Entries from April 2009
The Plot Against America
The Plot Against America, April 2009, 9/10.
Written by Philip Roth. Published by Houghton Mifflin.
Another Philip Roth novel and another great read, although admittedly one highly tailored to my personal interests. This book, a fantastically imagined piece of historical fiction, intricately blends fiction with reality, leading to a disasterous fantasy that, while entirely beyond the realm of possibility, also seems to have been an outcome only narrowly avoided. Much of the brilliance in this novel, and the readability, comes from the narrative perspective of Roth looking back and narrating as a young boy from his ‘memory’ of the events and the ramifications of a political system that turns against him and everything he knows. There is also a more personal family story that examines how close relationships can break down under external pressure, and again the narrator’s innocence heightens the drama. A wonderfully balanced book.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: 9/10, American, Fiction, Philip Roth
Absurdistan, April 2009, 8/10
Written by Gary Shteyngart, published by Random House.
This novel is hilarious! GS picks up the most darkly comic aspects of each situation with a precision that kept me grinning throughout the book. And sharpening the focus on these aspects while stripping away the inessential, he creates some surreal effects that brought me to tears with laughter. The surrealism attained by magnifying the comic aspects of reality successfully captures the twists of the mind when dealing with love and death. This book also offers an incredibly insightful analysis of the transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe and of the homologation of tastes and habits throughout the world.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: 8/10, American, Fiction, Gary Shteyngart
The Cloven Viscount (Il visconte dimezzato) , April 2009, 7/10.
Written by Italo Calvino, published by Oscar Mondadori
A favorite of italian middle school literature anthologies, this novella is meant to work on many levels. It is a fable, but also a metaphor – not a particularly subtle one – for the ambivalence and the complexity of the human soul. The young viscount of the title sets off for war with heroic convition, but is caught in an explosion as aoon as he reaches the battlefield. He is cut in half, vertically, but survives and returns to his domains. The novella follows the life and the actions of the two specular halves of the viscount: one is incredibly evil while the other is nauseatingly good. The two halves are totally single-faceted characters in a world in which everybody else is ambivalent. I just did not really manage to connect with this book.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: 7/10, Classic, Fiction, Italian, Italo Calvino
