Review: "The Summer Without Men" by Siri Hustvedt

I absolutely fell in love with Siri Hustvedt’s What I loved last year. As a person who loves Paul Auster, and who is dying for another published work of fiction that may or may not come, it was a much-needed experience (since the two are married in real life, I make this comparison with slight hesitance, so as not to come off as cheap). It was a brush with metaphysical that made me remember why I loved reading Paul Auster in the first place, and, more so, why I love reading in general. Her most recent novel, besides the one she published this year, The Summer Without Men, seems like a very odd experiment in novel writing. It acts like a short story, but is nearly 200 pages long, so at times it can’t possibly hold your attention while it performs it’s literary acrobatics in a box it doesn’t quite fit into. The best comparison for the story itself would be Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, set in modern times. Mia Fredrickson, the hero of the novel, is fresh out of a stay in a psychiatric hospital after her husband of thirty years suggested that they each take a, in his words, “pause”. After her slight mental breakdown, she moves back in with her mother, and, as the title suggests, spends the summer without any strong interactions with men. She teaches a creative writing course to a group of young girls discovering the pitfalls of adolescents, spends time with a girl her own age with an abusive husband, and group of her mother’s friends, most of whom are knocking on heaven’s door. It is a clever concept, but it didn’t need to be a novel. It’s padded with many abstract scenes in Mia’s head that seem out of place in a story this grounded. It’s not terrible by any means; just not as good as it should be coming from Hustvedt.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "The White Castle" by Orhan Pamuk

The one thing I knew about Orhan Pamuk before reading any of his books was that he is romantically involved with Kiran Desai, a writer 20 years younger than he is. A silly fact to know about a Nobel winning author, but after reading his short novel, The White Castle, I can tell you that he is not the most interesting writer between the pages, because this slim 150 page novel is the hardest short novel I have read since I trudged through Heart of Darkness many years ago. The book takes an intriguing story that involves grim executions, a promising frame tale involving a lost text being found by a scholar, and even the creation of a massive dangerous weapon, and proceeds to suck out all the fun that those things would bring in the hands of a writer who wants to entertain the reader instead of educate them. The novel begins when a historian finds the text that will be covered for the remainder of the book. The story that was found tells of an astronomer on ship from Venice to Naples is captured by the Turks and sent to Turkey as a prisoner. There, he meets a man who looks just like him, who he refers to as “Hoja”. This newfound doppelganger cruel at first, but soon involves the narrator in his plans. Like all books that I find boring, it is at least well written, and I am fully aware of Pamuk’s ability, and why he won the Nobel Prize in 2006. It is just not an entertaining read, with many historical digressions that take away from parts I would have much rather read about. All these factors make for an uninteresting and forgettable novel. I will read Pamuk again eventually, just not in the near future.

Rating: 2/5

Review: "The Map and the Territory" by Michel Houellebecq

Since I am making a big move across the country in a short time, I have been taking a look back at some of the things I enjoyed from the past. Whether it is old movies or TV shows, I’ve been giving them one last look before I move on. And books are no different. I realized a little bit ago, that I had not read a Michel Houellebecq book since my junior year of high school, so I read his most recent novel, The Map and the Territory, and while it is far from fantastic, it is an appropriate book for me to be reading at this juncture in my life. While his first three novels, Whatever, The Elementary Particles and Platform (I have yet to read The Possibility of an Island) are filled with nihilistic musings, graphic sex, and a complete distaste for modern life, this new novel is toned down a bit, and, at parts, is actually hopeful about the future of the human race. The novel focuses on a successful painter/photographer named Jed Martin, who lives in France, is alone after dating a supermodel, and is slowly watching his dad succumb to old age. In a funk, symbolized by the faulty plumbing in his flat, he befriends Michel Houellebecq in Ireland, in a fictitious turn that actually works. While not the unpleasant man on display in the media, he is more of a loner, comfortable with his isolation. Jed agrees to paint his picture, but soon after, the writer is found brutally murdered. This is not a spoiler, but it does happen very late in the book, switching gears in a way that jars the reader. But this last section ahs the most memorable and real moment, when Jed’s father makes a rational yet heartbreaking decision. The book’s ambiguity will frustrate some, myself included, and this is a very different book than the ones I read in high school.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Omon Ra" by Victor Pelevin

Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin is a hard book to digest in such a short time, but my feeling immediately following the completion of it are pretty concrete. It has really cool elements that will attract any fan of off-kilter Science Fiction, but even if you are not a fan of that style of writing, there are things here to like. The big difficulty I have with the slim 150-page novel is that it is a bit hard to decipher in terms of meaning and message. Which would be okay, but I don’t think a novel this bizarre can really stand on it’s own. The novel focuses on Omon, the hero of the novel if a novel like this has to have one, as he pursues his dreams of becoming an astronaut and going to the moon. The only problem is that he lives in Soviet Russia, which is a bureaucratic nightmare that constantly tries to end his dreams and destroy his soul in the process. But against all odds, he and his friend Mitiok, are accepted into military school, but things turn out to be worse in there than they were as a civilian, with Omon, Mitiok, and the other recruits facing horrific conditions, including forced amputations and surreal joke of a Russian space program. While the novel is meant to be humorous, I found very little humor in anything Pelevin has written. Despite the absurdity of the situation, everything kind of comes off as rather sad and depressing, which is the emotion that I think most readers will come away with from the book, especially towards the ending, which stresses the point Pelevin is trying to make about cultures that place more importance on the state than the individual. This is a short read if you have time, and would love to read Pelevin again.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Blood's a Rover" by James Ellroy

James Ellroy took dedicated readers on quite a ride through three very long, very taxing books with his Underworld USA trilogy, about a whirlwind time in American history where things were irrevocably changed, sometimes for the worst if you subscribe to Elroy’s twisted sense of the world. The first two novels, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand dealt from the years 1958 to 1968, about the time of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s assassinations. The final novel Blood’s a Rover, covers the years 1968 to 1972, where the dream of the sixties was on its last decrepit leg. Like the other two novels, Ellroy utilizes his staccato style of prose; a little different than minimalism in the way it induces feelings of rhythm in the proceedings. It is used very well here, but my problem with this book, and one I had with the other three, lies with characterization. While everyone talks cool, with a brutal nihilistic tone, it is hard to decipher who is who and what an act of violence means. In this volume, Wayne Tedrow returns, after killing his father, and is followed by Dwight Holly and Don Crutchfield, both of whom have ties to organized crime, as the mafia tries to build casino’s in the Dominican Republic. Throughout the 650 pages, violence occurs almost off-handedly, and people use people in ways that make honor redundant. Easily the best part of this novel is the rendering of historical figures, such as a coked out Redd Foxx who deals drugs almost as much as he tells jokes, a returning J Edgar Hoover whose brushes with criminality will make you sick, and a delightfully funny Richard Nixon, whose casual racism comes off as buffoonery. Together, the three books acts as a very unique take on our recent history, but by themselves, they leave a lot to be desired.

Rating: 4/5