Bergsonian Critique

For me, 2009 was a great year as an avid reader despite the dark times and despaired thoughts that engulfed me in the bulk of it (an experience that I rarely share with anyone). I think the reason I was able to survive my own dejections is due to the great journeys these books have embarked me along the way. It was a form of escapism that I was able to receive something out of it at the end, and it was quite profound, quite personal. Of course, not every book listed here is bound to fit your literary flavor, but I must say that I don’t regret anything I have read so far, except perhaps a book or two. For now, you’ll also have to accept two or three sentences condensing my thoughts regarding each book, as I really don’t have the time to discuss all of them in detail. I hope that I’ll continue building a better library as this year goes by and I hope that you do too.

• The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

Written under tyrannical reign of Stalin, this is a wild, throw-the-rulebook-out-the-door tale that manages to weave outrageous satire with eloquent speculation on morality. Bulgakov’s novel confidently navigates between deft, fantastic comedy and touching, emotional drama – without one disregarding the power of the other. While this is a response to the madness of the period of its year of birth, it is also a triumphant individual statement, and an excoriating one at that.

• The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper

If you ever feel like reading a classic, I think you could do worse for yourself than The Last of the Mohicans but you could definitely do better as well. The narrative is at times stiflingly boring and some events seem unlikely despite the era in which the book was written. However, staying-power won’t have been misappropriated if you just stick with it. Hiding in these pages is a truly great adventure, but the greatness – and sometimes the story itself – is obfuscated by the author’s heavy-handed use of language.

• The Hours – Michael Cunningham

The Hours is reminiscent of much of the literature by and/or about women in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, when suicide was a common theme; it seemed any woman who did anything out of the norm was doomed to die. Cunningham does a fine job in some parts of the book mimicking Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing, while recreating apparent everyday life for the three women and shows how society as a whole has become more accepting. Beautifully and lyrically written, this melancholic novel reminds us some still believe suicide is their only choice.

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz

This novel is an epic in the truest sense and in its fat is an endearing hero’s chest that beats a heroic heart. The earnestly openhearted Oscar leads us through his unflagging quest for happiness, while Diaz tumbles us through a century of Dominican history and shows us how the brief life of one lonely boy can epitomize the immigrant experience. Through his wondrous use of language and meticulous pacing, Diaz brings the book alive and makes it tremble in our hands.

• Hard Times – Charles Dickens

Always concerned with issues of class, social injustice, and employment, Dickens shows a broader concern with the philosophies and economic movements that underlie those issues, with three parallel story lines reflect a broad cross-section of society and its thinking. As the story lines overlap and intersect, often with consummate irony, Dickens keeps a light enough hand to prevent the story from becoming a polemic, though his criticism of hypocrisy, corruption, and “progress” at the expense of humanity is always clear.

• Enduring Love – Ian McEwan

The narrative of this contemporary novel feels simply like an intricately written case study, though occasionally punctuated with inconsistently glorious descriptions for an odd psychological disorder that even with all of Ian McEwan’s brilliance is still only mildly interesting. It is metaphysical representation of endurance both thematically and expressively, and those who strive in its pages are bound to deem a hint of love, or equally probable, resentment. Not the best of McEwan’s, and yet not his worst either.

• Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami

This remains as one of the most oddly philosophical and fairly enjoyable novels I have read by Murakami, and perhaps the best exercise to grasp his grace with magical realism. The uncertainty of the main characters can be a little tiring and the storytelling seems predestined for its own good but Murakami manages to tell them quite well with a meticulous stern and a hypnotic quirk.

• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami

It is difficult to think of anything more boring than the daily ruminations and soul-searching of a househusband, yet nothing I have read recently has been more engaging than the travails of Toru Okada, the unemployed protagonist of Haruki Murakami’s greatest opus. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle tells many stories in recounting the strange circumstances that press themselves into Toru’s life. At the heart of all these tales is the mysterious dissolution of his marriage to his wife Kumiko. With a warm, down-to-earth voice and a knack for creating credible characters and spinning a lively yarn, Murakami leavens the arresting philosophical symbolism of modern Japanese fiction that is so capacious and so pervasive on many levels.

• South of the Border, West of the Sun – Haruki Murakami

This is less a story of transcendent passion than a rather bleak look at the fear of disappointment that inhibits most human interaction. Redemption, in Murakami’s hands, is a matter of recognizing the role his main character, Hajime, has played in disappointing others, instead of dwelling on the injustice of his own disappointment. Ultimately, South of the Border, West of the Sun is different from what we have come to expect of Murakami: less surreal and complex, more introspective, less comic, and much closer to our lives.

• In the Miso Soup – Ryu Murakami

Having established a fairly conventional set-up from the get-go, Murakami gradually increases the tension and raises the stakes but furtively sidesteps expectations by slamming his big revelation straight into the middle of the novel. The masterstroke is when Murikami pulls back at just the right point before he makes his novel unreadable. And this is the case of the novel as a whole, it works as a thriller, a page-turner – one not for the weak of stomach – but its attempts at a greater cultural resonance of Japan’s nightlife is minutely labored.

• Piercing – Ryu Murakami

The plotting of the psychological thriller that this novel follows is little short of immaculate. The shortness and the fast-paced of the narrative show up the crafted symmetry of the principal characters: predator/victim, piercer/piercee, mutilator/self-mutilator. It’s a good, rather old-fashioned skill that is executed quite gracefully, but perhaps the most lingering aftermath of this novel is its true representation of how a tragicomedy truly functions. It is a pretty gory and often unpleasant tale but Murakami presents an intersecting picture of Japan’s own disillusionment of duality that comes off quite daunting.

• Anima Farm – George Orwell

This is a very well written critique of how socialist ideals are corrupted by powerful people, how the uneducated masses are taken advantage of, and how the dictator or communist leaders turn into capitalists. Orwell as usual has written a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works. It’s a classic that brilliantly serves as an excellent exercise in metaphors, analogies and creativity.

• Lullaby – Chuck Palahniuk

Here, Palahniuk flirts with the idea of a world without noise, suggesting that noise distracts us from the important aspects of life. At times, the novel is so obsessed with the idea of stretching social values that eventually the idea itself detracts from the story’s focal point. Nonetheless, the book manages to add its scattered echoes nicely when you reach the last page; it’s not spectacular by any means but it presents a rare chance to study Palahniuk’s unique views on society and reality.

• Snow – Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk once again provides a book about the contemporary difficulties faced by his nation (Turkey) that is being torn between tradition, religion, and modernization. It is a novel of lesser scope than its grand and magical predecessor that is My Name Is Red, and it is certainly more narrowly focused, although it is enriched by the author’s same mesmerizing mixes: cruelty and farce, poetry and violence, and a voice whose timbres range from a storyteller’s playfulness to the dark torment of a lost explorer.

• The Subtle Knife – Philip Pullman

As the middle book of the ambitious His Dark Materials trilogy, it is unsurprising how edgy it dangles on its own. Seeing that Pullman is obviously a fine writer and an intense inventor of concepts and backgrounds for the various creatures he populate in his story, the characterizations he provides remain basic at best with only the two main protagonists showing any real life. The closure is also less satisfying but the ultimate ride has its plunge that propels us to read more fiercely as we go on.

• The Amber Spyglass – Philip Pullman

His Dark Materials is an overwhelming reading experience, brought to a sublime and touching close by The Amber Spyglass. Its myriad twisting and intertwining plots and its emotional roller coaster make it an exhausting yet exhilarating read as its various questions, deceptions, and discoveries challenge readers to grapple with their own ideas of God, religion, life, love, and death. Despite the few overcrowded muddles and ignored, simply plot-driven characters, it is, for the most part, a great and an important contribution in children and young adult literature.

• The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

This Booker Prize winner captures the seemingly inconsequential experiences of how unspoken words and accumulated mistakes can sometimes produce irreversible tragedy. An inspired work of art that is quenched with lyrical prose, intelligent storytelling, and sublime characterizations; undoubtedly, it is destined to survive the test of time.

• A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

Relentlessly silly, improbable, and off the wall, Toole’s Pulitzer wining novel is s simply and insistently a great, perfect comedy of errors and airs, a farce of Olympic proportions. Ignatius Reilly, our contemptuous hypochondriac protagonist, has got to be one of the most off-putting main characters in modern literature, but this hygienically-challenged intellectual oaf has something in common with a soap-opera vixen: you just love to hate him. An unforgettable and a hilarious modern classic to the very core!

• A Special Providence – Richard Yates

This is a dry, acutely sharp perceptive novel, in which Yates displays a pathological relationship or complicated emotion in a few devastating sentences – that makes this book so potent. The lives he describes may be yawningly ordinary and gray, but the plain, uncluttered way he describes them is startlingly, deliciously colorful.

• Disturbing the Peace – Richard Yates

It has been said that Disturbing the Peace is a semi-autobiographical of Yates’ own difficulties as an alcoholic depressant, so it makes sense that there’s a strong purgative element in the narrative here. As if he’s using the book to distance himself from his own experience of madness, Yates pushes it further and further away before retiring it into an institution at the end. The plot of the book is somewhat uneven but it is intricately detailed, coherent, and artful throughout.

• Eleven Kinds of Loneliness – Richard Yates

Originally published in 1962, one year after the release of Revolutionary Road, this sublime collection of short stories stands with Yates’ earlier masterpiece novel at the pinnacle of American postwar fiction. Yates casts his characteristically compassionate eye over eleven unrelenting but flawless portraits of human frailty and resilience; it’s a cult book for an entire generation but for today it seems even more powerful.

• Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates

Revolutionary Road is a novel that readers are likely to think about long after they have finished reading. Yates certainly has a flair of displaying the human angst in its all hideous colors, like the frustrations of not living up to one’s own expectations or facing the terrifying nothingness that one can feel about life. His narrative is combination of gorgeous prose and gruff realism that can leave readers’ heads spinning for many days to follow: a melancholic outcome for reading a beautifully disturbing and excruciatingly painful novel.