Atonement (Boeke Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, ..., winner)

Atonement is a 2001 novel by one of Britain's most highly regarded writers Ian McEwan (1948- ). It is published in 2001 and won the 2002 Boeke Prize, the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2002 WH Smith Literary Award, and the 2004 Santiago Prize.

Plot Summary [1]

In the hot summer of 1935, 13-year-old Briony Tallis is already an ambitious writer. She has written a play for her older brother, Leon, who is supposed to arrive later in the day. The characters are to be played by her cousins, 15-year-old Lola and the nine-year-old twins Jackson and Pierrot. Briony's sister, Cecilia, has returned home from Girton College, Cambridge, and is trying to sort out her confused feelings toward her childhood friend, the housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, who is also home from Cambridge for the summer. His studies were financed by her father, Jack Tallis, and Robbie is now considering becoming a doctor, which would also be funded by Jack Tallis.
Cecilia wants to fill a vase with water at the fountain in front of the Tallis house. She meets Robbie and they start talking but the conversation quickly becomes awkward. When Robbie wants to help Cecilia with the vase, she remains stubborn, the vase breaks, and two pieces fall into the fountain. Cecilia strips to her underwear, jumps into the fountain and retrieves the fragments while Robbie only stares at her. Briony witnesses the ensuing moment of sexual tension from an upstairs bedroom and is confused as to its meaning.
Leon Tallis arrives with his friend, Paul Marshall. They meet Robbie on their way to the house, and Leon invites him to dinner. Cecilia is irritated at Robbie's coming, but does not know why he bothers her so much.
Meanwhile, Robbie wants to write a letter to Cecilia to apologize for his behavior at the fountain. He indicates that he also feels awkward around her, and, like her, does not know why. After finishing it, he unthinkingly writes another letter, using the word "cunt," suggesting his subconscious desires towards Cecilia. Although he then writes another version of it, the first version is accidentally delivered to Cecilia via Briony, who reads it. Briony consults her cousin Lola. Briony is then convinced that Robbie is a "sex maniac" and that she must "protect" her sister from him.
Upon reading Robbie's letter, Cecilia realizes her love for Robbie and they end up making love in the library. Briony interrupts them, and interprets their lovemaking as a sexual assault upon her sister.
During dinner, the twin cousins run away, leaving a letter. The dinner party divides into groups to go out searching for them. Robbie and Briony are the only ones who are left alone, as Robbie has to acknowledge later. In the dark, Briony comes across Lola being raped by an unknown attacker. Briony blames Robbie as the attacker. Lola, afraid and disturbed, lets Briony do the talking.
The police arrive to investigate, and when Robbie arrives with the rescued twins, he is arrested solely on the basis of Briony's testimony. Apart from Robbie's mother, only Cecilia believes in his innocence.

By the time World War II has started, Robbie has spent three years in prison. He is released on the condition of enlistment in the army. Cecilia has become a nurse. She cuts off all contact with her family because of the part they took in sending Robbie to jail. Robbie and Cecilia have only been in contact by letter, since she was not allowed to visit him in prison. Before Robbie has to go to war in France, they meet once for half an hour during Cecilia's lunch break. Their reunion starts awkwardly, but they share a kiss before leaving each other.
In France, the war is going badly and the army is retreating to Dunkirk. As the injured Robbie goes to the safe haven, he thinks about Cecilia and past events like teaching Briony how to swim and reflecting on Briony's possible reasons for accusing him. His single meeting with Cecilia is the memory that keeps him walking, his only aim is seeing her again. At the end, Robbie falls asleep in Dunkirk, one day before the evacuation.

Remorseful Briony has refused her place at Cambridge and instead is a trainee nurse in London. She has realized the full extent of her mistake, and now remembers it was Paul Marshall, Leon's friend, whom she saw raping Lola. Briony still writes, although she does not pursue it with the same recklessness as she did as a child.
Briony is called to the bedside of Luc, a young, fatally wounded French soldier. She consoles him in his last moments by speaking with him in her school French, and he mistakes her for an English girl whom his mother wanted him to marry. Just before his death, Luc asks "Do you love me?", to which Briony answers "Yes," not only because "no other answer was possible" but also because "for the moment, she did. He was a lovely boy far away from his family and about to die." Afterward, Briony daydreams about the life she might have had if she had married Luc and gone to live with him and his family.
Briony attends the wedding of her cousin Lola and Paul Marshall before finally visiting Cecilia. Robbie is on leave from the army and Briony meets him unexpectedly at her sister's. They both refuse to forgive Briony, who nonetheless tells them she will try and put things right. She promises to begin the legal procedures needed to exonerate Robbie, even though Paul Marshall will never be held responsible for his crime because of his marriage to Lola, the victim.

The fourth section, titled "London 1999", is written from Briony's perspective. She is a successful novelist at the age of 77 and dying of vascular dementia.
It is revealed that Briony is the author of the preceding sections of the novel. Although Cecilia and Robbie are reunited in Briony's novel, they were not in reality. Robbie Turner died of septicaemia caused by his injury on the beaches of Dunkirk and Cecilia was killed by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains above Balham Underground station. The truth is that Cecilia and Robbie never saw each other again after their half-hour meeting. Although the detail concerning Lola's marriage to Paul Marshall is true, Briony never visited Cecilia to make amends.
Briony explains why she decided to change real events and unite Cecilia and Robbie in her novel, although it was not her intention in her many previous drafts. She did not see what purpose it would serve if she told the readers the pitiless truth. She reasons that they could not draw any sense of hope or satisfaction from it. But above all, she wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia their happiness by being together. Since they could not have the time together they so much longed for in reality, Briony wanted to give it to them at least in her novel.

[1] Wikipedia.org: Atonement

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Ysabel (World Fantasy Award winner)

Ysabel is a novel by multiple award-winning Canadian author of fantasy fiction, Guy Gavriel Kay (1954- ), published in 2007, and won the 2008 World Fantasy Award in the Novel category.

Plot Summary [1]

Ned Marriner is in France with his father, Edward, a celebrated photographer who is working on a book about Provence. While his father shoots outside the deserted Saint-Sauveur Cathedral, Ned wanders in to look around. There he meets Kate Wenger, an American exchange student with a passion for ancient history and an extensive knowledge of the cathedral's past. The pair is startled by the appearance of a then-nameless man, who warns them to leave immediately, stating that they "have blundered into the corner of a very old story". Ned finds that he is able to sense the man's presence, a power of which he was previously unaware. Ned and Kate also notice an ancient carving of a woman on one of the church pillars, which the nameless man claims he created.
Frightened by the incident, Ned and Kate make plans to meet a few days later. Ned goes on a photo-scouting mission with his father's assistants, Greg, Steve, and Melanie, a young woman who is hyper-organized, witty, and well-liked by everyone, including Ned. They head towards Mont Sainte-Victoire, a much-photographed location made famous by Cezanne. But along the way, Ned falls suddenly and inexplicably ill. Arriving at the mountain, he is overcome by images of the slaughter that took place there centuries prior, when a Roman general killed thousands of Celts. He is rushed back to the team's villa, but once he has travelled only a short distance from the mountain, he recovers completely. Ned and Kate meet later that day in a coffee shop to discuss their situation. Ned is unnerved by the discovery of his strange abilities, while both are curious to find out more about the nameless man and his "story." Unaware that they are being watched by the nameless man, they make plans to meet again in Entremont, an ancient Celtic site, on the Eve of Beltaine. Kate leaves, but Ned becomes aware of the nameless man's presence and confronts him. The man tells him little, and soon leaves the cafe. Outside, however, he is attacked by unnaturally vicious dogs, and Ned steps in to defend him, saving his life.
Ned meets his Aunt Kim, a woman with mysterious powers. She tells him that she sensed he was in trouble, and came at once to offer her help. He discovers that she has the same ability to "sense" the presence of those with power, which she claims "runs in the family." They are confronted by a second nameless man, a large Celt with antlers, and are again warned to stay out of the "story." The Celt plans to kill the nameless man from the cathedral (who he calls a "Roman"), and threatens Ned for having helped him, but Aunt Kim manages to bluff their way out of the situation. Despite Ned's misgivings, Kate, who is acting strangely, convinces him to follow their original plan of visiting Entremont on Beltaine. They plan to be away from the place before dark, but not long after they enter the site, darkness falls several hours early. They hide from a ghostly procession of druids that arrives soon after and becomes more solid as the light continues to fade. The nameless Roman from the cathedral confronts them, ordering them to flee as soon as they can. Kate begins to struggle, possessed with a strange desire to join the druidic ceremony below. Just before she escapes, however, Melanie arrives, looking for Ned. As she approaches the waiting Celts, she is transformed into Ysabel, possessed by the spirit of an ancient woman who the two nameless men have been fighting over for centuries. Ysabel names the Roman Phelan and the Celt Cadell, and orders them to spend three days searching for her. Whoever finds her first will win her. Ned and Kate discover that this is the "story": a battle between two men for one woman's love, which has been repeated in various incarnations throughout the millennia.
Ned and Kate leave unnoticed, stricken by the loss of Melanie. He tells his father, Aunt Kim, Greg, and Steve everything that has happened, and also asks his mother, Meghan, to leave Sudan, where she is working with Doctors Without Borders, to be with them as they attempt to get Melanie back. Meghan and Kim, her sister, had a falling out when they were younger, and there are some strained moments once Meghan arrives and they attempt to work together and reconcile their differences. They are aided by Uncle Dave, Kim's husband, who also possesses special abilities and knowledge of the supernatural. Ned and his fellow searchers visit various historical sites in Provence over the following two days, trying to track down Ysabel's hiding place before Phelan or Cadell in the hopes that they will be able to rescue Melanie. Following a hint from one of the wild boars that are common throughout the South of France, Ned realizes that Ysabel is hiding on Mont Sainte-Victoire, the site where he experienced his mysterious illness. He decides to go there alone, as he is a marathon runner and will be able to reach the summit fastest. Despite feeling sick the entire way, Ned makes it to the summit before Phelan or Cadell, discovering Ysabel in a cavern that looks out over Provence. He demands that she release Melanie. Cadell and Phelan arrive shortly thereafter, both claiming the victory. Ysabel points out that it was Ned who arrived first, and reveals that Ned is distantly descended from the original Ysabel (who would have gone by a different name). Both Phelan and Cadell commit suicide by leaping from the mountain, for neither succeeded in reaching Ysabel first. When Ned looks at Ysabel again, he finds that she too has departed, leaving Melanie safe and unharmed in her place.

[1] Wikipedia.org: Ysabel

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The City & the City (Hugo Award, BSFA Award, Clarke Award, & World Fantasy Award winner)

The City & the City is a fiction novel by British author China Miéville (1972- ) published in 2009 and won the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 2010 BSFA Award for Best Novel of 2009, the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the 2010 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

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The City & The City

The City & The City takes place in the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. These two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but via the volition of their citizens (and the threat of the secret power known as Breach), they are perceived as two different cities. A denizen of one city must dutifully 'unsee' (that is, ignore, or fade into the background) the denizens, buildings, and events taking place in the other city — even if they are an inch away. This separation is emphasized by the style of clothing, architecture, gait, and the way denizens of each city generally carry themselves. Residents of the cities are taught from childhood to recognise things belonging to the other city without actually seeing them. Ignoring the separation, even by accident, is called "breaching" - a terrible crime by the citizens of the two cities, worse than murder.

The twin cities are composed of crosshatched, alter, and total areas. "Total"' areas are entirely in one city, the city in which the observer currently resides. "Alter" areas are completely in the other city, and so must be completely avoided and ignored. Between these are areas of "crosshatch". These might be streets, parks or squares where denizens of both cities walk alongside one another, albeit unseen. Areas that exist in both cities usually go under different names in each one. There is also Copula Hall, "one of the very few" buildings which exists in both cities under the same name. Rather than being cross-hatched, it essentially functions as a border. It is the only way in which one can legally and officially pass from one city to another. Passing through the border passage takes travellers, geographically (or "grosstopically"), to the exact place they started from — only in a different city.

From a physical standpoint, little differentiates the two cities, other than slight differences of architecture, vehicles and styles of dress which citizens and visitors are trained to recognise. Those who do not know about the separation might naturally view the two cities as one. Because of this, an extra power is needed to keep the separation in place: this organisation is known as Breach. When a 'breach' takes place (used here in the sense of 'breaching' the barrier between the two cities), Breach comes to take care of it. Members of the Breach organisation use their powers to take the breacher captive, and bring them to an unknown punishment. "Breachers", as they are called, disappear and are never seen again. Children and tourists, however, are treated more leniently: children may be forgiven for a small breach; if tourists breach, they are bundled out and banned from both cities forever.

Most breaches are taken care of by Breach immediately, but its surveillance capabilities are not absolute. Sometimes Breach must be specifically invoked to investigate a crime that seems to be a clear-cut case of breach, such as a smuggling operation that involves breaching in order to transport the smuggled goods from one city to the other. In order to invoke Breach, the police must present their evidence to an Oversight Committee composed of 42 members, 21 from each city. If the evidence presented is convincing enough, the Committee performs whatever other investigation into the matter it deems appropriate to resolve any remaining doubts its members have. If its investigation concludes to its satisfaction that a breach has taken place, then and only then will it invoke Breach. Invoking Breach is a last resort because it is an alien power to which some consider that Besźel and Ul Qoma surrender their sovereignty at their peril. [1]

[1] Wikipedia.org: The City & the City

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The Kite Runner (Boeke Prize winner, the first 2005 best seller in US, ...)

The Kite Runner is a novel by Afghan-born American novelist and physician Khaled Hosseini (1965- ); published in 2003 and won the Boeke Prize in 2004. It was the first 2005 best seller in the United States [1].

Plot Summary [2]

Part I

Amir, a well-to-do Pashtun boy, and Hassan, a Hazara who is the son of Ali, Amir's father's servant, spend their days in the then peaceful city of Kabul, kite fighting and roaming through the streets. Amir’s father, a wealthy merchant, who Amir affectionately refers to as Baba, loves both the boys, but seems critical of Amir for not being manly enough. Amir secretly believes his father blames him for his mother’s death during childbirth. However, he has a kinder father figure in the form of Rahim Khan, Baba’s friend, who understands Amir better, and is supportive of his interest in writing. Amir tells us that his first word was 'Baba' and Hassan's "Amir,' suggesting that Amir looked up most to Baba, while Hassan looked up to Amir.

Assef, a notorious sociopath and violent older boy with sadistic tendencies, mocks Amir for socializing with a Hazara, which is, according to Assef, an inferior race that should only live in Hazarajat. He prepares to attack Amir with brass knuckles, but Hassan bravely stands up to him, threatening to shoot out Assef's left eye with his slingshot. Assef and his posse back off, but Assef threatens revenge.

Hassan is a successful "kite runner" for Amir, knowing where the kite will land without even watching it. One triumphant day, Amir wins the local tournament, and finally Baba's praise. Hassan runs for the last cut kite, a great trophy, saying to Amir, "For you, a thousand times over." Unfortunately, Hassan runs into Assef and his two friends. Hassan refuses to give up Amir's kite. Amir searches for Hassan but hides when he hears Assef's voice. Assef decides to teach Hassan a lesson by raping him. Amir witnesses the act but is too scared to intervene, and returns home ashamed, guilty for not being able to help his best friend. He feels that his cowardice in Hassan's rape would destroy any hopes for Baba's affections, so he says nothing. Afterwards, Hassan and Amir keep a distance from each other. Amir reacts indifferently because he feels ashamed, and is frustrated by Hassan's saint-like behavior. Already jealous of Baba's love for Hassan, he worries that if Baba knew of Hassan's bravery and his own cowardice, that Baba's love for Hassan would grow even more.

Amir, filled with guilt on his birthday, cannot enjoy his gifts. The only present that does not feel like "blood" money is the notebook to write his stories in given to him by Rahim Khan, his father's friend and the only one Amir felt really understood him.

Amir felt that life would be easier if Hassan was not around, so he planted a watch and some money from his birthday party under Hassan's mattress in hopes that Baba would force him to leave; Hassan falsely confesses when confronted by Baba about the watch and the money. Baba forgives him, despite the fact that, as he explained earlier, he believes that "there is no act more wretched than stealing." Hassan and his father Ali, to Baba's extreme sorrow, leave anyway. Hassan's departure frees Amir of the daily reminder of his cowardice and betrayal, but he still lives in their shadow and his guilt.

Part II

Five years later, the Soviet Union invade Afghanistan. Amir and Baba escape to Peshawar, Pakistan and then to Fremont, California, where Amir and Baba, who lived in luxury in an expensive mansion in Afghanistan, settle in a run-down apartment and Baba begins work at a gas station. Amir eventually takes classes at a local community college to develop his writing skills after graduating from high school at age twenty. Every Sunday, Baba and Amir make extra money selling used goods at a flea market in San Jose. There, Amir meets fellow refugee Soraya Taheri and her family. Soraya's father, General Taheri, once a high-ranking officer in Afghanistan, has contempt for Amir's literary aspiration. Baba is diagnosed with terminal small cell carcinoma but is still capable of granting Amir one last favor: he asks Soraya's father's permission for Amir to marry her. He agrees and the two marry. Shortly thereafter Baba dies. Amir and Soraya settle down in a happy marriage, but to their sorrow learn that they cannot have children.

Amir embarks on a successful career as a novelist. Fifteen years after his wedding, Amir receives a call from Rahim Khan, who is dying from an illness. Rahim Khan asks Amir to come to Peshawar, Pakistan. He enigmatically tells Amir, "There is a way to be good again." Amir goes.

Part III

From Khan, Amir learns the fates of Ali and Hassan. Ali was killed by a land mine. Hassan had a wife named Farzana and a son who he named Sohrab. He had set up a life for himself in a village outside Bamiyan, but returned to Baba’s house as a caretaker at Khan’s request, although he moved to the little hut in the yard so as not to dishonor Amir by taking his place in the house. During his stay, his mother Sanaubar returned after a long search for her son, and died after four years. One month after Khan left for Pakistan, the Taliban ordered Hassan to give up the house and leave, but he refused, and was executed, along with Farzana. Khan reveals that Ali was not really Hassan's father, and that Ali was sterile, and that Hassan was actually the son of Baba, and therefore Amir's half-brother. Finally, Rahim Khan tells Amir that the true reason he has called Amir to Pakistan is to go to Kabul to rescue Hassan's son, Sohrab, from an orphanage.

Khan asks Amir to bring Sohrab to Thomas and Betty Caldwell, who own an orphanage. Amir becomes furious; he feels cheated because he had not known that Hassan was his half-brother. Amir finally relents and decides to go to Kabul to get Sohrab. He storms out of the house in a rage, but later returns and tells Khan will go find Sohrab. He travels in a taxi with an Afghan driver named Farid, a veteran of the war with the Soviets, and stays as a guest at Farid's brother Wahid's house. Farid, initially hostile to Amir, is sympathetic when he hears of Amir's true reason for returning, and offers to accompany him on his journey.

Amir searches for Sohrab at the orphanage. In order to enter Taliban territory, Amir, who is normally clean shaven, wears a fake beard and moustache, to avoid the punishment the Taliban would otherwise deliver. However, Sohrab is not where he was supposed to be: the director of the orphanage tells them that a Taliban official comes often, brings cash, and usually takes a girl back with him. Once in a while however, he takes a boy, recently Sohrab. The director tells Amir to go to a soccer match, where he could see the procurer making speeches at half-time and wearing black sunglasses. Farid manages to secure an appointment with the speaker at his home, by saying that he and Amir have "personal business" with him.

At the house, Amir meets the man, who turns out to be Assef. Assef is aware of Amir's identity from the very beginning, but Amir doesn't recognise his childhood nemesis until Assef starts asking about Ali, Baba, and Hassan. Sohrab is being kept at Assef's home where he is made to dance dressed in women's clothes, and it seems Assef might have been raping him. (Sohrab later confirms this saying, "I'm so dirty and full of sin. The bad man and the other two did things to me.") Assef agrees to relinquish him, but only for a price—cruelly beating Amir. However, Amir is saved when Sohrab uses his slingshot to shoot out Assef's left eye, fulfilling Hassan's threat made many years before.

While at a hospital treating his injuries, Amir asks Farid to find information about Thomas and Betty Caldwell. When Farid returns, he tells Amir that the American couple do not exist.

Amir tells Sohrab of his plans to take him back to America and possibly adopt him, and promises that he will never be sent to an orphanage again. However, US authorities demand, among other things, paperwork as evidence of Sohrab's orphan status. After decades of war, this is all but impossible to get in Afghanistan where, as Amir says, many dead have no certificate just as they had never had a birth certificate. Amir tells Sohrab that he may have to temporarily break his promise until the paperwork is completed. Upon hearing this, Sohrab attempts suicide. Amir eventually manages to take him back to the United States without an orphanage, and introduces him to his wife. However, Sohrab is emotionally damaged and refuses to speak or even glance at Soraya. This continues until his frozen emotions thaw when Amir reminisces about Hassan and kites. Amir shows off some of Hassan’s tricks, and Sohrab begins to interact with Amir again. In the end Sohrab only shows a lopsided smile, but Amir takes to it with all his heart as he runs the kite for Sohrab, saying, "For you, a thousand times over."

Adaptation

The Kite Runner was adapted into a film of the same name directed by Marc Forster in 2007.

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[1] "Harry Potter tops US best-seller list for 2005". ninemsn.com.au. 2006-01-07.
[2] Wikipedia.org: The Kite Runner

Diary of a Bad Year is a novel by Australian citizen, South African-born author J. M. Coetzee (1940- ) who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is one of  the two writers to win the Booker Prize twice. It was published in 2007 and nominated for New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, The Age Book of the Year Award, Victorian Premier's Literary Award, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, and Australia-Asia Literary Award, all in 2008.

Diary of a Bad Year

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Plot Summary [1]

The protagonist, called Señor C. by the other characters, is an aging South African writer living in Sydney. The novel consists of his essays and musings alongside diary entries by both Señor C. and Anya, a neighbor whom he has hired as a typist. The essays, which take up the larger part of each page, are on wide-ranging topics, including the politics of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Guantanamo Bay, and terrorism. The diary entries appear beneath the essays and describe the relationship that develops between the two characters, a relationship that ultimately leads to subtle evolutions in both their worldviews.

From The Washington Post [2]

J.M. Coetzee is a great novelist, perhaps the greatest writing today, and has garnered just about every important prize awarded for fiction written in English, including the Nobel Prize for Literature. By common consent his most powerful work is Disgrace, published in 1999, in form an old fashioned realistic novel that one can readily imagine having been written by Dostoevsky, Coetzee's acknowledged master, if the terrifying event at the center of its plot -- the gang rape of a young lesbian in the South African bush -- were transposed to Russia during one of its periods of violence and chaos. Coetzee's previous novels, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Age of Iron (1990) and The Master of Petersburg (1994) among them, are likewise in the realist tradition. They are stories plausible enough for the reader to accept them as true. To quote the protagonist of Coetzee's new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, such stories "tell themselves, they don't get told." The author doesn't intrude in the space between the version of reality he has created and the reader, or otherwise take the risk of breaking the spell he has cast.

Since Disgrace, however, Coetzee has been engaged in a fascinating effort to bend the realist novel into a new medium. Diary of a Bad Year is the most recent example of that enterprise; the mesmerizing and beautiful novel Elizabeth Costello (2003) was the first. In the latter work Coetzee introduced an alter ego, a famous female writer, born in 1928, and the author of nine novels, a volume of poems, a book on birds and a body of journalism -- an oeuvre closely corresponding to Coetzee's. We see her deliver seven lectures. Among them: one on the novel, two on animal rights (these were in fact given by Coetzee at Princeton) and one on Eros as it affects men and gods. The last chapter is a retelling of the parable of the Law in Kafka's Trial.

Elizabeth Costello came back on stage, as though to take a bow, in an exquisite chapter-length sequel to the novel that appeared in 2005 in the New York Review of Books, and again, much more substantially, in the novel Slow Man, also published that year. There Costello literally moves in with the protagonist, a 60-something man by the name of Rayment, living alone in Adelaide, Australia. Rayment had never met Costello before, and she is not a welcome or easy guest. But she is obsessed with him, and the difficulty she faces is that he won't cooperate. He refuses to undertake anything that makes the protagonist of a novel photogenic, such as making love to the three women who are in all likelihood available or, for that matter, Costello herself. Slow Man -- with its slow protagonist -- can be seen as a novelist's interaction with the characters of a novel that is still a work in progress and may not turn out as had been intended.

The obduracy of invented characters can be very real. The novelist comes across them somewhere in the zone of imagination and, because of a mysterious affinity, invites them to come aboard. They do -- and misbehave. Coetzee's surrogate in Diary of a Bad Year is JC (two of Coetzee's initials), another very distinguished novelist but this time originally South African, laden with honors, born in 1934 (Coetzee was born in 1940), and now living in Sydney (Coetzee, like Rayment, lives in Adelaide). Asked why he isn't writing a novel instead of the string of little essays to be published in Germany as "Strong Opinions," JC answers, "I don't have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up the whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today."

JC and Coetzee may be protesting too much. Diary of a Bad Year is an ingenious work that rivets the reader's attention, and it cannot have been easy to write. The top third of each page is occupied by the essays that JC is writing for a German publisher.

The middle third of the page tells the story of JC's relationship with Anya, a Philippine-Australian beauty he meets in his building's basement laundry room. In the manner of old men who have loved women, he feels an immediate flash of desire, but, cagy and reasonable, he resists temptation. Instead of making a pass or venturing a proposition, he engages her to type the essays he dictates into a recording machine. Her secretarial skills aren't much, but she becomes his Segretaria, his Secret Aria, an echo of Humbert Humbert's string of endearing names for Lolita. When they discuss his work, she bosses him around, adding to his infatuation.

On the bottom third of each page appears a running commentary by Anya on JC and on her own live-in affair with Alan, and also Alan's comments to Anya on JC. Alan is an Australian yob who has worked his way to being a financial consultant; in his case that may mean he is a crook. He has planted spyware on the hard drive of JC's computer, which reports on everything JC confides to his computer, especially his finances. Alan's Thatcherite lucubrations are a counterpoint for JC's sometimes quirky and more often predictable worldview: JC distrusts democracy and deplores the decline of Australian political life, loathes George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, feels shame descending upon him when he thinks of Guantanamo and Americans' use of torture. Alan, we soon learn, has concocted a larcenous scheme designed to get his hands on JC's money. Anya's response is somber and unequivocal: She will stand by her JC. More than that, she will be there to hold his hand and give him a kiss when the end comes, "just to remind him of what he is leaving behind."

So it turns out in the end that Coetzee has written a sometimes sentimental love story that plays out nicely to the legato accompaniment of his pronouncements, political and cultural, some of which hit the bull's eye while some come to the verge of pomposity. I said "his pronouncements," but of course they are JC's essays, which is a reminder that not everything in Coetzee's novel is as it seems. Except this: Lovely Anya has her heart in the right place, and JC is lucky enough to understand that. Is the experimental form the story took a success? I was amused and at the same time hoped that the marvelously inventive Mr. Coetzee will move beyond it.
Reviewed by Louis Begley
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

[1] Wikipedia.org: Diary of a Bad Year
[2] Breaking the Fourth Wall, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR, by J.M. Coetzee, The Washington Post, 2008.

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The Brass Verdict (Anthony Award winner)

The Brass Verdict is a novel by American author of detective novels Michael Connelly (1956- ) published in 2008 and won Anthony Award for the Best Novel in 2009 [1].

Plot Summary [2]

Since the events of the previous novel, Attorney Mickey Haller has spent a year recuperating from his wounds and a subsequent addiction to painkillers. But he is called back to the practice of law when an old friend, defense attorney Jerry Vincent, is murdered. Haller inherits Vincent's caseload, the high-profile trial of a Hollywood mogul accused of slaying his wife and her lover. Haller secures the "franchise" case, persuading the mogul to keep him on as counsel by promising not to seek a postponement of the trial, which is due to start in nine days.

Meanwhile, maverick LAPD detective Harry Bosch, the main character in several earlier novels written by Connelly, is investigating Vincent's murder. Bosch, warning that Vincent's killer may come after Haller next, persuades the reluctant lawyer to cooperate in the ongoing murder investigation. Meanwhile, Haller shakes off the rust, and lingering self-doubts, as he prepares for the double-murder trial.

Unknown to Haller, but revealed in previous Connelly novels, is the fact that Bosch is Haller's half-brother.

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Review [3]

"The Brass Verdict has the sneaky metabolism of any Connelly book. It starts slowly, moves calmly, hides pertinent bits of information in plain sight and then abruptly ratchets up its energy for the denouement....In the midst of this new story, Mickey rebounds with a vengeance....Like Harry Bosch's mojo, Mickey Haller's is liable to work well for a long time." (New York Times Janet Maslin 2008)

"Connelly is firing on all cylinders in this epic page-turner. The intriguing story line, the chance to view Bosch from another perspective, and Haller's reappearance as a main character add up to a fantastic read. One of the best thrillers of the year." (Library Journal Jeff Ayers )

"The answer to every Connelly fan's dream: Hieronymus Bosch meets the Lincoln Lawyer....By turns wary, competitive, complementary, cooperative and mutually predatory....Connelly brings his two sleuths together in a way that honors them both" (Kirkus Reviews )

"Connelly once again hits it out of the park in the tightly written, fast-paced and sharply imagined The Brass Verdict....Connelly builds to some breathtaking twists before all comes to a close. And a more perfect end to the maze he has drawn is difficult to imagine." (Denver Post Robin Vidimos )

"If at first encounter Connelly seems primarily an exceptionally accomplished writer of crime novels, at closer examination he is also a mordant and knowing chronicler of the world in which crime takes place, i.e., our world....Aterrific ride." (Washington Post Jonathan Yardley )

"A beautifully executed crime thriller....Bosch might have met his match in the wily Haller, and readers will delight in their sparring." (Publishers Weekly )

Washington Post [4]: Graham Greene liked to distinguish between his serious novels and those he called his "entertainments," though given the complexity of the man and his work it wasn't always easy for readers to draw the distinction. Probably Michael Connelly would be the last to compare himself with Greene, but he, too, writes at differing levels of seriousness. If at first encounter he seems primarily an exceptionally accomplished writer of crime novels, at closer examination he is also a mordant and knowing chronicler of the world in which crime takes place, i.e., our world. Three years ago, within the space of only a few months, Connelly published two novels notable for the serious business underlying the entertainment. The first, The Closers, published in May 2005, found his noted Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch trying to solve a "cold case" and thus trying to bring justice to victims on whom the law has turned its back. Then, in October of the same year, he published The Lincoln Lawyer, his first novel told from a lawyer's point of view, about an ambulance chaser named Mickey Haller, who, in the course of pursuing a lucrative case, finds himself seeking justice for a man he believes he failed to represent fairly when his case was being heard. Now, in The Brass Verdict, Connelly brings Bosch and Haller together for the first time. Though the novel has some serious things to say about the workings, and occasional failures, of the jury system, it is primarily an entertainment, and more than welcome purely as such. It's narrated by Mickey, a criminal-defense lawyer who is just coming off a year's self-imposed sabbatical -- he'd been shot in the gut and then had become addicted to painkillers in various forms -- and plans to ease slowly back into his practice. He's no K Street lawyer, as he tells a young man he takes on as his driver: "I haven't had an office since I left the Public Defenders Office twelve years ago. My car is my office. I've got two other Lincolns just like this one. I keep them in rotation. Each one's got a printer, a fax and I've got a wireless card in my computer. Anything I have to do in an office I can do back here while I'm on the road to the next place. There are more than forty courthouses spread across L.A. County. Being mobile is the best way to do business." Mickey's hopes of easing back in are quickly deep-sixedConnelly's faithful readers don't have to be told that his real name is Hieronymus, "like the painter" -- but there's a problem: The deeper both men dig into Vincent's past, the more suspicions are raised. Vincent had received a lot of money, presumably from Elliot, and much of it -- $100,000, to be precise -- had disappeared. Mickey says Vincent claimed that "he needed the money to buy a boat and that if he made the deal in cash, he would get the best deal and save a lot of money," to which Harry replies: "There is no boat. The story was a lie." Vincent "bought something," Harry says, "and your client Walter Elliot probably knows what it was" -- something, for starters, like a potential juror. "You should take it as a warning, Counselor," Harry continues. When Mickey scoffs, he says, "His lawyer got killed, not him. Think about it. And remember, that little trickle on the back of your neck and running down your spine? That's the feeling you get when you know you have to look over your shoulder. When you know you're in danger." Mickey doesn't want to be scared, but as things unfold it appears he doesn't have much choice. One of those things is, how much -- if at all -- can he trust his client? Walter Elliot loudly and frequently proclaims his innocence and insists he wants a speedy trial to clear his name as rapidly as possibly, but though Mickey wants to believe him, experience teaches him to be cautious: "Over the years I had represented and been in the company of a couple dozen killers. The one rule is that there are no rules. They come in all sizes and shapes, rich and poor, humble and arrogant, regretful and cold to the bone. The percentages told me that it was most likely Elliot was a killer. That he had calmly dispatched his wife and her lover and arrogantly thought he could and would get away with it. But there was nothing about him on first meeting that told me one way or the other for sure. And that's the way it always was." If you're beginning to get a whiff of the O.J. Simpson case, well, that's pretty obviously how Connelly planned it. Not merely is the accused murderer a Los Angeles celebrity and the victims his wife and her lover, but Connelly drops in the occasional teasing reference as well. When Elliot blusters in court that "the sooner Mr. Haller gets to prove my innocence to the world, the better," Mickey dismisses it as "O.J. 101," and when another lawyer offers to pitch in and help, Mickey tells him: "He wants only one lawyer at the table. . . . He said no dream team." But all of that is just a little juice on the side; the main story is strictly Connelly's. The essence of it is this, as Mickey puts it: "I was defending a man I believed was innocent of the murders he was charged with but complicit in the reason they had occurred. I had a sleeper on the jury whose placement was directly related to the murder of my predecessor. And I had a detective watching over me whom I was holding back on and couldn't be sure was considering my safety ahead of his own desire to break open the case." Yet how does Mickey feel? "I felt like a guy flipping a three-hundred-pound sled in midair. It might not be a sport but it was dangerous as hell and it did what I hadn't been able to do in more than a year's time. It shook off the rust and put the charge back in my blood." Mickey is pumped, and, take my word for it, you will be too. Even though the way it ends is just a wee bit contrived, it's still a terrific ride.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

[1] Anthony Award, Best Novel, 2009 Michael Connelly, The Brass Verdict

[2] Wikipedia.org: The_Brass_Verdict

[3] Amazon.com: The Brass Verdict

[4] Washington Post: Jonathan Yardley on 'The Brass Verdict'

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The Book Thief (Boeke Prize, Daniel Elliott Peace Award, ... winner)

The Book Thief is a novel by Australian author Markus Zusak (1975- ), published in 2005 and won Commonwealth Writers Prize, Horn Book Fanfare, Kirkus Reviews Editor Choice Award, School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, Daniel Elliott Peace Award, Publishers Weekly Best Children Book of the Year, Booklist ChildrenEditors' Choice and Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book in 2006, Boeke Prize, ALA Best Books for Young Adults, Michael L. Printz Honor Book and Book Sense Book of the Year in 2007, and Pacific Northwest Young Readers Choice Master List in 2009 [1].

Plot Summary [1]

The Book Thief takes place in Germany before and during World War II. The story is told from the point of view of Death, who finds the story of the Book Thief, Liesel Meminger, to be very interesting, as she brushed Death three times in her life. The novel begins when Liesel's mother takes Liesel and her brother Werner to live with foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann. We learn that her father is a communist, and her mother is chronically sick. Her brother dies during the trip and Liesel steals the apprentice Gravediggers' Grave Digging handbook, after he drops it in the snow. This would be Liesel's first close call with death, as well as her first time stealing a book. Liesel's foster mother and father, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, treat her well, though Rosa often insults Liesel by calling her a pig in German (affectionately, of course). Hans teaches her how to read using "The Gravedigger's Handbook", and she continues stealing books from various sources - mainly the library of Ilsa Hermann, the mayor's wife, a friend of hers who enjoys and tolerates her thievery. Liesel also befriends the other children of Himmel Street, including Rudy Steiner, who is in love with her and is also her best friend.

Eventually, Hans and Rosa take in and hide Max Vandenburg, a Jewish man whose father saved Hans' life in World War I. Max becomes friends with Liesel, making her two books, using repainted pages from a copy of Mein Kampf(My Struggle) and showing her his life story in a series of sketches. However, the Nazi presence and the rise of World War II throw all of their lives into turmoil. When a parade of Jews is brought through the town, Hans gives a piece of bread to an old man. He and the old man are whipped and the family lives in fear of the Gestapo searching their house and discovering Max. They arrange for Max to leave and rendezvous with Hans after a few days; however, when Hans arrives at the meeting point he finds only a note that they believe is from Max saying "You've done enough." After a few weeks, Hans is ordered into the army, as is Rudy's father, Alex Steiner - this is also a punishment; Rudy shows athletic and academic promise and is offered a place at an 'elite' school which was meant for Germany's future elite group, which his parents refuse. Hans is drafted into an air raid service, however after a few months he breaks his leg and returns home.

Liesel begins to write her own book, The Book Thief : the story of her life. When Himmel Street is bombed, she is the only survivor, as she was in the Hubermanns' basement, finishing her book that Hans encouraged her to read. She finds the bodies of her foster parents, and then Rudy. This is Death's third encounter with Liesel. Distraught, she drops the book, which Death finds and keeps. She goes to live with the Hermanns and when Alex Steiner returns, works in his tailor shop. In 1945, Max Vanderburg walks into the shop and he and Liesel are reunited. At the end of the book, Death tells us that she dies in Sydney, Australia, although few other details of her life are revealed, and gives her back the book, along with a truth he can not tell anyone else: "I am haunted by humans."

Total Death Encounters: 1) When Liesel was in the train with her younger brother. Werner coughed and stared blankly into the floor as death came and noticed Liesel. 2) After an air raid an American bomber plane crashes into the woods just at the end of Himmel street, Rudy walks to the dying man in the plane and puts a teddy bear on his chest before being carried away. Death saw Liesel and recognized her. 3)During a unknown midnight air raid on Munich, the bombers missed and hit Himmel street. Death watched as Liesel ran to see all of her dead peers. He was especially sad to take Rudy, He had so much life and so much to live for. He takes his soul when Liesel bent down to gave him a final farewell kiss, as she was in love with him after all. This is when Death finds the book.

Editorial Review [2]

The Book Thief will be appreciated for Mr. Zusak's audacity, also on display in his earlier I Am the Messenger. It will be widely read and admired because it tells a story in which books become treasures. And because there's no arguing with a sentiment like that.

[1] Wikipedia.org: The Book Thief
[2] The Book Thief - Markus Zusak - Review - Books - New York Times

The Finkler Question (Man Booker Prize winner)

The Finkler Question is a novel by British author and journalist, Howard Jacobson (1942- ), published in 2010 and won the Man Booker Prize on October 12, 2010.

The Finkler Question

Video: Howard Jacobson wins Booker Prize

Plot Summary [1]

The story centers on Julian Treslove, a former radio producer whose career has failed to rise as it should have, mainly because of his lack of focus on the task in hand and a degree of self-doubt which robs him of the certainty he needs to succeed.
Treslove has two close friends, Sam Finkler, a television producer and Jewish philosopher and the former teacher of Sam and Julian, Libor Sevcik, an elderly widower, also Jewish, who in some ways acts as a mentor to the two men.
One day, while walking near Broadcasting House Treslove is mugged and all his valuables are stolen. Treslove is mortified to realize that his assailant is a woman. And to complicate matters, although the words she uttered at the time of the robbery are indistinct, on further reflection, Treslove comes to believe that they were the words, “You Jew!”.
The thought of being the victim of an anti-Semitic attack, when he is in fact a Gentile begins to worry Treslove. Because of his two friends Sam and Libor, Treslove is already familiar with all things Jewish, and he begins to think about anti-Semitism, reading of attacks on Jews in Canada, France, Germany and Argentina. Slowly, his mugging begins to take the form in his mind of an “atrocity”, and as the novel unwinds, poor Treslove begins to question whether he is not in fact Jewish after all, something discerned by the mugger due to innate characteristics which he had not previously recognized.

Editorial Reviews [2]

“It is tempting—after reading something as fine as The Finkler Question—not to bother reviewing it in any meaningful sense but simply to urge you to put down this paper and go and buy as many copies as you can carry … Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding. It is also beautifully written … Indeed, there’s so much that is first rate in the manner of Jacobson’s delivery that I could write all day on his deployment of language without once mentioning what the book is about.”—Edward Docx, Observer (UK)

“Howard Jacobson [is] a writer able to recognize the humor in almost any situation and a man as expansive as most on the nature of Jewishness.”—Gerald Jacobs, Telegraph (UK)

“This charming novel follows many paths of enquiry, not least the present state of Jewish identity in Britain and how it integrates with the Gentile population. Equally important is its exploration of how men share friendship. All of which is played out with Jacobson’s exceptionally funny riffs and happy-sad refrains … Jacobson’s prose is a seamless roll of blissfully melancholic interludes. Almost every page has a quotable, memorable line.”—Christian House, Independent on Sunday (UK)

“Both an entertaining novel and a humane one.”—Henry Hitchings, Financial Times

“There are some great riffs and skits in The Finkler Question … But at the heart of the book is Julian the wannabe Jew, a wonderful comic creation precisely because he is so tragically touching in his haplessness. The most moving (and funniest) scenes are those in which he and Libor, the widower with nothing more to live for, ruminate on love and Jewishness.”—Adam Lively, Sunday Times (UK)

“[A] bleakly funny meditation on loss, belonging and personal identity.”—Ross Gilfillan, Daily Mail (UK)

“For some writers a thorough investigation of the situation of British Jews today might do as the subject for a single book. In The Finkler Question it’s combined with his characteristically unsparing—but not unkindly—ruminations on love, aging, death and grief. He also manages his customary—but not easy—trick of fusing all of the above with genuine comedy … No wonder that, as with most of Jacobson’s novels, you finish The Finkler Question feeling both faintly exhausted and richly entertained.”—James Walton, Sunday Telegraph (UK)

“A terrifying and ambitious novel, full of dangerous shallows and dark, deep water. It takes in the mysteries of male friendship, the relentlessness of grief and the lure of emotional parasitism.”—Alex Clark, Guardian (UK)

“The Finkler Question balances precariously a bleak moralizing with life-affirming humor.”—Bryan Cheyette, Independent (UK)

“Another masterpiece … The Finkler Question is further proof, if any was needed, of Jacobson’s mastery of humor. But above all it is a testament to his ability to describe—perhaps it would be better to say inhabit—the personal and moral worlds of his disparate characters.”—Matthew Syed, Times (UK)

“Jacobson writes perceptively about how durable friendships are compounded, in large part, of envy, schadenfreude and betrayal.”—Jonathan Beckman, Literary Review (UK)

“The Finkler Question is very funny, utterly original, and addresses a topic of contemporary fascination … The writing is wonderfully mobile, and inventive, and Jacobson’s signature is to be found in every sentence … The Finkler Question is a remarkable work.”—Anthony Julius, Jewish Chronicle

“Jacobson is at the height of his powers … As the men tussle with women and their absence, and their own identities, Jacobson’s wit launches a fusillade of hard-punching aperçus on human nature and its absurdities that only he could have written.”—Ben Felsenberg, Metro (UK)

“The Finkler Question, which is as provocative as it is funny, as angry as it is compassionate, offers a moving testimony to a dilemma as ancient as the Old Testament. It also marks another memorable achievement for Jacobson, a writer who never fires blanks and whose dialogue, which reads like an exchange between Sigmund Freud and Woody Allen, races along like a runaway train.”—Alan Taylor, Herald Scotland

“Howard Jacobson’s latest holler from the halls of comic genius … The opening chapters of this novel boast some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language … Jacobson’s brilliance thrives on the risk of riding death to a photo-finish, of writing for broke. Exhilaration all the way.”—Tom Adair, Scotsman

“Here are three men who are in varying ways miserably womanless. This is rich soil for comedy, and Jacobson tills it for every regretful laugh he can muster … Perhaps [Jacobson’s] Leopold Bloom time has come at last.”—Irish Independent

“The Finkler Question is characterized by [Jacobson’s] structuring skill and unsimplifying intelligence—this time picking through the connections and differences, hardly unremarked but given fresh treatment here, between vicariousness and parasitism, and between Jewishness, Judaism and Zionism.”—Leo Robson, New Statesman

“Full of caustic moments … that are also, essentially, funny … No matter the book’s themes, the way Jacobson weds humor to seriousness makes it affecting for anyone.”—Eric Herschthal, Jewish Week

[1] ACommonReader.org: Review: The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson, August 21st, 2010.
[2] Amazon.com: The Finkler Question, Editorial Reviews, October 13, 2010.

Things Fall Apart (the most widely read book in modern African literature)

Things Fall Apart is a novel by Nigerian novelist, poet, professor at Brown University and critic Chinua Achebe (1930- ).

Things Fall Apart is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world [1].

It is one of the first African novels written in English to receive global critical acclaim. The title of the novel comes from William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" [2].

In 2009, Newsweek ranked Things Fall Apart #14 on its list of Top 100 Books: The Meta-List [3].


Plot Summary [1]

Although Okonkwo's father was a lazy man who earned no titles in his village, Okonkwo was a great man in his home of Umuofia, a group of nine villages in Nigeria. Okonkwo despised his father and does everything he can to be nothing like him. As a young man, Okonkwo began building his social status by defeating a great wrestler, propelling him into society's eye. He is hard-working and shows no weakness—emotional or otherwise—to anyone. Although brusque with his family and neighbors, he is wealthy, courageous, and powerful among his village. He is a leader of his village, and his place in that society is what he has striven for his entire life.

Because of his great esteem in the village, Okonkwo is selected by the elders to be the guardian of Ikemefuna, a boy taken prisoner by the village as a peace settlement between two villages. Ikemefuna is to stay with Okonkwo until the Oracle instructs the elders on what to do with the boy. For three years the boy lives with Okonkwo's family and he grows fond of him, he even considers Okonkwo his father. Then the elders decide that the boy must be killed, and the oldest man in the village warns Okonkwo to have nothing to do with the murder because it would be like killing his own child. Rather than seem weak and feminine to the other men of the village, Okonkwo helps to kill the boy despite the warning from the old man. In fact, Okonkwo himself strikes the killing blow as Ikemefuna begs him for protection.

Shortly after Ikemefuna's death, things begin to go wrong for Okonkwo and when he accidentally kills someone at a ritual funeral ceremony, he and his family are sent into exile for seven years to appease the gods he has offended with the murder. While Okonkwo is away in exile, white men begin coming to Umuofia and they peacefully introduce their religion. As the number of converts increases, the foothold of the white people grows beyond their religion and a new government is introduced.

Okonkwo returns to his village after his exile to find it a changed place because of the presence of the white man. He and other tribal leaders try to reclaim their hold on their native land by destroying a local Christian church that has insulted their gods and religion. In return, the leader of the white government takes them prisoner and holds them for ransom for a short while, further humiliating and insulting the native leaders. The people of Umuofia finally gather for what could be a great uprising, and when some messengers of the white government try to stop their meeting, Okonkwo kills one of them. He realizes with despair that the people of Umuofia are not going to fight to protect themselves because they let the other messengers escape and so all is lost for the village. He also decides never to let the whites imprison him.

When the local leader of the white government comes to Okonkwo's house to take him to court, he finds that Okonkwo has hanged himself, ruining his great reputation as it is strictly against the custom of the Igbo to kill oneself.

[1] Wikipedia.org: Things Fall Apart
[2] Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart Study Guide
[3] Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List

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FYI: Obama's Wars by Bob Woodward is published on Amazon.

One Day (Exclusive Books Boeke Prize winner)

One Day is a novel by English novelist and screenwriter David Nicholls (1966- ), published in 2009 and won Exclusive Books Boeke Prize in 2010. Each chapter of this novel covers the lives of two protagonists on 15 July, St. Swithin's Day, for twenty years.


Review [1]

In 1988, the day after commencement, two college graduates briefly, romantically collide. The girl has pined for the boy for years; the boy is more aware of the girl than he lets on. She’s an earnest, outspoken lefty, he a handsome, apolitical toff who “liked the word ‘bourgeois’ and all that it implied” and “wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.” Their chemistry is as inarguable as their differences, but because of the pride, carelessness and misplaced optimism of youth, they let time and distraction separate them. Yet they never lose track of each other. “One Day” checks in on their intersecting lives once a year, every July 15, from 1988 through 2007.

The trajectories of Emma’s and Dexter’s lives will resonate with many American readers, even though the couple’s relationship begins at the University of Edinburgh and their adulthood takes root in London. With pleasing precision, Nicholls tags cultural touchstones that will be familiar to college graduates on both sides of the Atlantic. For the late 1980s, he resurrects a faultless diorama of the activist female student mentality, in the form of Emma’s cluttered bedroom. Entering it for the first time, Dex knows “with absolute confidence that somewhere in amongst the art postcards and photocopied posters for angry plays there would be a photograph of Nelson Mandela, like some dreamy ideal boyfriend.” He had seen “any number of bedrooms like this, dotted round the city like crime scenes, rooms where you were never more than six feet from a Nina Simone album.” After their night of kissing, fumbling and (on her part) hostile banter meant as coquetry, Emma, upright and uptight, announces that she can picture Dex at 40, in a tiny sports car: “You’ve got this little paunch tucked under the leather steering wheel like a little pillow and those backless gloves on, thinning hair and no chin. You’re a big man in a small car with a tan like a basted turkey.” His own vision for himself is more hopeful. He wants to “feature in magazine articles,” and grandly imagines a future “retrospective of his work, without having any clear notion of what that work might be.”

Very soon, their attitudes have stretched to fit the contours of the compromised, flashy decade to come. Emma, clinging to her idealism, plays bass in an “all-girl band . . . variously called Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit,” then joins a strident arts collective called Sledgehammer Theatre Cooperative (intent on doing “really good, exciting original political devised work”) before taking a job at a Mexican restaurant called Loco Caliente. It’s grubby work, but not as degrading, from Emma’s point of view, as applying for and being rejected from publishing jobs. On the side, she writes poetry in an “expensive new black leather notebook with a stubby fountain pen.” One sample of her work doesn’t augur well for her literary future: “It was the nachos that did it. / The steaming variegated mess like the mess of her life / Summing up all that was wrong / With / Her / Life.” Later Emma wonders if “what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.” When her boss offers her the job of restaurant manager because “I want someone who isn’t going anywhere. Someone reliable who isn’t going to run off to India without giving proper notice or drop it all for some exciting job,” she begins to cry.

Meanwhile, Dex, who did run off to India after Edinburgh, builds a career in London as the host of a succession of tawdry late-night television shows like “Largin’ It,” a loud lad-fest with rock bands and movie star guests, and cage dancers as backup. Flush with cash and coke, gleaming with zircon semi-fame, he shows up at Emma’s restaurant with a glossy new girlfriend, bragging of star-studded nights out and shaming Emma by pushing her to accept a tip. “Wrap party,” the hurt, contemptuous Emma says to herself. “He has become someone who goes to wrap parties.” But that sour reflection won’t sweeten her regard for her dull, devoted boyfriend, a lackluster comic (and Loco Caliente waiter) named Ian, whose mouth “hung open in repose” and whose face “made her think of tractors.” Ian’s relentless store of canned jokes fills Emma with chagrin. When they’re first dating, as he riffs on the menu offerings, she wonders “where the fallacy had come from, that there was something irresistible about funny men.” She can’t help making a comparison: Ian “was a man with a great sense of humor while at the same time being in no way funny. Unlike Dexter.” “Where,” she wonders, “was Dexter right now?”

Back in Bombay, Dex had drafted a long letter, “six blue sheets densely written on both sides,” guardedly revealing his affection for Emma and urging her to spend a few months with him in India. He would wire her money for the ticket; they would meet at the Taj Mahal. But the letter was never mailed. Instead, he left it on a barroom sofa in Bombay and headed off to a hostel with a “trainee pharmacist from Rotterdam with fading henna on her hands, a jar of temazepam in her pocket and a poorly executed tattoo of Woody Woodpecker at the base of her spine.”

A few years later, in the Greek islands, where they’ve gone for a just-friends holiday, Dex and Emma abide by a pre-vacation agreement: separate bedrooms and no flirting. Should they give it a try anyway? Could Cupid possibly unite a rudderless roué (whose own mother mourns, “Sometimes I worry that you’re not very nice anymore”) and a woman so self- conscious she thinks there’s a wrong way to skinny dip? Again and again, these two nearly come together. But it’s not until 1999, 11 years after their first collision, that Emma finally tells Dex, “When I didn’t see you, I thought about you every day, I mean every day, in some way or another.” “Same here,” he replies. The tardy confession accompanies the announcement of his engagement to another woman.

Will Dex and Emma get together before it’s too late? Will they ever act on the lone un-self-conscious thought Emma has been able to hold in her head since the day she walked away from Dexter, when she was 22 and he was 23, as his parents drove him home from college into his still unblemished future? “Love and be loved,” she had told herself, “if you ever get the chance.” It’s something you may want to find out this summer at poolside. And if you do, you may want to take care where you lay this book down. You may not be the only one who wants in on the answers.

Short Reviews [2]

"[An] instant classic. . . . One of the most hilarious and emotionally riveting love stories you’ll ever encounter." —People

“Big, absorbing, smart, fantastically readable." —Nick Hornby, from his blog

"[Nicholls] has a gift for zeitgeist description and emotional empathy that's wholly his own. . . . [A] light but surprisingly deep romance so thoroughly satisfying." —Entertainment Weekly

“Nicholls offers sharp dialogue and wry insight that sounds like Nick Hornby at his best.” —The Daily Beast (A Best Book of the Summer)

"Fluid, expertly paced, highly observed, and at times, both funny and moving." —Boston Globe

"Those of us susceptible to nostalgic reveries of youthful heartache and self-invention (which is to say, all of us) longed to get our hands on Nicholls’s new novel. . . . And if you do, you may want to take care where you lay this book down. You may not be the only one who wants in on the answers." —New York Times Book Review

"Who doesn’t relish a love story with the right amount of heart-melting romance, disappointment, regret, and huge doses of disenchantment about growing up and growing old between quarreling meant-to-be lovers?" —Elle, Top 10 Summer Books for 2010

“A great, funny, and heart-breaking read.” —The Early Show [CBS]

"Funny, sweet and completely engrossing . . . The friendship at the heart of this novel is best expressed within the pitch-perfect dialogue/banter between the two." —Very Short List

“A wonderful, wonderful book: wise, funny, perceptive, compassionate and often unbearably sad . . . the best British social novel since Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!. . . . Nicholls’s witty prose has a transparency that brings Nick Hornby to mind: it melts as you read it so that you don’t notice all the hard work that it’s doing.” —The Times (London)

“Just as Nicholls has made full use of his central concept, so he has drawn on all his comic and literary gifts to produce a novel that is not only roaringly funny but also memorable, moving and, in its own unassuming, unpretentious way, rather profound.” —The Guardian (London)

[1] The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, "The Love Not Taken", LIESL SCHILLINGER, June 18, 2010.

[2] Amazon.com: One Day (Vintage Contemporaries Original) [Paperback]

Palimpsest (Lambda Literary Award winner)

Palimpsest is a novel by Tiptree, Andre Norton, and Mythopoeic Award winning novelist, poet, and literary critic Catherynne M. Valente (1979- ), published in 2009 and won Lambda Literary Award in the same year; also it was named a 2010 Hugo Award nominee in the Best Novel category.

The novel follows four travelers: Oleg, a New York City locksmith; the beekeeper November; Ludovico, a binder of rare books; and a young Japanese woman named Sei. They've all lost something important in their life: a wife, lover, sister, or direction. They find themselves in Palimpsest after each a spend a night with a stranger who has a tattooed map of a section of the city on his or her body. [1]

Review [2]

“Catherynne M Valente’s Palimpsest just knocks me flat with her use of language: rich, cool, opiated language, language for stories of strange love and hallucinated cities of the mind.” — Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan

“Palimpsest is an elegant and evocative story set in a gorgeous alien wonderland.” — Elizabeth Bear, author of Hammered

"Gorgeously written and deliriously imaginative, Palimpsest is the book for those who love old maps and grow wistful at the sound of a night train. A modern masterpiece in Valente's unique voice and singular sensibility."—Ekaterina Sedia, author of The Alchemy of Stone

“Catherynne Valente has once again proved her mastery of the fantastic. Full to the brim with beautiful images and gorgeous prose, Palimpsest belongs on the same shelf with Calvino's Invisible Cities and Winterson's The Passion. Valente is writing the smartest, gentlest, deepest work in the field, and she's good enough to do it. I remain in awe.”—Daniel Abraham, author of The Long Price Quartet

"It's never enough to merely read a book like Palimpsest, it has to be imbibed, and it's sensuality fully savored."—Nick Bantock, author of The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy

“Outstandingly beautiful prose.”–Publishers Weekly

Palimpsest: A Review [3]

I first heard about the book "Palimpsest" through Livejournal spam. I kept getting reminders that the author, Catherynne Valente, would be reading from her latest novel at the KGB Bar. There was a plot synopsis of the novel in the announcement: something quivering and salacious, but also far, far too coy. Something about four strangers meeting in the night.

Here's the plot synopsis that would have got me to buy her book in person and to hear her read, something I wish I'd done now:

Palimpsest is a book about a city that is also a sexually transmitted disease. You visit the city the night after you fuck somebody infected with it, and then the city possesses your heart and dreams.

After you are infected, you can only be conscious of the lack of magic, mystery, and beauty in your life now that you have seen the alternative. The lack is as brutal as a spiked bat!

Palimpsest is the true reality that you have always known lies just out of reach for you. Like HIV, once you are infected with the city, you die unless you find a cure. But there is only one cure -- permanent immigration to Palimpsest -- and there has been a war that makes this nearly impossible. Good fucking luck, you wanton travelers!

Or, to sum up the theme using Valente's own far more lyric and lucid prose:

"To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them. I have been so many times to countries like that. I have learned how to make coffee in all their ways, how to share food, how to comfort, how to dance in the native ways. It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to... immigrate you could say."

* * *

"Palimpsest" is a fantasy novel, I guess. But it is a fantasy novel in the same way that the works of Haruki Murakami or David Mitchell are fantasy novels.

It is "high fiction," a book that tells a story on its own terms, using an uncompromising and invented form to create higher resonance than the genres of either "literary fiction" or "fantasy" are capable of providing.

High fiction is gaining ground in literature and might be literature's best hope for bringing in new souls. It melds the best things about post-modernism, modernism, and genre fiction, while cutting out the excesses of all three disciplines.

High fiction would not be possible without post-modernism's brush clearing, even though reading the triumphs of 60s, 70s, and 80s literature is like reading through the filing cabinet of an English professor while all the air is being sucked out of a sealed room, like some kind of Batman deathtrap.

But post-modernism worked! At least, it worked in television and film. Everything has now been leveled. Thanks to the gimcrackery of image, New York City is just as real a place as Hogwarts. Since this is true, fiction can tell whatever the fuck story it wants now and people will just go with it. Settings can be manipulated and tweaked to conform to the logic of stories without rigorous world building.

Nobody cares what is real anymore, because now even telling "true" stories means we have to incorporate the mystical, the alien, the fantastical, and the arcane. Also, memoirs and reality television have laid such siege to the truth these days that they have stolen it from fiction like a fancy toy, so fiction can do what it pleases.

However, the lessons of modernism have also taught us that formal experimentation, craft, and deployment of a unique style, are the best ways to elevate prose, and they always improve a work when used deliberately and with control. "Ulysses" = huge success! "Finnegan's Wake" = unreadable, unless it is the only book you ever read.

People toiling for decades in the thankless Prose Mines of modernism taught us the limits of language and revealed many of the tricks, traps, inadequacies, and open areas of narrative exploration.

These days, while you write fantasy novels, you must read Faulkner.

Which brings us to the most important component of "high fiction." The fantastic. The genre spirit. Over the years, the genre writers kept the raw spirit of fiction alive by focusing on pure story. Tales! Adventure! Imagination! Crisis! Catharsis!

And that's what people want. Genre writers realized that if they didn't get it from fiction, they'd get it elsewhere. Those with aspirations for high fiction can no longer neglect this audience. This audience is all of us.

High fiction combines the structural freedom of post-modernism, the elevated style of modernism, and the story power of genre. To write a piece of high fiction is to therefore write fiction that challenges a writer's skills on all levels.

This is a great age for such challenges, an age where if you know how to look, you can see that the path is clear for anything. This is the age of high fiction masterpieces such as Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore," Ursula Le Guin's "The Tombs of Atuin," Susannah Clarke's "Dr. Strange and Mr. Norrell," and Peter Matthiessen's "Shadow Country."

"Palimpsest" is part of this tradition; a tradition struggling out of imagination's protoplasm to reignite the novel for modern readers.

* * *

"Palimpsest" is the story of four people on three continents who journey to the city of Palimpsest together for the first time one night and are then forever linked.

The structure is simple but specially tailored to the subject. The story cycles between the four characters -- each of whom has different desires and problems -- while alternating between the psychogeography of the sexually-transmitted city and the real life dilemmas of four very damaged human beings.

For instance, in order to keep visiting the city, the characters must keep fucking new people who have been there. And every time they visit, they lose something or are permanently altered.

My major problem with this book is also its chief strength. This is not a novel driven by plot or characters. This is a novel driven by setting and by ideas, where the characterization is revealed by the setting. The setting is actuated by the structure, and the structure is lyrical and poetic, replete with images and synesthesias that describe a city that is half-wonder and half-nonsense.

It is a place built for crazy people. Luckily, our protagonists are crazy and fit right in. However, it is a gamble that the reader will be able to empathize with the obsessions of these half-rendered characters. Taken as a story about the safety valve of the imagination, however, "Palimpsest" becomes a book about what people will risk in order to fight for their rightful place.

Sometimes the end result was like reading a beautiful map instead of visiting a real place. Or reading the rules to a game instead of playing it. I am conventional: I wanted more change, growth, risk, and plot.

However, the map and the rules were so engrossing that I stopped caring after awhile and just let my mind savor the possibilities. The ingredients were so fascinating and rare that it became okay that I could not always taste the dish.

* * *

Palimpsest is also really hot.

The characters don't care who they fuck in order to travel to their dream city. Men, women, lepers, the disfigured, the portly, the old, the young, the good, the evil. Every person is their own country and if you want to visit, you have to pay the price.

The tension of the book is the movement between sleaze to the sublime, which is also the tension of sex itself. Isn't it? The passage from life to mystery; the movement from the ordinary to the exalted.

The lowest world is raised up:

"A folktale current in Hokkaido just after the war and passed from conductor to conductor held that the floor of heaven is laced with silver train tracks, and the third rail is solid pearl. The trains that ran along them were fabulous even by the standards of the Shinkansen of today: carriages containing whole pine forests hung with golden lanterns, carriages full of rice terraces, carriages lined in red silk where the meal service brought soup, rice-balls, and a neat lump of opium with persimmon tea poured over it in the most delicate of cups. These trains sped past each other, utterly silent, carrying each a complement of ghosts who clutched the branches like leather handholds, and plucked the green rice to eat raw, and fell back insensate into the laps of women whose faces were painted red from brow to chin. They never stop, never slow, and only with great courage and grace could a spirit slowly progress from car to car, all the way to the conductor's cabin, where all accounts cease, and no man knows what lies therein."

"In Hokkaido, where the snow and ice are so white and pure that they glow blue, it is said that only the highest engineers of Japan Railways know the layout of the railroads on the floor of heaven. They say that those exalted engineers are working, slowly, generation by generation, to lay the tracks on earth so that they mirror exactly the tracks in heaven. When this is done, those marvelous carriages will fall from the sky, and we may know on earth, without paying the terrible fare of death, the gaze of the red women, the light of the forest lanterns, and the taste of persimmon tea."

* * *

Valente has a huge, wild talent and reading her book is intoxicating yet dangerous, like sipping liquor from a crystal goblet and eating dainty sandwiches while getting a massage from an assassin.

It's a book that feels well-tuned and well-edited. Blood was spilled on this book. Whole ink buffalo were slaughtered, and every part was used.

Here's a fascinating and spot-on editorial Valente wrote about why editors are so important, and why self-publishing is not a good idea.

"The general meme seems to be this: with the advent of ebooks, which are definitely going to be the dominant form of book publishing forever and ever, there will no longer be any need for traditional publishers. Each writer will become something of an autonomous press, self-publishing through Amazon and Apple, who are totally awesome indie champions of the little guy, unlike those horrible corporate presses, hiring their own editors, copyeditors, typesetters, marketers, and artists, and putting up their work directly for sale online. Then: profit!"

"I find this to be a horrifying dystopian future, and I'll tell you why."

However, in this editorial, she does bring up a very important point about electronic rights:

"Where I think change could best happen right now is on the contract level. If, for example, e-rights became a subsidiary right I could administer separately, like audio rights, then you'd see a revolution in ebooks as we all experiment. Right now, however, you more or less cannot sell a book to a major publisher without giving them e-rights, and that sucks."

She isn't just whistling Dixie, either. When her partner lost his job and they needed money, she took a YA-novel from "Palimpsest" and turned it into a persistent, online web novel called "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making."

You can read this book for free here, and donate what you want.

I think this is exactly how electronic novels should look, personally. By putting out an online novel this way, an author doesn't have to go through Amazon, Apple, or Google, and they are able to add artwork, audio tracks, links, and "code art" in ways that simply don't work for ebook readers. You can read "Fairyland" from any computer with an internet connection. It can be tweaked. Corrected. Added to.

Unfortunately, "Fairyland" is also an example of a book that a professional writer had to put out without help, unable to pay for good graphic designers, good coders, or good editors, and also unable to convince publishers that this is what an ebook should look like.

Imagine what kind of electronic books publishers could make if they brought all of the resources of the New York industry to bear on this burgeoning market, instead of buying into the idea that Apple or Amazon are in a better position to create and leverage narrative art, which is a ludicrous idea.

* * *

"Palimpsest" is a radical and experimental piece of metatextual prose, cloaked in the guise of a perverted fantasy novel about A City. It is rough, smart, and flawed.

It is a book designed to makes passing it on a radical act. An act of transgression.

And I want to pass it on to you.

I want to put this book in your mind forever.

To make it a part of you. To tattoo it on your flesh. You like to read, right? So come a little closer...don't be shy...just a little bit closer, please... [END]

[1] Wikipedia.org: Palimpsest
[2] Amazon.com: Palimpsest
[3] Palimpsest: A Review by Miracle Jones