Book Review: How to be both by Ali Smith

 I'm away for a few days, so I've written a book review and scheduled it to post while I'm in Anguilla.

Ali Smith's new novel, How to be both [sic], is unlike anything I've ever read.  It's a bit metafiction, yes, but it also is self-referential and self-reflective to an extent I've never seen.

Let me explain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up:

This book was a finalist for the Booker Prize and it's getting lots of attention because of the way it's being published.  There are two narratives in the novel, and half of the books are published with one narrative first, while the remaining books have been produced with the other narrative first.

The "Camera" narrative (one story has a surveillance camera icon at the beginning) is a contemporary story of a teenage girl whose mum has died. In the midst of narrating her present grief, she has constant asides in which she reminisces about the past when her mum was still alive, particularly a trip to Italy where her mum expounds on the genius of a certain fifteenth century artist.

The "Eye" narrative (whose icon is a pair of eyes on a stem, like opera glasses), is that of the fifteenth century artist who has been transported to our time, but who, amidst his present voyeurism, is recounting the story of how his first mural was painted.

Interesting, eh? It's a little gimmicky, but it gets the point across.  I was told a couple of months ago by my Random House sales rep that the order in which one reads the two halves makes a difference in how one sees the book, and glancing through various reviews on Goodreads confirms that. Most people seem to be more drawn to the story they read first. I happened to read the contemporary story about the teenage girl first, and that ended up being the story that resonated more with me.

The thing is, the two narratives of the book do form two halves of the whole, which might seem self-evident, but they're also a bit like the twin strands of DNA: they're doubling back on the other, and layering over the other, and informing the other.  The question of the titular act of being "both" can be open to interpretation, and the answers are pretty wide ranging: how to be past AND present (or present and future, or past and future), how to be male AND female, how to be life AND art, how to be fragmented AND whole, how to grieve AND love, how to create AND destroy. I suspect that every reader will bring her own existential pairings to the text.

To say more about the plot would almost be pointless, as the ideas and Heraclitean pairings are what is important in this novel.  This book definitely isn't for everybody, but if you are drawn to unconventionality, or if you like a little pop-philosophy in your fiction, take this book out for a spin. I think you'll find much to think about if you do.

NB: This book is already available for purchase elsewhere in the world, but it goes on sale on December 2, 2014, in the US from Pantheon, a division of Random House.  I read an advance readers copy that was provided at my request by the publisher. 

National Book Award Fiction Finalists: My Thoughts

While I'm an avid reader and a reasonably good bookseller, I've never claimed to have my finger on the pulse of the book award circuit.  So I was as surprised as anybody when I discovered that for the first time since I've started paying attention to these things, I have read, or at least read in, all five of the finalists for the fiction award.

Of them, I only have completed two: Emily St John Mandel's excellent break-out novel, Station Eleven and the Marilynne Robinson's literary masterpiece, Lila. But just because I didn't finish reading the other three doesn't mean that I didn't like them.  On the contrary, I very much liked what I read of them.  One of the things about being a bookseller that might seem strange to a civilian, is that in addition to reading the things I like, I also have an obligation to read widely, beyond my personal preferences, so that I can better serve my customers.

I also am one of the four readers for my bookstore's signed First Editions Club, where we select one work of literary fiction each month and send signed copies to our club members. For this part of my job, I have to read the first 50-75 pages of an additional 6-8 books each month (on average), all on my own time outside of work.  For obvious reasons, I cannot finish them all, so even when I like a book, if I have a coworker who has finished it, I'm less inclined to spend more of my time to complete it. Why? Because now I have a secondary repository of book knowledge to rely on: I can recommend a book to a customer when I know that Nancy (or Hannah or whomever) has loved it and why she has loved it.

(On a slightly braggadocian note, of the five NBA books on the short lit, our First Editions Club committee picked three of them.  And if we'd had our way with getting signed copies of another one, there would have been a fourth, but the author either wasn't touring or wasn't in the US when we wanted to pick the book. Go, us!)

So, with all of that being said, here are my thoughts on the National Book Award finalists for fiction in 2014:

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine is wonderful, telling a very quiet story of older woman living in Beirut who has translated one book per year from the world literary canon into Arabic.  I read about half of this book and very reluctantly put it down. Not only does the author paint a vivid portrait of the cultural importance of Beirut, along with its devastations during the wars, but we get the importance of translation itself, along with its intricate give and take.

I read the first 100 pages or so of Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, which is set during World War II. I've noticed tons of reviews of this book popping up since it was published in April of this year, and two of my coworkers read it and loved it, so I felt less guilty putting this one down than I otherwise would have.

Short story collections don't often go head to head with novels for the major literary awards, but Phil Klay's debut collection, Redeployment, is handily able to take on the powerhouses.  As the title suggests, these are soldiers' stories, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I read the first two of them and they were extremely well done, and though ultimately this was not the book for me, I'm happy I bought a signed, first edition of it when I visited Nashville earlier this year.

I've been reading Emily St John Mandel's books since she first published Last Night in Montreal in 2009. I'm thrilled for her that her hopeful post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, is getting the critical acclaim that indie booksellers have been giving her for years.  I think this book ties with the Anthony Doerr for having the most widespread appeal to general readers. I would put either book into the hands of almost any fiction reader.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson concludes her trilogy set in the small town Gilead, Iowa, of yesteryear.  Like the Alameddine, it's a quiet story, largely the imagined inner life of the title character. I also happen to think that Lila ties with An Unnecessary Woman for being the most literary of the finalists, and thus if I had to make a prediction for the winner, it would be one of these two.

NB: Edited to add this -- It doesn't hurt that Marilynne Robinson is basically the winningest American novelist, ever.  For her last four books published (3 novels, one nonfiction), she has won six major literary awards: PEN/Hemingway, the Pulitzer (2x), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Orange Prize. That's not counting the lesser-known awards, or the major awards she was a finalist for but for which she didn't win.  Dayum.

Pulitzer Predictions: 2014

Yay! It's Pulitzer Time!    

I do not believe I've actually ever done a prediction post like this before, but for some reason I feel emotionally invested in several contenders this year.  So let's have some fun, shall we?  I've been trolling many websites that are predicting the Pulitzer Prize winners this year.  I think some of them are right on the money and some of them are delusional (they apparently don't know the criteria for being considered for the prize).  Some of them, frankly, make me want to cry with their predictions. For good or for evil, we will know the results as of the afternoon of Monday, April 14.

The following books are all either books that I think are deserving of the committee's nod, or are likely to get the nod, or both.  I hope that y'all will chime in with your favorite picks and the most likely contenders for this year.

But first, let's explore why the Pulitzer books generate so much speculation and debate.  Why more so than the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award?  My hunch is that, unlike other major awards for book published in the US, it comes down to two points: (1) Unlike those other free-for-all awards, the Pulitzer Prize is awarded to an American writer [which means that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's fine novel, Americanah, is ineligible. not that you'd know it from the various prediction lists on the interwebz.]. (2) More importantly, also unlike those awards, there is no longlist, much less no shortlist, published ahead of the award ceremony.  The winner and the finalists are revealed at the same time.

Okay, so here goes (knuckles cracking)...My top pick for either the winner or one of the finalists is Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. I go on about it here, but it's earned tons of accolades from nearly everybody except the First Lady, who seemed to think that her review of the book was a platform for talking about nutrition in privileged families.

My other favorites would be, in no particular order, The Son by Philipp Meyer, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Woman Upstairs by Clair Messud, and  A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra.

There are other books I loved from 2014 that I think are worthy of the prize, but are total long shots: Flora by Gail Godwin and Benediction by Kent Haruf. I'd love for either of them to win, but I doubt it will happen.

Then there are the books out there that I haven't read, but which I think are strong contenders.  Namely George Saunders' story collection The Tenth of December and The Good Lord Bird by James McBride.  While I would prefer that the prize go to a book I've already read and loved, I wouldn't be either upset or surprised if one of these won.

And then there are the books that I am actively hoping will not win, because if they, I will probably have to slit my throat.  Actually, in this case it comes down to just one book: Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers.  I hate and revile that loathsome book. Seriously, I might have been exaggerating for effect, but this book was laughably bad, which is why it is so completely mysterious to me for it to be getting the kind of critical attention that it's been getting.  Some betting operations have even listed this book as the odd-on favorite. Ugh.


 
Which brings me, at last, to the other categories.  Other than the winners themselves, who really cares about the other Pulitzer winners beyond the fiction awards, or at least cares as much?  Harsh but true.  In a twist of irony, novels get all of the glory in a prize that was originally created to acknowledge outstanding journalism.  I don't really have a stake in the other categories, other than general nonfiction, for which I'm hoping that Sheri Fink's excellent  Five Days at Memorial puts in a good showing. It was without a doubt the finest nonfiction book I read last year. (Hint: I only read 17 works of nonfiction compared to the 100+ works of fiction, so it's not like I'm drawing from a wide base. Even so, Fink's book would stand out.)

What about you, gentle reader?  Which books that you read from  2013 deserve to be recognized by the Pulitzer committee?  Or if you want to be wicked, which books do not?

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 Edited on 14 April 2014 to gloat add: Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch is the winner!  I'm really quite pleased about this.  I'm also delighted that Philipp Meyer's excellent novel, The Son, turned out to be a finalist.  The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis wasn't even on my radar, so shame on me.  In fact, it was so not on my radar that I returned a copy of this book two weeks ago to the publisher. 

Audio Book Review: Three Junes by Julia Glass

It's amazing to me the difference between reading a book and listening to that book. A good reader can elevate a not-so-great book, while a poor reader can make a great book seem tedious. In this specific case, I'm not sure I can explain the difference between my two experiences with Julia Glass's National Book Award-winning Three Junes, as both the book and the reader are good, but I suspect it's all down to two things: I am a more discerning reader now than I was ten years ago when the book was published, and books resonate more strongly at certain times than others.

My memory may be a bit faulty, but when I first read this book, I apparently never read the jacket copy, as I recall expecting this book to be about multiple women named June.  It's not.  Here's the lowdown, courtesy of the publisher:

In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage.  

Six years later, again in June, Paul's death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses.  

Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her. 

My first impression after listening to the first few tracks of the audio was, "Why the hell is the book being narrated in a Scottish accent?" I'd forgotten that family in question was Scottish, but it still surprised me that the non-dialogue parts were read in the accent.  It took a little getting used to, and on at least one occasion it required listening to certain words or phrases more than once to understand them. To wit: when Paul is visiting Greece, somebody starts talking to him about the "dunkies," or so I thought.  I had no idea what dunkies were, and it was only later in context that I realized that the character was actually talking about donkeys.

I'm ashamed to say that I could not identify how real the narrator's accent is, but he switched back & forth with relative ease between American and Scottish accents (to be honest, they all sounded a little bit faked to me. Faked well, but faked). There were only a few muddied passages where the dialogue switched quickly between characters and the narrative and it was difficult to distinguish who was speaking because the accents became conflated.  John Keating really did a great job of reading this audio, and there were times when it was his storytelling, rather than the story itself, that moved me to tears, although of course sometimes it was both.

My favorite section of the book was Fenno's, though I also really liked the first section that focused on his father, while the last section left me feeling mostly lukewarm. I think it's an interesting choice on any writer's part to impart more knowledge to the reader than to the characters, and I think that's what frustrated me most about the last section. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, in terms of what unfolded between Fenno and Fern, but it never happened.

While I remember liking this book when I first read it (I'd given it a 3* rating on Goodreads, for example), I kind of fell in love with the book while listening to it.  There are some seriously gorgeous passages that for whatever reason didn't jump out at me the first time I read it--of course, I can't quote them here because I was driving while listening to the book this time around. This is a mighty fine novel and I'm so glad that I decided to buy it on audio when I saw it at my local record store for $5.  I've since upped my Goodreads rating to 4*, and if I had liked the last section as much as I liked the first two, it might even have earned 5*.

What about you?  Have you had different reactions to the same book when reading it in different formats or when encountering it at different times in your life? 

Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk by Ben Fountain

NB: I have slightly modified my original review of this book.  I'm more excited than I can express that this book won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and since I said a long time ago that I thought this book would make the 2012-2103 awards circuit, I guess I'm crowing (get it?) about my own premonitions, too.

Summary from my ARC: Told over the course of a single day*--specifically Thanksgiving Day at Texas Stadium, as the Dallas Cowboys take the field--Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is the story of Bravo Squad, eight survivors of a ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents, whose bravery and and valor have made them national heroes. In the final hours of their Pentagon-sponsored "Victory Tour," Bravo's Silver Star-winning hero, nineteen-year-old Billy Lynn, will confront hard truths about love and death, family and friendship, war and politics, duty and honor.

I feel that in addition to being a fresh and edgy book, this may be an important book. So far it's the only one I've read coming out of the Iraq War that subsumes itself in neither action sequences nor in an overwrought family or romantic drama. This one seems to be just as much about the concept of war itself as the politics behind it and how America feels about it. (Though given the book takes place mostly in Texas, especially Dallas, we're not really given a look at the dissenters' side of things.) 

Billy Lynn is a fascinating character, a boy thrust into the army (in lieu of doing hard time) after taking a crowbar to his sister's ex-fiance's car for gallant but misguided reasons. He's a thoughtful young man, fully aware that the labels of "hero" mean nothing when one's actions are guided neither by bravery nor fear, but simply reactionary to any given situation, including Bravo's famous firefight with the Iraqi insurgents: one day you're the hero and the next day you're cowering under your humvee and refusing to come out. His thoughts are never far away from his imminent return to Iraq, nor from his buddy, Shroom, who died the day Billy was labeled a hero.

Ben Fountain's novel is the first book coming out of the Iraq War (that I've read, at least) that seems willing to say that war is, more than anything else, a commercial enterprise AND an entertainment enterprise. It's difficult not to draw these parallels about the US's involvement in Iraq with, say, the Dallas Cowboys franchise and the oil-steeped politics of the state in which the book is largely set, or the larger-than-life characters we meet, such as the Dallas Cowboys' owner or the man who spends the book negotiating a movie deal for Bravo. War as commercially motivated enterprise, not a political one, isn't a new concept per se, but it goes a long way in increasing this particular reader's distaste for it, because if it's really not about oil, really not about protecting our interests, and really not about freeing a people from their dictator's rule, then it's really not something I can ever understand, or wish to, for that matter.

Karl Marlantes blurbs this book, and he's not a writer whose opinion I take lightly, especially when it comes to the topic of war. He calls it "the Catch-22 of the Iraq war," and with a comment like that, I'm not sure that there's anything more to add.  I'll just conclude with some passages that resonated with me as I read it:

"So they lost Shroom and Lake, only two a numbers man might say, but given that each Bravo has missed death by a margin of inches, the casualty rate could just as easily be 100 percent. The freaking randomness is what wears on you, the difference between life, death, and the horrible injury sometimes as slight as stooping to tie your bootlace on the way to chow, choosing the third shitter in line instead of the fourth, turning your head to the left instead of the right. Random. How that shit does work on your mind (26-27)."

"Those people [movie studios, producers, etc], the kind of bubble they live in? It's a major tragedy in their lives if their Asian manicurist takes the day off. For those people to be passing judgment on the validity of your experience is just wrong, it goes beyond wrong, it's ethics porn. They aren't capable of fathoming what you guys did (57)."

I love this moment between Billy and his sister Kathryn, re: their father:

" 'He's an asshole,' Kathryn said. 

To which Billy: 'You just now figured that out?' 

'Shut up. What I mean is he likes being an asshole, he enjoys it. Some people you get the feeling that can't help it? But he works at it. He's what you'd call a proactive asshole' (75)."

Billy with his nephew on leave:

"Based on his highly limited experience with small children, Billy had always regarded the pre-K set as creatures on the level of not-very-interesting pets, thus he was unprepared for the phenomenal variety of his little nephew's play. Whatever came to hand, the kid devised some form of interaction with it. Flowers, pet and sniff. Dirt, dig. Cyclone fence, rattle and climb. Squirrels, harass with feebly launched sticks. 'Why?' he kept asking in his sweetly belling voice, as pure as marbles swirled around a crystal pail. Why? Why? Why? And Bill answeing every question to the best of his ability, as if anything less would disrespect the deep and maybe even divine force that drove his little nephew toward universal knowledge...So is this what they mean by the sanctity of life? A soft groan escaped Billy when he thought about that, the war revealed in this fresh and grusome light. Oh. Ugh. Divine spark, image of God, suffer the little children and all that--there's real power when words attach to actual things. Made him want to sit right down and weep, as powerful as that. He got it, yes he did, and when he came home for good he'd have to meditate on this, but for now it was best to compartmentalize, as they said, or even better not to mentalize at all (82-83)."

The reader never gets the full picture of exactly what happens to earn the Bravo Squad their Victory Tour back home, but here is one of Billy's ruminations on it: "All your soldier life you dream of such a moment and every Joe with a weapon got a piece of it, a perfect storm of massing fire and how those beebs blew apart, hair, teeth, eyes, hands, tender melon heads, exploding soup-stews of shattered chests, sights not to be believed and never forgotten and your mind simply will not leave it alone. Oh my people. Mercy was not a selection, period. Only later did the concept of mercy even occur to Billy, and then only in the context of its absence in that place, a foreclosing of options that reached so far back in history that quite possibly mercy had not been an option there since before all those on the battlefield were born (125)."

Read this book.  Seriously, just read it. If it doesn't make the award circuit come NBA & NBCC time, I will be grievously disappointed with the state of the world.

And the versatile blogger award goes to...

Alexandria and Moira from the incomparably-named Brazen Broads Book Bash Blog have recognized my book & travel blog with the Versatile Blogger Award.  How nifty is that?!  I didn't really start blogging in earnest until summer '10, and it's so much fun--all the more so to realize that other people out there unrelated to me by blood or marriage might be reading it!


Here are the rules to the award: 

1.  Share 7 things about ourselves.

2.  Pass the award on to 10 bloggers recently discovered.

3.  Notify the blogger recipients.

4.  Link to the blogger who gave us the award.

Seven Things About Me:

1.  I was born in Wisconsin but raised in Mississippi
2. Much like Albus Dumbledore, socks are some of my favorite gifts to receive.
3. Dogs are in my heart, but cats have bewitched my soul.
4. Plaid flannel just might be the fabric of the gods.
5. I did not change my last name when I got married.
6. If I could spend half my time anywhere else in the world, it would be the Caribbean.  Anguilla or Grenada if you made me choose a specific island.
7. A good rum punch is hard to find.

The Ten Bloggers I Award This To:

1.  Wildly Read
2.  A Reading Odyssey
3.  Bank Square Books
4.  Lemuria Blog
5. Bookend Crossing
6.  Everything Distils...
7.  Levonne's Pretty Pics
8.  Shiroccan Adventures


And because I'm still relatively new to the following process, I don't have any more blogs that I follow that haven't already received this same award.  Hopefully that will change quickly, the more I participate in various hops.  So for good measure I'm just going to list one more time the good folks who passed this one on to me:


9. Brazen Broads Book Bash


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