03

Nov

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I liked this one better. That’s right– I enjoyed The Angel’s Game even more than The Shadow of the Wind. It’s not like claiming a preference for the Star Wars prequels, but it’ll get me weird looks.

Hey, down in front, cabrón, you’re in the way of the dust jacket.

This is the follow-up to Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s bestseller The Shadow of the Wind, which had even cynics believing that the term “literary thriller” isn’t always an oxymoron. The Angel’s Game is a prequel of sorts. Centering around a new character, it takes place a generation earlier in 1930s Barcelona, an extravagantly miserable city where everyone thinks they’re a writer.

David Martín is the author of the bestselling series of lurid penny-dreadfuls called “City of the Damned.” He spent his young adult life writing these crime stories like clockwork from his home, a foreboding tower house in the city. In churning them out, he was fueled by a dark inspiration he couldn’t explain (not to mention jittering handfuls of drugs), and life takes an ugly turn when he’s diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor and his lifelong crush marries his rival.

But then a mysterious publisher, Andreas Corelli, offers him a small fortune if he’ll write a “fable” that can be the basis of a new religion. As Martín accepts the Faustian pact, he becomes a rich man and his health inexplicably recovers. But people begin dying around him, and the tower house reveals clues of the previous writer who accepted Corelli’s book deal.

As you can tell, this one’s more Poe than Dickens. The core mystery in The Angel’s Game lacks the labyrinthine depth of its predecessor, but it introduces possibly supernatural elements that take Martín’s story to a much darker place.

Descent into Madness? Check.

So as far as I’m concerned, advantage: Angel’s Game.  What’s more, Martín’s a terrific protagonist. Whereas Daniel Sempere was a thoughtful dullard who required the company of vivid characters, David is an asshole– an asshole you can support, mind you, as he doesn’t fully deserve his onslaught of misfortunes. He’s that kind of writer who embraces his misery with a roll of the eyes as he lights a cigar. It is odd , though, how he’s not acutely aware of the Mephistophelian aspect of his employer.

(And if you’ve read this book and think that’s a spoiler, I’ve got a big bouncy ball for you to go play with)

Even still, Ruiz Zafón populates the stage with some strong characters, which include those dredged up from their lonely, squalid hovels as David investigates the past. In a subplot that just barely fits into this story, Martín becomes the reluctant mentor to a seventeen-year-old wannabe writer, Isabella, and their relationship is just a gem. They each make sarcastic reference to their companionship as a Mr. Rochester-Jane Eyre pairing, and like much of the dialogue in this book, I love their barbed exchanges to goddamn pieces. But alas, his heart belongs to Cristina, the aforementioned crush who married his best friend. She, by the way, is not really a character so much as a Holy Grail to be snatched away again and again as a means of torturing our protagonist…

That it’s a better book than The Shadow of the Wind doesn’t even seem debatable to me– that is, until the plot sees the finish line and steps on the gas. The climactic chases and struggles constitute a spastic mess, and the body count becomes downright Shakespearean, which goes to show that if you’re having trouble tying up loose ends in your story, start killing off as many characters as you can.

The dismount isn’t entirely graceless. What ultimately happens to Martín is so horribly bittersweet, it leaves me a little more shaken as I think about it.

So yeah, different book from the first. But both are generally well written, and both, of course, contain that overt “book love” in all its pandering glory:

“I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.”

Read it if

1. A Spanish-inflected Poe mystery sounds too good to pass up

and

2. You like, or at least tolerate, ambiguous endings

203 days ago Short URL 3 Comments

Book Review

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16

Oct

More Kafka to be Published, and He’s Too Dead to Care

Danke, Max.

If you’ve enjoyed reading The Trial, do two things:

1. Thank Max Brod

2. Wipe your spit off Franz Kafka’s grave

I’m just kidding about number two– sort of.  See, Kafka famously demanded on his deathbed that none of his fiction or letters ever be published. In fact, he implored his friend, Max Brod, to burn every last page of his remaining work.

But like we see fairly often, a great contribution to literature is borne from an act of personal betrayal. Brod went and had much of it published, and as a result we’ve had The Castle, Amerika, The Trial, and short fiction such as “The Metamorphosis.” Brod guarded the rest of the manuscripts– 40,000 pages– with his life, even smuggling them in a suitcase as he fled the Nazis. Encouraged by the public reception of his friend’s works, Brod went so far as to demand in his will that the rest of the surviving fiction and journals be donated to the public, preferably a library in Israel. His secretary’s daughters eventually ended up with the Kafka stacks, selling material here and there and insisting upon ownership because they were “a gift.”

But as reported yesterday by The Guardian, an Israeli judge ruled “no they weren’t,” and Ava Hoffe has to cough up the Kafka.

Maybe you react with unrepressed joy at the news of any archive releases or lost manuscripts, as in “Yay, More Books.” But allow me to inject some guilt into this conversation.

This is can be a sticky situation, ethically speaking. How seriously should one take a friend’s dying wish– the last thing he/she has on this earth? Also, how much should one value an artist’s control over his/her own legacy? We’ve run into this with Hemingway, Dickinson, Austen, and more recently David Foster Wallace– all authors with writings posthumously published without or against said author’s wishes.

If we’re going to be utilitarian about this, we’ll say screw your feelings, One Person: this is to the potential enjoyment of millions. But maybe– every now and then– authors are reasonable in holding back work they consider unfinished or subpar…

So the archivists, scholars, and editors will pore over the manuscripts for weeks to compile Kafka’s lost works and journals. What if, upon the project’s completion, we received a public statement from the National Library of Israel that went a little something like this:

We thought we knew better than the great Franz Kafka, that these lost pages would form a lasting tribute to world literature and mankind, or at the very least be publishable by some conceivable standard. We assumed the author’s reluctance toward releasing his own work was merely the result of a self-defeating neurosis. This, we have learned, is not so.

These writings are bad. Very, very bad. The National Library of Israel has reached a scholarly consensus that Kafka was not only justified, but morally obligated in his initiative to destroy the entire volume.

After endless shifts of panning through dense, unreadable bilge for so much as a silver nugget of artistry that would never emerge, the Library now makes these previously unreleased writings of Kafka available to the enquiring public. Realize, however, that the Library does so only in acquiescence to overwhelming popular demand and the desire not to invalidate its expenditures.

The Trial 2: Double Jeopardy is scheduled to print in December, with a new introduction by Philip Roth.

221 days ago Short URL Comments

Between Books

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02

Oct

Book Blogs are “Bad for Readers”

Book blogs harm the integrity of serious literature? Read You Bastard cannot help but feel included in this indictment.

Last week The Independent interviewed Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement and judge of this year’s Man Booker Prize. His comments set off a storm of controversy across the book blogosphere, which is generally what happens when you criticize the book blogosphere.

“It is wonderful that there are so many blogs and websites devoted to books,” Sir Peter said with some equanimity, “but to be a critic is to be importantly different than those sharing their own taste… Not everyone’s opinion is worth the same.” He elaborates on his views of blogging:

“…. Eventually that will be to the detriment of literature. It will be bad for readers; as much as one would like to think that many bloggers opinions are as good as others. It just ain’t so. People will be encouraged to buy and read books that are no good, the good will be overwhelmed, and we’ll be worse off. There are some important issues here.”

As they say: Snap.

This is not unlike the way traditional journalists have viewed news bloggers for more than a decade. Here comes amateur hour, pilfering the quotes I got from my interviews and forming half-baked opinions (or forming opinions, period). Which I’m doing with this story, by the way.

Blogging is the bridge over the moat. Pedigreed devotees like Sir Peter now have to share the castle keep with the motley rabble, who are more passionate than disciplined in their promotion of books.

“There is a widespread sense in the UK, as well as America, that traditional, confident criticism, based on argument and telling people whether the book is any good, is in decline. Quite unnecessarily.”

I hope he’s not under some powerful delusion that this decline is a new thing. When have literary critics not bemoaned, albeit justifiably, society’s diminishing appreciation for what they do? With all these noisy bloggers, they’re losing control of the conversation. They don’t feel they can effectively do their job of determining the works we ought to value as a culture.

Let’s consider where he’s coming from

…and have a peek at Stothard’s priorities in evaluating literary excellence:

He dismisses the readability tag as a “side issue” on judging novels and concedes the organisers may have chosen him as chair of the judges to avoid similar issues this year. 

(I guess we can see another Wolf Hall this time, for better or worse.)

He and book bloggers both love to write about what they read, but the relatability likely ends there:

He cannot remember the last sporting event he went to and has no interest in films, admitting to only ever seeing six films in his lifetime.

This is quite telling. It’s a testament of his devotion to literature– he’s all-in. Of course, anyone who invests his every waking moment to the written word and nothing else is going to be incredibly sensitive to any perceived downtick in the societal value of books.

And if anything, that’s why he’s not the best person to listen to on what the public should be reading. Where’s his perspective? A twelve-year-old could condescend to him on the principles of cinematography and what a corner kick is.

At the risk of sounding democratic, I believe that if someone’s making decisions on what passes and what fails in the literary canon, his agenda should more closely resemble that of an enlightened human being than an antisocial android. I have a towering respect for someone like Stothard in his dedication to literature, but can someone this isolated from the general reading public, as he seems to be, truly be effective in promoting good books? When you champion an author’s achievement while ignoring standards of enjoyability and readability, rather than seeking some combination of these, of course the reading public will find you increasingly irrelevant. If no one wants to read the works you’re preserving, they will not be preserved.

I can think of only one proper fashion of settling this debate. As he is a knight, I beseech Sir Peter get himself armoured and saddle his steed: I would fain meet him in the lists.

235 days ago Short URL 12 Comments

Between Books/What We Talk About When We Talk About Talking About Books

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