Helen Humphreys, Wild Dogs

Although her storytelling devices are sometimes reminiscent of Faulkner and her subject matter of Russell Banks (especially the Banks of The Sweet Hereafter), Helen Humphreys’ voice is all her own—which is even more of an accomplishment given that she presents her story using multiple narrators.

Humphreys’ subject is the loneliness and despair that torment the inhabitants of an unnamed northern town. Six strangers, whose dogs have joined a feral pack that lives in the woods surrounding the town, become friends through the act of standing beside the woods every night in hope that one or more of their pets will decide to emerge and return to the warmth of human cohabitation. A failed romance between two of the characters—one of whom, oddly, we are not told is male or female until about halfway through—and a climactic act of violence loom largest in setting the mood for this brief novel, but there is more than enough other sadness to go around for each of the characters who populate this bleak landscape. A haunting and moving book.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Helen Humphreys

Muriel Spark, The Finishing School

Muriel Spark is known for her work in the novella form, and her latest is yet another in that tradition. But The Finishing School seemed like it ended almost as soon as it started—all premise and no payoff. In this case the premise was a good one: Rowland Mahler, frustrated novelist and self-important teacher at a finishing school he runs with his wife Nina, grows increasingly (and literally insanely) jealous of one of his students, Chris Wiley, a prolific 17-year-old working on a speculative historical novel about Mary Queen of Scots.

Once she has established her sizable cast of characters (Rowland, Nina, Chris, numerous students, school employees, neighbors, and even a couple of publishers Chris woos with his still-incomplete manuscript), Spark can't seem to find much more for them to do than mutter sardonic comments at one another. Luckily, at 181 tiny, sparsely printed pages, this little book won't last long enough to bore anyone, but neither is it much of a diversion.

(P.S. Doesn't the cover design resemble Dai Sijie's somewhat?)

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Muriel Spark

Dai Sijie, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch

I’m a fan of slapstick movies and literary novels, but I think this is the first time I have come across a genuinely slapstick literary novel. Muo, our poor protagonist, gets heaped with more embarrassing and/or accidental miseries than Buster Keaton on his worst day, the strangest of these probably being the earliest—in terms of page count, not plot line. (One odd aspect of the book is how freely it plays with chronology, although to little real effect.) On a night train somewhere outside of Chengdu, stretched out below his bench in an attempt to get closer to a teenage girl who has crawled under there to sleep, Muo experiences a spontaneous orgasm upon touching what he thinks is the girl’s foot but which turns out to be the handle of the broom she had used to sweep the floor before lying down.

Like much else in this entertaining book, it would take up too much space here to explain how Muo finds himself in this specific predicament. But here is the general drift: Muo, a French-trained psychiatrist, returns to his native China to bribe a judge who has the power to release his unrequited university love, Volcano of the Old Moon, from her imprisonment for anticommunist activism. The judge’s price? One night with a virgin—which explains Muo’s pursuit of the girl on the train, as well as of many other women during the course of this short, highly readable novel.

It doesn’t however, explain the orgasm, which can be put down to the fact that Muo, for no particular reason I could glean, also has a foot fetish, and that’s where I felt the slapstick detracted from the book’s larger theme, the poignancy of Muo’s yearning romanticism. Dai clearly wants Muo to be a sympathetic, well-rounded character, but there is something hollow at his center, even as Dai attempts to give him a complex interior life. I’m not quite sure why this should be. Maybe it has something to do with the lack of congruence between Muo’s inner turmoil and his role as a foil for the book’s other, much less complicated figures? Whatever the reason, a novel that could have been both touching and hilarious ends up being only the latter.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Dai Sijie

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

I expected so much more from this novel, Murakami’s latest to be translated into English, than I felt it delivered. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of my favorite books, and I have read each of Murakami’s other translated works of fiction with varying degrees of aesthetic satisfaction but never anything less than pure pleasure at the reading experience itself, until now. Kafka on the Shore reveals a different Murakami than the one I am used to. Instead of an extremely nimble and idiosyncratic use of fantasy elements, an overreliance on cheap surrealistic gore and sex. In place of characters who fascinate by their unique and stubborn lack of conformity with conservative standards of accepted behavior, ones who fit only stereotypical patterns of nonconformity (teenage runaway, torch-carrying bereaved lover, the transgendered, the mentally challenged). Instead of an unpredictable plot—or a refreshing apparent plotlessness, which may amount to the same thing—a schematic alternation between two parallel narratives that will (of course) dovetail somewhere toward the end.

One narrative depicts the exploits of Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old boy who flees his domineering father, takes a job in a private library, and is somehow fated to enact a quasi-Oedipal psychodrama: his father dies under mysterious circumstances, and he enters into familial but also sexual relationships with two women, one of whom is a stand-in for the mother who abandoned his father when Kafka was young, the other a stand-in for the older sister she took with her when she left. The second narrative details the story of Nakata, survivor of a mysterious childhood incident that took away many of his mental faculties but left him with the ability to hold conversations with cats. Along the way we are presented with jarring scenarios that wouldn’t feel out of place in big-budget horror or science fiction films, and the whole thing ends rather abruptly, with only the least interesting aspects of the story resolved. The single reminder that this is the Murakami who wrote Wind-Up Bird, Norwegian Wood, or Sputnik Sweetheart is the absolutely trademark sense of utter melancholy that pervades the book, but without the rest of Murakami’s strengths to back it up, it seems that melancholy alone just isn’t enough to power an entire novel.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Haruki Murakami