- Being Dead by Jim Crace
I was disappointed with Crace's latest novel. I thought Quarantine was terrific, and I thought that the premise of Being Dead easily provided a sufficiently unusual perspective for Crace's shining storytelling abilities. An elderly couple are murdered, and as their bodies lie decomposing, Crace reconstructs their lives together. Problem is, there lives were singularly uneventful. Crace is a great writer, but I fear he has given himself too great a challenge here. Try as he might, he cannot create an interesting story about uninteresting people. The chapter describing the murder in clinical detail is gruesome and riveting, though.
- Last Orders by Graham Swift
Using multiple narrators, Swift achieves a kind of carousel effect with the same characters going round and round. We notice a little more detail about each, and learn a little more about them on every go round
The characterizations were excellent, and all (except Vince) remind me of that wonderful line from Dark Side of the Moon, you know..."Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way".
My only gripe is that important factors motivating the characters are never fully revealed...What did Amy tell June about her father? What did Ray do with the money?
Swift writes with elegance and clearly loves the England he so wonderfully evokes here.
- The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Revert
The folks that brought you "The Blair Witch Project" are also promoting a movie called "The Ninth Gate" based on this novel. It's about a literary detective, a chap who tracks down rare books and arranges for them to come into his possession (by hook or by crook). He is hired to track down an ancient manuscript which is supposed to contain the secrets of summoning Satan himself. It is filled with lots of literary allusions, and is a lot of fun.
- Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi
Kureishi calls this "Intimacy, A Novel" but it is really hard to believe that you aren't reading his most personal thoughts. The narrator is a writer, living in London, who has been nominated for an Academy Award. Kureishi too is all this. He tells of his decision to leave his wife and family for a variety of reasons, but which really all end up with his inability to accept the limitations of a permanent relationship and a family. Most of the time you want to grab him by the lapels and tell him to grow up...but part of the time you know exactly what is going through his mind. Kureishi doesn't pull any punches here, and he reveals more than enough warts on his character for us to dismiss him as nothing more than a selfish lout. But few selfish louts have the skill and courage to bare their souls so completely.
- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
One of the blurbs on the cover of this book says that it is "snort in your coffee funny", and it is. I bought it at La Guardia and giggled all the way back to Toronto. Bryson is out of shape and 40 something, but he doesn't let that get in the way of tackling some pretty challenging projects. In this book he attempts to walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, all 2,100 miles of it. With a refreshing lack of preparation and a wonderfully innocent traveling partner he sets off on a his epic trek. What he finds along the way begins out being hilarious and I am convinced that Bryson could write about having an appendectomy without anesthetic and make it funny. As he comes to grips with the magnitude of the challenge, he mixes in some genuine humility, and generally makes you feel good about being asked to join him, even vicariously.
- Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Rich kid finishes college; decides there is dignity in leading a simple life off the land; crashes around the USA for a couple of years living off the kindness of strangers; heads to Alaska; dies.
Krakauer wants us to find some meaning in this. I am not sure that there is much to be learned, and I don't think that Christopher Johnson McCandless found any more dignity from dying young in Alaska, than he would have achieved from staying alive in Virginia.
- Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
Amis imagines a man living his life in reverse, and, in reverse, this particular life makes sense. It is the life of a doctor at a Nazi death camp, a man whose old age is filled with gentleness and compassion, but who winds his way backwards to hideous depavity. Of course, in reverse it doesn't seem hideous, working backwards the doctor is able to breath life into thousands of lifeless bodies, and although their life is at first pitiful, the doctor, still working backwards, is able to slowly restore his patients to full health, at which point they walk backwards onto a train and return to their homes.
This book is slightly schizophrenic. It doesn't quite know whether to be technically dazzling by weaving a coherent story with time marching in the wrong direction, or to be another stinging indictment of great evil. At times it manages to be both...but only at times. Too often, Amis is more the great technician, unable to let the horror show through.
- Night Train by Martin Amis
Amis tries his hand at writing American noire crime fiction. The Brits hated it. I thought it worked quite well.
- Stick by Elmore Leonard
I was starting to feel quite "out of it" since I had never read a single word by Elmore Leonard, and his novels kept getting turned into great movies (Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown). So I picked up this dud to see what all the fuss was about.
It's not that there is anything wrong with it, I guess, but it just sort of ambles along from crime to sex and back again. If that is your thing, then you could do worse than to pick up Stick (get it?). But if it is any indication, I haven't felt the urge to add any more Leonard books to my 1999 list. Maybe next year.
For a list of books from 2000, click here.