Bookstorm

"A great slab of unprocessed pain sits toxically on the country's heart": AD Wilson examines why Western writers are so fascinated with Russia.

There are multiple ways to think about Russia's extremes. The obvious one is physical. Much of the vast country is lethally cold for half the year or more. Virtually any outdoor activity--starting a car; walking down the obstacle-course, snowbound streets--can be its own microdrama. This harsh environment helps to explain why Dostoevsky and others always seem to be stretching up their hands to heaven. The fundamental questions--Why are we here? Is anyone in charge?--somehow seem sharper at -20C, or on a three-day train ride.

Here's a post-Christmas round-up for you ...

• Hannah Levintova points to three books to tackle your quarter-life crisis.
• Edith Grossman and Lydia Davis discuss the art of translation.
• "This was going to be the Axe Body Spray of book clubs": Rick Marin starts an all-male book club. (The first selection was Don DeLillo's Falling Man.)
• Do you want to understand David Foster Wallace's fiction? Then start with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
• Laura Miller ponders why we love bad, cliché-ridden prose.

If you've made it this far, congratulations: you've managed to survive yet another Christmas. So, from my blog to yours, happy holidays. I hope they were happy, merry, and filled with eggnog-laced rum.

These are my favorite books from the past year ...

• The Poet by Michael Connelly. This is one of the most terrifying novels I've ever read. I'm pretty jaded when it comes to serial killers, but the Poet is one of the most convincingly twisted villains I've ever come across.
• Neuromancer by William Gibson.
• Under the Dome by Stephen King. King is at his best when he has a huge cast of characters to work with, and this is a welcome return to his seventies glory days. Under the Dome isn't going to change anyone's mind about him and his capabilities--he still can't write dialogue--but this is the best book he's published in decades.
• Taroko Gorge by Jacob Ritari. Taroko Gorge is very low-key, but it deserves more attention. It was the most surprising novel I read all year. Centering around the disappearance of three Japanese girls, Taroko Gorge is a sustained piece of storytelling, with Ritari's lean prose intensifying the drama.
• The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway.
• The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.
• Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoevsky. I'm still ambivalent about Crime and Punishment--on the surface, this is a terrible book: it's poorly written and the plot often hinges on fantastic coincidence. (This is forgivable, considering the conditions under which Dostoevsky started writing the novel.) Yet, for all its flaws, this is a challenging and thought-provoking piece of literature. You could probably discuss Crime and Punishment for hours.
• Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer.
• An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke.
• If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino.

Could Humpty Dumpty be the "official guide" to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake? Harry Levin seemed to think so, and, in the London Review of Books, Michael Wood elaborates on the similarities and differences between Joyce and Lewis Carroll.

... Carroll has a taste for sheer absurdity, the collapse or travesty of plausible meaning, whereas Joyce, as far as I can tell, wants only to multiply meanings, and believes they will never end. We might miss a few, or a lot, and he himself might not always know what they are. But they'll be there, and some day someone will find them. This is a bewildering assumption but in its way a comforting one, and it doesn't have the edge of Carroll's parodies. Of his version of meaning grounded in nature rather than convention, for example: '"brillig" means four o'clock in the afternoon--the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.' Or of the famous arbitrariness of the sign: 'a "borogove" is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round--something like a live mop.' Try working that out from the name. Compared with these astonishing jinks Joyce's antics can look almost reasonable. In relation to 'jabberwocky', say, a 'jibberweek' seems quite familiar--we've all had one of those. And when Joyce recites the names of days, they too sound like many days we've known: 'moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday'. Sunday is safe for the moment; safe because unmentioned. Sometimes the transpositions are even simpler, like 'while the sin was shining', 'sneeze out a likelihood', 'call a spate a spate', 'whirled without end', or 'the late cemented Mr T.M. Finnegan'.

But reading Finnegans Wake is more than a matter of collecting one's favourite quotations--even if there is a huge pleasure in that, especially if you admire truly terrible jokes. You have to like the sheer strain that goes into a phrase like 'a pentschanjeuchy chap', which comes in the middle of a paragraph mentioning all the early books of the Old Testament (including 'guenneses'), especially if you don't really know how to connect Punch and Judy to the Pentateuch. I think of the worst (best) joke in Walter Redfern's fine book on puns. A person who has been given bits of greenery for her birthday instead of the colourful flowers she was hoping for decides to make the best of things. She says: 'With fronds like these, who needs anemones?'

I've been trawling through the WikiLeaks cables, and while much of what I've seen is pretty mundane--in most cases, the title is all you really need to know--I found a few that could be read as literature. Whether it's good or bad literature is open to debate (literary criticism?), but yes: amidst all the dry writing and cliché turns of phrase, there are cables that make for lively, interesting reading.

Take "A Caucasus Wedding," for example. Sent from the Moscow embassy in August of 2006, it's actually a great story, with vivid writing, characters, history, and setting. The first paragraph, with a little spit-shine and marketing enthusiasm, could stand as the summary from the back of a novel:

Weddings are elaborate in Dagestan, the largest autonomy in the North Caucasus. On August 22 we attended a wedding in Makhachkala, Dagestan's capital: Duma member and Dagestan Oil Company chief Gadzhi Makhachev's son married a classmate. The lavish display and heavy drinking concealed the deadly serious North Caucasus politics of land, ethnicity, clan, and alliance. The guest list spanned the Caucasus power structure--guest starring Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov--and underlined just how personal the region's politics can be.

Sounds interesting and readable, doesn't it?

"A Caucasus Wedding" goes down quite nicely. The prose is surprisingly polished and creative. Sure, the overall effect is one of detachment--after all, the author is observing the wedding, not participating in it or mingling with the crowd--but I'm struck by how descriptive the cable is. It makes me wonder if the writer is secretly yearning to publish. Consider the following two paragraphs:

An hour before the wedding reception was set to begin the Marrakech reception hall was full of guests--men taking the air outside and women already filling a number of the tables inside, older ones with headscarves chaperoning dozens of teenaged girls. A Dagestani parliamentarian explained that weddings are a principal venue for teenagers--and more importantly their parents--to get a look at one another with a view to future matches. Security was tight--police presence on the ground plus police snipers positioned on the roof of an overlooking apartment block. Gadzhi even assigned one of his guards as our personal bodyguard inside the reception. The manager told Gadzhi there were seats for over a thousand guests at a time. At the height of the reception, it was standing room only.

At precisely two p.m. the male guests started filing in. They varied from pols and oligarchs of all sorts--the slick to the Jurassic; wizened brown peasants from Burtunay; and Dagestan's sports and cultural celebrities. Khalid Yamadayev presided over a political table in the smaller of the two halls (the music was in the other) along with Vakha the drunken wrestler, the Ingush parliamentarians, a member of the Federation Council who is also a nanophysicist and has lectured in Silicon Valley, and Gadzhi's cousin Ismail Alibekov, a submariner first rank naval captain now serving at the General Staff in Moscow. The Dagestani milieu appears to be one in which the highly educated and the gun-toting can mix easily--often in the same person.

Then there's "Lifestyles of the Kazazhstani Leadership," which isn't as literary as "A Caucasus Wedding." Still, it contains loosely connected and titled vignettes which reminded me a bit of Lydia Davis's flash fiction. It's not as ironic as Davis, but some of the scenes are humorous (while at a nightclub, the prime minister of Kazazhstan "chose to dance on an empty stage above the dance floor"--upon reading this, my girlfriend said, "Go on with your bad self!"). This cable will surely embarrass the Kazazhstani leadership, but it still makes for pretty fun reading. Even Elton John makes a brief appearance.

Words Without Borders' Susan Harris talks with one part of the Wu Ming collective, who translated Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars into Italian. Apparently, it's not as easy as one might think.

WWB: What is the most challenging part of translating King?

WM1: King's style looks simple, but it is actually very difficult to translate. As an author, he's very fond of puns, neologisms, idioms, local slang and so on. He plays with all the singularities of the English language, precisely the stuff that can't be translated in any way! This is typical of, er, "monoglot" writers, by which I mean those writers who don't care about what happens to their works when they're translated into other languages.

There are basically two kinds of novelists: those who care about translations, like Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, because they're used to exploring foreign languages, and those who don't care, like Elmore Leonard or Uncle Stevie, because they're perfectly happy with inhabiting their native language, with no forays in other cultures and koines.

I'm still not sold on Full Dark, No Stars. The cover is terrible--it looks like the bastard child of Sidney Sheldon and Anne Rice covers. Still, I always get sucked into the comment sections of the A.V. Club's King reviews.

After some reflection, I've decided that Under the Dome was one of the best books I read this year. It's definitely the best work he's done in decades. (And, despite its mammoth size, the book is tightly plotted and moves rapidly. I plowed through it in no time.)

It's been a long week--time for a round-up ...

• This week, Mario Vargas Llosa will accept the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• Syma Tariq considers the many literary alter egos of Fernando Pessoa.
• Lynn Neary suggests some books for your next book club discussion.
• The New Republic gathers some of the worst sex scenes written by politicians and political pundits.

I've been reading David Foster Wallace's Oblivion for nearly two months--I keep getting distracted by other books--and it's a good introduction to his work. His stories are also some of the funniest I've ever read. Wallace's humor is dark and twisted (such as a scene in "The Soul Is Not a Smithy," when a man gets his hand, and most of his forearm, caught in razor-sharp snowblower blades), and usually horrifying. I probably laugh as a defense mechanism, but I also think much of the humor comes from why something happens: in Wallace's world, tragedy can usually be avoided (as with the above-mentioned snowblower incident), and Wallace's narrators are often omniscient, giving readers the sense that they're in on a sick, ironic joke. Sure, Oblivion may not be for everyone--"Incarnations of Burned Children" is particularly blood-curdling--but it makes for great reading, especially if you're like me, and can laugh at tragedy and misfortune.

In other news, Newsweek tours Wallace's just-released archives at the University of Texas.