Book 1, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Well, here is the Mt. Everest of my bogus enterprise, the most daunting of all the doorstopper books I’ve planned to read in 2012. I know that I’ve also endeavored to read Tale of Genji and Don Quixote but there’s somehow a unique weight that comes with undertaking a Russian tome.

I read the first volume of The Brothers Karamazov back in college but I can’t actually remember much about it. I’m quite certain that i have read up to the infamous Grand Inquisitor chapter but I can’t recall much beyond that. Dostoevsky has always been daunting to me; I’ve tried multiple times to get into Crime and Punishment but I always back away from the intensity of it. I’ve built up a certain apprehension towards The Brothers K as well and was quite surprised that this particular iteration, as translated by Ignat Avsey, starts of in a pretty inviting–even jaunty tone.

Four characters are at the heart of The Brothers K. The patriarch is Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his sons are, respectively, Dmitry, Ivan, and Aleksei (fondly called Alyosha by almost everyone). For the sake of brevity, I’ll simply list the pertinent events of Book 1.

Finishing Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

1st Diary Entry – Midnight’s Children
2nd Diary Entry – Midnight’s Children
3rd Diary Entry – Midnight’s Children

I was not prepared for the way this book ends. There has been too much foreshadowing, I thought, too many narrative obstacles hurled at me by Salman Rushdie, for me to be completely floored by how he would tie up this story. I was so very wrong. The last 100 pages of Midnight’s Children quite literally winded me as the whirl of Saleem Sinai’s world is once against devastated by the tides of history.

At the beginning of Part 3, Saleem suffers from an affliction that takes him from his destroyed life in West Pakistan to East Pakistan (formerly East Bengal, later on Bangladesh) where he and three other young Pakistani soldiers joined the war against the Bengal secessionists. What occurs there is a Heart of Darkness-like ordeal in the swampy jungles, where Saleem and his companions begin to lose not only their sanity, but also the pieces of their civilized selves. To be quite honest, this part became very difficult for me to read through. It is partly due to some stylistic idiosyncrasies that Rushdie chose to include and partly because I didn’t really care enough for the minor character to parse the meanings behind their fever-dreams. I was also not knowledgeable enough about the Bangladesh Liberation War to catch all the allusions he makes.

End of Part 2 – Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

(Credits: The quote is from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The poster is by Brett Thurman on Behance. Click for better image resolution)

1st Diary Entry – Midnight’s Children
2nd Diary Entry – Midnight’s Children

A series of forced overtimes at work has eaten away at my reading time for the past two weeks and frankly, I’m still too busy stewing in my resentment, so this will be a short post. It’s already March but Dostoevsky will have to wait a few more days. : (

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold in Saleem Sinai’s childhood world. While far from idyllic, the Methwold Estate has given him considerable protection. However, his entry into puberty leads to a series of ruptures. Saleem discovers an aspect of his mother’s past that enrages him and his own family manages to inadvertently cut him off from the rest of the Midnight’s Children. These breaks culminate to his family’s ruin in India and their eventual migration to Pakistan.

300 Pages into Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Photo from Vanity Fair

1st Diary Entry – Midnight’s Children

Despite the inclusion of characters who live in slums and wander the streets to make money, Salman Rushdie is chiefly chronicling the lives of the affluent Indians in Midnight’s Children. This is an important thing to note because while Saleem constantly proclaims that his story is the story of India, he is telling it from his position on top of the country’s socioeconomic pyramid. His own home–a compound that used to belong to an eccentric British man named Methwold–cloisters him and his family from most of the turmoil that occurs in Bombay after India’s independence from British rule. Not that the members of his household are protected from the political and social changes around them; no one is untouched by that.

The circumstances of Saleem’s birth has shades of soap opera-style scandal and mystery but the most important aspect is the time when it occurred. He is born exactly at midnight of August 15, 1947, the day of India’s independence. This ties him closely to the 1000 other newborn babies that entered the world on the same hour but only Saleem earns himself a letter from Jawaharlal Nehru.

The First 100 Pages – Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

I have tried reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children three years ago and stopped within the first 200 pages of it. Although I have read The Moor’s Last Sigh beforehand, I still found myself confounded by this noisy, brash, and difficult book. This is exactly the reason why I chose to limit my reading resolution to one doorstopper book a month for 2012, so I can finally find the time to finish this Rushdie.

First let’s establish the baseline for why I find this such a challenging work. It is told entirely in First-Person POV by Saleem Sinai, a man scrambling to commit his life’s narrative to paper as his body starts to deteriorate and come apart. “Life’s narrative” is a difficult thing to qualify here, however, since Saleem himself is so cosmically entwined with India that his recollection spans three generations’ worth of familial and national histories. Saleem constantly intrudes upon the narration, offering glimpses into the future and editorializing the events for both the audience and his lover(?) Padma (she also intrudes into the storytelling). Midnight’s Children is practically the definition of postmodern literature: fractured, subjective, and confusing. It upends the conceit of the bildungsroman, which focuses on the life of a single individual as he grapples with history. Here, the individual IS history, and he shapes it as much as it shapes him.

Finishing Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

1st Diary Entry – Wolf Hall
2nd Diary Entry – Wolf Hall

There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

The storytelling structure becomes more or less conventional once Thomas Cromwell becomes the top dog in the eyes of both Henry VIII and the Boleyns. In the early parts of the novel, Henry was a sort of misguided yet not entirely unlikeable character, but by the end he has become a right bastard. Is it weird that I still root for Thomas Cromwell despite the fact that he is largely responsible for Henry’s descent into assholery? That’s what a masterful command of point-of-view can do, I guess.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

My personal assessment of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad changes each time I think back on it. Sometimes I think it’s a trifling thing, made up of airy stories that don’t really have any staying power beyond the act of reading them. Other times certain passages simply haunt me. I change my mind even further whenever I read other people’s reviews of it, especially since time and winning the Pulitzer seems to have turned some people into dismissing Goon Squad and its importance. But after hearing Slate’s Audio Book Club Podcast discussing the book I think that I can comfortably put a stake in the ground: I love this book.

The buzz surrounding this novel originally came from its stylistic inventiveness and subject matter. It is series of loosely interconnected short stories that track the lives of several individuals across space and time. Many of them, like Benny and Sasha, are heavily involved in the music industry while others are more tenuously so. People pop up and disappear all throughout, turning the entire novel into a a treasure hunt of sorts as you try to discover what happens to characters that you care about. Time is the goon that the title refers to, a shadowy figure that roughs you up and beats you down when you least expect it.

Halfway Through Mantel’s Wolf Hall

1st Diary Entry – Wolf Hall

I really need to buckle down if I am to finish reading this book by Tuesday. A big chunk of this post is full of spoilers so consider this a warning, though I’m not sure how I can possibly spoil a novel based on 400-year old historical events….

Halfway through Wolf Hall, Cardinal Wolsey is dead and Thomas Cromwell’s star is on the rise. The very people who orchestrated his patron’s downfall–the Boleyns and the Howards–have all turned their flowery attentions on to him. Even the king himself is intrigued by his seemingly foolhardy loyalty towards Wolsey, though Henry VIII gradually starts valuing him for his shrewd mind and candid attitude. From being a mere blacksmith’s son, Cromwell is now one of the most admired men within the king’s court.

The First 100 Pages – Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

(Not the cover of my copy but I like this one a lot more!)

While I’ve known the basics of Henry VIII/Anne Boleyn saga, I have to confess that I only know of a few major players such as Cardinal Wolsey from what I’ve seen on the Bravo TV show The Tudors, which is wildly inaccurate to say the least. So Hilary Mantel’s depiction is informed and contradicted by what popular culture tells me about this historical moment. That Anne Boleyn is a seductress that almost brought an empire to its knees. That Henry will forever be known for having six wives and disposing of them in horrific ways. This is something that Wolf Hall takes into account without addressing it overtly.

Wolf Hall is surprisingly modern, but I don’t quite know how to convey that through textual evidence. It just feels that way to me. Part of it is the prose–it does away with leisurely sentences that writers often use to signal that a novel is historical. The juxtaposition of the pomposity and machination within the king’s court with the clipped, precise sentences that describe them can be jarring, but I find it incredibly effective.

The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene

I haven’t yet decided if reading this novel at the height of summer in the Philippines was supremely prescient or foolhardy. The first few chapters are alienating in their bleakness, approximating the aridity of a soul so far from grace. Graham Greene’s prose sucks out all the oxygen from the story, leaving a nihilistic parable suspended in time.

The Power and the Glory is ostensibly grounded in a historical event. Set in the 1930′s, it dramatizes the period when a wave of revolutionary fervor led to the persecution of Mexico’s Catholic Church. Priests are hunted down–either forced to renounce their vows through marriage or executed. Graham Greene creates what is a essentially a man-on-the-run thriller here, as an unnamed character called “the Whisky Priest” struggles to elude capture in the countryside of rural Mexico. He is chased by a bloodhound simply known as “the Lieutenant,” whose desire to annihilate the old, corrupt ways propels this all-consuming vendetta.

Ilustrado

Ilustrado is a novel full of and about fakes. The fragments that make up the book are themselves knockoffs of different genres–murder mystery, satire, interviews from The Paris Review, everything but the kitchen sink. Miguel Syjuco’s brassy debut novel turns on its head the first accusation thrown in the face of every expat writing a novel set in the Philippines: “Just how authentic are you?”

A manuscript by lionized (or should it be “pantherized?”) Filipino writer Crispin Salvador disappears after his death in New York. This propels his student Miguel to travel to the Philippines, taking it upon himself to connect together the different threads of his mentor’s existence and hopefully retrieve the lost magnum opus. Interspersed between fragments of Crispin’s earlier novels, plays, and newspaper columns, the narrative follows Miguel as he tracks down the different people that Crispin had loved and wronged, unearthing a portrait of a sublime failure.

Giovanni’s Room

I’ve always held this notion that there is such a thing as missed connections when it comes to novel-reading. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin is one such book for me–it is a deeply moving story in many ways, but I think its effect would’ve been more profound on me if I had read it when I was younger. Which means that the fault is mine and not the novel’s, of course.

Giovanni’s Room is a novel of claustrophobia, of physical smallness and emotional suffocation. The title refers to the rented Parisian room that an American expatriate named David shares with a bartender he meets at a gay bar. He is a typical example of the young, disaffected Americans who traipse around Paris in the post-war period, but his life takes a turn the moment Giovanni strikes a conversation with him. Passion is ignited in an instant, but while their mutual attraction is acknowledged and consummated early on, their happiness is far from assured.