Book: The Tiger's Wife; Movie: Never Let Me Go

If you haven't heard of The Tiger's Wife then I'm certain you will fairly soon. It seems to be the literary sensation du jour. Everybody is raving about it - critics, booksellers, writers and readers the world over. It's a first novel by a young 25 year old American woman Tea Obreht.


These are the accolades on the front and back covers:


'Tea Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years'. Colum McCann


'A novel of surpassing beauty, exquisitely wrought and magical. Tea Obreht is a towering new talent'. T.C. Boyle


'The Tiger's Wife is a marvel of beauty and imagination. Tea Obreht is a tremendously talented writer.'
Ann Patchett


Here's Tea's short bio: 'Tea Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia. She was the youngest author on The New Yorker's Top 20 Writers Under 40 list. Her short fiction has been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2010, and the Guardian Summer fiction issue.'


Now there's a clue right there as to why this novel is simply not worthy of all the starry-eyed attention it is receiving. Obreht is primarily a short story writer, and it shows. The problem with the novel is a structural one. The half dozen or so self-contained stories, while fascinating and 'magical' in themselves, are only tangentially meshed into a coherent, meaningful whole. Like units in an apartment block, each with its own life, they don't link into the one, transcendent narrative. There's no resonance, or powerful meanings. No vision. No metaphysics. 


I don't want stories. I want a novel.


Oh, Obreht can write alright. No doubt about that. But I'm so sick of reading novels by graduates of creative writing or literature programs. They are, well, so 'writerly'. I couldn't finish The Legacy, a first novel by Australian Kirsten Tranter, for the same reason. After 200 pages I bailed. It was just so annoyingly show-offy and self-indulgent. It badly need a good editor to take an axe to it. (Though it has just made the long-list for this year's Miles Franklin award. So who am I?)


Then this afternoon I went to see the new movie Never Let Me Go, just because British actor Carey Mulligan was in it. I'll see anything with Carey Mulligan in it, because she's just so beautiful - in an intelligent, interesting way. (If you don't know her, get out the DVD of An Education, and you'll see what I mean).


Never Let Me Go is a superb film directed by Mark Momanek, with a screenplay by Alex Garland (The Beach), that absolutely blew me away. Here is meaning, vision, resonance, metaphysics in abundance. It's PROFOUND. I hadn't read the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro so didn't really know what to expect, but it's essentially about young people and their innocence, and how society fences them in, tells lies to them, shatters their illusions, squeezes the life out of them. It has a sci-fi premise, which most dumb reviewers can't get beyond, but that is a scaffold that makes so much sense as an organising principle for the movie's larger meanings.


And it's also a very moving love story. 


Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield are the other two leads, and the wonderful and ageless Charlotte Rampling has a minor part as well.


See this film.

'O' - A Presidential Novel

When the novel Primary Colors by 'Anonymous' was released in early 1996 a huge debate raged for months about the identity of the author. The book, like its subject, a fictionalised Bill Clinton, was compelling. Nothing was spared. We were titillated by his numerous affairs and infractions, and got loads of juicy, political tidbits involving barely disguised but utterly recognisable players. Most of all we got exquisite glimpses of Bill and Hillary's stressed, earthy and psychologically tangled relationship. It was great stuff, obviously written by a privileged insider.


Eventually, Joe Klein, Newsweek's senior political columnist, fessed up about his authorship - after being outed by an academic who had carefully compared writing styles. It was all great fun, and the huge six-month run the mystery got in the press rocket fuelled the book's sales. It was a great marketing ploy - one of the most successful ever for a non-fiction title.


So now we get 'O' - a Presidential Novel, by Anonymous, which the publisher, Simon and Schuster, has undoubtedly positioned within the same marketing frame, hoping that the same media dynamic would apply. Except that the author's identity has been discovered virtually on publication - Mark Salter, former advisor and speech writer to John McCain. So in a way the book has been still-born, the public enthusiasm rather tepid. Mark who? A Republican?


But please don't be put off. This is a seriously good and enthralling read. It's for political junkies perhaps - there are no 'revelations' about Obama's private life, no corruption, no guns, no marital dramas, no congressional dirty deals, no scenes of high emotional intensity. What we get instead is an insider's account of the imagined but riveting presidential election campaign of 2012.


It's a totally different beast to Primary Colors, which has obviously thrown a lot of reviewers. Dennis Altman, professor of politics at Latrobe found it dull, uninteresting and disappointing. He was anticipating another Joe Klein, dirty laundry expose. Well, it's just not that sort of book. The reviewer for The New York Times was also unimpressed. He dismissed it as "trite, implausible and decidedly unfunny" with passages of "very bad romance-novel prose".


Well, I beg to differ. Sure, some of the prose is a bit clotted, but I found it a riveting examination, in minute detail, of a political campaign, and the people running it, something we don't very often get to see. We're up close with these people, living with them, feeling the nuances of their emotions and feelings as the campaigns unfold. The main character is Obama's campaign manager, under extraordinary pressure. Key players include some savvy, clever journalists, mainly working for newer, online publications, which the campaign managers, on both sides, fairly obviously detest. Arianna Huffington, for example, is mercilessly shredded! 

Despite his Republican background, the author, Salter, is scrupulously fair to both sides. He's no lover of the Tea Party, and especially of Sarah Palin. He loathes these people. His Republican candidate is an thoroughly orthodox, intelligent and likable human being (which begs the question - is such a person likely to emerge in 2012?). He is obviously a fan of Obama, portraying him, his policies, ideas, competence and gravitas extremely sympathetically.

This is a sensitive and insightful rendering of a political drama obviously yet to unfold. But it rings so true.

So who wins the 2012 election? It's a close race, the polls give it 'too close to call', and the book ends the day prior to polling day!

As I said, for the political junkies!

Wonderful new Boxing Day movies



The King's Speech is well worth seeing, although you sort of have to put up with all the emotional tics of the blue rinse set who mostly make up the audience - all their oohs and aahs as the (later) Queen Mum and the little royals (Elizabeth and Margaret) are played as ever so loving and cutesy. This movie is sentimentality writ large. Nothing is spared to tug at the heart strings of even the most cynical in the audience, let alone the aged and faded monarchists flocking to it. Colin Firth is suberb as George VI, and even Geoffrey Rush, of whom I've never been a great fan, portrays a likeable Aussie without stooping to the cliched Bazza Mackenzie oafishness. Hugely enjoyable. 

I debated with myself whether I'd see Blue Valentine, as I don't relish overripe scenes of domestic strife a la Americain. But this exceptionally good movie rises above the usual cliches of the genre. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling should both get Oscars for their performances. They manage to convey the rawness and richness of these ordinary working class lives, yet with a subtlety that simply left me speechless. And there is so much going on in this movie, that only occurs to you afterwards, maybe days afterwards. It is simply brilliant. A classic.

Somewhere, the new one from the marvellous Sofia Coppola, is receiving both highly positive and highly negative reviews from a variety of critics. Margaret and David both loved it, but Jim Schembri from The Age hated it, calling it 'cosmically ponderous'! I had to see it! I was fully expecting to agree with Jim, who nailed it on the new Harry Potter after all, and he reminded me how much I disliked Coppola's Marie Antoniette.

Nevertheless, he was wrong. Somewhere is every bit as good as Lost in Translation, if not better. It's a distillation of all Coppola's obsessions, and done with poetry and enormous suggestiveness. Virtually every frame is full of resonance. Lives of quiet desperation, with little meaning or connectedness, a painful emptiness, a constant longing - these are her themes. Here again I've been thinking about this movie for days, relishing it and marvelling at how she managed to convey so much with such economy. Just see it.

For some light relief I thought I'd see the new French romcom Heartbreaker, starring the impossibly handsome Romain Duris and Johnny Depp's lovely French wife Valerie Paradis. I enjoyed it a lot. Three and a half stars.

My Top 10 books 2010

Here, in order, are my Top 10 lists for fiction and non-fiction for 2010. I've posted reviews of most of these titles on this blog previously.

FICTION:

Eva Hornung, Dog Boy
Ian McEwan, Solar
David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin
Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones
Jeremy Chambers, The Vintage and the Gleaning

NON-FICTION:

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Race of a Lifetime
Michael Lewis, The Big Short
Sarah Ellison, War at the Wall Street Journal
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nomad
Tony Blair, The Journey
Geoffrey Robinson, The Case of the Pope

John B Thompson, Merchants of Culture

Timothy Wu, The Master Switch

George Megalogenis, Trivial Pursuit

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

It's been three months since I've posted. I'm sorry. It's not that I haven't read anything. In fact I've read some excellent stuff, mainly non-fiction. For example, Tony Blair's exceptionally interesting memoirs; Geoffrey Robertson's persuasive and damning indictment of Pope Benedict's refusal to radically confront the huge problem of paedophilia in the Catholic priesthood; Paul Berman's Flight of the Intellectuals, which is a fairly savage critique of currently chic Islamic theologian Tariq Ramadan and his liberal stance in regard to Islam and its place in Western societies; and John Thompson's very interesting survey and analysis of today's US and UK book publishing industry - Merchants of Culture (which I'm reviewing in the international publishing journal LOGOS, out in November). 

But my review today is of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom. I'd read his first novel The Corrections when it came out in 2001 and went on to win the prestigious National Book Award. I enjoyed it, but can't say I loved it. I found it rather dry and frequently tedious, and most of the characters cold and distant. Technically of course it was brilliant. But Freedom, in my humble opinion, is a far more interesting and accomplished work. Without a shadow of a doubt, this book will become a classic of American literature. Put simply, it's spellbinding. It's absolutely enthralling. It's easily the best American novel I've read in years - up there with the classic Middlesex, and probably better.

It's the story of two young people who are attracted to each other in college, and then marry, for better or worse. They have two kids, who, unfortunately but fairly universally, develop personalities of their own. They all grow, develop careers, interact with society and politics. They have wide and varied family networks, and friends supportive and dangerous. Franzen's genius is in the way he creates full, living, breathing, passionate and thoroughly modern human beings. The ripe, combative richness of modern America is here - the passionate liberal versus conservative politics, the anger of middle America, the educated Eastern elites versus the resentful working class. It's Bush and Cheney's America - 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the coming of Obama.

But, in the end, Freedom is not a political book. It's a novel of love and hope - the deep, profound connections between human beings that bind and last, no matter the pain, the wrenching divisions, the awful disappointments. Read this book for the dialogue alone - the arguments, the angry phone calls, the sheer intelligence and emotional intensity of their verbal interactions. It's spellbinding. The writing is magnificent. Witty, alive, ambitious.

The ending, which was absolutely right, had me in tears. I could barely find my way to the scotch bottle. Much American literature has always struck me as overripe. Everything is bigger, larger than life, more intense and dramatic than any ordinary reader has ever experienced. The English are subtle, understated. But Freedom, although thoroughly within the American tradition, has a sureness and credibility that resonates.

Read this book over the Xmas holiday season. It's 562 pages long, so you need the time get involved in its world.

You won't regret it, and you will emerge a far better human being.

Brett Easton Ellis: Imperial Bedrooms

Imperial Bedrooms is a sequel to Brett Easton Ellis' first published novel Less Than Zero (1985). Like Salinger's Catcher in the Rye thirty four years previously, LTZ seemed to define the zeitgeist of a generation, and propelled the 21 year old Ellis to literary superstardom, an exaltation he has struggled with, and indeed creatively mined, ever since.


Many critics seem to think Ellis essentially is this self-referential teller of the one evolving story - the story of his rich Los Angeles friends and their aimless, destructive rituals, and his place as an author at once participating and observing. But I don't think this really defines Ellis at all.


To me he wrote one of the greatest English novels of the post-war age, a true classic - American Psycho. When this was first published in 1991 most countries, including Australia, banned it outright, or only allowed it to go on sale if shrink-wrapped!! I was living in Queensland at the time and simply couldn't get it. A friend sent me a copy from the US (this was pre-Amazon days).


American Psycho was a savage, devastating critique of late 20th century decadence. A searing, powerful, relentless indictment of meaningless, indulgent, voyeuristic lives. Many readers were warned off it because of the violence. Too bad really. They missed the entire point. Your nose had to be rubbed in it - that was the point.


So where does the new novel Imperial Bedrooms fit within the Ellis oeuvre?


It's a disappointment. Nowhere near the power or resonance of American Psycho, and missing the freshness and surprise (perhaps this is to be expected) of Less Than Zero. The same Ellis obsessions are there, however. His young friends from 25 years ago are now power-players in Hollywood, making B-grade movies, attending endless parties, awards nights, launches, etc, but still as vacuous, bored and desperate as ever. They have become the Champagne dregs, with all the appurtenances of material success - BMWs, BlackBerries, fake tans, fake faces - but none of the substantiality of character. There are no wives or kids, just endless, meaningless sex with young, grasping, aspiring actors. The only coinage the women have is their c..t. The main character, Clay, is a sick, perverted, sexual predator. Truly an ugly human being.. 


Ellis is a chronicler of surface glitter. But there is always menace, a sense of being caught up in something larger, an overriding evil. Violence is always happening or threatening, and is as meaningless as the glitter and baubles.

Unlike in Less Than Zero there is an unfolding dramatic narrative in Imperial Bedrooms, but it is less than believable and rather contrived. I thought at one stage I was reading a script for Days of Our Lives! There was dialogue but no communication. But then again, this is quintessentially Ellis.

If you like Ellis you'll like this book. I certainly liked it, although it's far from his best.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

I must admit I approached this new novel from English novelist David Mitchell with a certain amount of trepidation. I hadn't read his widely praised Cloud Atlas, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2004, but I knew it was regarded as a 'difficult read'.

Well, his new novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is absolutely brilliant. This book will be soon regarded as a classic. It is a rich, absorbing, highly dramatic and hugely enjoyable saga of life and society set in a secluded, anti-Western and anti-Christian Japan in 1799. The sea-faring Dutch have managed to negotiate a commercial relationship with the isolationist Japanese authorities, and have been allowed to set up a small piece of 'foreign territory' on a small island in the port of Nagasaki.

The intense relationships between the Dutch themselves and between them and the Japanese provide most of the drama of the book. The dialogue is superb, enlivened by an earthy crudity that is frequently funny and, of course, downright racist in today's terms:

'The jaundiced pygmies'.

'What was that frog-croak?...how I hate a man...who farts in French and expects applause'.

Towards the end of the book the British get involved, and carry on as only the British know how ('So let's give this despotic backwater a taste of the coming century..'). But 'untainted' Japan is an equally flawed and brutal society, with sheer evil and hypocrisy riddled throughout.

'If only, Shiroyama dreams, human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders'. 

The re-creation of that moment in history two centuries ago brings home some basic truths that Mitchell constantly underscores. The ordinary lives of ordinary human beings today are qualitatively better on just about every level and on any measure. There is no romanticising of the past going on here. In terms of medicine (there were no x-rays or antibiotics so people suffered awfully from common complaints we can cure so easily now), communications (replies to letters took three years to arrive), education (superstition and sheer ignorance had awful consequences), social structures (slaves and the lower classes were treated with abject cruelty), law and justice (corruption reigned supreme), and international relations (power and subjugation ruled) - compared to these brutish realities the modern world is a highly civilised place.

We tend to forget this. Mitchell rubs our noses in it.

In the end this book celebrates the value of honorable and courageous men and women, individuals who stand up for what is right, and thus power the progress of liberation for all.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet  is an enormously satisfying novel, and I urge you to read it. You won't be disappointed.

I predict a shortlisting for the Booker, for sure.