I decided to start reading "Spook Country" again, which it had been my plan to finish during Thanksgiving break. The reason I stopped:
Being an intellectual thriller, the novel is driven by an ongoing quest by the protagonist, Hollis Henry, to uncover a complicated plot involving several parties across the US and world. It is a "paranoid narrative" of the first order. Eventually Hollis finds her way into the lair of the secretive media corporation "Blue Ant," and suddenly the book is filled up with one sophisticated security system after another, lasers and metal doors, we find ourselves in the SUPERCOOL and SUPERSECRET headquarters of this guy Bigend and, well, we feel like grabbing a game controller and kicking ass. There is something about the setting that is akin to video game level design, something like Half Life. Now, I'm sure that William Gibson deserves to do whatever he wants, but I don't quite understand why, when there are secrets to be revealed, those secrets have to be packaged in awesome, bogus-future sleek wrapping.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Don Juan de la Mancha
In Robert Menasse's "Don Juan de la Mancha," every paragraph ends with a punchy, witty remark. Total immersion in the novel requires a willingness to emerge oneself in the Austrian everyday, and an ability to manage a plethora of female names. There is nothing wrong with the book, but I will probably never finish it. There are some tricks with unreliable narration; the narrator goes to a therapist and tells the story of his student years, a discourse that takes over many pages of the book--and is followed by the revelation that much of the story was made up.
Most of the jokes in the novel are founded on the assumption that the '68er movement in western and central Europe was pretty funny, and that it was just a bunch of rich kids doing the opposite of what their status required. Apparently Robert Menasse has written a neo-Marxist treatise on the culture industry, maybe back in the 70's (I only know it from browsing a book by JJ Long), and in this novel it seems that the expectation is that one has already been there, done that, and long since gotten old enough to dismiss all the radical, critical silliness of past decades. Fine, fine, I have no problem with criticizing criticism, but like so many novels I've read (like New York City novels) I can't help but think the whole text orbits around some kind of insider knowledge and laughs at me quietly.
Most of the jokes in the novel are founded on the assumption that the '68er movement in western and central Europe was pretty funny, and that it was just a bunch of rich kids doing the opposite of what their status required. Apparently Robert Menasse has written a neo-Marxist treatise on the culture industry, maybe back in the 70's (I only know it from browsing a book by JJ Long), and in this novel it seems that the expectation is that one has already been there, done that, and long since gotten old enough to dismiss all the radical, critical silliness of past decades. Fine, fine, I have no problem with criticizing criticism, but like so many novels I've read (like New York City novels) I can't help but think the whole text orbits around some kind of insider knowledge and laughs at me quietly.
Monday, June 9, 2008
First 30 pages of "The Mayor's Tongue"
A book I found at The Bookery on the new releases table, and then again in the Olin library at Cornell, bound with one of those glossy library jackets, I took out and read the first thirty pages today. It's by Nathaniel Rich, editor of the Paris review, the second prominent release of literary fiction that I'm aware of in the past year that was written by the editor of an intimidating periodical (the other being Keith Gessen's book).
I am posting after having read the first thirty pages, since I think the speculations made in the first encounter with a novel, which are usually lost as you read on, can be of some use and amusement. So far, I've been introduced to the two protagonists, and though I squirmed a little during the conversation between two old men on a park bench about dreams, I did willingly follow the initial adventures of this Eugene. Oddly, I would look up from the page and down again, and was surprised to see third-person pronouns. It feels first-person.
Eugene avoids a typical New York City setting, but somehow ends up pulling up familiar dirt-and-eccentricity that I've come to expect from New York Novels. His coworker from the Dominican Republic is affectionately rendered, but remains an exotic; his benevolence towards Eugene feels at times like a cautious measure taken by an author in writing about someone who is "different" and doesn't want to provoke a conflict in the story or in the reader. That his coworker speaks an obscure dialect emerging from a secluded valley in the Dominican Republic....this also seems like a measure taken to ensure that the character does not get associated with immigrant stereotypes, even though it also feels like a joke.
I am posting after having read the first thirty pages, since I think the speculations made in the first encounter with a novel, which are usually lost as you read on, can be of some use and amusement. So far, I've been introduced to the two protagonists, and though I squirmed a little during the conversation between two old men on a park bench about dreams, I did willingly follow the initial adventures of this Eugene. Oddly, I would look up from the page and down again, and was surprised to see third-person pronouns. It feels first-person.
Eugene avoids a typical New York City setting, but somehow ends up pulling up familiar dirt-and-eccentricity that I've come to expect from New York Novels. His coworker from the Dominican Republic is affectionately rendered, but remains an exotic; his benevolence towards Eugene feels at times like a cautious measure taken by an author in writing about someone who is "different" and doesn't want to provoke a conflict in the story or in the reader. That his coworker speaks an obscure dialect emerging from a secluded valley in the Dominican Republic....this also seems like a measure taken to ensure that the character does not get associated with immigrant stereotypes, even though it also feels like a joke.
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