Review: "The Imperfectionists" by Tom Rachman

When I got this book, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman it was a complete mystery as to what I was getting into. I had not read any of its reviews (it came out before I started buying Bookmarks Magazine). I had extra money and extra space in my bookshelf, and Borders was closing so it was half off. I am always looking out for new writers who have only published one book or collection of short stories. I like being there when someone great and talented is just starting out, so when they become great in the future, I can say I saw their evolution as a talent. It is why I have so eagerly and emphatically praised the young authors like Karen Russell, Tea Obreht, Joshua Ferris, and Wells Tower, while I do not actively seek out dead authors. I love the mystery and intrigue of what can come next from them, which you cannot get from dead authors obviously, even through rereading them. As for this one? I was, for the most part, pleasantly surprised. Rachman has a great grasp of what goes on in any kind of workplace. This novel, which is really a collection of linked short stories, deals with the many people with offbeat problems who work for an English language paper in Rome. It shows these people at some of their worst moments and with these sobering events comes a new kind of realization that life goes on, even if the newspaper does not report it. My favorite piece is the one involving a lowly aspiring journalist who is walked over, taunted, and finally screwed over by a more charismatic yet shallow reporter. It is sickening to read, simply because it is true. People will always flock to the more outwardly unique person, despite the fact that they are not a good person and always think only of themselves. While that part is a shining example of this books qualities, it is not perfect. It transitions immediately from place to place, which is jarring and annoying. And the little tidbits in between chapters describing the papers origins are not very interesting. But I still give this book a high B, very far from a waste of time.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Coma" by Alex Garland

After reading The Coma, I think I have decided that Alex Garland is the book worlds equivalent of a one hit wonder. His first novel, The Beach, was quite the intriguing piece of travel fiction that did not fall into the Kerouac or Thompson trap of being arrogant and poorly written. Although I do not think it is going to age well even ten or twenty years from now, since it relies heavily on an attitude and culture that was very brief and did not have a high shelf life, I found some honest feeling in it and really thought its narrative drive made up for some of the goofiness, but I truly enjoyed it found the reading experience memorable. Then I read his second novel, The Tesseract, and while it was not very bad, it was quite the forgettable book, one whose plot and characters I had forgotten about not even a week after finishing it. And I regretfully have to say the same thing with his third novel, The Coma, which falls into the same trap as The Tesseract. A man is severely beaten and wakes up from a coma, but has experiences and time lapse he cannot explain, and begins to think if his comatose state is really over. It really has all the same problems as his previous novel. It is too experimental and filled with too many vague details for someone whose main strengths are narrative drive and high-octane action. It makes the reading a bit tedious, even though it took me less than an hour (all together through separate reading sessions) to finish. That is the upside is you will finish this quickly. It is not just me who can; it has pictures and text that is big and spaced enough that it takes you no more than 30 seconds a page. It is a quick read, but not a good one.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "The Passage" by Justin Cronin

Really, believe all the hype and hoop-a-la surrounding this book, The Passage by Justin Cronin. Yes, it is not a very original idea, and yes, it came out at a time when vampire novels were just flooding the market, but it really is as good as the reviews say they are. This book is simply an event; something you can take on vacation or read during break, but be warned, you will be doing little else but existing within its pages for that time, and that is not a bad thing at all. It is so entertaining and so well written, well paced, and well everything, I just have to give it what may be the highest honor any reviewer can bestow upon it, especially this one: it is the best post-apocalyptic epic I have read since The Stand. And with The Stand being my favorite book, I try not to use that term lightly, but I think it is that good. Justin Cronin came out of nowhere (he had published two novels before this, as well as a collection of short stories, none of which I have heard of before this book came out) to create a staggering portrayed of an American wasteland that rivals the granddaddy of all end of the world epics, and catapulted himself high into the ranks of great modern storytellers. And while that story is good and satisfying, do not let that influence your reading experience, because the book itself is so much better than that, and a lot of books that may pass literary genre these days. It starts of very simple, telling the story of Amy Bellefonte, the hero of the book, as her mother, a prostitute leaves her on the doorstep of convent, and dashing off, never to be seen again, leaving Amy vulnerable. This story is alternating with the story of Brad Wolgast, FBI agent sent to gather death row inmates for secret government experiments involving a new strain of virus that turns the infected into super strong bloodsuckers that give of a bright light through there luminous skin. These stories collide violently, leaving the virus out in the open, and Brad and Amy forced to flee to the mountains. When this story ends, we flash forward 92 years, as a colony has developed over decades in California, where Peter, one of the members of the five original families, sees Amy (who got a lighter dose of the virus in the lab) while on a scouting mission, leading him, and a select group of followers on a voyage that could lead to a new world and society. To spoil any real details would be criminal, a lot of the greatness in reading this book is how the plot points and surprises carry you along on a fantastic voyage you really don’t want to end, despite the many dangers and scares involved. Truly a book for people who simply love to read, and find story the most important aspect of a great novel, check it out (and its sequel, due out in October) and fall gracefully under its spell.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Waiting for the Barbarians" by J. M. Coetzee

I do not know what it is, but every book I have read by J. M. Coetzee has been really good. He is writer I seemed destined to be uninterested by. One with too many critics and scholars supporting him, and having won the Nobel Prize in a time where the award is given more for social and political work instead of fictional prowess, he has all the markings of someone whose books are meant for college English classes and not for fun yet challenging books. I am glad to not only say that I am a fan of this great writer having read three books that are downright fantastic, but that all the awards and recognition Mr. Coetzee gets are well deserved, because, as I said in my review of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, he is one of (in my very, very humble opinion) the two best writers of fiction still alive. It pains me to say that, because nothing grinds my gears than insincere, annoying as hell literary hyperbole (which as an English major in English classes with other English majors, I hear too damn much of) I really believe it to be true. No other two writers can bring together literary snobs and your everyday lover of fiction to like the same book. And I have to give a little bit more credit to Coetzee, because he is working within narrative frameworks that aren’t have as interesting as Murakmai’s. There are no talking sheep, no man skinners and for sure no nefarious beings posing as Johnny Walker or Colonel Sanders. It is just brutal harsh realism in Coetzee’s novels, and he has found a way to turn these realistic events that we have seen depicted the same way over and over again, and turn them into thrilling set pieces filled to the brim with humanity. In this novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, we meet the Magistrate of a small frontier settlement, that is being besieged upon by the implied threat of the savage tribes around the land, as well as the real threat of the large and invasive empire, represented by the chilling Colonel Joll (whose described first by his sunglasses, in perhaps Coetzee’s best sentence). Eventually, the Magistrate falls for a savage girl, and in an attempt to save her, becomes and enemy to the empire, and loses his dignity in the process. It is a story we have heard before, but with Coetzee’s ability to turn his eloquent prose into something that keeps me turning the page, it becomes some thing of a new experience, with his many nuanced descriptions of people speaking louder than dialogue. I am all for story over prose, but sometimes it is just too good to not fall in love with. His abilities at telling a story seem to be overshadowed by his subject matter (even Coetzee himself might frown on the idea), but it is there, and it is kept me reading through three memorable books, and I hope to keep going forward with this true living master.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "In This Way I Was Saved" by Brian Deeleuw

Although it is early in the year, I think that I may have found the book that was the biggest let down for me, In This Way I Was Save by Brian Deeleuw. It is a book where the distance between what I thought it was going to be and what it actually was too great to ignore. Now I could include the terrible Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close on that list, but really, I walked into that book with really low expectations, and they were shattered. This is not that serious of a case, but it still depresses me that this book is not very good, because I wanted it to be. At least in Foer’s self-indulgence I could find some laughs, here, I was just bored, and that just makes the experience more disappointing. The novel sets itself up like a horror story, we meet these two kids, Daniel and Phil, who meet on a playground, and it is readily apparent that one of them is an imaginary friend to the other. We are introduced into one of the kid’s home lives, where his mother is an eccentric publisher, and we follow these two through their years of adolescence, and toward more glaring acts of depravity. I hope I have not made it sound to exciting, because the action is explained in prose that is laid on too thick that is also not very original. I like the premise, which is a lot like Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and thought it would be a little like Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, which was a literary zombie novel that blended well, here it does not, which makes me sad, because it a cool idea that is not done enough as many other horror tropes
Rating: 2/5