"Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose." Winston Churchill
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:: October 2006 |
One Hundred Years of Solitude ( Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1967) |
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"Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point." |
| Comments: The most famous opening lines in Latin American literature introduce the story of the village of Macondo, and launched the genre of magical realism into the modern literary canon. Colombian Marquez manages to capture, in his Nobel winning work, the unique, spiritual, exotic, despotic, lush, and revolutionary complexities of Latin American culture. |
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:: August 2006 |
The Sea (John Banville, 2005 ) |
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"So there they all were, the Graces: Carlo Grace and his wife Constance, their son Myles, the girl or young woman who I was sure was not the girl I had heard laughing in the house that first day, with all their things around them, their folding chairs and teacups and tumblers of white wine, and Connie Grace's reavealing skirt and her husband's funny hat and newspaper and cigarette, and Myles's stick, and the girl's swimsuit, lying where she had tossed it, limply wadded and stuck along one wet edge with a fringe of sand, like something thrown up drowned from out of the sea." |
| Comments: Banville's Jamesian winner of the 2005 Man Booker prize containes one of the most unreliable narrators in recent fiction. Manipulative, avaricious Max returns to a holiday spot from his youth following the death of his wife, and remembers, or misremembers, his childhood infatuation with an upper class family, and the twin son's and daughter’s games with their governess. With subtle allusions to Henry James The Turn of the Screw, Banville explores how we manipulate our memories of the past in order to minimize our guilt and disguise our flaws. Some critiques found Banville’s prose “too perfect” – how bizarre… |
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:: May 2006 |
The Ice Storm (Rick Moody, 1994 ) |
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"The turkey was no longer moist. This conclusion was unavoidable. Above all, she and Benjamin agreed on the necessity of moist turkey...One had to guard against dryness in leftovers. One had to reheat gravy. And Elena had failed here. She knew if she ever suffered a real and debilitating mental illness, its onset would not be the result of a failed marriage or because of some twentieth-century spiritual impoverishment; it would be caused instead by these details, by a pen mark on a designer suit, by the slight warp in her Paul Simon album, or by the acrid taste of old ice cubes. These small things led to a bottomless pit of loneliness beside which even Cambodia paled." |
| Comments: It is 1973, and shag rugs, brown flairs, and kitchen gadgets abound. Hendrix and Joplin are newly dead; Nixon is being impeached. An ice storm brews in middle-class, suburban Connecticut., as two families, the Hoods and the Williamsons try to celebrate Thanksgiving against a lifestyle of sex, drugs, adultery, and middle-aged angst. Moody's biting satire of America in the 1970's has a surprising tender core, and, be warned, contains amusing yet explicit descriptions, of some rather unattractive personal habits. |
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:: March 2006 |
The Lover (Marguerite Duras, 1985 ) |
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"One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, 'I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.'" |
| Comments: A young woman’s coming of age is such a different experience (even now, in these so called emancipated times), from that of a man. Duras distills perfectly that moment a girl realizes she has sexual power, and that this knowledge is both a burden and a gift. Yet her heroine’s “flagrant exhausted face,” already has “those rings around the eyes, in advance of time or experience,” because she also recognizes that this is, in fact, what she has been raised for. Her unhinged mother, (“we’re ashamed of her. I’m ashamed of her”), and despicable elder brother (“a family layabout, a rummager in closets, a murderer without a gun”), rely on her to restore the family’s fortunes. She prostitutes herself for them, but with a Chinese man, thereby offending their sense of racial superiority. Ironically, her lover’s father feels too, that she is a “white whore” beneath his contempt. Through 114 sublime pages, Duras encapsulates a specific colonial landscape, while the child-woman enters the adult frays of love, lust, and ownership. Her deftness is such that one barely notices none of the principals are named and when I look back on the novel I remember it as one cohesive ‘shot’ rather than disparate episodes. The opening scene on the ferry is a tour de force, extending over the book’s first twenty seven pages, building tremendous tension for the meeting of the lovers, the meeting that changes the narrator’s life. |