Tournament of Books discussion
note: This topic has been closed to new comments.
2014 Books
>
2014 - Match-Up Decisions
i noticed in the comment's section of today's decision a few people who preferred 'tuner of silences' too, ellen!and YES! i think it would be great to hang out with kevin, and john, over beers one night. :)
I...know I'm being incredibly dense, but I cannot for the life of me see where the comments section of today's decision IS. What should I be clicking on if I want to read those comments? Or do I have to be signed up for something?
Down below all the actual post are disc comments by readers. I haven't been able to keep up today (stupid work) but they are usually great conversations
Not that I can see. It just ends after Kevin and John's commentary. Is this just my computer? How odd.
What I DO see is a [clickable] Facebook trademark symbol. Is it possible that you have to be on Facebook to read the commentary? I'm not.
I don't think so I do not log in via Facebook at all. Below the Facebook recommend clickable icon mine says 81 comments and then below that starts the open discussion via disc server
Ellen wrote: "Like I said before, I'd so kill to hang out with Kevin Guilfoile some time...You know, I didn't love either of these books -- but I may be the only person on the planet who read both of them and ..."
I agree with you, Ellen. I didn't hate GLB but I preferred ToS.
Ellen wrote: "What I DO see is a [clickable] Facebook trademark symbol. Is it possible that you have to be on Facebook to read the commentary? I'm not."no. you don't need to be on facebook to see the comments. that facebook button is just if you want to share the post on FB. weird you can't see the comments. right now, it's showing there are 82 of them, and that notice is immediately below the FB button-thing.
Ellen and Drew, count me in for the group who read both books and preferred Tuner of Silences.
Oh, good. I was starting to think I was the only one who kind of liked Tuner of Silences. And both on my phone and on my computer, my page ends with that facebook button. How very bizarre.
Actually, just looked again. Under the facebook button there's a line that says:"blog comments powered by Disqus" and when I click on that it just brings me to this 'Disqus" site. I wonder if for some reason that site is incompatible with my computer? But how could it be incompatible with my [work] computer AND my phone when everyone else seems to have access to it?
Weird.
Hey, boring update! Now I can at least seem them on my phone. Cool.
Hey, gang, I post (rarely) in the comments as "Teedle"...just put up a question to John and Kevin asking them if, as they say, neither of them actually read Tuner of Silences, then why was a book that was obviously the best-reviewed book of the year (Tenth of December) eliminated. Especially considering that one of them, at least, has probably read it. I don't want to seem like an ass for asking the question, I'm really just curious and would love to hear their answer, so if anyone else would like to hear the answer, if you could up-vote the question, I'd love it.
For the record, I didn't love either of the two books today, although i still think that Good Lord Bird has a great chance to win it all.
i think that is a fair question, topher. i was one of the people that challenged them on not reading...can't remember which book, last year. i totally understand that there is only so much time in any given day for reading, and it would be impossible to read every book being considered, but it would be interesting to know what, generally, would make them choose an untested novel over one that has been read by at least one of them. (and in this case, a book that has garnered so much critical acclaim.) i am sure you didn't sound like an ass in asking.
today's match-up:The Dinner
vs.
The Signature of All Things
judge: Rodger Hodge
Roger D. Hodge: Imagine, if you will, the worst meal you have ever experienced. Not the worst food, but the most unpleasant, insufferable, excruciating overall experience at table, with the most boorish, self-involved, solipsistic, or self-dramatizing dinner companions. Perhaps the source of the trouble was a relative, or maybe an in-law, though co-workers and bosses, ex-spouses or soon-to-be ex-spouses are equally plausible. Perhaps everyone at the table was a monster (save you, dear reader). Capture a moment from that memory and bring your discomfort to the fore; meditate on that feeling, the agony of contemplating the minutes—the seconds—remaining until the check arrives and release becomes a reality. Imagine the dinner you cannot avoid, the dinner you have dreaded, the dinner from which no escape is possible. The dinner you would blind yourself with dull pencils to avoid repeating. If you ever have suffered such a meal—and who has not?—then you have a reasonably good idea of what it’s like to read The Dinner, by Herman Koch.
The Dinner takes the form of a confession, and the story’s frame, as the title makes clear, is a single meal. Our narrator is a former history teacher named Paul Lohman, the brother of Serge Lohman, a prominent Dutch politician. Serge is running for prime minister. Paul and his wife, Claire, are meeting Serge and his wife, Babette, at a trendy restaurant. The names and the relationships and professions emerge over the course of many pages; Koch likes to mention a name first, in passing, then after a while he drops some clues about the character’s identity. The story emerges with mechanical efficiency. The tone is aggressive, pushy, relentless, just like Paul, who we immediately sense is a very angry man.
Paul has been dreading this dinner. Why? Well, he doesn’t tell us exactly, not at first. He’s always withholding information for one reason or another. He won’t tell us the name of the restaurant, because he doesn’t want people to show up there looking for him, even though he clearly loathes the place. He won’t tell us where Claire was hospitalized or what was wrong with her, because it’s no one’s business. Nor will he mention the name of the student he reduced to tears, or what exactly he said. He makes a point of telling us that he won’t tell us, rather than simply eliding the information. Paul is a difficult man, clearly, and he can’t stand his brother, whom he regards as an unintelligent phony.
It was Serge who picked the restaurant, the kind that usually requires a reservation three months in advance, which by itself is enough to guarantee that Paul will hate the place, because he finds all the drama surrounding restaurants and chefs to be absurd. “Serge never reserves a table three months in advance. Serge makes the reservation on the day itself—he says he thinks of it as a sport.” Babette is also slightly ridiculous, though not as bad as Serge. She shows up to the restaurant wearing sunglasses, earning a silent sneer before Paul realizes that she’s been crying. Probably something Serge said on the way over, he thinks. Later he wonders if Serge fucks the way he eats: as quickly as possible. Surveying the scene, Paul’s gaze passes scornfully over the perky waitresses in their black pinafores and ponytails, and especially the pretentious manager in his ridiculous suit who fusses over the service and belabors his descriptions of each dish, the provenance of the ingredients, and the techniques of preparation. Paul’s observations are probably meant to be funny, but they’re bitter and unpleasant. Perhaps something is lost in translation. “Normally,” Paul says, “I don’t give a damn about that kind of information—as far as I cared, the rosemary could have come from the Ruhr or the Ardennes, but it seemed like far too much fuss over one little plate of olives, and I had no intention of letting him off the hook that easily.” Paul is the kind of man who enjoys giving servers a hard time. We all know the type.
One person Paul adores is Claire, his wife, and at first he tries to contain himself, because he doesn’t want to upset her. As the evening progresses Paul drops little hints about what’s really going on, and the story slowly emerges. Something has gone very wrong in Paul and Claire’s happy little family, and it has something to do with their son, Michel, and his cousin Rick, and possibly Beau, the African boy Serge and Babette adopted from Burkina Faso. The cousins call him Faso. No one at the table, including the reader, is quite sure what the others know, so there are several layers of dramatic irony at work. Most of the details emerge in extended flashbacks, narrated by Paul, that become ever more fantastic and violent. I can’t tell whether we’re to take these episodes at face value or whether they are meant to signal Paul’s unreliability as a witness, but eventually the plot becomes so extreme that the novel threatens to collapse under the weight of its implausibility.
I won’t tell you what happens, to paraphrase Paul, but it doesn’t really matter. The dinner ends badly, as it must. That was obvious from the first page. Koch’s achievement, if it is an achievement, is to have created a reading experience that is possibly even more unpleasant than the nightmarish meal at the center of the novel.
Uncomfortable scenes at the dinner table also figure prominently in The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert. Koch quotes Tolstoy’s famous observation about happy and unhappy families, only to invert it; Gilbert’s grand 19th-century narrative remains true in spirit to the great Russian in more ways than one. The Signature of All Things is a big novel of adventure and ideas, science and exploration, love and sorrow. The story of Alma Whittaker, born in 1800 to a great botanical explorer and businessman, takes us all over the world. We follow her father, Henry Whittaker, from London’s Kew Gardens to Madeira, Tenerife, Table Bay, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii, as he travels with Captain James Cook onboard the Resolution. Henry is a tough lad, and he will do whatever is necessary to achieve his goals. He endures the agonies of seafaring and youthful inexperience. He meets naked savages and watches them eat raw dog meat. He commits no crimes and at port he avoids the company of women, even the lovely bare-breasted Tahitians. Henry collects exotic gardenias and orchids, carefully packed in dried moss, for his employer at Kew and remains silent and watchful and develops his natural cunning. He avoids Cook’s fate when natives tear the captain to pieces. He travels to Peru and spends years in the Andes, barefoot and shivering, learning the secrets of Jesuit’s bark, which cures malaria. Those secrets make him, along with his Dutch partners, a very rich man. Henry takes a Dutch wife, emigrates to Philadelphia, and founds a botanical and pharmaceutical empire.
Alma Whittaker grows up wealthy among a vast assortment of exotic plants, surrounded by the finest library in the New World. Educated by her mother, she reads Latin and Greek at an early age and speaks several modern languages. Alma sits at the dinner table with her father and joins him in interrogating leading scientists and explorers, who all come seeking patronage, introductions, or financing. All must submit to the terrors of the Whittaker table. She is a prodigy, an obsessive, a natural-born scientist. “In her ninth summer, completely on her own, Alma learned to tell time by the opening and closing of flowers. At five o’clock in the morning, she noticed, the goatsbeard petals always unfolded.” Each hour was revealed by some botanical signal. “By three o’clock, the dandelions had folded.” Alma finds she cannot draw faces or animals but that she can sketch plants with great accuracy. When she wishes her drawings were more beautiful, her mother replies, “Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy’s distraction.” Alma never tires of observation and experiment and always seeks the why as well as the what and the how.
The behavior of humans presents more complex puzzles; Alma lacks social graces and emotional intelligence. She is passionate yet homely and befuddled by the interior lives of others, especially her strange, beautiful adopted sister Prudence. Alma’s uncompromisingly scientific mind drives her forth into the world, where she makes discoveries both personal and scientific. As a woman, however, she must struggle against a society that is not yet prepared to accept her intellectual contributions.
The Signature of All Things commands a large stage: The narrative unfolds against the backdrop of European colonialism and empire, amid the social turmoil of the scientific and industrial revolutions, as well as the abolitionist movement. The mysticism of Jacob Boehme contends with the naturalism of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. Gilbert pitches her voice in a pleasingly old-fashioned register and demonstrates a strong command of historical and scientific detail, yet never overwhelms the reader with historical data for its own sake. Instead, she transforms botany into the raw material of an earthy lyricism: the natural history of mosses has never been so sensual. Gilbert plays no games with temporality or point of view. She populates her story with strong characters who are in turn appealing and horrific, pathetic and fairly heroic. Like any self-respecting 19th-century novelist, she flirts with melodrama yet avoids miring her narrative in sentiment. “Time,” Gilbert writes at one point, “does not object to passing,” and indeed time passes quickly in this enormously entertaining novel, despite its size and the scope of its ambitions. The contrast with The Dinner, a distasteful and unappetizing exercise in nastiness, could not be more stark.
TODAY’S WINNER: The Signature of All Things
i have to say --- YAY!!!! i am so glad gilbert's novel triumphed in hodge's judgement. TSoAT was, i think, the book that surprised me the most in 2013. i was just captivated by it, and swept away with the story. i think i even called it 'lush'. haha. the dinner, on the other hand, infuriated me. i felt wholly manipulated during the entire read (this comment from hodge made me laugh out loud: "The dinner you would blind yourself with dull pencils to avoid repeating.") , so i would disagree with john's comment that gilbert's book was more a manipulation than koch's. though i did vote for TSoAT to make it through this round...i didn't actually think it would.
The Signature of All Things was the one book on the list I didn't read, by choice. The whole Eliz. Gilbert zeitgeist irritates me, not least because she lives near me and I know a lot of people who know her socially, and she is fairly universally disliked. I understand that this novel was different, but I, too, like Kevin and John, was getting pretty bored of the whole "Dickensian" overtone to a lot of the books on the list, and frankly, as a true Dickens fan, I feel like saying to Phillip Meyer and Eleanor Catton, and by association, Eliz. Gilbert, " I KNOW Charles Dickens, and you, sir [or madam] are no Charles Dickens." Ahem. Anyway. The upshot of it is, I am really feeling this loss. The Dinner was one of the two books I came into this already having read, and while I can't say I LIKED it, exactly, I found it a great read and one of the most evocative books I've read in a long time, along now with The People in the Trees. DO people have to have a main character whom they really like in order to think a book is a good and gripping one? I don't, necessarily. I need a good story and I happen to be a sucker for what I call a "Eureka" ending, where there's a shock I don't expect at the very end (like People in the Trees, or, if anyone's read it, The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud), and while The Dinner doesn't exactly have that, what it does do is turn itself completely on its end, by having the character who seems the most dislikable at the outset -- the brother -- turn out to be the only one with any sort of moral conscience at all. I was really impressed with the structure and the atmosphere -- and the story -- of The Dinner, and, also frankly, it takes a LOT to surprise me in a book, and it did it. I really wanted it to win its round. Harumph.
Ellen wrote: "DO people have to have a main character whom they really like in order to think a book is a good and gripping one? ..."for me - no. not at all. i LOVE unreliable and unlikeable characters. done well, they can be so much more interesting and nuanced. but they do have to be interesting and that's where i felt 'the dinner' failed for me. i didn't find any of them interesting.
i have not (and don't plan to) read 'eat, pray, love'. it's just not the type of book i go in for. but i find the whole backlash against gilbert because of that book fascinating. as though she could control what that book became once it was out in the world? but, i had read her earlier novel Stern Men, enjoyed her TED talk a lot, and have liked her journalism work in the past. so while i was keen to read TSoAT, my expectations were not very high. i mean, i hoped for a good read...but that was it. i actually went back and re-read 'stern men', after i finished TSoAT, and i can see, now, where TSoAL sprouted from.
also - THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS -- would have been a great TOBX book. i was bummed it didn't make it through. months and months (nearly a year now) after finishing that read i am still going OH NO SHE DINNINT!
loved it!
Ellen wrote: "The Signature of All Things was the one book on the list I didn't read, by choice. The whole Eliz. Gilbert zeitgeist irritates me, not least because she lives near me and I know a lot of people wh..."oh - you also bring up another interesting (to me) dynamic, ellen: the idea that personal knowledge of the author, in real life, can impact your desire or perception of their writing.
i was sorry to read that, within your circle of people, gilbert is 'fairly universally disliked'. gilbert was in toronto not too long ago and i heard the exact opposite from people i know who were able to spend quite a bit of time with her while she was here. they all found her incredibly lovely, smart and kind. things like this really interest me. and i am someone who probably thinks about things like this too much. in another group, we were recently discussing whether it's good or bad to know too much about an author?
Exactly. I can't remember the last time a book made me gasp out loud and say, also out loud, "oh, my GOD. Oh, no, she...they....no!" and to realize that, actually, the whole book was a kind of set-up to that moment....I don't know anyone else who read it, and, frankly, had trouble (like I am with The Dinner, and more pertinently, The People in the Trees) thinking of whom I could recommend it to; many people do not like to read books that might leave them uneasy or disturbed. But LIFE leaves us uneasy and disturbed, although maybe The Woman Upstairs goes just a little too far...I did just give it to a friend for her birthday, so I can't wait for her to read it so that we can discuss it.
We were simulposting. I have to presume that one's persona when one is on a book tour and meeting people whose affection for your book has helped to support you can sometimes be different than one's persona in one's home town where one is a minor celebrity. And you can't take my impressions as gospel, either -- this is what I've heard from my [fairly literary -- co-bookclub members] who happen to live in the same town with Gilbert.
I read both of these books and didn't love either. I definitely don't need to love the main character - I read The Woman Upstairs and thoroughly enjoyed the book - much more so than either of these two novels (I was disappointed it didn't make TOB). TSoAT I just didn't buy...I couldn't get lost in the story too many parts seemed forced or farcical to me and clearly that wasn't the author's intent. I did not love The Dinner either but I think I enjoyed its twists and style more. It was disturbing and more unpredictable and kept me engaged.
Looking at the rest of the line-up, I think so much has to do with the personality of the judges. in Lowland VS E&P, Jami Attenberg (who i know nothing about) has a tumblr with quotes from Lena Durham and photos of street fashion. This (plus the general "blah" attitude towards the Lowland) makes me think E&P is going to be the unlikely winner. Any opinions? For The Son VS At Night We Walk in Circles, my gut says The Son. I'm aBooking the son right now, and it is powerful and painful. I didn't read Circles. I checked it out from the library but I have infant twins and I just couldn't get it up to read Circles. This is another thing that depends strongly on the personality of the judge, though. I don't know much about John McElwee. Do you?
today's match-up is posted:The Lowland
vs.
Eleanor & Park
judge: Jami Attenberg
Jami Attenberg: Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park is a funny tearjerker that reads fast. Whoosh, it’s done, and you’re sad it’s over. I read it in a day, passionately, carrying it with me wherever I went all over the house I’m staying in for the winter, bumping my head three times on the same hanging lamp, the one I never see coming because it’s not familiar to me yet, and also because I am the kind of person who bumps her head on lamps.
It’s about a big, beautiful, eccentric girl in Omaha in the mid-1980s and the pretty, bright, biracial, emerging punk-rock boy who loves her and also is interested in wearing eyeliner. Eleanor lives in an abusive, overcrowded, poverty-stricken household. Park’s family, while complicated, is ultimately supportive and astonishingly soulful. Eleanor & Park is about love, and taking care of the people you love.
In particular I was charmed by Park’s relationship with his mother, who operates a hair salon in their garage. Here she bonds with him over her understanding of Eleanor’s home situation.
“I come from big family,” his mom said. “Three little sisters. Three little brothers.” She held out her hand, as if she were patting six heads.
She’d had a wine cooler with dinner, and you could tell. She almost never talked about Korea.
“What were their names? Park asked.
His mom’s hands settled softly in her lap.
“In big family,” she said, “everything…everybody spread so thin. Thin like paper, you know?” She made a tearing gesture. “You know?”
Maybe two wine coolers.
“I’m not sure,” Park said.
“Nobody gets enough,” she said. “Nobody gets what they need. When you always hungry, you get hungry in your head.” She tapped her forehead. “You know?”
The book alternates between Eleanor and Park’s perspectives, sometimes in very short paragraphs. This strategy hooked me immediately. Also the characters are so fresh and present and Rowell’s dialogue so witty, that even when they’re being whiny punk adolescent jerks you know you’re going to get something interesting from them in the end, so it just kept me reading. I cried a bunch while reading this book. A bunch! I would recommend it to practically anyone, except for people who describe themselves as book snobs, because there’s just no saving them from themselves.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland is a slow-moving, thoughtful tale that begins in 1960s Calcutta and concludes in modern-day America. I had to bribe myself to read it with the promise of long afternoon baths two days in a row. Eventually, though, I began to miss the book when I was not reading it, for somehow it had clawed its way under my skin, and I wanted to know how it ended.
It is the tale of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, one who leaves to study in America, and one who stays behind to become involved in the volatile Naxalite political movement. Udayan marries a woman, then dies (early in the novel, so no spoilers here!), and Subhash steps in to save his sister-in-law from an oppressive existence. This book is ambitious and politically minded. It, too, is about love, but more so about obligation.
The Lowland is beautifully described throughout. Lahiri’s gaze lingers so lovingly it makes my heart swell.
The gingko leaves, yellow a few days ago, glow apricot now. They are the only source of brightness this morning. Rain from the night before has caused a fresh batch of leaves to fall onto the bluestone slabs that pave the sidewalk. The slabs are uneven, forced up here and there by the roots of the trees. The treetops aren’t visible through the windows of Bela’s room, two steps ground level. Only when she emerges from the stoop, pushing open a wrought-iron gate, to step out into the day.
This is Brooklyn she’s talking about, by the way, not some sensuous rainforest. But Lahiri can make anything sound at its most magical and gorgeous.
If only she could handle the plotting and structure the same way. The research that Lahiri has done for this book is tremendous and I certainly appreciated being educated about an unfamiliar world, but too much historical/political information bogs down the first third of the book. Lahiri doesn’t truly let us get to know many of the characters until much later in the book (I did cry once), but I like to feel characters close to me all along. When Udayan died I felt so little, and I am pretty sure I should feel something—either positively or negatively—when a main character dies.
I am a big fan of Lahiri’s short stories and prefer them to her novels. I think she finds her rhythm better in more confined spaces. I will also admit I was prepared to be dismissive of yet another tale of an Indian academic in New England, but it’s her terrain, it’s what she knows, and that’s like telling Alice Munro she can’t write about small-town Canadian life or Murakami to stop writing about people magically disappearing and women’s earlobes. It’s what they do and you either get on board or miss the ride completely.
And Lahiri’s prose is really something worth witnessing. It’s certainly more accomplished and complex than Rowell’s. Reading her is like watching a champion skier race down a mountain. You’re standing and staring and your mouth is open and if you’re lucky you can hear a swish here and there, and you know you’ll never be able to do it but you’re glad someone else can.
Rowell’s prose is simple, nothing fancy, nothing extra, yet is still pretty special as-is. It’s like running a cross-country race with someone, and you can hear their breathing, and their footsteps, and you’re with them, you’re side by side with them every step of the way, breathing that same breath. It’s all very human and connected.
Oh, look, I have used sports metaphors and somehow we have all survived.
Anyway, the winner is Eleanor & Park because I enjoyed reading it much, much more than The Lowland. I felt closer to the characters and I cared urgently about what happened to them. That’s my kind of book.
TODAY’S WINNER: Eleanor & Park
i know E&P is beloved by those who have read it (i have not)...but i really didn't think it would move into round two. so...i find this interesting. and maybe i am a book snob. haha!! :) (i feel the need to qualify that while i don't read a lot of YA, hardly any, in fact, i did read The Fault in Our Stars last year...and i enjoyed it a lot. but i didn't think it was a good tournament book. so maybe i am only a half-snob??)
I knew this was a decent possibility, but this one still hurts... especially since my gut is telling me E&P had a far better chance to return as a zombie than Lowland. I know this Lahiri wasn't as universally beloved (I loved it, and so far it's my #2 book of the Tourney), but c'mon even "off" Lahiri is far better than a ton of books out there. Then again, Lahiri is write in my preference wheel-house, so am biased.I was prepared to like E&P, but it just really didn't do it for me. I am a child of the 80s and the book seem that much a love letter to the decade. I guess I never had the pain/angst of first time love in high school (making me even geekier/worse off than E&P), so maybe that's why I didn't relate either, tho had issues with its structure and didn't think the writing was anything particularly special either. (Thought last year's Fault was much, much better -- while still be uber-angsty and manipulative, ha!)
But alas, I do get the preference of loving/feeling a book more than respecting it... the 'ole artistic over technical score ice-skating analogy. But this is why I love ToB anything can happen... and it always does! ;-)
Ugh, this one really gets me upset! I haven't even read E&P, so I suppose I can't judge the judging, but I simply do not understand why everyone says that The Lowland was "cold" or "chilly." It was hands down the most emotional book I read this year. (I suppose maybe that might mean something about what I consider to be "emotional.") Seriously, even my review on goodreads talks about how Lahiri is the best writer because her sentences are gorgeous AND she can make you cry in public places.
I liked both The Lowland and Eleanor & Park very much and this was the head-to-head I was least looking forward to, but I also am discouraged by the general reception The Lowland has had. I cried through almost the entire second half of that book and felt very wrapped up in the story and characters, so I don't understand why some critics and readers have been less than enthused about it. It's also my #2 among the ToB selections I've managed to read (Life After Life being #1). I'm hoping it has some zombie potential.Many of the decisions so far seem to come down to "I just liked this book better." Maybe that's fair. I guess that's how we all judge books ultimately. I was hoping for more, though.
I'm a bit surprised but not unhappy about this one because I really enjoyed E&P. I think I enjoyed The Lowland more than the reviewer did but I also agreed with her from a pure joy of reading aspect I loved E&P. It's funny I always wrestle with books that I like and respect and know are technically amazing vs books that are just a pleasure to read. My GR ratings are probably a mix of me bouncing back and forth rating books based on if I just loved them vs if I thought they were impressive works even if the story didn't exactly do it for me. Where I'm still incredibly disappointed The Luminaries lost its round I'm happy this time....Now tomorrow if The Son doesn't win (my absolute favorite of the tournament and the year) I will be so sad. I really did not love At Night We Walk in Circles and I think it totally pales in comparison to The Son on every level so I should probably brace myself....
I really liked E&P - it was such a good audiobook. However, I figured that The Lowland would win because it was more literary. I agree with Katie that E&P was pure joy to read. This round reminded me that ultimately that is what counts - what books bring you pleasure. That is what we should read no matter what.
Even though I really like Jami Attenberg, I thought the commentary on today's bracket did a much better job of explaining why Eleanor & Park is a great pick. I loved it and I'm not a YA reader at all.
I've gotten all of them so far, but I'm not sure how much longer my predictions can hang on!
I've gotten all of them so far, but I'm not sure how much longer my predictions can hang on!
today's match-up decision is posted:The Son
vs.
At Night We Walk in Circles
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/
Judge: John McElwee - He works in the fiction department for the New Yorker and is a former literary agent at the London- and New York-based Aitken Alexander Associates. He contributes to special projects for The New Inquiry. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I used to represent Scott McClanahan.”
John McElwee: It’s a tall order to pit such vastly different, accomplished novels against each other. Meyer’s is a 200-year, six-generation-spanning saga of power and blood-reckoning in Texas. Alarcón’s is a formally daring take on art and repression in an anonymous but thinly veiled Peru. Cowboys and Indians versus Playwrights and Actors.
I’ll do my best, starting with the Meyer.
I hesitate to bandy about words like “Western” and “epic,” so I’ll just say that The Son is a very big book, a sort of foundational myth of the American frontier. It takes as its spine the life and legacy of Eli McCullough, aka “the Colonel,” born “the first male child” of Texas, who spends the next century at war. First, alongside the Comanche band that abducts, then embraces, him in his youth. Later, amongst Texas Rangers, Confederate cavalry, and hired hands, as he carves out a place for a perennial outsider such as himself. It ends up being a very big place, and the McCullough name becomes one of the wealthiest and most powerful in Texas.
The Colonel’s testament—as recorded by the WPA—is interspersed with the journals of his son Peter, who eschews his father’s Comanche-influenced admonition that “no land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.” Peter is riddled with guilt over the bloody seizure of their property—and its steady ruination, arranged by the Colonel himself, for the purposes of fortunes in ranching and, later, oil. Peter’s granddaughter, Jeannie, is decidedly less squeamish and carries the family banner—multiplying profit—through Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and to the turn of the 20th century, at once bolstered and, ultimately, undone by the Colonel’s view that “the story of the human race” is one of “soil to sand, fertile to barren, fruit to thorns. It is all we know how to do.”
But Peter’s father-haunted musings grow tiresome. Jeannie, though a refreshing and well-wrought female voice, is unfortunately more affecting as a failed East Coast debutante than an international oil magnate. I often found myself, in their chapters, longing to get back to the Colonel’s gripping portrayals of life on the frontier and amongst the Comanche, the extraordinary detail of which made me feel almost prepared to find some wilderness and set off into it for good.
Their stories, like their lives, unfold in the Colonel’s shadow, but this hardly detracts from a novel of such remarkable scope and heartbreaking specifics. This is the type of book you read at night until your eyes go crooked and you fall asleep with the light on.
One of the times this happened, I actually had a nightmare inspired by the book—being pursued by a pale rider in my childhood backyard—a feat that puts it in rare company with Frankenstein and Blood Meridian. The McCarthy comparisons people tend to throw at Meyer make sense in this respect, and, I’ll add, in the way he changed my view of humanity.
Mostly because of the startling way Meyer collapses time—like WJ Cash writing with Alan Gurganus’s heart—with its demonstration of how recently an entire way of life, from origin story to corporate hegemony, was ripped from the wild and from aboriginal hands. The sensation is best described by Jeannie: “As for JFK, it had not surprised her. The year he died, there were still living Texans who had seen their parents scalped by Indians.”
Daniel Alarcón’s At Night We Walk in Circles is a more slippery, complex novel, with many faces. It forgoes the narrative appeal of war for a deeper reflection on the illusion and disillusion that rides in war’s wake. At heart, it’s about art and idealism during a time when all the artists and idealists seem to have been eliminated—or, more accurately, about an artist prat-falling on the sword of his own craft.
The novel centers around a renegade theater troupe called Diciembre—legendary for its subversive productions during the “anxious years” of civil war in the ’80s—which has been defunct since its leader, Henry Nuñez, was arrested on trumped-up terrorism charges in 1986 and incarcerated for several months in the country’s most notorious prison, known as Collectors.
The story, related in a collage of interviews, journal extracts, and longer, inspired narrative bursts by an obsessive journalist, kicks off 15 years later, when Henry announces a revival of Diciembre. A young actor named Nelson, eager for a new direction in his stalled life, responds to his idol’s call and wins a part in his landmark play, “The Idiot President.” Leaving his widowed mother and on-again off-again girlfriend, Ixta, in the capital, Nelson embarks on a months-long tour of the production, performing in taverns, homes, fields, and markets across the country’s war-scarred, Andean interior.
We’re warned from the beginning that Nelson will meet a dark end, and, accordingly, their jaunt goes awry when Henry, captive to his experience in Collectors, reroutes the tour—a betrayal that forces his protégé to assume new roles for which he’s dangerously unprepared. The fourth wall crumbles in a bad way, and players and audience alike realize that, in Nelson’s words, “One could not enter the world of a play. One could not escape one’s life.”
The fact that I can tell you this without giving much away is a mark of the novel’s ingenuity—and its undoing, in my reading. Alarcón, or his narrator, brilliantly distributes Henry’s and Nelson’s stories in an daring, elliptical manner throughout the novel, racking up accomplishments along the way. He pulls off a rare, unpretentious portrait of artists at work, a crystalline meditation on the cultural performance of peace, and a powerful, textured sense of place, in spite of the place’s namelessness.
For sure, I’ll never forget Alarcón’s deadpan descriptions of Collectors. He’s writing at white heat in these scenes, which are harrowing and moving and, at times, somehow, sweet.
Take harrowing:
There were men: ordinary men as you might find on any street, in any neighborhood, tall men short men, skinny men, fat men, black men, brown men, white men (though only a few of those), tired men, frantic men, old men. They looked like people I’d known, people I’d seen before, only harder, perhaps. But that was only part of the story: together, they were outnumbered by another group, the broken men, and these were legion.
And imagine the chill that registers when he realized the only type of men who aren’t there are guards.
It’s a packed, rich book—multiple excerpts appeared in the magazine that employs me—but all of this incendiary material gradually loses its immediacy, filtered as it is, Savage Detectives-style, through the perspective of his obsessive interlocutor. It’s supposed to be tongue in cheek, but the narrator’s telling is too studied, too insistent with foreshadowing and whodunit techniques—too present. In the end, artifice trumps emotional content, and I felt kicked out of the book. I couldn’t shake the sense that I was reading a clever, structural solution to the problem of these beautifully, horribly intertwined lives.
Each of these authors aim high, but it seems to me that Meyer, even if he bit off more than he could possibly chew, knew where he was headed, while Alarcón was looking for a way out of the whole thing.
TODAY’S WINNER: The Son
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/
today's match-up is posted:The Goldfinch
vs.
Long Division
judge: Héctor Tobar
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...
Héctor Tobar: Before The Goldfinch arrived in my mailbox, I was not among the millions of readers who’d fallen under the sway of Donna Tartt. Her previous novels, including the ultra-mega-bestselling The Secret History, were unknown to me. (I’m usually allergic to bestselling anything). Once it was in my hands, the most notable thing about The Goldfinch was its heft: At nearly 800 pages in hardcover, it’s a massive object that will come in handy if LA ever breaks into rioting again and I’m in a looting mood.
By comparison, Kiese Laymon’s “paperback original” Long Division is svelte and unassuming. Laymon’s work was also unknown to me, but that’s more understandable: Long Division is his first novel.
I approached Tartt and Laymon like a man using his remote to switch between two TV football games, reading a chapter or two of one before turning to the other. This turned out to be a somewhat disorienting experience, given the wildly different parts of America on display in these two books from two very different natives of Mississippi. With The Goldfinch I was transported inside the kind of soft-focus vision of affluent, near-affluent, and cultured Manhattan that New York publishing peddles again and again to the 98 percent of us who are not Manhattanites. Then, with Long Division, I joyfully lost myself inside an exceedingly original vision of current-day, small-town Mississippi, listening to two African-American teens exchanging erudite insults in an imagined contest of wits that’s a hybrid of poetry slam and a spelling bee.
In Long Division, a young man named City is preparing to compete in The Fifth Annual Can You Use That Word in a Sentence National Competition. Crafting long, grammatically correct and viciously cutting sentences is a natural gift to City, and he can’t stop using it, even when he’s not on stage. On the schoolyard he flails sentences at his rival sentence-maker and nemesis, Lavander, who has the annoying habit of beginning his own sentences with the clause, “All things considered…”
“Look, I don’t have to consider all things to know you ain’t special because you know ‘plagiarize’ is spelled with two a’s, two i’s, and a z, not an s,” City begins in one astonishing run-on sentence and putdown of Lavander, “especially since if you train them XXL cockroaches in your locker, the ones that be the cousins of the ones chilling in prison with your old thieving-ass brother, Kwame, they could spell plagiarize with…the crumbs of a Popeye’s buttermilk biscuit, which are white buttery crumbs, that stay falling out of your halitosis-having daddy’s mouth when he tells you every morning, ‘Lavander, that boy, City, with all those wonderful waves in his hair, is everything me and your dead mama wished you and your incarcerated brother could be.’”
The writing in Long Division is a tour de force of colloquialisms and street slang put to intellectual good use. Laymon is undoubtedly a bright new voice in American fiction. But Donna Tartt ain’t no slouch either.
In the opening chapters of The Goldfinch, Tartt literally sets off an explosion to get the action going—and in the iconic Metropolitan Museum of Art, no less. Assorted other melodramatic turns follow, involving nefarious Russians, a soft-hearted furniture restorer, and various vacuous denizens of Las Vegas. But The Goldfinch is really a coming-of-age story with 13-year-old Theo Decker as its protagonist. The moment at which Theo becomes an orphan is also the moment at which his mother introduces him to the storied object of beauty around which The Goldfinch revolves: a painting by the 17th-century Dutch master Carel Fabritius. The work (which exists in real life) is one the few Fabritius paintings to have survived a 1654 explosion that destroyed his studio and much of the city in which he lived.
“He was Rembrandt’s pupil, Vermeer’s teacher,” Theo’s mother tells him as they stand before the painting. “And this one little painting is really the missing link between the two of them—that clear pure daylight, you can see where Vermeer got his quality of light from.”
Tartt’s account of the life of Fabritius and of the adventure his painting takes up but a few pages: but all alone it makes the first 100 pages of The Goldfinch well worth the price of admission. Tartt’s novel is a celebration of the creative spirit, and of the innocence of those who seek out beauty in an otherwise crass and greedy world. Tartt is a practiced professional, and she manages to keep the story moving and the pages turning, even though The Goldfinch is one of those books that makes me wish I were a book editor: Too often its domestic scenes drift aimlessly, and Theo’s many foils verge perilously close to stereotype.
As Long Division moves forward, City’s story takes several turns that are not quite predictable, but that aren’t especially surprising either. On stage at his big, nationally televised contest, City confronts bald racism from the white people in charge: He’s asked to craft a sentence using a synonym for stingy that sounds a lot like a vile ethnic slur. Even if I used that word right, I’d lose, City protests. The humor gets broader, and Laymon’s satire loses its edge. At the same time, City’s principal has given him a book to read, and this becomes a novella within the larger novel. I found this secondary story confusing and not especially compelling, given that its cast of characters resemble the sketches of historical figures you might find in a high-school history textbook. Overall, Long Division is a wonderful debut effort from Laymon; if we’re lucky enough to get a second novel from him, he’s certain to take on the big themes of history and justice with more textured characters and scenes.
Tartt’s narrative strategy in The Goldfinch is simple but effective: She creates non-threatening worlds that are familiar to the reader, and then introduces the odd threat to this domestic tranquility: terrorists, mobsters, self-involved parents. It’s not quite my cup of tea, frankly, but she never fails to show off her mastery of the many settings into which her story wanders: a little Ukrainian slang here, a bit of Amsterdam moodiness there. And for that reason, Tartt’s The Goldfinch is my winner.
TODAY’S WINNER: The Goldfinch
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...
today's match-up:Life After Life
vs.
The People in the Trees
judge: John Green
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...
John Green: I am a longtime fan of the Tournament of Books, but I never realized until now what a dirty and messy business it is to choose one excellent book over another. And now, not entirely convinced of my own decision, I must endeavor to convince you that I made the right one.
Let us begin with Life After Life, Kate Atkinson’s novel of the multiverse. On the first page, Ursula Todd murders Hitler in 1930. In the following chapter, she dies while being born in 1910. Each time she dies—and she dies a lot—we turn the page and she is alive again, in an otherwise identical world, with a vague deja vu-like awareness of what must be done in order to avoid death. This allows us to see 20th-century England from many perspectives: In one life, she is living in Germany and married to a Nazi; in another, she is a victim of the Blitz.
But what’s most interesting about Ursula is the lives she can’t lead, because she is a British woman born in the early 20th century. She can’t, say, be a fancy higher-up in the Home Office during World War II like her brother. To seek a career is to reject marriage. To be married is to lose sovereignty. Ursula can live again and again, but she can never wake up from history.
The obvious questions here—if you could live your life over, would you do it better; how do we construct meaning in human life when such tiny details decide our fate; etc.—are interesting enough, but what makes the novel really work is the Todd family itself. Atkinson’s pastoral English family drama is so rich and witty that when Ursula ends up (in most of her lives) leaving home for London, I kept missing the family homestead, Fox Corner, even though Ursula’s lives during the Blitz offer up lots of thrilling bombing and intrigue and sex.
Ultimately, the novel is distinguished not by its premise but by its precise characterizations and relationships. At one point, a character (I’m trying to avoid spoilers here) describing grief says, “I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.” That line gave form and expression to my own experiences with grief, and in doing so helped me to feel less alone in the world. Ursula’s story did lose some momentum for me in the final 100 pages, but I experienced those wonderful jolts throughout the book.
And then we have The People in the Trees. What a book. What a weird, fascinating, and provocative book. I’ve never read anything like it. The People in the Trees is the fictional autobiography of disgraced Nobel Prize winner Dr. Norton Perina, who helped to uncover a group of people whose lives have been dramatically prolonged by eating the meat of a certain turtle, although at the cost of profound dementia. They live forever, but squawk incomprehensibly, and the women don’t even shave their armpits.
The genius of Yanagihara’s story is that she takes established ideas—about civilization and language and privilege and capitalism and science—and offers us a genuinely fresh perspective through Perina’s profoundly unreliable narration. For instance, it had never previously occurred to me that one of the reason “civilized” people (especially academics) are so interested in foraging communities is that they are immortal in a way we aren’t: Their way of life in their communities could go on as currently lived for millions of years; we know ours cannot.
Yanagihara wonderfully plays out all this and much more through the lives of the Uvu’ivuans, the Micronesian people Perina devotes his life to studying. But of course the romanticization of the primitive is as dehumanizing as any other single way of imagining the other, and Perina is quite the essentializer.
The knock on this novel is that Perina himself is pretty horrible: He’s long-winded, exceptionally pleased with himself, and astonishingly misogynistic. Here, he is describing a female colleague:
I did not look at her, but around her seemed the sickening scent of menstrual blood, a tinnily feminine smell so oppressive that it was a relief finally to begin the day’s climb and to find it vanishing slowly into the odors of the jungle. And from then on I was unable to look at her without thinking of oozing liquids, as thick and heavy as honey but rank and spoiled, seeping from her every hidden orifice.
If that’s not enough to make you want to punch him in the face, Perina is also a pedophile.
But anyone who has read much anthropology—particularly the stuff from the ’50s and ’60s in which white men would write of their encounters with untouched, uncivilized, innocent primitives—will recognize the narrative voice. These days, it seems likable protagonists are a requirement of literature, but I’ve always enjoyed reading from the perspective of someone whom I can joyfully revile, and Perina fits the bill. But of course what’s finally so troublesome is that Perina isn’t so different from any of us whose privileged gaze takes in those we see as less civilized.
I’m still trying to get my head around The People in the Trees; it left me bewildered and troubled, and while certainly Perina’s voice can be exhausting, it’s a magnificent way into examining race, power, and what we mean when we talk about civilization. Don’t fear that it’s all boring and philosophical, though: There’s jungle adventure and the thrill of discovery and the horror of the Faustian debt coming due. It’s a roaring good read, provided you don’t mind despising your narrator much of the time. I can’t remember the last time I read a first novel so complex and intellectually engaging. This is the real deal—a big book that’s also a very good one, centered on issues that are absolutely central to the well-examined contemporary life.
Because it feels so fresh and relevant, my vote goes to The People in the Trees, but I do hope that through the magic of Zombie voting, Life After Life will live to fight another day.
TODAY’S WINNER: The People in the Trees
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...
I thought his commentary was wonderful but I am less surprised than some. I have casually followed some of his twitter and vlog stuff and he has always seemed thoughtful. I don't fall in the camp of TPIT lovers, I found it mostly boring and had to stab myself awake to get through most of it but I can appreciate the reasons. I agree more with the commentary below though and preferred LAL but oh well maybe a zombie!!
Jan wrote: "Jess, Jennifer, where is the Like button when I need it? :-) By the way, GLB is also wonderful on audio."I love to find out what books are great on audio. Any others?
I fear I am way too invested in the Tournament of Books -- and particularly in The People in the Trees and its place therein. I read this judgment in a Starbucks yesterday morning while taking a friend for some medical tests, and not only did I make a loud exclamation (I refuse to say "shouted out loud"), but I actually felt tears come to my eyes. And I LIKED Life After Life! but to me, The People in the Trees was a thing apart, and I had EXACTLY the reaction John Green did, to close it and say -- wow, what a book. I never, ever thought it would get past the first round -- way too difficult and hard-to-swallow in its thematic material -- and I still can't fathom anyone of my acquaintance to whom I could recommend it, but I still say -- what a book. John Green, just in case you're reading these comments, I applaud you.I will say -- I can't see how John Warner, having given up after 100 pp., can appreciate or agree with the analysis. 100 pp. of this book can't even begin to give you an idea of it.
todays is the beginning of the quarter-finals. we have:Hill William
vs.
A Tale for the Time Being
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/
judge: lydia kiesling, who is a staff writer at The Millions, where she writes criticism, essays, and the semi-regular column “Modern Library Revue.” She lives in San Francisco. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I reviewed The Goldfinch for the Rumpus.”
Lydia Kiesling: I began reading A Tale for the Time Being and by page seven felt guilty that this process was going to be such a breeze. Some books are so upfront about the fact that they are going to beguile the shit out of you that you can’t do anything but cancel your plans, hunker down on the couch with your mohair blankie, and be beguiled. Ozeki’s novel is itself structured around these kinds of beguiling narratives. I arrived home to a package on my doorstep; inside it were unfamiliar books and salted caramels. This novel’s protagonist (Ruth, suspiciously like the author Ruth Ozeki) walks along the beach and finds a bag covered in barnacles containing a Hello Kitty lunchbox and assorted wondrous texts. One of these is the diary of a young person so winsome that Ruth enters into a whole metaphysical Zen space-time science situation in order to help her out. Naoko Yasutani, aged 16 and channeling a little bit of Harriet the Spy, writes from the refuge of a French maid-themed cafe of dubious repute, telling her unknown readers about her bullying classmates, her Zen Buddhist great-grandmother, and her suicidal father, with whom she is “living in a spaceship” in Tokyo, orbiting her happy former life. Like Ruth, I loved her right away.
When I finished Ozeki’s novel and began Hill William, I was not beguiled. I felt the urge to hunker down, but only to protect myself from the raw shit the universe doles out to the people living in it. All the same, I wondered if I was going to be the bystander/referee in a classic David and Goliath scenario. In the curious way of fiction, the novel’s narrator (Scott, suspiciously like the author Scott McClanahan) makes real the things you read in the news, makes you feel how lives are ruined because someone asks the wrong neighbor boy to babysit. His defenseless little animals—a baby flying squirrel crushed in a La-Z-Boy, a hamster named Hardees lost in a concrete porch—are analog to their human counterparts: raped boys and girls, the lonely and reviled Gay Walter. Hill William made me want to gather up the whole world in a hug and just suffer the little children right unto me. But you know the kids would turn into fractious, rage-filled men like Hill William’s own narrator; the hamster would smell and eventually die.
I am not the first Tournament judge to end up with books weirdly ordered around similar themes. The people of these novels are helpless in the face of things they cannot control, from the micro to the macro, from individual human threats of cruelty and sexual violence, to enormous forces like capitalism, plate tectonics, and time. In Hill William, it is poverty, mental illness, and perennial abuse. If you’re a flying squirrel, it is the hard luck of falling in love with a recliner and being crushed in its coils. It is deafness and blindness and trucks that haul away the trees, leaving the mountains “chewed up and raw.” In A Tale for the Time Being, it is the sadism of teenagers and the cowardice of substitute teachers. It is Alzheimer’s, the Fukushima reactor, and the military-industrial complex. All of the two books’ respective characters have to assert themselves where they can. In Hill William, they carve their initials into soft turtle bellies. They molest their neighbors, get baptized, punch themselves, see a therapist. In Ozeki’s novel, they drop bombs on whales. They join convents, aim their kamikaze planes into the sea, write memoirs, plant an Eocene forest.
While I admired both of these books, I finished with a clear favorite. Conceding this made me fretful and preemptively defensive. I don’t know that Ruth Ozeki exactly has the backing of the entire publishing establishment, but her novel sports an award medallion on its cover and a blurb from O, The Oprah Magazine. Hill William is a small unorthodox square, with authentic typos on its thin pages. Everything about it says “underdog.” I did not even think of it as a novel until I finished it and saw someone refer to it as such on the internet. I had been thinking of it as a series of short stories, or face-punching little vignettes, child rape, and misery linking together like a remote mountain chain. A Tale for the Time Being began to look almost safe and cozy by comparison. I am not at all enthusiastic about McClanahan’s primitive-ecstatic style—“I hit myself. / It feels like a prayer. / I hit myself. / It feels like something strange. / I hit myself. / It feels like something beautiful.”—but that’s just, like, my taste. How bourgeois of me, I thought, to order art in accordance with my taste. I thought of the mohair blankie with shame.
But the thing is, I love long, beguiling books you lose the day to. I love frame narratives and frames-within-frames and smart suffering teenage girls and depressed fathers and frustrated novelists with writer’s block and missing cats. I love reading about people’s weird marital vibes and their homes on desolate islands with tall trees and ancient oyster beds. I love putting a book on my shelf that I know I’m going to read again, on some future platonic day when the rain falls and I’ve got nowhere to be. I love getting punched in the face, too, and Ozeki delivers her own kind of punch. If we decide to measure achievement by things that profoundly disturb the heart and the stomach, recall Nao’s own sexual assault at the hands of her classmates, the evidence posted online for her father to discover. Obsessively trawling for coverage of the tsunami, Ruth watches an interview with a man who saw his wife and infant son get carried away by the wave: “‘That life with my family is the dream,’ he says. He gestures toward the ruined landscape. ‘This is the reality.’”
When Ruth asks a beachcomber friend about the origin of the Hello Kitty lunchbox, she is warned against letting “narrative preferences interfere with [her] forensic work.” “I can’t help it,” Ruth replies. “My narrative preferences are all I’ve got.” I think that, in contests like these, bizarre things happen when people circumvent their aesthetic instincts to satisfy a metric of quality or justice to which they do not naturally ascribe. So I’ve decided not to worry about underdogs or who is more raw or who has had more fellowships. Yes, my face aches from McClanahan’s punches. My heart aches for his denuded mountaintops and all his wounded little boys and girls. But in the end, it’s Naoko Yasutani I want to put my arms around. It’s Ozeki’s novel I want to take home.
TODAY’S WINNER: A Tale for the Time Being
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/
Liz wrote: "Jan wrote: "Jess, Jennifer, where is the Like button when I need it? :-) By the way, GLB is also wonderful on audio."I love to find out what books are great on audio. Any others?"
Ruth Ozeki reads A Tale for the Time Being and it is really wonderful. A different experience from reading it on paper with all the footnotes, etc but she knows how to pronounce all the Japanese words and brings the perfect nuance to the audio. It was my favorite book of the ToBX.
Anne wrote: "I love to find out what books are great on audio. Any others?"Hi, Anne, I just posted this on another TOB thread. I haven't listened to it, but have been told that The Luminaries is excellent on audio. Good Lord Bird is a fabulous, as mentioned previously, as are The Son and Signature of All Things. Filthy Rich, Life After Life, and The Lowland are also good on audio. This is the first year I've succeeded in reading all the TOB entries, and part of the reason is audiobook listening. :-)
Ellen wrote: "I fear I am way too invested in the Tournament of Books -- and particularly in The People in the Trees and its place therein. I read this judgment in a Starbucks yesterday morning while taking a f..."You might be my brain twin, Ellen. I live in fear that John, Kevin, and The Morning News gang will decide this has become too much work and 10 is a nice round number to stop with. How would I organize my year of reading if not by trying to psych out the TOB short list? :-) TOB makes me think so much more about the social aspects of reading, and how deeply gratifying it is when a judge you respect responds to a book in the same way you did -- especially a book like People that can generate such intense responses. I do believe it is the deepest "love the book"/"hate the narrator" reading experience I've *ever* had.
Jan wrote: "Anne wrote: "I love to find out what books are great on audio. Any others?"Hi, Anne, I just posted this on another TOB thread. I haven't listened to it, but have been told that The Luminaries is ..."
I tried to listen to The Luminaries but it was too complex for me to wrap my brain around. In one ear and out the other, I'm afraid.
For this year's ToB I listened to A Tale for the Time Being, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, The Dinner, The Lowland, AT Night We Walk in Circles and The People in the Trees. I managed to get through all the books in the tournament except for Hill William, The Tuner of Silences and Long Division. Apparently I didn't miss much as none of those has done very well.
Anne wrote: "I managed to get through all the books in the tournament except for Hill William, The Tuner of Silences and Long Division. Apparently I didn't miss much as none of those has done very well..."True, but Long Division got a lot of enthusiastic responses from the judge and commentariat. It's a fun read...a weird-ass book with a lot going on, great energy to the writing, and very charming characters. It's short and well worth a read, even if it fell before The Goldfinch.
Agree on Long Division. It and hill William were two I hadn't heard of all all pre tourney and am glad I read even if they didn't go on ;)
Katie wrote: "Agree on Long Division. It and hill William were two I hadn't heard of all all pre tourney and am glad I read even if they didn't go on ;)"Yes! Those discoveries are a big part of the fun.
today's match-up:The Good Lord Bird
vs.
The Signature of All Things
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...
Judge: ToB 2014 Reader Judge Greg Walklin is an Assistant Attorney General at the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office, where he practices in the consumer protection and antitrust division. He and his wife, Tiffany, live in Lincoln, Neb. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I reviewed The Lowland.”
Greg Walklin: As an attorney, I take comfort in the old legal proverb “the best judge knows least,” as I knew next to zilch about either Elizabeth Gilbert or James McBride or these two books. I’d like to think that this gives my judgment some modicum of objectivity. It was, of course, impossible for me not to know Gilbert as the author of Eat, Pray, Love, or that McBride had penned The Color of Water—the former was ubiquitous in my neighborhood coffee shops around the release of the Julia Roberts flick, the latter among composition undergrads when I was in college. But nothing I’d seen or read had left much of an impression.
At first blush, these two novels appear strikingly different. One is about a rich white woman living among Euclidean gardens, and the other about a starving black slave aiding a violent rebellion. Upon finishing them, however, what struck me were their similarities: both The Good Lord Bird and The Signature of All Things are historical fiction, both are set in America in the 19th century (1859 is a year of particular import for both stories), both have narrators whose obliviousness causes them heartache, and both are, I’d argue, coming-of-age novels.
Both are also pretty great.
In The Signature of All Things, Alma Whittaker grows up “a girl possessed by a soaring enthusiasm for systems, sequence, pigeonholing, and indexes.” Early on, there is a beautiful scene where Alma learns how to tell time by the opening and closing of various flowers, and another where she plays the role of a comet in an astronomer’s living model of the solar system. “What Alma wanted to know most of all was how the world was regulated. What was the master clockwork behind everything?” The bulk of this novel finds Alma studying away in her estate’s carriage house, examining plants under microscope, and ignoring the sacrifices those around her make, until she finds a special fascination with mosses. It’s not as dull as it sounds. She’s searching—although she’s not always actually aware she is searching—for the ultimate system (“the signature of all things,” as her evanescent husband terms it).
Lest you think Gilbert has departed entirely from her bestselling memoir, Alma does eventually go on her own midlife crisis eat/pray/love-ish quest to Tahiti—this, rousing Alma out of her (and the plot’s) funk, is the novel’s strongest section. But Alma’s problems are more complex than what some yoga and good cooking can fix: they’re existential, sexual, and intellectual, and while they’re modern issues, Gilbert is talented enough that they don’t feel altogether anachronistic.
While one long early chapter recounting Alma’s father’s rags-to-riches rise seems out of place, The Signature of All Things ultimately emerges as a different kind of bildungsroman, where the heroine takes an entire lifetime to come of age. Even though this makes for a slow plot, I didn’t mind it much: Alma is charmingly ignorant of the social world and scholarly without being pedantic. Her silver-spoon upbringing doesn’t elicit much of my natural sympathy, so keeping her likeable is a notable achievement. Undoubtedly, in this age where it takes many of us longer and longer to grow up, Alma’s lifetime of learning—and her social awkwardness—is particularly relevant. (If she’d been born in the 21st century, some physician might even have stuck her somewhere on the autism spectrum. Like some individuals with autism, Alma does have an oral fixation, although hers is of an erotic variety.)
Henry Shackleford, the enslaved protagonist of The Good Lord Bird, presents a stark contrast to the privileged Alma. Henry doesn’t have an endless library, microscope, or carriage house. He is forced to grow up nearly overnight after being suddenly liberated by John Brown, the violent, scripture-quoting abolitionist. Initially because of a mix-up, Henry dons a bonnet pretending to be Henrietta, sobriquet Onion. For his own safety, he remains masquerading as a girl most of the novel—all the way to Brown’s famous raid on Harpers Ferry.
Onion’s forced cross-dressing is at times not terribly believable, but mostly it’s a brilliant choice: this book highlights, like none other I’ve read, the falsities and contradictions of America before the Civil War. “[E]verything on this prairie’s a lie, child,” a self-hating prostitute, who recognizes Onion is a boy, says. “Ain’t nothing what it looks like. Look at you. You’s a lie. Slavery is a lie, of course, that certain people aren’t equal to others.” John Brown is considered “crazy” partly for claiming all men are created equal, but “would tell a fib in a minute to help his cause.” The usually lionized Frederick Douglass is lampooned as a bigamist, lothario, and drunkard who strongly implies “mulattoes” are better than “most Negroes.” Of the historical figures fictionalized in The Good Lord Bird, only Harriet Tubman emerges generally unscathed.
McBride uses Onion’s indelible voice, which accomplishes a variety of feats—it feels authentic and original, and manages to be readable despite being entrenched in the idiom of the age. The Good Lord Bird wouldn’t be half the novel it is without Onion’s gems of description and insight: Onion speaks of prostitutes “generally so ugly they’d make the train leave the track” while the courtesan Onion falls for (the aforementioned self-hating woman) “had the kind of rhythm that you could hear a thousand miles down the Missouri.” Funny, sad, lapidary, moving, transgressive, puzzling: The Good Lord Bird makes a strong case that it, in fact, should move on.
Since I loved both novels, then, how could I choose between the two? After agonizing for a while, I fell back on my profession: like all lawyers, I tried to reason my way through it. Writing lists of weaknesses and strengths, the idea was to assess which one had the stronger case, the better “argument” in legal speak. But that proved fruitless, so I looked back at previous Tournament of Books judgments for guidance—our own version of legal precedent. Previous judges inspired my standard: If I was going to subject another judge to the winner of these two novels, which book was more deserving of being read again?
And it was The Good Lord Bird that more urgently demands, I think, another reader. Many facets of McBride’s picaresque slave story made me stop and seriously pause—such as the small detail revealed in the opening chapter that, despite wanting throughout the novel to flip off the bonnet and announce himself as a boy, Onion ends up cross-dressing his entire life, until he is accused of “scoundreling and funny-touching a fast li’l something named Peaches.” Great books, it has been often said, make you go back to the first page and start reading again. That was the first thing I did upon finishing The Good Lord Bird.
By the end of my reading, I had pretty well figured Alma out, but Onion escapes my comprehension (and his own, too, I’d wager). I like that. The contradictory world of The Good Lord Bird feels far more authentic than the neat, orderly system that The Signature of All Things assembles. How far should we go to accomplish things that we know are right? Was John Brown justified in his violent rebellion? Was he a hero whose comrades failed him? Did the whole country fail him? Or was his apotheosis a lie? The world is on trial in The Good Lord Bird, and there’s evidence for its guilt and innocence. I want to see what another judge (and another, and another…) will think.
Calvino once wrote, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” While The Signature of All Things starts conversations, I don’t think The Good Lord Bird will stop talking to us for a long time.
TODAY’S WINNER: The Good Lord Bird
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...
today's match-up:Eleanor & Park
vs.
The Son
judge: John Freeman is the author of The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox and How to Read a Novelist. He teaches at Columbia University. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “None.”
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...
John Freeman: Reading these two novels back to back might have been the oddest literary double-header of my life.
Philipp Meyer’s The Son is a grand, blood-splattered historical epic about the violent settlement of Texas. If it were an animal it’d be a bear—a big, bristle-haired, gore-mouthed grizzly capable of dragging a fully loaded 18-wheeler across, say, 2,000 miles of frozen tundra simply because it was bored and had a newish toy.
And then, out of sheer pique, it might eat that semi.
The other book, Eleanor & Park, is a swift, tunes-mad tale of teenage romance. It’s playful and likable, a 320-page teddy bear that burps up sayings if you squeeze it. I say this because I have never spent this much time in the head of fictional 16-year-olds who have thought so little about sex, and this book seems to be screaming, each time you squeeze, “Love each other but don’t even think about sex!”
I tried reading them simultaneously but The Son kept trying to eat Eleanor & Park, so I divided them and read each separately.
Eleanor & Park did not win me over at the start. It begins, as far too many YA novels I have read do, with a new kid coming to town. Eleanor is freckly, awkward, and dresses in thrift-store clothes before it was cool to do so. Also: Eleanor buys clothes at Goodwill because she is poor.
In the opening scene Eleanor hops on the school bus to a high school in Nebraska and sits down next to Park. He’s Korean-American, listens to Sub-Pop records, has dated the cool girl (even if this was back in grade school), and knows Taekwondo. He might be different, but his peers respect him.
Alternating between the two teenagers, we watch as their awkwardness evolves from passive aggression to a form of courtship. The book gently maps itself atop Romeo and Juliet, and even has a few scenes in which characters quote from or talk about the play.
This scaffolding turns out not to be necessary; Rainbow Rowell finds her groove fairly quickly and then this book develops the friendly rhythm of a rom-com. Park notices Eleanor reading his comic books over his shoulder, so he slows down and makes it easier for her to do so. She laughs at how subtle he thinks he’s being, but soon she can’t stop thinking about him.
The novel is not without edginess. Rowell easily enters the paranoid mind of teenage romance. After they finally hold hands, Park worries he’s gone too far. “Jesus,” he thinks, “Was it possible to rape somebody’s hand?”
I was relieved that Rowell didn’t make too much of the racial difference between Park and Eleanor. They simply like each other, in a G-rated way. She likes his hair and his skin. He fancies her freckles. Taking it to the next level is talking on the telephone. Neither of them has a driver’s license.
In many ways, Eleanor & Park reads like a historical novel. There is no Facebook, Instagram, texting, or easily accessible porn. It’s as if Rowell has decided to strip all the microprocessors and dark matter out of teenage romance, and return it to an idealized pastoral place where 16-year-olds who catch a lucky break and have a whole day alone at home do a bit of kissing and then talk meaningfully about their families.
The only darkness at the edge of this town is a series of dirty messages someone keeps scrawling on Eleanor’s binder, the kind of expletives you find written on bathroom stalls. Simultaneously, her mother’s new boyfriend turns out to be a drunk and dangerously controlling. Something is going to break, and Park and Eleanor’s romance becomes a kind of safe haven for her. Or will it break, too?
No novel operates under a burden of realism, because even realism is a pose. Still, if a novel adopts the pose of realism—drawing from pop culture, forms of speech, news stories; unfurling scenes in a filmic way, like long set-pieces—to simply set a whole issue aside feels like a dodge. Even for a character, like Eleanor, who is feeling slightly haunted. Here are teenagers free-spirited enough to speak their minds, to swear, to get in fights, but somehow it takes them almost 300 pages to finally think of, say, masturbation or sex?
I haven’t read enough YA fiction to judge how common this de-genitalization of teenagers is, but it feels like a disservice. (Even if it pleases a few—if not all—librarians.) How less alone I felt, in contrast, when I read Judy Blume’s great novels, to know it’s OK to have desires.
Eleanor & Park seems to pry desire apart from young love, to shut down the express lane between the two. Or slow it down. Perhaps that’s appropriate for teenagers of a certain age: to stop, to wait, to listen to their hearts. Take a break for safety’s sake. But to not even acknowledge the continuum feels like wishful thinking.
The Son leaves none of the gory details out. Like how when you rip off a scalp the remaining bits of connective tissue might glint in the light of a New Mexico spring day. Or the fact that deer tendons make excellent tensile string for a bow and arrow. Want to know how a man screams when he is tortured? What a man’s dying breath sounds like when he is shot through the chest by a yard-long arrow? Read onward.
The Son boldly sweeps forward through nearly two centuries of American history, lassoing all the great contradictions into an epic multi-generational family tale. The McCulloughs are Texas royalty, which means they have stolen, killed, and worked for the quarter-million-plus acres of their ranch. It once was scrub, then it is range for cattle, and by tale’s end it’s pumping out oil.
There are a lot of characters in this book, but we get to know a few closely. Eli McCullough, known as the Colonel, is born in the early 1800s. As a teenager he watches a band of marauding Comanche storm his family’s ranch, murdering and raping his mother and sister, before he is taken into their band as a kind of slave and given the name Tiehteti-taibo, which means “Pathetic Little White Man.”
Eli’s tale of his capture and survival is an astonishing piece of narrative, full of terror and humor and a peculiar form of bearing witness. During the first years of abduction he does women’s work: carrying water, tanning hides, collecting ash. Gradually, he learns to shoot, to resist, and in slow motion he becomes a kind of man in Comanche terms, earning his captor’s trust and coming to respect their ways. He observes the conservation and honor of their epic buffalo hunts, is party to the murderous battles they have with other tribes and with the occasional army ranger who wanders into their path; he takes a lover, and then another one.
It is startling in a book so rich in adventure, killing, and dangerous loving that Eli’s story does not dominate it. Meyer follows several other storylines: In 1915, Eli’s son, Peter, regrets the rising tide of racism that brings the McCulloughs to war with their Spanish neighbors and turns their relationship to the local Mexicans paternalistic.
Simultaneously, the book follows a watery day in the life of Jeanne Anne McCullough, Peter’s tough-as-nails granddaughter. She has fallen in her home, and as she dips in and out of consciousness, she flashes through scenes of her life, growing up rich in a masculine world, living in the shadowy legend of a great family name even as its numbers are thinned by war and conflict.
As the novel creeps forward in time, history’s score begins to repeat. Hubris leads to a downfall; strong men take what they want and apologize later; when no justification is available, an enemy is created and turned into something less than human. The Mexican royalty gets greedy; their people need a strong man. A century later the new oilmen are singing the same tune about the Arabs in the Middle East.
Meyer’s characters are aware of history’s echo, and yet they often ignore it in the way that people close to violence acquire a numbing cynicism or emboldening righteousness. The McCulloughs’ tale, though, prompted neither emotion in this reader. Not since Child of God have I read a novel so steeped in blood, yet so gently hopeful its blood-spilt tale will turn a reader’s head. There is sprung poetry in its sentences, and gore abounding. It wins this round with one swipe of its mighty paw.
TODAY’S WINNER: The Son
http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...
This topic has been frozen by the moderator. No new comments can be posted.
Tournament of Books
Books mentioned in this topic
Life After Life (other topics)The Good Lord Bird (other topics)
Life After Life (other topics)
The People in the Trees (other topics)
The Good Lord Bird (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
John Freeman (other topics)John Green (other topics)
Héctor Tobar (other topics)
Jami Attenberg (other topics)
Roger Hodge (other topics)
More...
You know, I didn't love either of these books -- but I may be the only person on the planet who read both of them and preferred The Tuner of Silences. Not a lot -- but enough to be notable. It seemed so much more unassuming than Good Lord Bird, and I was puzzled by much of what puzzled Sarah Schulman -- without her prism or her clear anger at those things. I wanted to love it, and I had it on my list to read before the ToB, but I just...didn't. Tuner of Silences I'd never even heard of, nor had I heard of the author -- but I found it a better read. Go figure.