way to expose the failings of language than to publish a novel you just couldn't finish?

I could go on, but there's no point in doing all the thinking for you. The New York Trilogy could be considered differently by every person who reads it. Heck, my own perception has shifted just in the day it's taken me to write this. No, I don't like it as much as Leviathan, but it stands well on its own merits. Recommended.

The letter 'A' - Leviathan

Hidden away in the television stand is a beat to hell old book called Video Movie Guide 2002, by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter. For my own amusement and edification, I have often perused it. One time I found this description:

Smoke **** Novelist Paul Auster's 1990 Christmas fable has been transformed into a brilliant little ensemble piece, revolving around the idiosyncratic regulars of a Brooklyn cigar shop. The film unfolds like a skillfully staged play, and the characters are fascinating. Rated R for profanity and mild violence. 112m. DIR: Wayne Wang. CAST: Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, Stockard Channing, Harold Perrineau Jr. Ashley Judd. 1995

This appeared to be just my type of film and a few months later, painfully aware of my high expectations, I sat down and watched it. It is now one of my favorite films. I won't go into all of it just now.

The point of it is that I was then in a position to take interest in the novels of Paul Auster. High expectations mixed with his reputation as a "writer's writer" led to my being acutely afraid of reading him, for fear I'd find the work dull or pretentious. Which is how, with Leviathan sitting on the shelf, I chose Zorro for my first read in 'A.'


Having finished the short, constant page-turner that Leviathan was, let me first say that Paul Auster knows his stuff. A well-read man, he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, dedicates to Don Delillo and crafts a story three layers deep.

Starting at the title. Why is the book called Leviathan? It was the title for an unfinished novel by Benjamin Sachs, the main character. Peter Aaron, the narrator of Sachs' life, therefore pays tribute by naming HIS account after the former work. And we, the audience, know that in reality this is not a true story, merely the fancy of the novelist Paul Auster, who DOES exist (at least so far as I can tell).

That may seem confusing, but it's straight from a handy bag of post-modern tricks (author inserts is another one, which Paul doesn't indulge in...at least here). Despite the fireworks, the story is simple enough. After a man blows himself up on the side of a road when his handmade bomb goes off, Peter Aaron instantly suspects it was none other than his best friend Benjamin Sachs. He sets out to explain how Sachs' arrived at that point. The novel proceeds apace.

And so the games begin.

This is a book you can mine from. Notice that, although Aaron is the narrator, he is strangely undefined? Even when Sachs vanishes (something he often does over the span of the book), Aaron remains something of an unknown. He often expresses opinions and theories, yet what he amounts to is an invisible presence, a straight man to the clownish Sachs. He shines a light on the other characters, yet remains somehow in the dark. All this without being mysterious or unreliable; rather, he is eclipsed by the eccentrics around him.

This is probably because Peter Aaron is Paul Auster. He is not a character in his own right; he's a necessary voice. Confused yet? My theory is that all writing is autobiography, hidden under layers of fiction, perceptions, shifts in view and outright lies. Some authors go a step further than that and allow their alter ego into the story (not the same as author insert). It doesn't harm the story at all - in fact it makes it easy to picture Aaron, what with the Auster photo on the back....

The cast could all have a book to themselves. There are stories within the story everywhere you look - Maria Turner's art projects and her art of living being the most noteworthy.

Notice when characters vanish, they metamorphosis in circumstance, if not always in character (see Sachs, Lillian Stern and Reed DiMaggio).

Notice that both times Sachs feels intense desire for a woman (other than his wife) it is a prelude for all hell to break loose?

Notice what starts as a mystery yarn peopled with lovable weirdos slowly descends into a tragedy? This last fact is the most painful part of the book. I gather that the difference a second can make fascinates Auster. At the beginning of Smoke, Augie Wren wonders...if he'd been just a little slower at the register, Mrs. Benjamin would have been a few seconds later out the door and might not have died in the ensuing street violence.

Similarly, Aaron is tormented by the lost chances, the moments where he let Sachs down, or where recovery was almost in reach when a single coincidence, short-cut, phone call, photograph, unspoken relationship snatched it away and left Sachs in free fall. It is, in the end, an extraordinarily sad little read. Sachs, though crazy, is given so many attractive qualities that you want him to save himself, and know from the first line that it's not gonna happen.

The pretentiousness of the book is exemplified by Aaron and Sachs, writers each. This allows Auster ample opportunities to illuminate some aspect of the craft or the business. I didn't mind this at all, as it afforded a no-holds-barred synopsis of Sachs' first novel, The New Colossus, a historical epic that you'll immediately want to run out and buy, except (of course) it doesn't exist. More post-modern pranks.

Prose style can best be described as "clean." Feels fresh off the page, clear and precise, no excess fat, polished till it shines.... Interesting for me is to compare styles with Zorro, both featuring after the fact narration by an onlooker, yet while Zorro had almost no dialogue, Leviathan overflows with it.

Time period? Seventies and eighties. Setting? Except for a nightmarish sojourn to California, it's mostly New York (another one of Auster's themes).

Lastly, if you want romance, don't read this book. There's broken marriages, spousal insecurities, infidelity and a match made in hell during the California episode.

Be on the lookout for coincidences. Barrels of them. I gather that's another of Auster's interests. Somehow, one can accept the unreality of the plot, and though the final twist doesn't quite hang together, there was never any eye-rolling on my part.

To conclude: I loved this book. It entertained, gave food for thought, and moved me emotionally. I can ask for little more. I'll read another one soon and if it's as good as Leviathan he's going on my favorite authors list.

Recommended to intelligent people, people with short attention spans, those who want to try out Auster and don't know where to start, modern literature buffs and those looking for a good read.

On with the journey.

The Letter 'A' and 'Zorro'

So it occurs to me to give this one final attempt, as this blog takes up and wastes valuable Internet space, and a journey unrecorded is hardly going to leave a trace.

It came about, in my library home, that at fourteen I discovered what pretentious and humble joy there was in reading the great classics of literature. I started with The Mayor of Casterbridge and never looked back. I read War and Peace at fifteen purely for the prestige of it. I started the Harvard Classics at sixteen, albeit reluctantly, for the same reason. I all but abandoned my old genre of young adult fantasy and focused entirely on the works of such venerable writers as Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde.

Then there was a problem. With the singular exception of Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief, my favorite novels were all by authors no longer even recently living. Suddenly I looked around and realised the only modern authors I knew by name were Cormac McCarthy and A.S. Byatt, and I hadn't read either, nor intended to. Then I looked at the library shelves and saw them stretch from Ackroyd to Zusak with stops for The Kite Runner (which everybody's heard of) and Awaiting Trespass (which nobody has).

Then I turned eighteen and, long story short, decided to embark on a parallel literary journey through the shelves of modern literary fiction, and since I had no burning desire for any of it, I decided on a methodical course of A to Z, with only occasional deviations. The letter A alone consists of 20 books, not all of which I have the desire to read, but that still leaves over 10 before I move along.

So I began in the spring, and not wanting to be frightened off by any ponderous tome, I selected Isabel Allende's Zorro for my first read.

Sadly, I was not entirely happy with it.

So let's talk about Zorro.



When I was a kid, The Mark of Zorro was just about the only black and white film I could sit through. When I re-watched it a few years back, I was disillusioned by Tyrone Power's acting skills and by the almost total absence of the masked avenger. He had, what, two scenes? Most of the time, I was stuck watching an aggravatingly witless fop surrounded by 2-D characters (the highlight being Basil Rathbone). That is not surprising given that Zorro was originally the concept of one Johnston McCulley, a pulp writer who cranked out hundreds of stories under every imaginable pseudonym. Such was the inglorious beginning of the American Robin Hood.

Nowadays, Zorro Productions controls the franchise, and it was due to them that Isabel Allende was contracted for the duty of dreaming up the origins of the character. She's a Zorro fan; I am not. The chemistry was bound to fail, but I hoped a literary author would win me over as Steven "high explosives" Spielberg had not.

What I found inside the pages was every imaginable cliche you could think of. If you want: Indian uprisings, pirates, dastardly villains, Spanish damsels, a secret society of valiant heroes, Indian magic, warrior women, run ins with bandits, gypsies and jail breaks, you'll find it all in this novel. I was amazed by that alone. The only cliche not given credit was the wedding, since Zorro had to be free at the end to continue romancing.

It was a pageturner, it had a tongue-in-cheek quality and the habit of recollection. The tale was recounted, not played out with dialogue. I didn't mind that, though late in the day the authorial intrusions did become somewhat wearisome.

In the end, what I found most annoying in the book was its feminism. It annoyed me greatly that the Spanish sisters Juliana and Isabel were so hemmed in. Juliana (gorgeous) was a fickle nitwit, while Isabel (plain) was a tomboy who secretly learned fencing and tagged along on the swashbuckling adventures. All things considered, both were just plain annoying, Isabel the more so because I have never understood the idea that a "strong female character" to quote one of the blurbs, has to be sassy and swing a sword. (You see a lot of that in fantasy novels, too)

My other grievance was Don Diego de la Vega, as perfect and talented as any superhero. Learns to fence - he's BRILLIANT! Learns to play cards - he's BRILLIANT! Learns acrobatics - he's BRILLIANT! Learns horsemanship - guess what, he's BRILLIANT! Ms. Allende did allow him the shocking inadequacy of being an "abysmal" poet, which made me laugh.

Onwards to the villain, Moncada, petty and mean for the sake of it. I found him of no interest whatsoever, and he was never given any depths or shades of grey.

Onwards to Jean Lafitte the pirate. Don't tax your imaginations here, just imagine Jack Sparrow dressed in black.

The setting, the period details and all the minor characters, from Bernardo to the blind man, were all exceptionally interesting, and it did keep me reading. Generally, I found the middle portion set in Spain, where Diego had nothing to do but be perfect and pine for Juliana, to be the dullest, and the rest of it to be action-packed and enjoyable. I do not mean to be negative, since even the novel's failures were more silly than directly aggravating.

The final questions: have I found new respect for the legend of Zorro? In a manner. What the book taught me is that the great hero is classic pulp and not meant to be taken seriously, that he is always going to be viewed in a tongue-in-cheek way, complete with banter, comic relief and horses that demolish the barns meant to contain them.

Would I read more Isabel Allende? Perhaps. After all, her early works are considered excellent, The House of the Spirits is next door to being a modern classic, and whatever else I've said, Zorro was not badly written.

However, though I will fondly remember sitting on a rock, barefoot in the sun, and turning the pages of the book, there is no more of her work in the household library, and so I've moved on to a summer of Paul Auster.

Paul Auster will be my next blogging article, unless I decide to wax poetic about a film in between....