December Book Club Choice

The book club will no longer be voting on a book every month. Rather each person will be choosing a book and the rest of us will read it. December's book will be The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. This novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2008. It was reviewed in the NYT.

Tediousness is boring. Tediousness is. Tedious.

Lyricism can be beautiful and in the case of Nothing, by Janne Teller it is the only thing the book has going for it.

"A plum tree has many branches. So many endless branches. All too many endless branches" (p. 12). The plum tree is where Pierre Anthon sat once he decided not to go to school anymore. From one of its branches he would call out to the kids who continued going to school and tell them that their actions were meaningless.

In an effort to fight the idea that they led meaningless existences Pierre's classmates band together to identify and stockpile all the meaningful items in their lives. Since they fail to identify for themselves what they find most meaningful, their classmates choose the item. Told through the eyes of a narrator who remains nameless for most of the book, this choosing escalates up until the end with what in reality would be shattering consequences.

Unfortunately, the plotline appears to be cribbed from some after-school TV special about the perils of teenage peer pressure. If it were not a book club selection I would not have finished it. However, if one likes Nihilistic philosophy or is a depressed teenager without a television I might recommend it.

Wildly inventive book blurbs

What is a reader supposed to think when the back of a book such as Kafka on the Shore states that it is "A magnificently bewildering achievement...Brilliantly conceived, bold in its surreal scope, sexy and driven by a snappy plot...exuberant storytelling" (Independent on Sunday). Or that it is "Addictive" (multiple blurbs). Addiction is defined as "The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something" (theFreedictionary). Sexy implies that there is some type of sexually attractive person or activity in the book. However, what these two words mean in book blurbs is quite different than what their dictionary definitions, and of the two only addictive might apply to this novel by Haruki Murakami.

The premise is that the fifteen year Kafka is trying to escape an Oedipal prophesy, passed on him by his father, and ends up in a library with helpful, but unusual employees. There are many incidents, some of which involve sex, but none of which could be described as particularly sexy. They are perhaps sad, violent, or disturbing, though.

Another narrative thread follows a rather simple elderly man, Nakata, who has the unusual skill of speaking with cats, and by this means locating the occasional stray feline. The paths of Kafka and Nakata never actually cross, but their stories are intertwined with each other.

The end of the book is quite open to interpretation. There are unanswered questions, and the reader must be willing to either tolerate ambiguity or form hypotheses that are satisfactory.

Multigenerational dramas

Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende is an interesting book, but like all books about multiple generations of characters it is lengthy. Unfortunately, it is also part of a trilogy, with Portrait in Sepia, and The House of the Spirits being the missing books. So, I cannot give a complete review of the entire plotline. However, I can safely classify the book as bildungsroman/romance light.

This novel is a story about Eliza Sommers, who adopted by a British family living in Chile, grows up sheltered in a multicultural household. Historical detail is vividly provided and the cultural attitudes of the British are painted over the Chilean background. Eliza grows up and falls in love with a young Chilean man. The novel moves from romance to adventure as Eliza follows her love to the gold rush in California. On the ship she stows away with the help of a Chinese doctor (to whom Allende has already introduced the reader, through extended flashbacks and descriptions of mainland China and Hong Kong) and with his help searches California for her love. Disguising herself as a boy she searches until her love has become more of a talisman than a memory. Finally, she returns to San Francisco and assists the doctor with his work. The book ends with the long-delayed acknowledgement of love between the doctor and Eliza.

Though this is a good story, the fact that there is no resolution after 399 pages and additional books that continue the story is discouraging. One has to be really interested in the characters to continue. If your not interested in multigenerational stories this is not the book for you.

"Crapula"

The Year of the Hare/Jäniksen vuosi by the Finnish author Arto Paasilinna was published in Finnish in 1975. The English translation did not come out until 1995. It was favorably reviewed by the NYT. It is an interesting premise - a man, Vatanen, who is having a midlife crisis, nurtures a young leveret back to health, and spends the year traveling around the country with said leveret.

At times the book is quite funny, unfortunately somethings fail to translate. The translator, Herbert Lomas, no doubt did a great job, but the combination of twenty years between publication and translation, plus the challenge of translating humor makes the book less amusing than one might expect. The vocabulary choices were sometimes quite odd too. For instance one chapter is titled 'crapula.' Which comes from Latin and means very drunk. It is not a very common word in American English and sounds very much like crapola - rubbish.

Now that I have criticized it, it was selected for inclusion in UNESCO's collection of representative works.

There are also some very dark moments where Vatanen is very cruel, and others where he is treated cruelly. Knowing that it is a funny book in Finnish makes me suspect that these moments are not intended to come out as cruel and unpleasant. Despite these defects, the book is interesting and readable.