Since 2013 I have set myself a challenge of reading 50 books a year and then I track my progress on Good Reads.
I fell three short in the first year but have hit my target ever since. This year I gave the maximum five star rating to six titles: Continue reading
So far this year I have read two prize-winning ‘novels’ – The Sell Out by Paul Beatty (Man Booker) and The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Pulitzer).
Both have been widely praised for their craft and cleverness. Both left me wondering what happened to good old-fashioned storytelling. These are driven by themes rather than plots, each with an unnamed narrator respectively reflecting upon racism in America and perceptions of the Vietnam war.
The weightiness and worthiness of the topics is beyond doubt but masked by a knowing irony; neither author has any interest in a conventional narrative with a start-middle & end.
Far be it from me to knock the post-modernist slant of these works. As a worshipper of David Foster Wallace, I am fully aware that modern truths cannot always be told in a linear style but at the same time I find myself increasingly missing characters and plots.
I have come to realize just how many classics of English literature I know but have never read; for example Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe. While re-reading Infinite Jest I now intend to plug these gaps. Pre-modernism here I come.
As a self-confessed movie nerd I can’t get enough of the ironic post-modernism to be found in directors like David Lynch, Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch. I identify strongly with the cynical and often surreal gaze they direct towards the modern world.
In my book, The Coen Brothers fit squarely into this category so it comes as something of shock to find Ethan and Joel’s names (alongside British playwright Matt Charman) on the screenwriting credits for Spielberg’s very conventional drama. Apparently, their remit was to add some zip to a story which, with shades of Fargo, is “inspired by real events”.
Lawyer James B. Donovan played by Tom Hanks is the decent, upstanding all American family man appointed to defend the devious Russian spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) in what is initially conceived as little more than a show trial.
I suspect it is the Coens who came up with the best line in the movie when, in response to Donovan’s comment that Abel never seems to worry, the spy asks “Would it help?” This is funny the first time around, but when he poses the same question on two further occasions, it loses its novelty value. Otherwise, the script is tight and workmanlike although has none of the wisecracks or lively verbal exchanges you come to expect in Coen Brothers movies. Continue reading
I read this story to plug a gap in my literary knowledge and as background research as part of my re-reading of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The style and experimentation certainly helps put Wallace’s magnum opus into context.
When you read of Barth’s Ambrose it hard not to think of DFW’s “communicatively challenged” Hal Incandenza : “Ambrose was at that awkward age. his voice came out all high-pitched as a child’s if he let himself get carried away: to be on the safe side, therefore, he moved and spoke with deliberate calm and adult gravity”.
Above all it is the self referential, ‘metafiction’ of Barth’s story that is most striking and entertaining. Wallace didn’t use this postmodern device so much in IJ but you find the influence in his shorter fiction, notably the closing story in his Girl With Curious Hair collection called Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way. Continue reading
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