Review: "Care of Wooden Floors" by Will Wiles

Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles is so much better than it’s title suggests. It is an ironic title, but gives no indication for the level of nefarious detail that lies hidden within its pages. I have been eyeing this book for a while, with its slick, understated cover and a story that lends itself to many dark treats. But despite those tasty bitter morsels that lie hidden in this book, this is a very relatable book, with a plot setup that will be instantly recognizable to anyone with a friend like the one our unnamed narrator has: a person whose perfectionist tendencies and finicky habits seem to bleed over from there personal lives into other people’s as well, affecting them in bad ways that the other person would never realize, because they are too caught up in their own world and their own rules to pay attention to the feelings and needs of anyone else. Every person has a friend like that, and if you don’t, you just might be that person who unknowingly causes misery on others. It is a cool niche that this book carves out that I didn’t even begin to think about until this book brought it up. But despite that, this book is also very entertaining in a way that makes it perfect for beaches or long airplane rides. I was able to finish it in two days without breaking a sweat, and I’m sure a reader with more endurance could finish this book in a matter of hours. The narrator remains unnamed, but his source of pain does not. He is housesitting in an unnamed Central European town for his friend Oskar, a semi-famous composer who is known for, even back when he and the narrator were in college together, for how much of a perfectionist he was, going so far as to have nervous breakdowns when his bottle of vodka was moved from the freezer to the fridge. Oskar is having problems in his marriage, and needs to go to America and asks our narrator to watch over it.  But despite his misgivings, the narrator accepts the offer, seeing it as a way to escape the doldrums of his and work on the novel he has been meaning to write forever. Everything is going smoothly, with Oskar’s two cats being taken care of, and a eerily specific set of notes placed around the house letting the narrator know what he must do to maintain the irreplaceable wooden floors among other things. But once the narrator spills wine on the floor, leaving a stain, all hell breaks loose. It is cool how Wiles creates tension out of the anger and fear the narrator feels, anger at Oskar’s brutal dictums, as the notes take on a rather frightening tone as they are found in odd places, and fear at what Oskar might do if he finds out what kind of damage has been caused. Despite most of the action taking place within the confines of a luxury apartment, you’d be hard-pressed to find any other novel that creates as much suspense from everyday events such as this one.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Parasite" by Ramsey Campbell

This novel, The Parasite, is the third Ramsey Campbell novel I have read, and while I will continue to read his books, I can’t say that I will ever be a big fan of his. The weird logic I use is that while his books are wild rides, they do not affect me the way other horror novelists like Jack Ketchum or Joe Hill do, which get a more visceral emotional out of me. Campbell is a lot like H. P. Lovecraft, in that he is a master at creating a dreadful mood that permeates every word that he writes. It looks and sounds cool, but it gets very tiring soon, which may be why Lovecraft wrote very few novel length works. This kind of writing works better in fragments, at least for someone like me who is not used to such heavy wording in my horror novels. Out of the three Campbell novels I have read, the other two being The Doll Who Ate His Mother and The Face That Must Die, The Parasite is the best one. It begins in a haunted house, where a young girl named Rose is attacked by an entity after being locked in a room and abandoned by her friends. Years later, Rose is a film critic who is mugged in New York City, and has an out of body experience, which forces her to look to the past event, and confront an evil that is dangerously close to home. Not to spoil anything, but if you liked the movie Insidious, which I did, you might like this book, with many expounded ideas about astral projection being the coolest part of this novel. But like most Campbell, it is easy to get lost, know who is who, and who the villain actually is. Like I said, this novel a cool experience, but one that is incomplete despite it’s qualities.

Rating: 4/5

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.