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September 27, 2006
Books I Read in September
New Total: 99
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
Publishers Weekly: A Turkish poet who spent 12 years as a political exile in Germany witnesses firsthand the clash between radical Islam and Western ideals in this enigmatically beautiful novel. Ka's reasons for visiting the small Turkish town of Kars are twofold: curiosity about the rash of suicides by young girls in the town and a hope to reconnect with "the beautiful Ipek," whom he knew as a youth. But Kars is a tangle of poverty-stricken families, Kurdish separatists, political Islamists (including Ipek's spirited sister Kadife) and Ka finds himself making compromises with all in a desperate play for his own happiness. A detached tone and some dogmatic abstractions make for tough reading, but Ka's rediscovery of God and poetry in a desolate place makes the novel's sadness profound and moving.
My Review: This book was definitely more engaging than My Name is Red (which I read during my trip to Turkey last summer), but still a challenge. There were moments when I was totally caught up in the story, and others when I just wanted it to be over. I can't tell if this is a Turkish thing, or an Orhan Pamuk thing--since I had similar feelings towards his previous work.
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Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
Publishers Weekly: In this latest addition to the author's incomparable oeuvre, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home, both to escape his father's oedipal prophecy and to find his long-lost mother and sister. As Kafka flees, so too does Nakata, an elderly simpleton whose quiet life has been upset by a gruesome murder. (A wonderfully endearing character, Nakata has never recovered from the effects of a mysterious World War II incident that left him unable to read or comprehend much, but did give him the power to speak with cats.) What follows is a kind of double odyssey, as Kafka and Nakata are drawn inexorably along their separate but somehow linked paths, groping to understand the roles fate has in store for them. Murakami likes to blur the boundary between the real and the surreal—we are treated to such oddities as fish raining from the sky; a forest-dwelling pair of Imperial Army soldiers who haven't aged since WWII; and a hilarious cameo by fried chicken king Colonel Sanders—but he also writes touchingly about love, loneliness and friendship. Occasionally, the writing drifts too far into metaphysical musings—mind-bending talk of parallel worlds, events occurring outside of time—and things swirl a bit at the end as the author tries, perhaps too hard, to make sense of things. But by this point, his readers, like his characters, will go just about anywhere Murakami wants them to, whether they "get" it or not.
My Review: I loved this book, and now am fighting every urge to go out and buy all of his other work. This is the first non-South American writer I've encountered who does magical realism in a way that works, and I was drawn into the web to the point where the Kafka on the Shore world seemed more real than the chair I was sitting in. Highly recommended to EVERYONE.
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Everything is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Amazon.com The simplest thing would be to describe Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's accomplished debut, as a novel about the Holocaust. It is, but that really fails to do justice to the sheer ambition of this book. The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish American--who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran Foer--travels to the Ukraine in the hope of finding the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his search by Alex Perchov, a naïve Ukrainian translator, Alex's grandfather (also called Alex), and a flatulent mongrel dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. On their journey through Eastern Europe's obliterated landscape they unearth facts about the Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that have implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative is not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran Foer's perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters that Alex sends to Foer. These are written in the kind of broken Russo-English normally reserved for Bond villains or Latka from Taxi. Interspersed between these letters are fragments of a novel by Safran Foer--a wonderfully imagined, almost magical realist, account of life in the shtetl before the Nazis destroyed it. These are in turn commented on by Alex, creating an additional metafictional angle to the tale.
My Review: Hmm, even days after finishing this audiobook (the narrators were GREAT), I don't know what to say about this novel. There were certainly parts I thought were interesting, engaging, dramatic, and even perhaps brilliant, but the overall effect was somewhat lacking. It was almost as if the author ran out of steam at the end of things and wasn't quite sure how to end. I'm not surprised, I can't imagine how it should have ended, but I was left wanting more.
Comments
I Love Haruki Murakami, you should read the wind up bird chronicles and Norwegian Wood next! Also - finally cracked into White Teeth and I'm really getting into it - she's so clever, I'll let you how I feel about it at the end...
Posted by: carmen at September 28, 2006 01:38 PM
