The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

I found The History of Love in the back of a friend’s bookshelf, and wasn’t really sure of what I’d find. It turns out I found one of the most remarkable novels I have read in years.

Even now I’m not sure I can adequately express even a portion of it. It truly is a history of love, beginning with a little boy’s love for a girl, which is also every boy’s love for every girl. His love leads him to write the girl a book; he wants to make her laugh. Years later and a continent away, a young man buys the book and gives it to his girlfriend. They name their child Alma, after every girl in the novel. As Alma struggles to find something or someone to take away her mother’s loneliness, she starts unraveling the history of the book, and of its author, and of his love, and every love that was and will be.

I was reminded of Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer when I read this. It shares a humour and depth that demands attention but doesn’t take itself too seriously. After all, love, with its weighted consequences, doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is truly one of the best novels I have ever read. It’s complicated and confusing and at times I couldn’t keep track of the chronology, but the confusion only strengthens the characters and heightens the sense of love as a remarkable negotiation of chance.

I’d give it an immediate 9.5 strings of yarn spanning oceans between a girl and a boy. Or rather, the 9 would go between the girl and boy. The remaining half would go between Alma and Misha. Please read it.

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

The Master and Margarita is of the brand of Russian literature that explains everything about life. Along with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and of few other Eastern Europeans, you can apparently get all you need to know about the world. This book is about the devil, but more so it's really just about good and evil. When I was doing this FYP thing at King's, one of the biggest things that I really got from it was from reading The Confessions by St Augustine and realizing how much of modern Christianity just isn't based on founding principles. The Confessions is a canonical book of Christianity yet it is entirely contradictory with modern beliefs. One of the things I find most interesting, is the idea of a Devil. One of the strongest sentiments in The Confessions and in Dante's Divine Comedy and for that matter, part of The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, was that there is no evil. The Hell is a creation of mankind with the purpose of allaying the consciousness' of humans who don't fully understand God. Now I don't really believe in any of this but it lends itself well to the idea of an attempt at balance instead of a war between good and evil.
The Master and Margarita is a book of fiction and fantasy that takes many ideas that we think of as flightful such as the devil, and interchanges them with ideas that we think of as solid and unquestionable such as reality. The whole book has a very interesting play with metaphor and with the fantastic. I found that this was a great book about not beating you over the head with its morals and yet being able to figure out what the hell the theme of the book is. This being said, I think it would be less enjoyable if the reader hadn't already encountered Geothe's Faust and Marlowe's Dr Faustus (again thank you FYP).
One of the classics and though it is heavy in meaning, it is a quite enjoyable and thoroughly readable without getting a headache. I would advise having a browser open with wikipedia though because some of the Russian terms and the references are hard to catch. Make sure to look up why the devil keeps referring to poodles if you do read the book.
7 cat-demons out of 8

Andrew

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

A book swirling in controversy, a million little pieces delivers a brutally frank and at many times disgusting account of a 23 year old's 6 weeks in rehab. This book has been called "A million little lies" by many because it was discovered that Frey "embelished" his account. He never went to jail (while he claims to have done a 3 month stint) and some of his accounts are beefed up to make him seem cooler. In my opinion, it's a damn shame that this was exposed as not entirely true. If the book were real or at least people regarded it as true, I think that a huge number of people could be helped and encouraged by it. It is really an envigorating and empowering novel that is thoroughly heartwrenching.

Frey employs a few gimicks that I think he could have done without such as not putting quotation marks around those who were speaking, which I think was intened to make the account more human but in my opinion just made him seem a little dumb.

Nothin much more to say because it's essentially a biography and you really just read about his life. Doesn't have much literary quality but has some nice practical applications. Fun romp through the ghetto too which is probably where most of the appeal comes from.

Would have liked it way more if I'd thought it were real. Honestly I don't think I would have entirely believed that it had happened if I hadn't already known since its just a bit too far fetched, not in the details of his life story, but in some of the ways people around him respond, and how he himself responds. A bit too cliché almost. I'm not sure and I don't have enough experience in the matter to really be making all that much of a judgement.

whatever

Worth a read if you're ok with reading about brutal violence and hard drugs. An emotional rollercoaster for sure.

3 crack rocks out of 6

Andrew

Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of the World - Haruki Murakami

There is a line, kind of like a timeline but more like an umbrella, over which stretches the literary quality or esoteric substance between pulp fiction (stephen king etc) to hard philosophy (Heidegger, Nietzche etc). Now, not all pulp fiction is bad and not all phlosophical books are good obviously, and there are definitely connections between them. It seems like the best possible outcome would be a novel that combines interesting, entertaining story line with meaningful understandable philosophical content. Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of the World delivers astoninshingly well. A captivating plot that drives forward (and often sideways) to fulfill a supremely metaphysical goal. This book is a very interesting look into the human psyche and how the subconscious and conscious minds interact and what the hell they are for that matter. By no means an easy read but at the same time an enjoyable one and you really feel like you've gotten something out of it by the end even if all you're getting is a bewildered afternoon.

What I would be interested in doing would be to go through the book and pick out every literary and cultural reference and amassing them into one room. Then spending the next month going trough it all. Dozens of books, TV shows, musicians. Really quite interesting how Murakami really brings all of these thoughts together as if he were writing a paper and substantiating his arguments. He does it well though because he picks at so many well known pieces. He does what many bibliophiles do by offering insight into other books that someone might have missed or understood a different way. Interesting to think of books as a culture and a community.

Anyways, quite good and though I think I need a bit of a rest I'm definitly going to have to pick up some more of his books.

15 unicorns out of 16

Andrew

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

This book is literally so good that I can't tell you anything about it. Knowing anything about it going it would ruin so much of the surprise and intruige that fascinated me about this book. I stand by the fact that you should never read the dust jacket of a book. I mean never. It can totally destroy a book. I might even say decimate. "How can I decide if I want to read a book then?" you might ask. This answer is hard for some and easy for others. You have to know someone who's read the book. Even if you just have a great bookstore in your town (Page and Turners is a good example for Barrie) then you can just go in and ask what they think you might like. Try them out and see if they know your taste. If they do then you can go to them for advice in the future and then you have a stead flow of books coming in. This website might be a guide too. I could probably give a better recommendation in person but I stand by my opinion and I welcome you to go out and find the books I say are good and read them. Refute me if you must but then at least you'll know if our opinions differ. To start with, read Cloud Atlas. Now that's a good book.

Andrew

Pastoralia - George Saunders

I'm sorry but I didn't like this book at all. Its a collection of short stories that I found blunt, boring, uninsightful and just plain pedestrian. It seemed like Saunders was using a few tricks to captivate the reader but never got beyond that. Some interesting ideas but not very well written and not that well executed either. Gimicky but the one thing that I will give it is that it shows a side of western culture that isn't often seen. It seems that most books are written about a tightly perscribed subject matter. Kind of like the people who write books know exactly who their audience is, and in a way only hold up a mirror. Thats where you get all these books written about writers. In Pastoralia, you get to see the slums. Lots and lots of dumb people too. This is the group of people that when you talk in academic circles, noone really believes exists. You try to ask "Who the hell elected George Bush" and none of your friends can answer because for the most part, they all think like you do. It's very hard to get this portion of the population represented in literature because the people who usually write literature don't associate with "low-lifes". Cool to see a huge sector of the voting power that usually isn't seen but otherwise, this collection of short stories just falls flat. Characters are thin, plots are far out but totally bogus.

Read it if you want to see the people who think being in the Iraq war is a good thing, but otherwise, I'd stay away from it.

Andrew

ps sorry James I liked the other books you recommended.