The People Immortal by Vasiliĭ Grossman

 

Vivid account of a Red Army group in Ukraine in 1943 as they finally begin to turn the tide against the Nazi invasion. Unusual, shifting pov style of narration. Grossman unknown to me, but was the first to publish acclaimed fiction about the war during the war, and was a national hero in Russia for inspiring hope in a beleaguered time.

Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze

 

Sort of a high-class, grad school version of Jim Thompson.  The shell-shocked veteran turned criminal teams up with the femme fatale to hatched an armored car robbery, using an abandoned mine shaft as the perfect getaway/hideaway where they can also bury the evidence.

Prose style strong, at times a litttle too self-conscious and minute for my taste. But I'd recommend the book to fans of noir crime fiction.

Skylark by Dezso Kosztolanyi

 

Liked this, strange novel, about what a father and mother get up to when their unmarried 35-year old daughter goes on vacation to see cousins in the country for a week.

The father's antics at his former Club - his resumed drinking and gambling - are vividly drawn, in the strange male culture of turn of the century Hungary which was completely new to me.

A little Kafka-esque in its descriptive strategies of both external and internal landscapes.

He flung open His arms upon the cross, exalting human suffering in a single, heroic gesture that belonged to Him alone since the beginning of time. But His head dropped, anticipating the number indifference into which it was about to fall, His face already petrified with pain. [175]

Skylark had found it hard to get used to life on the plain, and not a day had passed without her longing to be home again. And now she was glad to be back in the town, which, with all its comforts, allowed people to forget so much, and held a promise of real solitude to those who had to be alone. [209]

Devil Makes Three by Ben Fountain

 

Good, but ambitious plot involves lots of sociological and political and historical backstory being brought in about the birth and struggle of Haiti. Sort of loses narrative oomph. Well-written as always with Foundation, and clearly a heroic tale (as well as effort).

Caught by Henry Green

 

Fascinating 1943 novel about an upper class gentleman who joins the Auxiliary Fire Service in London one year before the Blitz. Most of the novel takes place before the bombing but presages it: the protagonist leaves his wife and child in the countryside, and bunks and lives with working class men and men. Green's dialogue is exquisite: the working class phrasings and emphases are illuminating.

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Seamas O'Reilly

 

Like this in the end, but had to get over my initial dismay that it was no Angela's Ashes. It's a non-fiction memoir of a large family in the north, the narrator's mother dies when he is five years old. It's more of a portrait of his wonderful father.

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

 

Hemingway vs Pynchon vs classic Cormac. dash of DeLillo, sprinkle of McGuane. 

Deep sea salvage diving, quantum physics and mathematics, dogged government agents pursuing the main character, who lives off a fortune in gold coins buried at his grandmother's house, a cast of New Orleans barflies that recall an unwritten cast of grad school characters from A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. 

Fierce writing, a wandering narrative, confusing dialogue. Interesting and aggravating. 

The sections where Western's sister has long visits with the voices insides her head who present as real character - namely, "The Thalidomide Kid" - are puzzling and never really resolve for me. Even more so when Western himself is visited by The Kid [312].

The long pages of dialogue between two (or three characters) are confusing, not just in typical McCarthy style, but beyond that, as the longer conversations go on, the more the sides of the discussion seem interchangeable: each character settles into a very high-level, ironic, high-diction tone of voice.

Still, McCarthy writes like a fire when he's on.

So if you get the impression from tie to time that we're sort of winging it here so be it. The first thing is to locate the narrative line. It doesn't have to hold up in court. Start splicing in your episodes. Your anecdotals. You'll figure it out. Just remember that where there's no linear there's no delineation. Try and stay focused. Nobody's asking you to sign anything, okay? And anyway it's not like you got a lot of fallback positions. [60-61]

Listen, Ducklescence, he whispered. You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that's certain is that it's not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you can't help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you don't. Not in your heart you don't. If you did you would be terrified. And you're not. Not yet. And now, good night. [144]

When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the 

coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief. [160]

...having even read a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood. [161]

Even the interpretation of the positron as an electron traveling backward in time. [174]

Beauty makes promises that beauty can't keep. [204]

What, you got no questions? I thought it would be fun to have a guy inquiring about his sister's sanity from the sister's own hallucinations. [312]

No matter the magnitude of your doubts about the nature of the world you cant come up with another world without coming up with another you. [319]

Documents they'd no gift to read in a cold to loot men of their souls. [328]

I think the odds are on that we will still be here to see him wet his thumb and lean over and unscrew the sun. [368]

Why can you not bury him? Are his hands so red? Fathers are always forgiven. In the end they are forgiven. Had it been women who dragged the world through these horros there would be a bounty on them. [422]

He said that a Godless life would not prepare one for a Godless death. [434]

But that's not what's at the heart of the tale. The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale. [338]

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

 

Great, heavy, long, witty, and heart-breaking. And somewhat exhausting.

Willie, Dickie's gay, intellectual, brilliant friend at Trinity College, on human resistance to changes humans need to make in order to combat climate change:

... the thought of no longer being ourselves is harder for us to get our head around than the thought of being dead. [507]

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

 

Dissatisfying. Long wind-up to a muted violent ending. Moshfegh can write, but to what end? In 1964 a tortured young woman lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father, while she works at a nearby boy's prison. Something rings false about the framing. Told from the woman's first person point of view, but from current time as she recollects the time as an old woman in her 70s, we find out scant things about the present time, and 1960s is sketched out sketchily and not quite believably.

The woman is awful - she hates herself (or at least the old woman hates her younger self remembered) and she hates everyone around her.

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

 

Really enjoyed this, a three-part cultural history of Harlem in the 1970s, following a furniture-store owner's troubles and triumphs as he dabbles in crime to supplement his income, following in his dead father's footsteps. Everybody knows everybody in Whitehead's Harlem, for good and for bad.

The End of the Road by John Barth

Been several lifetimes ago it seems since I read this as an novel as an undergraduate. Hits differently now. Very bleak, somewhat pedantic -- and yet arresting. The ethical conundrums of a love triangle playing out at a backwater community college in the early 1960s in Wicomico County, MD.

The Chamber by John Grisham

 

Good but drawn-out too long. 

Grisham renders in sweeping, intimate-ish fashion the complete scope of the one-month run-up to a former Klu Klux Klanner inmate's execution, after nine years on death-row. A dozen different points of view are used -- but the effect is more broad than deep. All characters seem to think and feel in a similar manner.

Harrow by Joy Williams

 Another grim one from Joy. Unusual style, almost plotless, everything happens in the omniscient narrator's voice, and in dialogue.  An orphaned young woman ends up at an elderly retreat on the shore of a dead lake in the west someplace, as the old people plot vengeance against against a world of corporate greed and ecological neglect. Obscure. But William's prose is knotty and powerful.

Slammerkin by Emma Donogue

 

Really enjoyed this novel of a poor girl growing up in London in the mid 1700s, who is thrown out of her family (by her mother - "You have no mother now) and takes up prostitution to save her own life. Then she abandons that life, and heads to the tiny farming village where her mother was born, and tries to make a living as an assistant to a dress-maker. In true "naturalistic" style, though, things don't go well for a woman with nothin and no connections. Vivid writing and a very modern idiom makes this story feel contemporary.

McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh

 

I like this strange and violent book. I had disliked her MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION though I can't really remember why. But this was different.  Reminded me somewhat of THE NORTH WATER.

Lone Women by Victor Lavalle

 

Unusual new novel from Lavalle, whose work I've enjoyed before. Was perplexed but glad I stuck with it in the end: he somehow make a creepy supernatural thriller (with a dragon!) out of American frontier history, particularly the "lone women" land grants in Montana in the early 1900s. He takes on racism and  sexism at the same time. There's nobody else quite like him.

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa

 

Very strange novel or memoir or prose poem or all three, about a poet in modern Ireland searching for clues about a poetess from 17th Century Ireland whom history has all but erased. I enjoyed the first half of the book more than the second. First half was more of the narrator/poet's struggle with motherhood and breastfeeding and post-partum isolation and mental struggles, while second half gets more into an imagined history of old Ireland.

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

 

Liked this a lot, but I'm a sucker for time-travel books that manipulate my emotions. See Time Traveler's Wife, etc. Even the upper West Side of Manhattan milieu -- usually one of my bugbears because of its usual cliched cast of privileged white people -- comes across well. At least it refers to NYC in the 1980s!

The Seven Good Years by Edgar Keret

 

Cute but reductive. The real life Keret is much less funny and sharp and enraged than his fictional ego.

Only The Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby

 

Another solid story from Cosby. Race war simmering in a small town in southern Virginia, brought to a boil by discovery of a serial child-killer and torturer operating under religious delusions. Cosby's prose can get a little cliched, melodramatic, and predictable - and some of his character set pieces (dead mother, troubled brother, wise father, old girlfriend) are seemingly written by rote) - but he keeps his weather eye on the action and it never lets up.