Review: "The Woman Who Lost Her Soul" by Bob Shacochis

Of this year's Pulitzer Prize nominees, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis is clearly the worst one, and that is not just because of how good the other two books are. Both The Goldfinch and The Son are easily two of the best books to come out in this new decade, with The Goldfinch walking away with the award. This long 713-page book had tough company, but even if the books were of slightly lesser quality, this book would still not be in the running to win such a major prize. For most books that are this long, I can at least pinpoint the main idea that is the driving force of the novel, even when I do not like it or agree with it. But in this book, I was confused all the way through when I wasn’t being flooded by sentences as badly worded as any I have come across recently. The plot is cool though, telling the story of Tom Harrington, a lawyer who feels the need to make humanitarian efforts to help out the country of Haiti. With the help of his associate Conrad Dolan, he goes to down to investigate a murder that Dolan is also investigating and finds himself thrust back in time to his memories of photojournalist Jackie Scott, whose Tom’s obsession with being eclipsed only by her lack of conscious. This book is all over the place, with large sections in German occupied Croatia in the 1940’s and Turkey in the 1980’s, with each section poorly channeling better stories by better writers, such as Roberto Bolano and James Ellroy. It’s okay at first, the first section and the section in Croatia being really good, but after that, the reader is left with 500 long pages to make sense out of everything, with a few funny sequences not being enough to make it bearable. While not the worst book I have read, even this year, it didn’t deserve to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "Giles Goat-Boy" by John Barth

My thoughts on post modern books have shown up in my reviews before, so I won’t have a need to go into to them too much, except to say that John Barth’s fourth novel, Giles Goat-Boy, really falls right in the middle of my feelings for this subgenre of literature. I have read Barth’s first two novels, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, and can say, years later, that they were pretty good, The Floating Opera especially. They are simple stories that talk about big human issues with grace and wit, even when things get really dark. I haven’t read his breakout novel, The Sot-Weed Factor, or any of his shirt stories that my friend Chad really likes, but I’m not in too big of a hurry, because no matter how inventive and sprawling this odd story gets, or how self-satirical it becomes, it still is too much like the ideas it is poking fun at. The story, which is the craziest you may come across, is about a feral boy named Billy Bockfuss, who was birthed by a super-computer called WESCAC (think Skynet but zanier), only to grow up raised in a family of Billy goats near New Tammany College, taken care of by former professor Max. As he grows up, he wants to become a real person, and takes the name George Giles, in an effort to infiltrate the college and stop WESCAC. The plot is beyond nonsensical, but luckily not all the time, with a full parody of Oedipus Rex playing out on the college campus, reminiscent of The Paranoids in The Crying of Lot 49. But most of its 700 pages feels every scrape of that arduous length, and the reason for this book’s neglect becomes clear. It’s not the worst I have read, but if you want to read a John Barth book, by God, don’t start with this one.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "The Elixir of Immortality" by Gabi Gleichmann

On the heels of another compulsively readable epic in Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole, I was even more surprised when I started reading Gabi Gleichmann’s 750 page historical novel The Elixir of Immortality, and found that it was the exact same kind of book: one that made you carry it around everywhere you went just in case you were stranded somewhere without proper entertainment. I knew almost nothing about this book when I picked it up, only doing so since it fit all the requirements for my reading list this year. T was even more surprising to me when I found out that Gleichmann is a Hungarian writer, a country whose fiction is some of the most boring I have read, evidenced by the books of writers such as Peter Nadas and Laszlo Krasznahorkai. The Elixir of Immortality shares none of the traits with those books except its length, but even that is something a reader will find necessary when you find out how long the timespan of this story is. On the surface, it is the story of one famous families struggle, that of the Spinozas, with the changes in history, and how, even if they do everything to avoid it, gets caught up in the eyes of many of the world’s most famous historical upheavals, mostly with bloody results that end in the death of a loved one. This is reason enough to check this book out, since it is always interesting, handling it’s many side and temporary characters with ease that will help you forget that sometimes it is hard to match things up. But at a deeper level, one that I only understood once I finished the book’s final pages was that it is a story about loneliness and the attempts we make, failed or successful, to attract people into our lives. The story we are reading is one being written down by Ari Spinoza, the last in the blood line of this family who have existed for almost a thousand years. He is childless, and has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer that he has gotten from years of smoking. In an effort to leave something behind, he starts to tell this story, which his estranged great-uncle told him and his brother Sasha as children. It begins in the year 1192, when Baruch Spinoza, not the philosopher, comes upon a grizzled old man who says that he Moses, and entrusts in him the secrets of immortality, which he writes down in an old book that will be passed down through history, including events like the French Revolution and the two world wars, with each generation suffering some kind of tragedy (especially if they have a large nose). A lot of those events are the book’s surprise which I won’t spoil, with the last section, perhaps the quietest and saddest, wrapping everything up as nicely as any recent book I have come across. Even if the length might deter you, although I hope not, this book will reward you greatly.

Review: "The War of the End of the World" by Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa is a writer I have wanted to like for a while, and with the novel I have just read, The War of the End of the World, he comes a bit closer to being a writer whose books I look forwards to reading once a year. While it is denser than The Feast of the Goat, with a more complex plot line that is easily followed, this epic, apocalyptic tale is a much more fun book to read. You can tell, even if you find yourself lost from time to time, that this is a book written with passion and anger, and it is very hard to ignore. It has moments of great beauty and crushing violence that are hard to shake off. The plot deals with a partially true account of a tiny republic in Brazil called Canudos led by a charismatic god-like leader who saw that the antichrist had come to Earth not in the form of one man, but in one entity, this being the dictatorship that ruled Brazil at the time, and his lawless, government-less society as the only way to save the world from falling into evil hands. The novel charts the rise of this large community and the attempts by the government to take it down. There is a lot going on in the book, so much so it is hard to find your way back if you get lost, a problem that I feel would have been solved by a character chart at the beginning of the novel. But I never felt like I was wasting my time reading this book. While it lacks in essential areas, I did enjoy a lot of the vignettes about the people whom the leader of the Canudos, known as “the Counselor”, has taken under his wing. Each is a person with an awful past that brings into question the republic’s motives. I do recommend this book, and any other Llosa books you can get your hands on.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Quesadillas" by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Despite it’s name, Juan Pablo Villalobos’ Quesadillas is not a delicious snack but a bitter indictment of a culture that seems hell-bent on destroying lower class people and harvesting them for rich people. But this slim novel does so with a great sense of humor and passionate heart, and it is just bizarre enough that it fits perfectly for the FSG Originals imprint that has brought us authors as distinct as the rural violence of Frank Bill and the odd realities of Amelia Grey. And like most FSG Originals, with the exception of Frank Bill, this book is hit or miss, but thankfully mostly hit. It gets weird sometimes, a bit too weird for its own good and for the reader’s sensibilities, but at 158 pages, it never over stays its welcome as long as the reader is along for the ride. Orestes, a middle child in an abnormally large and very poor family, narrates the story. The story is not the most important aspect here, even though it involves twins disappearing and the possibility of an alien abduction. The real treat here is how Villalobos can take such a grim subject matter, take away all the sadness and anger and replace it with biting humor. When the two youngest children go missing at a grocery store, the focus isn’t on the grief, but the possibility that there will be more quesadillas to go round. And that silly motif is played up throughout the whole novel, a fun metaphor for desperation and escape that would become unbearable if the novel were longer than it is. But a lot of the enjoyment of this novel comes from reader’s ability to go with the story’s flow. If you are patient throughout this slim novel, I can guarantee that you will be rewarded.

Rating: 4/5