2013 has
dragged off its sorry ass. It is consigned to the dustbin of the past. Below is
the list of books I managed to read in 2013.
Fiction
- Big
Breasts and Wide Hips (Mo Yan)
- The
Chef (Jaspreet Singh)
- The
Room (Emma Donoghue)
- How
it all began (Penelope
Lively)
- There
but for the (Ali Smith)
- The
Third Reich (Roberto Bolano)
- Nemesis
(Philip Roth)
- Narcopolis
(Jeet Thayil)
- To
Kill a Mocking Bird (Harper Lee)
- The
World in the Evening (Christopher Isherwood)
- Open
City (Teju Cole)
- Nowhere
Man (Aleksander Hemon)
- The
Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler)
- We
had it so Good (Linda Grant)
- Capital
(John Lanchester)
- No
One Writes to the Colonel (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
- A
Small Circus (Hans Fallada)
- In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)
- Love and other Dangerous Chemicals (Anthony Capella)
- The West Pier (Gorse trilogy) (Patrick Hamilton)
- Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (Gorse Trilogy) (Patrick Hamilton)
- Unknown Assailant (Gorse Trilogy) (Patrick Hamilton)
- Burmese Days (George Orwell)
- Lionel Asbo: State of England (Martin Amis)
- The Merde Factor (Stephen Clarke)
- N-W (Zadie Smith)
- Fiesta (The Sun also Rises) (Ernest Hemingway)
- The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Rachael Joyce)
- Flight Behaviour (Barbara Kingsolver)
- Porterhouse Blue (Tom Sharpe)
- Zoo Time (Howard Jacobson)
- HHhH (Laurent Binet)
- Scenes from Early Life (Philip Hensher)
- Hunger Angel (Herta Muller)
- Scenes from Provincial Life (William Cooper)
- Trumpet (Jackie Kay)
- The Luminaries (Eleanor Catton)
- The Lowland (Jhumpa Lahiri)
- Harvest (Jim Crace)
- Gillespie and I (Jane Harris)
- The Woman in Black (Susan Hill)
- Telegraph Avenue (Michael Chabon)
Non Fiction
- Them:
Adventures with the Extremists (Jon Ronson)
- The
Men who Started at the Goats (Jon Ronson)
- The
Psychopath Test (Jon Ronson)
- The
Last Jews of Kerala (Edna Fernades)
- Outside
of A Dog (Rick Gekoski)
- Boomrang
(Michael Lewis)
- Finding
George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop (Emma Larkin)
- The
Traveller’s Cookbook (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown)
- Life
with No Brakes (Nick Spalding)
- Tune
in Tokiyo: The Gaijin Diaries (Tim Anderson)
- Alfred
and Emily (Doris Lessing)
- The
Men who Killed Gandhi (Manohar Malgaonkar)
The first
book I read in 2013 was the provocatively titled Big Breasts and Wide Hips,
written by the Chinese author Mo Yan. Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 2012, which triggered an acute attack of colitis in some in the
West in whose eyes Mo Yan has sold his soul to the Chinese dictatorship and
therefore not worthy of the prize. Big Breasts and Wide Hips is a huge
novel (one of the four humongous novels I read in 2013). 600 plus pages crammed
from top to bottom with words in small font would, I put it to you, severely
test the concentration and patience of the most bloody minded readers. I am
glad to say that I completed reading the book that has more characters than in
East Enders. The novel can be viewed in two ways; no, make it three: it is a
chronicle of human misery; it is also a celebration of China’s ancient traditions;
and, finally, it is also a case in point of the opacity, the impenetrability of
the Chinese society (I am not sure that the author intended it). It is a
rollicking read with some bravura characters none of which, regrettably, stayed
in my mind (and not only because I found their names confusing).
The novel
that surpassed Big Breasts and Wide Hips as regards girth was The
Luminaries, the winner of the 2013 Booker Prize. Canadian born New
Zeeland author Eleanor Catton became, at twenty-seven, the youngest to win the
prize. (I once heard the British novelist, Andrew Miller, who many moons ago,
was shortlisted for the Booker for one of his novels, pronounce in a literary
programme that he did not think one could write a good novel when one was
young, as one had simply not accumulated enough life experience which would add
depth to the novel. Miller did not specify his cut off for “young age”;
however, given that he published his first novel when he was in his
mid-thirties, I should imagine that in Miller’s books writers under the age of
thirty, as a rule—or a group—are incapable of producing novels that would make
people sit up and exclaim, “Now this novel is worthy of a Booker!”) The
Luminaries is a clever novel; too clever at times, although, you’d be
relieved to know that, if you are not clever enough to figure out the
cleverness of the clever Eleanor Catton, you’d not necessarily miss out
anything (which raises the question whether the cleverness isn’t otiose). The
Luminaries is a plot-driven novel. At its heart is a mystery, which all
but the most obtuse of readers would figure out by page six hundred. The novel,
nevertheless, plods on for two hundred more pages which, in my view, add
nothing to the plot. The Luminaries is competently written with modicum of wit
scattered here and there. As in Big Breasts and Wide Hips, there are some
memorable characters. On the whole I liked the novel sufficiently to be wanting to
read Catton’s earlier début novel.
The third
biggy I read in 2013 was The American writer Michael Chabon’s Telegraph
Avenue. In the spring of 2013 I heard Michael Chabon in a literary
programme where he spoke about his writing career and also read out an excerpt
from Telegraph
Avenue, which he was promoting. In the programme Chabon came across a
very likeable, unassuming, almost self-effacing (without sounding like a fraud)
man with a sense of humour. Exactly how I had imagined him to be having read
his hilarious Yiddish Policemen’s Union and the Pulitzer-award winning The
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Telegraph Avenue was the last book I
read in 2013, and it also took me the longest (two weeks) to finish. Set in the
noughties in California, Telegraph Avenue tells the story of two married couples, one black and one Jewish. The husbands are also professional
partners as they co-own a second hand shop that specializes in rare vinyl
records. After reading Telegraph Avenue I arrived without
delay at two conclusions: (a) Chabon is
a genius; and (b) my intellect is simply not up to assimilating Chabon’s encyclopaedic
knowledge of Jazz and comic books, or grasping the full meaning of Chabon’s
sentences that are longer than the Ganges. There were occasions when I had to
read a sentence—with independent and subordinate clauses galore between the
noun and the verb, and overzealous use of parenthesis (within a parenthesis at
times)— two-three times to make sense of it. For these reasons I found Telegraph
Avenue hard work. Entertaining novel, but I don’t think Chabon has
quite nailed it this time. I’d rate the other two novels of Chabon I’ve read
ahead of Telegraph Avenue.
Hans
Fallada was a long forgotten German novelist of the 1920 and 1930s who was
“discovered” by the English speaking world, in 2009, when the translation of
one of his novels, entitled Alone in Berlin, became a world-wide success.
Predictably, translations of Fallada’s other novels appeared. A
Small Circus is one of these novels, also Fallada’s début novel.
Inspired by Fallada’s experience as a journalist for a provincial newspaper in
a small German town towards the end of the Weimar Republic, A
Small Circus depicts, with great élan and with liberal doses of black
humour, the socio-economic problems of the times made worse by petty
machinations of self-serving politicians, which, in the fullness of time, would
pave the way for the rise of Hitler. A Small Circus has a huge cast of
characters (a list is given at the beginning of the novel of all the “dramatic
personae”, which is very handy), none of which, when this sprawling,
almost-six-hundred-pages novel comes to its end, comes out well. I have not
read Alone
in Berlin, but I am very keen to read it, having been very impressed
with A
Small Circus.
Indian
writer Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis was one of the best
novels I read in 2013. Set in Mumbai (when Indians had no problem calling it
Bombay) over a span of three decades (from 1970s to 1990s) Narcopolis, which apparently is highly autobiographical (as many
first novels tend to be), tells the interconnected stories of people whose
lives are enslaved and ruined by opiate addiction. Narcopolis does not have a
conventional, coherent story line; it is not a plot-driven novel. Instead, what
the reader gets are life-stories of the characters living in a red light
district of Bombay, which go to and fro in time. Thayil’s prose has hypnotic
readability and the characters are affecting.
I read Emma
Donoghue’s Room with scepticism (which I possess in abundance) I reserve
for novels which are based on harrowing true stories that have attracted a lot
of lurid publicity and which become favourites of (usually women’s) book
groups. I read Room because it was one of the novels chosen by the (men only)
book group of which I am a member. Donoghue has taken the harrowing story of the
Austrian woman, Elisabeth Fritzl (kept captive in a basement for 24 years by
her biological father who repeatedly raped her and father a number of
children), as a starting point, and produced a remarkable novel that seems like
a psychological study of a young child who has seen and known nothing except
the room in which he was born. Written for the most part from the point of view
of a bright, precocious yet credulous five year old, Room is a compelling
read.
Some more
novels which I read (one re-read) because they were chosen by the book group
were In
Cold Blood, Burmese Days and To Kill A Mocking Bird. Burmese Days
is George Orwell’s début novel. In it he creates a microcosm of the British
Empire in its distant part, and creates a picture of the Empire and the sahibs which is unedifying to say the least. Apparently
Orwell did not think much of this novel and, in later life, described it as
“lifeless”. Orwell was too harsh on himself. Burmese Days is perhaps
uneven, less than hundred percent satisfying, but, still, a very engaging novel,
which also shows glimpses of the socio-political ideas Orwell was to develop in years to come. In Cold Blood is Truman Capote’s masterpiece. This was the
novel he was born to write. This non-fiction novel (a term, I believe, first
coined by Capote) tells the story of the brutal murder of a Kansas farmer and
his family by two drifters. Capote gives the impression that he has taken great
efforts to get the facts of the case right, an effect greatly enhanced by the
reportage style of prose. In
Cold Blood is regarded as a landmark novel, and with good reason. To Kill A Mocking Bird is another landmark
novel, the only novel written by Capote’s childhood friend Harper Lee (a
character in the novel is heavily based on Capote whom Lee knew as a child). To
Kill A Mocking Bird is a novel of two parts. It is a straightforward
tale of state-sanctioned appalling miscarriage of justice in the Depression era
Alabama. It is also a coming of age story in a small town in Alabama in the
Great Depression, which is also very well done.
John
Lanchester’s Capital is a novel I enjoyed a lot. It tells the interwoven
stories of a cross section of Londoners living on the imaginary Pepys Road in
twenty-first century London. Capital is a state-of-the-nation kind of novel. It
is multi-layered, humane, wise, acutely observed and, despite being all of
this, funny. Everything I look for in a novel.
Climate
change is the leitmotif of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. Its
heroine is the impressively named Dellarobia Turnbow. The novel seems to have
written primarily to disseminate the message of climate change that is
obviously close to the heart of its author. The message (overdone at times)
comes wrapped in an absorbing story-line and supported by Kingsolver’s
sumptuous prose and mordant wit. Flight Behaviour is a pleasure to
read.
A surprise
for me in 2013 was Jane Harris’s Gillespie and I. I had not heard of
this writer or this novel. I came across it in the local library and decided to
try it because the story-line seemed interesting. I am glad I read it. Set in
the 19th century Scotland, Gillespie and I is a gripping tale
of manipulation, obsession and deception.
Very well written and suffused with dry humour Gillespie and I is a
compelling read. I have now decided to get Jane Harris’s earlier, first, novel
and read it.
The
enigmatically titled HHhH, is an excellent English
translation of the original French novel written by Laurent Binet. This novel
can also come under the title of non-fiction novel. It tells the story of the
assassination of Reynard Heydrich in German occupied Prague during the Second World War. Written in short, untitled, chapters, many barely longer than the length of a paragraph, HHhH reads like a thriller it is
meant to be.
In Scenes
from an Early Life, the British novelist Philip Hensher moves away from
the themes and geographies of his last two novels (Northern Clemency and King of
Badgers) to a very different theme and geography. The scene is East Pakistan,
which stands on the verge of a civil war with its more dominant partner, West
Pakistan, and, with help of the giant India that separates the West and East
wing of Pakistan, would achieve its independence and come to be known as Bangla
Desh. The story is told by a grown man, now living in England, who looks back
upon his childhood in Bangla Desh during those tumultuous years. The
experiences of the man (based heavily, as acknowledged by Hensher at the end of
the novel, on the real life experiences of his partner) sound very authentic.
That said Scenes from An Early Life, which reads like a memoir, seems to
lose its focus a bit, as if Hensher is undecided whether to focus on the family
drama or the political upheavals. Hensher is a favourite writer of mine, and I
have read many of his books. Scenes from An Early Life is not a
bad novel at all, but, when you finish it, you are left with the nagging
feeling that something is amiss.
A lot is
amiss in N-W, Zadie Smith’s fourth novel. This is another
state-of-the-nation novel (like Capital) that depicts life in twenty-first
century London. The plot, such as it is, is vapour-thin. There is no settled
feel to the novel, partly, I suspect, because Smith attempts different prose
styles and forms in different sections of the novel (the stream-of-consciousness style of the
opening section is especially irritating). I have read all of Smith’s earlier
novels and liked all of them (even The Autograph Man, which is
apparently her least successful novel). N-W, I am sad to say, just didn’t
work for me.
Martin
Amis’s Lionel Asbo: State of England was panned by the critics when it
was published. Like most of Amis’s novels, this is not a plot-driven novel. It
has flashes of Amis’s linguistic brilliance and grotesque comedy that you
expect from Amis. My problem was Lionel Asbo, despite Amis’s manful efforts to make him a kind of low-level
Dr. Evil character—sinister, yes, but also cartoonish, complete with his comic
accent and pronunciation—was just not that interesting. He is neither menacing
enough, nor particularly funny; he was just dull.
Howard Jacobson's Zoo Time imagines, in a very Jacobsonian (i.e. over-the-top) way, the scenario of the end of the literary novel as we have known it. As with almost every other novel of his, Jacobson treats the plot with the contempt it deserves (therein perhaps lies the cue of the apocalyptic scenario of the demise of the literary novel imagines in the novel). The novel can be seen as a bitter (though very funny at times) diatribe against the modern world's reluctance to treat the literary fiction with respect. It goes without saying that the novel is also preoccupied with two other perennial preoccupations of its author: sex that pushes the boundaries of social moratorium (the protagonist of the novel harbours a desperate desire to sleep with his mother-in-law) and the Jew thing.
Philip Roth's Nemesis (which may turn out to be his last published novel) is set in the 1940s in the Jewish quarter of Newark, and tells the story of a polio epidemic which wreaks havoc in the middle-class Jewish lives. The novel has a nostalgic, elegiac feel to it, and the milieu of the 1940s Newark is tenderly described; but the novel is missing a dimension. While you feel sorry for the Jewish families that are losing their children to polio, the novel (strangely for a Roth novel) has an enervating feel to it.
In the summer of
2013, while on a holiday, I read Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises),
considered to be Ernest Hemingway’s first major novel, which left me underwhelmed.
This was the second Hemingway novel I have read and I don’t (yet) count myself
as a Hemingway fan. The other novel I read on that holiday, for no other reason
other than that it was lying about in the apartment I was renting, was The
Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by someone called Rachael Joyce. The
book, which was described as a Sunday Times best seller, was about as interesting as David
Cameron’s speeches in the Commons. In other words waste of time.
Jhumpa Lahiri is
a Pulitzer award winning American writer of Indian descent. The
Lowland is her second full length novel (which was short-listed for the
2013 Booker Prize). It took me a while to get into this novel, which tells the
tangled story of two brothers and their wife (yes; they share a wife between
them, though not, I should clarify, at the same time); but it slowly grew on
me. A subtle commentary on the unfulfilled lives people lead.
Ali Smith
is a British novelist who is considered to be overabundant in the talent
department. I read a Smith’s most recent novel—the first of Smith's novels I
read—the incompletely titled There but for the, in 2013. The
novel, as its title suggests, is anarchic in its intention. (It starts with a
bizarre prologue I struggled to make head or tail of and its relation (symbolic
or otherwise) to the main story, and decided, in the end, not to bother.) Smith
throws a conundrum at the readers: how does one deal with a guest who literally overstays his
welcome. The novel comprises several stories—some more riveting than
others—that have only a superficial connection with one another.
Alexander
Hemon is an American novelist of Bosnian origin who (like Ali Smith) oozes
talent, according to many. I had read a novel of his in the past (The Lazarus
Project) which I’d thought was entertaining, if slightly flawed. I read in 2013
Nowhere
Man, which might be Hemon’s début novel. Hemon has an unusual gift for
the language (perhaps it relates to English not being his first language; like
Nabokov Hemon did not learn English until adulthood, until he arrived in
America); and has a whimsical way of describing things and employing metaphors,
which, for the best part, is amusing. Nowhere
Man is an accomplished example of resourceful writing. My only concern
is that the novel is overstrained. A series of anecdotes from the life of the
novel’s protagonist, however amusing and thought provoking, is not enough to
make a coherent whole.
Trumpet is the only novel to date (if I am
not mistaken) of the British poet Jackie Kay. First published in the late
1990s, I have had this novel with me for years, having bought it for a quid in
a second-hand book-fair; but I had not read it, until it was chosen by the book
group. One of the bookgroup members spoke in such glowing terms of the novel I
was afraid the table at which we were sitting would combust. I thought,
initially, that the story—that of a Jazz musician, a woman who leads her entire
life as a man, even marries a woman and adopts a son (who never suspects that
his father was a woman until the father dies)—stretched the limits of
credulity. Until I discovered that the novel is in fact based on the true story of a
jazz musician of minor repute, in America in the 1930s and 1940s, who went on
to have a series of relationships with other women (who described themselves as
heterosexuals) and even adopted sons who “discovered” that their father was a
woman only after his/her death, even though they had been living for several
years prior to the musician's death in a cramped caravan! Kay makes no attempt to
postulate theories as to why the protagonist of her novel would have wished to
lead her life as a man; no psychological insights are offered. What Kay is
chiefly interested in is exploring human relationships, and she does so
triumphantly. This is a beautifully written novel which unexpectedly touches your heart.
Three of my
favourite novelists sadly passed away in 2013: Ruth Prawer Jhabwala, Tom Sharpe
and Doris Lessing. I did not manage to read any novel of Jhabwala this year,
but re-read Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue and, as on the
occasion I had read it several years ago, enjoyed it thoroughly. (The novel was
chosen by my bookgroup and I was disappointed to note that it was not rated
very highly by most members.) I read
Lessing’s last published work Alfred and Emily. The book is part
fiction and part memoir. Alfred and Emily were Lessing’s parents. In the first
section of the book Lessing imagines her parents’ lives as they would have been
if the First World War hadn’t happened. (Lessing believed that her parents’
lives were irredeemably scarred by the Great War). The second section, which is
a memoir, describes the lives they led in Southern Rhodesia where Lessing grew
up. Lessing was 89 when she wrote this book. I did not think that the fictional
part of the book worked all that well (it also ends rather abruptly), but the
second section, the memoir, was very fascinating and, at times, moving.
Now to non-fiction.
The best
non-fiction book I read in 2013 was Manohar Malgaonkar’s The Men who Killed
Gandhi. The book which tells the conspiracy behind the assassination of Mahtama
Gandhi, is unputdownable. I have reviewed it earlier on this blog.
I read Emma
Larkin’s (an American journalist based in Thailand, I think) Finding
George Orwell in a Burmese Tea Shop after I read Burmese Days. Orwell
had based his novel on his own experience of living in Burma (Orwell’s mother’s
side of the family, French, had made fortune in Burma in the nineteenth century
and, by the time Orwell was posted in Burma in the 1920s, had lived in Burma
for two generations). Larkin decided to travel to the actual places where Orwell had lived, and on which, most of the fictional places in
the novel were based. In her journeys she met a number of Burmese intellectuals
and professionals. Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Tea Shop is predictable in
many ways (not least with regard to the sad conclusions Larkin reaches about
the Myanmar, as Burma is known these days), but it kept my interest till the
end.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
is a left-of-the-centre British journalist (of Asian / Indian origin) who
contributes regularly to some of the broadsheets and is rather good at
fulminating about some or the other injustice in the society. (When it comes to
social injustice, Alibhai-Brown is blessed with an acutely sensitive radar that has the efficiency of the sniffer dogs
at Heathrow programmed to detect hard drugs which may or may not have been
brought into the UK hidden inside the rectum of a ‘mule'.) My customary response to Alibhai-Brown’s articles is of irritation; and I am further irritated that I am
irritated because I find myself in agreement with what she writes most of the
time. (I think it is the air of self-righteousness that I find off-putting). The
Traveller’s Cookbook, Alibhai-Brown’s memoir, was a pleasant surprise.
It was funny, engaging, and—except for the last bit when she whips herself
into a frenzy and ranted about Margaret Thatcher (not without reason)—chilled
out , a state of being one does not usually associate with Alibhai-Brown.
Rick—Richard
Abraham—Gekoski –is an American born writer, broadcaster, rare book dealer and
a former member of the English department at Warwick University (according to
the entry on him in WkiPedia). Outside of A Dog is Gekoski’s
bibliomeoir (don’t ask me what a bibliomemoir is), inspired by a quote of Groucho Marx
((“Outside of a dog a book is man’s best friend, inside of it’s too dark too
read”). Gekoski—you are left in no doubt whatsoever about this—is a voracious
reader who, throughout his life, has devoured books with the gluttony of a
silkworm. In Outside of A Dog Gekoski has chosen—out of the thousands of
books he has read—twenty-five works for his critical appraisal. The critical
essays ooze erudition, knowledge and culture like blood seeping out of a
saturated bandage. These essays are juxtaposed with episodes from Gekoski’s
life. I found Outside of A Dog a mixed bag, primarily because I just do not
have the intellectual wherewithal to fully understand—and therefore
appreciate—professor Gekoski’s critical appraisals. But I enjoyed reading the
personal anecdotes which are permeated with gentle humour.
Jon Ronson
is a British journalist whose talent seems to lie in getting himself
ingratiated with people who are a hairbreadth away from getting diagnosed with
some clinical mental condition, and writing hugely entertaining accounts of the
time he has spent in their company. I read a collection of Ronson’s non-fiction
work (Them: Adventures with Extremists; The Men who Stared at the Goats;
and The
Psychopath Test) in 2013 (they were available for a ridiculously low
price on Kindle) and marvelled at the people who seem to lead their entire
lives at the edges of sanity.
Another
e-book I bought (at ridiculously low price) was Tune in Toyo: The Gajin Diaries,
an account of a year spent in Tokyo by an American named Tim Anderson. Anderson
went to Tokyo to teach English to the Japanese. If you are looking for deep
insights into the Japanese culture, this is not the book for you. If you are
looking for a good laugh or something light to read on holiday (or in loo) this
is the book for you.
Below is a
list of ten novels I enjoyed reading the most, in 2013.
- Narcopolis (Jeet Thayil)
- Room (Emma Donoghue)
- In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)
- To Kill A Mocking Bird (Harper Lee)
- Flight Behaviour (Barbara Kingsolver)
- Porterhouse Blue (Tom Sharpe)
- Gilespie and I (Jane Harris)
- Capital (John Lanchester)
- HHhH (Laurent Binet)
- Trumpet (Jackie Kay) & The Lowland (Jhumpa Lahiri)
Since I did
not read many non-fiction books in 2013, I will list my top five.
- The Men who Killed Gandhi (Manohar Malgaonkar)
- The Psychopath Test (Jon Ronson)
- Finding George Orwell in A Burmese Tea Shop (Emma Larkin)
- The Traveller’s Cookbook (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown)
- Them: Adventures with the Extremists (Jon Ronson)
My
resolution for 2014? For a long time I have been troubled by the suspicion that
I have wasted the prime of my life reading novels of little to no consequence.
It is a weakness in my character. Every year, like a reformed alcoholic, I
promise myself that I will abstain from books-of-no-consequence; but every time
I spot a Stephen Clarke novel I can’t stop myself from buying it, even though I
know that the novel will be full of puerile, shallow humour which would not add
anything meaningful to the development of my personality (which so needs
developing). In 2014 I am going to read at least ten twentieth century novels
of consequence. Life is too short to read inconsequential novels. Ragged
Trousered Philanthropist, here I come, riding Gravity’s Rainbow.
