returned to the library, unfinished

John Irving, Until I Find You

Unfinished? More like barely begun. Irving’s novels were such an important part of my formative years that I almost feel guilty for passing over his newest one, even though I also feel that the days when he did his best work are long behind him. Apart from simply running out of time (most of which I spent on Chadwick and Eco—see below), I found that I just didn’t have the patience to become engrossed in one of his neo-Dickensian sagas right now. I hope to give it another try later.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, John Irving

Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel

Eco takes such evident pleasure in the creative process that it’s hard not to be caught up in his excitement and to marvel at the ease and lightness of his prose (or at least that of the translation from the Italian, by Geoffrey Brock). You can almost hear Eco chuckling as he sets to work establishing his premise, one that other novelists can only admire with jealousy because it’s the kind that can be done just once: What if a sixty-year-old man awoke from a coma a partial amnesiac, his sole memories those of the popular culture—the novels, comic books, movies, and popular songs—he has consumed since he was a child?

In the central section of the book, the narrator Giambattista Bodoni (nicknamed Yambo), an antiquarian book dealer, returns to his childhood home to sift through the pop-culture artifacts he has saved there since the end of World War II, to see if these can reawaken the rest of his memories. And as we follow Yambo on his quest, the book itself allows us to participate in it by means of numerous color reproductions of the material Yambo revisits. Italian translations of Mickey Mouse comics, illustrations from boys’ adventure novels, stills from Hollywood movies, Fascist propaganda posters, front pages of Partisan newspapers—all these and more are presented and described in loving detail, weaving above Yambo’s personal story another, larger story that we all share regardless of when or where we were raised. With one jarring exception, the illustrations cast a spell over the reader just as much as they do over Yambo, enchanting us into feeling the urgency of his quest. (The exception: A reproduction labeled as a promotional poster for the film Road to Zanzibar is clearly an image of the U.S. DVD case.) For almost all of us—and this is the great secret at the heart of Eco’s endeavor—what we read, watch, and hear of the great world around us is no less significant in shaping our selves than are the unique experiences we undergo as members of individual families and towns.

Towards the end of the novel, Yambo regains his personal memory by unexplained, almost supernatural means; the most likely scenario is that, shocked into unconsciousness again after discovering a first folio of Shakespeare among his childhood artifacts (something so rare that Yambo immediately recognizes he can sell it for "a gazillion lira"), his mind is free once more to roam unhindered among the events of his childhood. This gives Eco the opportunity to tell us two extended stories about Yambo’s teenage years: his role in engineering the escape of a band of Russian prisoners from the hands of the Black Brigades, and his unrequited crush on a high-school classmate. The first of these stories is gripping, but the second is much less so, despite its being accompanied by phantasmagoric montages created from bits and pieces of the earlier pictorial artifacts. Worse, Eco ends the novel at the climax of this second story without ever allowing Yambo to return to his wife and children or his bookstore. (Has Yambo died? Eco leaves the question unanswered.) Still, the pleasures of the rest of the novel more than make up for the frustrations of its final chapter. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is the most sheer fun I’ve had reading a book in quite a while.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Umberto Eco

Charles Chadwick, It's All Right Now

Is it possible to sustain for almost 700 pages the conceit that one is not writing a novel but merely recording impressions from an ordinary, unremarkable existence? Charles Chadwick nearly pulls it off. In four sections set during the early 1970s, the mid-1980s, the early 1990s, and the turn of the millennium, and purportedly written some time after each group of events has occurred, the narrator Tom Ripple gives an account of his life with no clear goal in mind, it seems, other than to pass the time, first at work and then during a protracted retirement. Marriage, children, television, neighbors, job, divorce, relocation, dating, parties, friendships, pastimes, church, shopping, illness, death, plus reflections on religion, history, music, philosophy—all are covered in great variety and detail, with little to link them besides mere chronology. As the years go by, Tom attempts halfheartedly to gain some perspective on his experiences, and it is this that Chadwick uses to give the book its shape and tone: often poignant, sometimes downright mournful, tinged with hopefulness, but ultimately inconclusive about what Tom's life means to him.

It was this inconclusiveness that, however faithful to reality, made It's All Right Now ring kind of hollow for me. To be told after so many pages only that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to discern meaning in the passing of time seems finally to be a way of dodging one of the highest callings of which art is capable. True, the patterns we find in our lives are usually manufactured—stories we tell ourselves to get through the days and years—but in a novel such a lack of ambition feels impoverished, even perversely defeatist. Tom Ripple learns to take comfort where he can find it (in music, nature, and other people), and so did I as a reader of Chadwick's book, which contains many, many passages of lovely writing. But I finished it still yearning for a kind of enlightenment that Chadwick seems to think is unattainable in a work of contemporary fiction.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Charles Chadwick