Monthly Archives: December 2008

Now for my last post of 2008. Thanks to everyone who visited here through the last year — I’ve greatly appreciated your company! I hope each and every one of you has a great 2009.

So, to my favorite books of the year. To be clear, this list will have nothing to do with the best books published in 2008; I read only five books from the past year, and only one of them is good enough to appear here (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle).  Undoubtedly, it was a great year for nonfiction. Nonfiction accounted for less than 30% of all the books I read, but I could easily justify a best-of list with nothing else on it.  I’ve raved so much about the books I’m about to list, that most of you will be thoroughly bored by them and are probably eager for me to move on to something else.  Still, if I’m going to write about my favorite books, these ones must appear (links are to my posts on the book):

1. Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage.  This is a book about trying to write a book about D.H. Lawrence.  I’ve never been a Lawrence fan, but that doesn’t matter — what matters is Dyer’s brilliant, original voice.  The book rages and rambles, and I happily followed Dyer wherever he wanted to go.
2. George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone.  A friend gave me this book as a gift, and I’m so glad she did because otherwise I would have missed out on something wonderful.  I loved this book so much I’ve recommended it to tons of people, and in fact, I praised it so highly to Hobgoblin that he assigned it in one of his classes.  I hope the students liked it.
3. Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman. Malcolm is a writer I’ll read no matter whom she writes about.  This book is about the reputations of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and the story of her researches into their lives and their biographers.  Malcolm makes fascinating material out of the way reputations are formed and biographies are written.
4. Jenny Diski, Stranger on a Train and Skating to Antarctica.  I’ve raved about these books plenty already — no need to do it any more.
5. David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster.  Wallace’s essayistic voice is so utterly charming and friendly, you don’t want ever the book to end, and you forgive him for being way, way smarter than you are.  He can make any subject he takes up seem like the most fascinating subject in the world.

Also really great: A.J.A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo, Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf’s Nose, and Joan Didion’s The White Album.  It’s a little absurd to list nine books out of eighteen as being especially great, but the truth is, they all deserve to be there.

But I read more than nonfiction.  Here are some of my favorite novels:

1. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. This book was incredibly odd, and that’s exactly the kind of book I like.  Even better, it’s oddness has to do with religion, a combination I find irresistable.
2. Cormac McCarthy, The Road.  I’ll never be a huge McCarthy fan and read everything he’s written, but this one was powerful and haunting and hard to forget.
3. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford.  This is a charming book, plain and simple.  Not a whole lot happens in it, but that doesn’t matter in the least.  It’s a book that will make you happy.
4. David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.  If Cranford makes you happy, this one will make you cry.  But it will awe you at the same time — it’s such a haunting story, so beautifully written, and so moving.
5. Tom McCarthy, Remainder.  This one won’t make you happy and won’t make you cry — instead, it makes you think.  It’s an experimental, philosophical novel, one that makes you think about happiness, and also authenticity, self-awareness, and existence.  It’s odd and clever and fun.

Also really great: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (review to come).

Not a bad year, right?

Cross-posted here.

In light of all the discussion over at Reading Gaddis about originality and creativity,  I was struck by the passage (on p. 89 in the Penguin) where Wyatt quotes Herr Koppel, his art instructor in Munich:

That romantic disease, originality, all around us we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original … Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way.  When you paint you do not try to be original, only you think about your work, how to make it better, so you copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates … you do not invent shapes, you know them, auswendig wissen Sie, by heart…

Up to this point, I’d been thinking about originality and creativity in religious terms because of Aunt May’s diatribe about how being creative is usurping God’s role.  But Wyatt didn’t just get this lesson from Aunt May — he got it from Herr Koppel as well, who has entirely different reasons for critiquing creativity.  Herr Koppel, it seems, is an anti-Romantic; he looks back to the pre-Romantic era where artists didn’t value originality (at least not in the same way) and instead focused on honing their craft, which was best done by copying the masters.  You tried to internalize the best techniques that others had already mastered; you believed that there IS a set of techniques out there that constitutes the best techniques possible.

What Wyatt thinks of Herr Koppel’s view isn’t entirely clear; shortly before he quotes the passage I gave above, he says, “I felt like him, just for that instant, as though I were old Herr Koppel,” which leaves some room for distance or disagreement between the two.  But it does make clear that Wyatt has heard the message that originality and creativity are dangerous and undesirable from two different people in entirely different contexts, and it offers another reason why Wyatt’s relationship to creativity is so vexed.

It also opens the possibility that Gaddis is critiquing or responding to Romanticism in some way, a thought that became clearer to me when I came across this passage (p. 95, Wyatt is speaking):

Listen, this guilt, this secrecy, he burst out, — it has nothing to do with this … this passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour … what is it?  What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work?  What do they expect?  What is there left of him when he’s done his work?  What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work?  the human shambles that follows it around?  What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

The artist doesn’t matter; only the work does — in saying this, he’s critiquing the Romantic cult of the artist as genius.  The artist is really little but a conduit for the art itself — once the art exists, the artist doesn’t matter anymore.  Just two paragraphs later, he says, “There’s only one thing, somehow, he commenced, faltering — that … one dilemma, proving one’s own existence ….”  Not only does the artist not matter much, but apparently everyone has only a tenuous hold on their own existence.

This might help explain why so many things are unfinished in this novel, including sentences and conversations — there is very little that’s certain, very little to hold on to, no real reason to try to complete something and make it whole.

My book group met this afternoon to discuss Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife, and it turns out we did have some things to discuss, in spite of my suspicions that we’d all say we loved it and then not have anything further to add.  It turns out the other members of my book group didn’t all love it as much as I did.  Some felt that all the attention paid to animals was troubling given what was happening to the humans in the story, and others felt the narrative jumped around in awkward ways and wasn’t as developed in places as it could have been.  The conversation was interesting to me because while I liked the book a lot, what the others said did speak to some doubts that were flickering around in my mind as I read, particularly the point about structure and narration.  As we talked, I was able to think through more clearly what my responses really meant.

Ackerman is doing something complicated in the way she narrates the story.  She has a short explanation at the book’s beginning about how she uses her sources, but after that she disappears completely as a narrator until the very end.  So the book reads something like a novel with a distant third person narrator who only occasionally gives the reader a glimpse into what is happening in the mind of Antonina, the zookeeper’s wife.  Those glimpses come from Antonina’s journal, but it’s easy to forget as you’re reading along that Ackerman was working from sources, since she rarely discusses them in detail.  Some people in my group felt the book would have worked better if it were pushed further in the direction of a novel, with more about the inner lives of the characters.  And I was wondering if it might have worked better if Ackerman had put herself into the narrative more by discussing the sources and the research directly.

But as it is, I think the book captures an important quality.  Without the obvious guiding hand of a narrator, the kind of narrator who gives shape and meaning to the story, it feels jumbled and little chaotic, which is the right kind of feeling to capture, given the book’s subject matter.  Ackerman seems determined to let the story speak for itself and not to become too involved in telling the reader what to make of it.  There’s a lot of room to draw your own conclusions and respond in your own way.  Her largely exterior point of view with only little bits and pieces of interior feeling leaves room for you to imagine what the people were feeling on your own.  The narrator doesn’t fill in the blanks for you.  This strikes me as respectful of the reader, and it also leaves room for some mystery — because it is a kind of mystery, I think, how and why people did what they did when they were risking their lives to save others.