Review: "The Invoice" by Jonas Karlsson

Man was this novel fun. Picking up The Invoice, the new translation of Swedish author Jonas Karlsson, I had very little expectation as to what I would be in for. It had a fun premise and a neat cover and came across as an easy read. While it is a quick one (its 204 pages fly by quickly) it is also one of the most moving books I have read all year. It takes a really fantastic idea whose relatability can only be matched by the horror of it all, and not only choose not to go dark with the material, but makes a truly uplifting novel about the little things in life and beauty and that lies hidden within simplicity. As our unnamed narrator slowly slinks down this rabbit hole he has found himself in (with little choice to do otherwise) we not only learn about his life, whose sadness is not glorified, but with each subsequent turn in the plot we can’t help but put ourselves in the shoes of this prescient, hapless and interminably unlucky man whose only sin is that he was minding his own business and he was enjoying his life a little too much. The book opens as our narrator, a man on the verge of forty who has carved out a comfortable if quant existence for himself gets what might be the largest bill in the history of Sweden, 5,700,00 kroner (about $863,000) from a shadowy bureaucratic company with the initials W. R. D. He pays this no attention and goes about his day. He works a few days at a small video store that caters to film buffs, he has one miserly friend named Roger, and the rest of his time is spent watching movies, paying video games and eating at the same places. When a month goes by and the bill now has increased to 5,700,150 kroner, he gives the company a call. After spending days trying to get a hold of someone, he finds Maud on the other end, who informs him that he is being charged for the enjoyment he has had over his life (for a lack of a better description). As he tries his best to come to terms with his situation and attempts to find a way out, we are taken back to the times in his life that he is apparently being changed for. His parents are dead, all of his friends are married and busy, and he is still in love with an old college girlfriend that left him abruptly. While the plot is very Kafkaesque, the book is anything but bleak. The man’s fight to fix the bill, and really explain the dignity of his life and reason for being is a noble one, one that comes with the chance at a new relationship with the mysterious Maud and one which ends in a rather ambiguous and hopeful way. This is an easy book to fall in love with, and anyone whose ever felt that the simplicity they so cherish in life is leading that said life to pass them by will find great comfort with such a wonderful book.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Noise of Time" by Julian Barnes

The Noise of Time, the new novel by Booker Prize-winning author Julian Barnes reminded me of a lot of other books while reading throughout. Luckily, that is a positive assessment of this swift hypnotic novel about a composer who gives up his dignity, creativity and happiness for a chance of survival under Stalin’s regime. There is very little dialogue in the novel, and most of the text is third person narration inside the mind of a man with little else but regret and shame, and it is compelling as hell. The only other book by Julian Barnes I have read is Flaubert’s Parrots, and I don’t recall that book being this interesting. If the book has any weaknesses, it is the other characters besides our protagonist, all of whom seem very paper-thin and act as simple cyphers for whatever feeling the main character finds himself in. other than that, this book is great. It is based on a Russian composer named Dmitri Shostakovich, and follows him over three separate years, all of which are leap years, as he deals with the decisions he has made. In the first year, 1936, Stalin witnesses one of his operas, and his work his denounced and he is taken in for an interrogation. Through a stroke of luck, his interrogator is executed and his life is spared by bending to the will of the state and changing his musical style. It happens again in 1948, and denouncing the work of another saves him. And in 1960, he joins the communist party. All through this, we see the pains of regret as his friends are killed, the love of his life dies, and he tries to fill the void with unfit lovers and lifeless art. The motif of a wounded vet begging for money in a train station is confusing when it opens the book, but it becomes clearer what it symbolizes when the scene resumes near the end. A good, but not great book about the power of the past and its stranglehold on the future. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Making Nice" by Matt Sumell

While veering toward the unpleasant yet never quite touching it, it is hard not to see the main character at the center of Making Nice, author Matt Sumell’s debut collection of linked stories, as anything more than a menace that is a danger to those around him and himself. It takes moments from this man’s life, and tries to make the proceedings cute and quirky with a tone that will leave a bad taste in the mouths of many readers. The stories can be funny, but that humor overtakes the book so even the sad moments have one too many jokes placed in them. It is even entertaining at points, as we follow this man from one mistake to the next as he tries to “make nice”, but I found the lack of honesty about the subjects discussed and the character’s failure to understand their circumstances an ill fit for such a book. For the sack of my reading guidelines, I labeled this book a collection of short stories, but they are really just linked vignettes that follow one guy, Alby, soon after the death of his mother. He is a violent man, but a passionate one as well, quick to use his fists, but very empathetic toward the downtrodden, such as his ailing Grandmother and an injured bird he nurses back to health. But when he is not at rest, he is fighting strangers, loafing about on his boat, and sexually using countless numbers of women. I found it hard to have sympathy for this guy, who revels in his own ignorance, an act in which the writer is guilty of as well. Even when Alby’s father, a loafer, is on the verge of death and he tries to cheer him up in a rather tacky way, this book, as well as the tornado at its center, kept me at a cold distance throughout its 219 pages. 
Rating: 3/5

Review: "The Strange Case of Rachel K." by Rachel Kushner

There is very little bad with Rachel Kushner’s collection of short fiction pieces, titled The Strange Case of Rachel K., but there is also very little good about it either. At only 80 pages on very small pages, and from the kind of writer Kushner is, this book can’t help but seem like a prelude to something else, and I question if that figurative something is even good in the first place. A few years ago, I read her breakthrough novel The Flamethrowers, and as time has passed, I completely forgot what it was about except for a few spare details (60’s radicals, sections in Europe, little else) and it just became another book on my shelf. And sadly, this book looks to be going the same route. It is favorably compared to Bolano on the front flap, but these three short pieces feel like Bolano-lite. It has the same ideas in mind, but not the gumption to follow through with them. Since there are only three pieces here, I feel I should talk about them all. The first piece, “The Great Exception”, begins with the implied brutal death of an explorer of the new world, and ends with the disillusioned relationship between a woman traveling from Hawaii to Cuba and the man she meets there. The second, unrelated story, “Debouchment”, unfolds over a few pages and consists of radio broadcasts, people talking in bars, and eventual explosions. The title story, really the heart of the book, shows the offspring of the couple in the first story, and the demise of Rachel K. at the hands of those that want to be with her. I find it hard to discuss this story more since we are given so little. If this is just a precursor to a bigger novel, I might give it a chance, but as it is, I’m left thoroughly disappointed.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "Prodigals" by Greg Jackson

After finishing Prodigals, the debut short story collection by newcomer Greg Jackson, I knew I would have to let it sit for a day. After letting time pass, the first thing I would like to mention is that this collection won’t be for everyone. It’s one of those books that I have mentioned in the past that I will put in the category of personal favorites: books whose qualities I can see but will completely understand if someone does not like it, such as Murakami’s Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the ultimate personal favorite, or Mo Yan’s Frog, my most recent personal favorite. Having got that out of the way, I found myself quite floored by this collection, which I found smart, maddening and compulsively readable. Reading the first story, I thought I had this book pegged: it reminded me of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Informers, or at the very least a spiritual relative of that book, the reasoning behind this I will get to soon, but the deeper I read into this collection, the more I focused on it, I realized this book is something totally different and it defies any kind of logical pigeonholing. Yes, the people in these stories are privileged, and find themselves drawn, through boredom to the darker sides of life, but Jackson isn’t so much interested in that as he is in the hidden pockets of humanity that accidently unveil one’s true desires, and by the end, he even loses interest in that, using his skills to deconstruct how we interact and our hidden motives. The first story in this collection, which led to the Ellis comparison, “Wagner in the Desert” sees a group of twenty-year olds having a last hurrah in the desert, while they orchestrate deals that will leave them financially comfortable and sustain their elite status. That alone doesn’t begin to describe why this story is so good. Jackson’s skillful way of setting the scene, getting into the character’s head, and by having the closest thing to the story’s theme being revealed by a side character make these stories something special. It is a an idea that finds its way into other stories as well, like “Dynamics in a Storm” where a man and a woman who might be his therapist (is he her patient, then why does he know such intimate details of her life?) are stuck in rainstorm and their journey becomes a reflection on regret, malice and longing, and the final story, the appropriately named “Metanarrative Breakdown”, where two cousins, bonding while the family patriarch lies on his death bed, swap stories, one of which involves a love interest, shrooms, MDMA, and a deeply philosophical car lot attendant. My favorite story is “Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy” where a couple visits old friends in the French countryside, and the menace of a locked room and a washed-up tennis star establish a disturbing, disquieting milieu. These stories a re rife with unnoticed pain, uncheck longing, like the painful “Amy’s Conversions”, and each struck a cord, whether I was consciously aware of it at the time or not. One of the strongest debuts I’ve come across this year.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Dead Boys" by Richard Lange

While I did not like it as much as I liked his most recent collection, Sweet Nothing, Richard Lange’s debut collection Dead Boys is quite a revelation for those who are just being introduced to a writer who has been described as the heir apparent to writers as varied as Raymond Carver and Jim Thompson. He perfectly melds each of those writer’s most famous attributes into a short form of storytelling that is both intimate, swift and brutal but with a keen sense of what is good in all of us and what makes us sally forth during tough times. It’s subject matter also reminded me of the debut collections of writers like Donald Ray Pollock and Frank Bill, but while those collections focus on the swift and brutal nature of their settings and characters, these stories take a bit longer to gestate in the reader’s mind and we don’t realize how much they will linger until the echo so their final lines. They take place mainly around the Los Angles area, but instead of the glitz and glamour that city is associated with, Lange’s stories focus on the downtrodden and slightly seedy areas that are juts down the road. I found the varied settings very refreshing here, which exhibit Lange’s understanding of many different walks of life, and how most times, whether they are a borderline criminal or someone desperately trying to get by, their desires are often one in the same. As with all of my short story reviews, I will pick out my favorites and tell you why I liked them so much. I’ve come to figure out that short story collections are only as good as their first story, really their first chance to make a good impression, and this one does, with the story “Fuzzyland” about a man who visits his sister, who has juts been raped, and wrestles with feelings for wanting a child with his wife through his niece. Like most stories here, the main character is brooding, pseudo-tough guy who is uncomfortable with his feelings and takes whatever life dishes out and by the end, has shed his thick outer layer and revealed his true self, whether willingly or unwillingly, and this story is a good example of that. While this collection is big and big-hearted, some of the smaller stories really shined as well, like “Culver City”, about a man whose wife finds damning photos at a celebrity house party and uses them for blackmail. That interesting concept however, becomes a great metaphor for the guy’s feelings about his doomed marriage. If I had to pick my favorite, it would be “Bank of America” which turns the bank-robbing story on its head by making not only making the story villain-less, but also have a somewhat shaky happy ending. It is the most unexpected stories since Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”. These powerful stories exist on the precipice of hope and despair, love and self-loathing, and you won’t soon forget them when you are finished. An incredible collection.

Rating: 5/5