Nobel Intentions

1976 - Saul Bellow: Humboldt's Gift

2009-05-06T23:50:00.005-04:00

***Warning: Spoilers ahead***

I wanted to like Humboldt’s Gift – I really did. I was so pleased when I saw that a member of my book group had picked it as our latest selection.

And as I started my Nobel trek and then quickly (and unfortunately) had to put a hold on it, I was glad indeed to be able to kill two literary birds with one stone – read Humboldt for my book club *and* for my Nobel project.
Sigh. I was naive then. How little I knew ;o)

Anywho, let’s get right to it, shall we? This book frazzled me like no other has done in quite a while. I kept on seeing its amazing potential and then one page later it would once again descend into nonsense. So many great passages and then something like 30 pages of practically unpunctuated page long paragraphs of random facts…but not even random facts. Because see, that sort of thing would actually interest me, being that I’ve been known to read silly trivia books in one sitting. No, this was more like random factoid-ettes, a seedling of a factoid cut off in its prime to be left as an incomprehensible snippet, ala Lenin’s uncle. Sigh. Some of those pages, many times ‘philosophical’ in nature, reminded me of that song by Billy Joel ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, except not fun.

But then he’d come back with some brilliant observation, referring to America as a ‘didactic country whose people always offer their personal experiences as a helpful lesson to the rest’, thoroughly foreseeing our current era of confessional memoirs as bestsellers.

Or later Charlie would mention how’d he’d been a ‘passionate morbid little boy…’, bringing me back to my own childhood when (for I don’t know, fun?)I’d imagine a world without my mother, which would quickly reduce me to a slobbering mess.

And then we’d be back to tangents on top of tangents, just making me want to fling the book across the room.

I found Charlie to be just beyond sympathy which is another thing that made reading this book quite an endeavor. There was not one sympathetic character in the bunch. Now, I don’t have to like a character in order to enjoy reading the book. But it went beyond that – I just didn’t really care what happened to any of these people. I cared about what happened to Hannibal Lecter when I read ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, so it’s not about someone being bad or evil. It’s about them being blah. I couldn’t really get into any of them. I found myself endlessly annoyed by Charlie, but that was far as it went – I didn’t actually care about him though.

Particularly when he’d attempt to guess Renata’s thoughts, imagining them to be solely about wealth and possessions – how presumptuous of him. And even at the end, ‘…the beauty of a woman like Renata was not entirely appropriate. It was out of season…’ – after everything that’s happened to him, after Renata has left him and attempted to show him what he’d done wrong, he still doesn’t see her as a person. He still sees her as a symbol rather than a human being.

As for what the gift was – yawn.
Humboldt leaves him a Hollywood treatment. After all this tangential nonsense and shoe-gazing, that’s what we get? Boo.

I don’t want to judge Saul Bellow solely on this book. It wouldn’t be fair.
After all, some of my favorite authors have had off books as well. So I’m hoping that’s what happened with ‘Humboldt’s Gift’ and Bellow’s other books are just brilliant…or at least not inane.

2006 - Orhan Pamuk: Snow (Inaugural Post - Whoo-hoo!)

2008-05-14T02:31:00.005-04:00

So i had to start somewhere, pick one first out of the 104 laureates, and then one book out of the first one i selected. As i mentioned in my first post, i decided to first read whichever authors i already had in the house. I happened to have quite a few books by this author, although i had yet to read any works at all by him. I think i might have read a piece of his in the New Yorker, but that was about it. I happened to pick up a few of his books back when Coliseum Books (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coliseum_Books), a sorely missed NYC institution, was going out of business. They held a sale to get rid of their reduced inventory and I spotted a few of his works and paid up. But I don't think i actually picked up my first selection until a bit later, when I received a lovely book as a birthday present, but that i unfortunately already owned. I trudged to Target to exchange it, looked through their small book selection and picked up a couple of titles, including Snow by Orhan Pamuk which became the inaugural title. I actually finished reading this about a week ago (first time i get a chance to write it up) so hopefully not too much of it will have left my brain.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this novel, since again, I hadn't read much by Pamuk beforehand. I knew it was set in Turkey, it dealt with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, but that's about it.

I initially really enjoyed the book, particularly the dialogue. But a third of the way in, I felt like there was a change in translators (at best), or the author just decided to give up on believable dialogue. It started to feel clunky, which is why I wonder if it was a translation error. But i'm getting ahead of myself.

The basic plot (which mostly takes part over only 3 days in the life of a small Turkish town and most importantly, in the life of a minor exiled Turkish poet) concerns the visit of a poet - Ka - to the small town - Kars. It's very much an insulated town, quite literally demonstrated by them ending up closed off from the rest of the world, i.e. Turkey, by a heavy snowstorm which starts as Ka is arriving.

He's come to town to ostensibly interview the families of some dead young girls, who have allegedly committed suicide b/c they'd been asked to remove their headscarves while at school. Turkey is a secular state and outward signs of religion such as Muslim women wearing headscarves are discouraged, and outright forbidden in universities and public buildings up until recently. In response to this 'outrage' demanded of them while in university, some girls in Kars have killed themselves which has made them martyrs to the movement and encouraged ever more rebellion.

Ka goes around posing as a journalist, interviewing the family and friends of the dead girls, but the reason he's really decided to return to Kars is that a girl he fancied while a student, happens to now be living in Kars, and is newly separated. He thinks this is his chance to get her to marry him. Yep, you read right. He hopes to convince her to marry him and go back to Germany (where he's been exiled for political reasons he no longer believes in), even though they haven't seen each other since their student days. Have i mentioned that he's only in Kars for 3 days? And that they were just casual friends while in school?

But i digress. So Ka is walking around asking to speak to everyone...which sparks the curiosity of well, the whole town, particularly the officials in charge who decide to track his every move. He also manages to get the Islamic fundamentalists interested and gets himself into all sorts of unexpected circumstances. He ends up being one of the only witnesses to a terrorist assassination...which he quickly runs away from; he meets with the leader of the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, who may or may not have ordered the assassination Ka has just witnessed, as well as many others beforehand; he performs at an event that ends up being the stage (quite literally) for a coup...Ka really gets around.

Up until this point, I followed the book rather well and was enjoying it. But then it started to just go a bit batty for me. For one, i've never seen the word 'atheist' written so often and referred to so much in a book outside of a Christopher Hitchins polemic. It's apparently what Islamic fundamentalists, at least those living in Kars and Greater Kars, are obsessed with. 'Is so and so an atheist?' 'Are they themselves atheists if they have even moments of doubt?' and again 'Is so and so an atheist?' It started to drive me mad. Mostly b/c I couldn't imagine spending so much time of my life thinking about what someone else who did not follow my views (whatever they happen to be) thought of my own. If one has deep beliefs in god, the easter bunny, aliens in space, then what does it matter what someone else thinks, particularly if they're not confronting you on the matter and don't give a fuck? Sigh. That's not a slight on the author at all, it was just a frustrating thing to realize that people across the globe dedicated so much of their time to thinking about such inanity. Just live your own life and let others be.

As for the theater troupe coup plot...honestly, that bit just defied belief. A theater troupe comes to town and stages a coup from the stage, taking advantage of the fact that the town is snowed in? Really?

But i suppose my biggest problem with the novel, and that really, really bothered me as a plot point, was how 'in love' Ka becomes with Ipek, the grown-up crush of his student days. In three days. Now, we've all had crushes that were very intense and very quick, and most of us have fallen in love, and sometimes relatively quickly, but three days?! No, didn't believe it for a moment. I mean, he's professing his love for her, upon seeing her again for the first time in 20 years or so. I just didn't buy it - it just felt so shallow. And the fact that he kept on referring to her beauty (and not much else) didn't exactly help his case. Then again, i just found him a shallow character period. He's involved in various traumatic events and all he can think to do is run and write poems? I'm all for submitting to one's muse, but right in the middle of a dangerous crisis? It was mad. But perhaps that was the point - to show how art can take over one's senses.

Ok, before i end up writing a tome on this book (and give away the ending), i'll try and wrap up. Pamuk's work challenged me, with characters that bugged me and acts that baffled me. But the writing was solid and the subject was engaging, even if it lost me a bit towards the end. And notwithstanding the heaviness of most of the book, it did have some light moments, like the city newspaper editor who would write up the news a day early :o)

I don't know if i'd recommend this particular title to most, but I'll definitely be dipping into my small Pamuk collection in the future and reading a bit more by him. But now i have to figure out which author i should read next...

So I got it into my head to start a new blog...

2008-05-06T00:45:00.004-04:00

I knew of some people who were attempting to read through all of the Pulitzer prize winning novels in a year, or the Booker winners in a year, and thought that sounded like a great idea.
A way of exposing oneself to some (allegedly good) literature that one wouldn't necessarily pick up on one's own.
But i didn't want to copy-cat their idea. I considered a few of the big prizes, or even some of the big publishers' lists (Penguin Classics and the like - too large and overwhelming) and then decided to go for the gold of literary prizes and attempt to read all of the Nobel laureates in literature.

It'll be a bit harder both in the scope and depth of this venture, partly b/c the Nobel is given to a body of work, rather than to a specific piece. So not only would i have to read something by each writer, i'd also have to do some research and pick a particular work as well - one that i thought embodied their body of work. Although as I've already spotted, this might prove somewhat easy for some writers, as there's only one of their books in English translation. I'm not giving myself a set time frame since I'll also continue one of my book club memberships *and* will continue to read for fun as well. I'd like to put it at about 2 years beginning now, seeing as there are 104 laureates which works out conveniently enough to about 1 a week for 2 years. Having said that, and already admitting that I'll also continue to read for other reasons, I'm not sure if this is completely doable. So let's say that 2 years would be nice and something to strive for, but I won't exactly be broken-hearted (or too surprised) if I'm not able to finish by then.

I won't be reading them chronologically as i think that would drive me mad. My first ten writers or so will be determined solely by the books i already have in my collection (or have picked up in the last month or so) and in whatever order I feel like. After I've exhausted the few I already own, I thought I might use different methods to select the next title to read. Might throw a dart at a world map and choose this way or maybe have a little survey on the blog and my readers (hope to hoodwink at least a few friends into checking it out - 'Yes, this site is full of: [insert the following] kittens, naked chicks, naked guys, cheat-sheets for Grand Theft Auto IV') can pick choice A, B, C, or J ;o)

We shall see - it'll be an ever developing project. I hope to have some pics thrown in of yours truly (always in disguise - Why? B/c it'll be fun) reading the selection du jour in various spots, a bit like Where's Waldo for the literati (er, i'm not really this precious, i promise).

But enough intro, they always bore me to tears and I usually end up skipping them. On to the first book...