Below is a list of the books I read in 2016.
Fiction
- Dogs of Littlefield (Suzanne Berne)
- Worst. Person. Ever. (Douglas Coupland)
- Skylight (Jose Saramago)
- Money (re-read) (Martin Amis)
- Life After Life (Kate Atkinson)
- Leave Me Alone (Murong)
- The Spy who Came in from the Cold (Re-read) (John le Carre)
- The Graveyard (Marek Hlasko)
- Eternal Philistine (Odon Von Horvath)
- La Place De L’etoile (Patrick Modiano)
- Zone of Interest (Martin Amis)
- The Cellist of Sarajevo (Stephen Galloway)
- The Betrayers (David Bezmozgis)
- Elizabeth is Missing (Emma Healey)
- Enchantress of Florence (Salman Rushdie)
- The Vegetarian (Han Kamg)
- The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
- Strange Weather in Tokyo (Hiromi Kawakami)
- The Sympathizer (Viet Thanah Nguyen)
- Les Enfants Terribles (Jean Cocteau)
- Darkness and Day (Ivy Compton-Burnett)
- Go Set the Watchman (Harper Lee)
- The Mission Song (John Le Cerre)
- Noise of Time (Julian Barnes)
- Expo 58 (Jonathan Coe)
- Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
- The President’s Hat (Antoine Lauren)
- The Trial (Franz Kafka)
Non-Fiction
- Moranthology (Kaitlin Moran)
- Impossible Exile (George Prochnik)
- Stringer (Anjan Sundaram)
- Just Mercy (Bryan Stevenson)
- Chernobyl Prayers (Svetlana Alexievich)
- A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)
- Unchosen (Julie Burchill)
- It’s All News to Me (Jeremy Vine)
- As I Was Saying (Jeremy Clarkson)
I ended 2016 by finishing Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The novel was
chosen by my book-group, and we were going to discuss it in December, over the
Christmas meal; however, one of the members sent an e-mail informing that he
was getting very depressed by the book, and could we please, please not discuss
it over the festive meal? He suggested that instead of The Trial, we should
discuss a book we had enjoyed reading. (To this another member replied, what if
“we have hugely enjoyed The Trial?”) In the end, taking
cognisance of the delicate emotional health of the depressed group- member, it
was decided that any book other that The Trial which the group-members
might have read and (on the outside chance) enjoyed should be discussed over
the Christmas meal.
The Christmas meal of the book-group took place in a
vegetarian Indian restaurant, highly recommended by the aforementioned
depressed group-member (depression possibly triggered by a century old German
novel written by a tubercular writer, who thought the novel was so poor that he
left instructions that it should not be published, which begs the question why
he did not destroy the manuscript himself). The service was poor, food awful,
and the waiter (who may well have been the owner) oleaginous (he enlightened us
on the seventeen-thousand ingredients that went into the making of the dish,
the complicated and nerve-racking process of preparing the dish, the region in
India it originated from etc., as if that would compensate for the poor quality
of the food). The resident expert on Indian food in our book-group, by dint of
being ethnically Indian, was asked for his views on the food. He said (with
distinct lack of enthusiasm) that it was ‘alright’. I thought he was lying. Another
member decided that this was exactly the right time to subject us to a detailed
feedback on the colonoscopy he had undergone last month, and forthcoming
cystoscopy (he talked nonchalantly and made several droll comments, all aimed
at conveying that the whole thing was actually very serious and he was coping
with great fortitude). It was just as well that The Trial was not
discussed.
I started reading The Trial over the Christmas period,
and finished it just before midnight on 31 December. Written in 1914, The
Trial could be interpreted as a heavy and macabre satire of the
bureaucracy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (though I doubt it; it was not a
Stasi-style dictatorship), or a commentary on insidious and destructive (yet
very bureaucratic) totalitarian regimes. I particularly enjoyed the penultimate
chapter—the meeting between Joseph K. and the prison chaplain in the unnamed
city’s cathedral, when the chaplain tells Joseph K. a parable to explain his
situation (it doesn’t).
I didn’t read many books in 2016—thirty-seven in total,
which must be the lowest number in many years. The year started well, and, by
the end of summer, I had read more than twenty-five books. It almost ground to a
halt in the second half of 2016, and I managed to read no more than half a
dozen books in the last six months of 2016. I did not quite get round to finishing a few of the books in the list. A
Moveable Feast, Les Enfants Terrible, and Darkness
and Day were three such books. I shall finish reading them in 2017;
however, I have listed them here because I have read more than two-third of
each of the books. I should like to say that this was because I was distracted
by weightier matters such as Brexit and the election of the Donald to the
presidency of the USA, but if I did that I’d be lying. For what it is worth, I
found all of the three books heavy-going. I remember reading somewhere that the
queen likes reading the novels of Ivy Compton Burnett. I should very much doubt
whether Darkness and Day, first published in 1951, is one of them. Written
almost entirely in dialogues, this should have been an easy and quick read for
me; but it wasn’t, not least because of the labyrinthine sentence-structure.
Almost everyone in the novel (including the domestics) speaks archly and
obliquely, which made it difficult at times to figure out what was really
hinted at. The dialogues were sometimes funny, occasionally confusing, and
mostly tedious. Les Enfants Terribles is a surreal novel. I was expecting
that, having watched the film The Dreamers a few years ago, which apparently was
inspired by the novel (I haven’t seen the film Cocteau himself made, based on his novel). I was
also expecting sexual tension, eroticism and emotional sado-masochism (again,
having watched The Dreamers). What I was not expecting was how difficult and
tedious I would find the novel to be. This, I concluded, was mostly because of
the prose, reading which was like wading through treacle. I found this surprising
because the novel is translated by none other than Rosamond Lehmann. I guess Les
Enfants Terribles must be a very difficult novel to translate. On the
whole I found Les Enfants Terribles distinctly underwhelming. I shall finish
reading it this year, but I don’t think I shall change my views.
Below are some of the books I enjoyed reading in 2016.
The Noise of Time is Julian Barnes’s first novel after his
Booker Prized winning A Sense of an Ending. It belongs to
an increasingly popular genre: fictional biography. David Lodge has
exploited this genre effectively in recent years. I don’t mind it, especially
when the novel is written by my favourite author. I would rather read a
fictional biography than a biography (which I find often dry). The Noise of Time
tells the story of the genius Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich, who
survived Stalin’s terror, and successive Soviet dictators. The Noise of Time,
stylistically, is not dissimilar to Barnes’s earlier masterpiece The
Flaubert’s Parrot. There are several vignettes and anecdotes which are
narrated and re-narrated in Barnes’s deceptively laconic style. The end result
is a gripping tale of how one of the musical geniuses of the twentieth century battled with his
conscience to survive dictatorships.
I read two books of Martin Amis, who, like Julian Barnes, is
a favourite author. One was Money, Amis’s old classic. I reread
it because it was selected by the book-group, and found it as impressive as I
did when I read it first. It of course captures the zeitgeist of the 1980s
perfectly, but its themes transcend time. And I can never tire of Amis’s prose
style. The second Martin Amis novel I
read is his most recent, The Zone of Interest. Zone
of Interest is a Holocaust novel, Amis's second, after The
Time’s Arrow (which was nominated for the Booker decades ago). Amis is
in splendid form here. Written in three sections, The Zone of Interest, at
its heart, is a grim satire, and throws into sharp relief the utter banality at
the heart of evil. A superb novel.
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible was one of the
best novels I read in 2016. I had been meaning to read this novel for a long
time. I’d read a couple of novels of Kingsolver, earlier, and had liked them. I
finally got round to read The Poisonwood Bible in the summer
of 2016. It tells the story of the family of a Christian fanatical preacher,
Nathan Price, who goes to what is now The Democratic Republic (DR) of Congo.
The novel has multiple narrators: Nathan Price’s wife and four daughters.
Kingsolver has a great writing style, and she uses it to great effect to
deliver a devastating commentary on the tragic consequences of the rigid and
obsessive adherence to any doctrine.
The Sympathizer, the debut novel of the Vietnamese-American
author Viet Thanah Nguyen, was the surprise winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize
for literature. The novel can be considered to be in the tradition of John
Lecarre novels: a literary thriller, a spy novel. It is also a confession—a
confession by the unnamed narrator, for the benefit of a commissar. It is only
towards the end that the context and location of the narration become clear to
the reader. The Sympathizer may not be in the same lane as the best of John
Lecarre novels; however, packed with different stories, it is an engaging read.
Another Pulitzer winning novel I read in 2016 was Elizabeth
Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. Olive Kitteridge, promoted as
a novel, is really a collection of several stories in small-town America, at
the centre of some of which is the cantankerous eponymous heroin of the novel.
Almost all of the stories are interesting, some riveting, even, although Olive
Kitteridge is only a peripheral character in many of them. I liked Olive
Kitteridge, all said than done, although I also do not think it is a
novel; it is a collection of very well written short stories.
Like Olive Kitteridge, Jose Saramago’s Skylight
, also published as a novel, is a collection of short stories, though they cohere together better than Olive Kitteridge. Skylight was the first novel
Saramago wrote when he was a young man, in the 1950s. He sent it to a
publishing company, but heard nothing from the company—did not even receive the
rejected manuscript. Saramago did not write another novel for several years.
Fast forward several years, to the late 1980s. Saramago, who, by this time, had
become a celebrated author in Portugal (though still some years away from winning
the Nobel Prize for Literature) received a phone-call from the publishing
company which had rejected the novels decades ago. During the shifting of the company's offices to another premise in
Lisbon, the old (and only) manuscript of the novel was discovered. The publishing company, having made the belated discovery that the novel was in fact a masterpiece (that Saramago, by this time, had become a renowned and critically acclaimed author, I am sure, had nothing to do with it), sought Saramago's permission to publish the novel. Saramago
denied the permission on in-my-view-rather-dubious-grounds that the novel was not
worth publishing, as it was rejected the first time. After Saramago’s death,
his widow and estate allowed the publication novel. Skylight, thus, saw the light of the day more than sixty years
after it was first written. I am very glad that they did. I loved Skylight,
which is very different in prose style (much less dense) (I am making this judgement based only
on the translated novels of the great author) and subject matter, from the novels which Saramago went on to write later (which established his reputation; this was perhaps the reason why Sarmago was not keen for Skylight to be published).
I read more translated novels in 2016 than I generally do. I
have reviewed a few of them on this blog in 2016.
I did not read many non-fiction books in 2016, which was par
for the course. Three books stood out for me.
By far the best was Anjan Sundaram’s Stringer, which is about
the current day DR Congo. Sundaram explores DR Congo without trying to teach a
lesson. He has no agenda; he lays out the canvas and lets the reader reach his
own conclusions. Stringer is a superb book. Based on this evidence, Sundaram
seems to be a worthy successor of the great V.S. Naipaul. Unlike Sundaram, Bryan Stevenson, in Just Mercy, has a very clear agenda—to lay bare the institutional racism in the American justice system. Just Mercy is one of the most moving books I have read in a long time.
Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the Novel prize for Literature in 2015. Chernobyl Prayers tells the devastating consequences for the ordinary people of the worst nuclear disaster in the twentieth century, compounded by the conspiracy of silence of the Soviet dictatorship.
I decided to buy It is all News to Me after hearing its author Jeremy Vine, who is a BBC Radio 2 presenter, in a literary programme, where he read excerpts from the book. They were hilarious. Vine himself came across in the programme as a man with a great sense of humour (and stage-presence). The memoir is not bad, but I realised that the passages Vine read out in the programme were the only funny bits in it.
I enjoy reading Jeremy Clarkson the same way I used to enjoy listening to a cantankerous uncle of mine, who would rant about anything and everything. Just like my uncle’s ranting (which grew fiercer as Alzheimer set in) I find it impossible to take anything Clarkson writes seriously (I suspect he does, too), but he does bring a smile to your face. Ideal book to read in the loo or on a long flight.
The top ten novels in 2016 were as follows:
1.
The Zone of Interest (Martin Amis)
2.
The Spy who Came in from the Cold (John Lecarre)
3.
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
4.
The Noise of Time (Julian Barnes)
5.
Skylight (Jose Saramago)
6.
Money (Martin Amis)
7.
The President’s Hat (Antoine Lauren)
8.
The
Sympathizer (Viet Thanah Nguyen)
9.
Olive
Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
10.
Worst. Person. Ever (Douglas Coupland)
