Suite Nocturne - Patrick Modiano (French)
What helped make Such Fine Boys successful, I see now, is that it was made up of self-contained stories about different people. This novella (it’s barely over hundred pages) has one first person narrator, and though individual scenes are comprehensible, the plot holding it all together isn’t. It seems to be a metaphysical mystery in which a man in his sixties is on a search – one that takes place entirely in his memories – for a foundation to his existence, and he was “relying on the sea-green Fiat and its driver to help me discover it.” In the opening scene he’s twenty and is hit by the Fiat when crossing a Paris street. He’s brought to a hospital, but his injuries aren’t serious. Much of rest of the book involves the young man’s efforts to find the woman who was driving the car. It seems that he knows her, in some vague way. The word “seems” has already appeared twice in this review; not a good sign. I don’t like to be immersed in a nebulous world, especially when no clear answers ever emerge. The novel ends with the narrator finding the woman, and they’re immediately (and mysteriously) on familiar terms. She invites him to the apartment where she’s staying. The last paragraph has them together in an elevator; Modiano writes: “Her hand was resting on my shoulder and she whispered something in my ear.” What she whispers is never divulged (why not?). The predominant thought I was left with was “What’s been going on?” As is the case in Boys, one thing going on is parental neglect, and this time it reaches extreme proportions (no mother, a silent specter of a father, a feeling of having “come from nothing”). Are we on shifting sands for all our lives without a loving family to ground us? If Modiano is making that dubious point, he does so in such a roundabout way that it loses force. I closed my review of Boys with the stated intention of reading more by this author. Now – unless I’m assured that the work is more accessible – I think I’m done.

An Unmarried Man - Darryl Ponicsan
I liked the movies “The Last Detail” and “Cinderella Liberty” – they had their hearts in the right place and rang true. Darryl Ponicsan was the author of the novels both films were based on, so I got this book. For a while there were things that kept me engaged: the vindictive wife and the lawyers were good, as were the financial details of a marital break-up. But this is the husband’s story, and though I was meant to feel empathy for Ben’s loneliness and despair, I couldn’t. His responses to situations were unrealistically over-the-top, making him seem like a dope, and I was bothered by his crudity. Still, the workmanlike writing carried me along for what I hoped would be a mild diversion. Then, quite suddenly, near the midway point, a plot contrivance caused it to fall apart. A woman moves into an apartment adjoining Ben’s; she’s the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, one who, he thinks, kings would desire. She’s intelligent, has a sense of humor, is compassionate and morally upstanding. She’s also, for reasons inexplicable to me, ready to go to bed with Ben after one brief meeting. What follows are sex scenes depicted in ugh-inducing detail. When Mr. Ponicsan launched into a description of cunnilingus I had quite enough of him. And so yet another book bites the dust. And all I want is to be entertained.

Identity - Milan Kundera (French)
In looking over my four previous reviews of books by Kundera, I came across the same conclusion reiterated in slightly different words: “Kundera is a cerebral writer, more a moral philosopher than a novelist. Plot is subservient to his intellectual pursuits, and though we’re constantly in the minds of his characters, they function mainly to convey his ideas.” Of those five novels I thought only one fully succeeded – Life Is Elsewhere, which came out in 1969, when the author was forty years old. At the end of Identity the reader is informed that it was “Completed in France, in Autumn 1996” (when authors gain Kundera’s eminence they often record such momentous events for posterity). This novel gets a ditto to my quote above. The two people whose thoughts are being dissected are Chantal and Jean-Marc. Chantal is receiving anonymous letters, and I found her reactions to them interesting. But this plot premise is interrupted by much expounding (mostly by cynical men) on a variety of philosophical topics. So a question arises: Kundera may be intelligent, but is he a novelist? The ending of Identity provides an answer. Somehow Chantal winds up naked at an orgy. How she got there isn’t clear (the last look we had of her she was fully clothed in a phone booth at a London train station). At any rate, she’s terrified, running about a strange house, trying to escape. There are many exclamation marks (!) to emphasize her state of mind. Then the next chapter begins with Jean-Marc clasping her shuddering body: “Chantal! Chantal! Chantal! Wake up! It’s not real!” Yes, folks, Chantal was dreaming. At this point, one page before the end, the author arrives on the scene: “And I ask myself, who was dreaming? Who dreamed this story?” Kundera goes on at length in this mode, closing with: “At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border?” Well, Milan, I’m not smart enough to answer those deep questions. But I am smart enough to recognize a really dumb ending when I read it. And I can also do simple math: you were seventy-eight when you completed this book (in France). Maybe it’s time to give up writing fiction and direct your intellectual energies elsewhere.

Laughable Loves – Milan Kundera (Czech)
Kundera’s characters and the situations he puts them in are a means by which he can explore ideas about human nature. Sex plays a prominent role in these seven stories, but this isn’t a sensuous book; sex is treated clinically and is most often a means by which people wield power over one another. As for the title of the collection, love is nowhere to be found, and the laughter is often contemptuous. Kundera’s thoroughness in pursuing emotional maneuvering can become laborious, and the sex distasteful (“Symposium” made me yearn for simplicity and virtue). Kundera is at his cruelest in “Dr. Havel After Ten Years.” He presents us with a man who is “legendary” as a womanizer; but, while staying at a spa, Havel finds that anonymity and age have negated his power to get any woman he snaps his fingers at. His ego is somewhat revived when an editor recognizes him as the famous libertine; to this naive young man the doctor imparts sage advice about sensuality. I found the premise to be foolish and juvenile – until I realized that I was reading a farce about shallowness. When the young man introduces his girlfriend to the doctor (who’s in a foul mood at the time) Havel dismisses her: “Yes, that girl is really nice, but a dog, a canary, or a duckling waddling about in a farmyard can also be nice.” He then maliciously promotes his secretary – an unattractive older woman – as someone who (to an epicure in these matters) possesses a “genuine erotic beauty.” So the editor dumps his girlfriend and has sex with the secretary. The story makes a point about how people are swayed by appearances and reputation and celebrity. When Havel’s beautiful actress wife visits him for a day, he shows her off, making sure that the women who rejected his advances will see how she adores him. After the wife leaves these women are all too eager to get in bed with Havel, and, of course, he accommodates them. In other stories Kundera is softer, more realistic and even, in “Let the Old Dead Make Room for the New Dead,” a bit compassionate. Not much – just a bit.

The Lost Girl – D. H. Lawrence
I found this little-known work by Lawrence to be more engaging than his message-laden major novels. In The Lost Girl he’s lost. The plot lurches about, and his main character can’t feel one way without having a contradictory response. But when you accept Alvina as a person unable to find her way in life, you accept the confusion. Her need to belong – to be a part of something or somebody but failing again and again to achieve this – mattered to me. As she turns thirty, still a virgin, she becomes reckless (though she always had a reckless streak that she let loose in small ways). She joins a traveling music troupe (she plays the piano as actors put on a show). Ciccio, one of the troupe members, overwhelms her both physically and emotionally; she finds him beautiful and compelling. Yet some inner core in her resists him, and she often sees him as no more than a stupid animal. To me Ciccio was the weakest character in the book; by making him uncommunicative Lawrence also makes him unbelievable. Alvina continues to separate herself from her privileged upbringing by marrying Ciccio and moving to a remote and primitive village in Italy (which both enchants and repels her). At the end she’s pregnant and Ciccio is about to leave to serve in the Italian army (WWI has broken out). Lawrence has created a muddle, and the abrupt and simplistic hopeful ending he comes up with is a cop out. But, still . . . What matters in this odd, over-the-top and somewhat preposterous book is Lawrence’s exuberance: he feels his power to write, and this was infectious. Throughout are descriptions of people and places that are brilliant. Alvina is tumultuously alive, as are many others in the large cast: her wayward father, whose dissolution we follow; the imperious Madame who rules over the troupe; the prancing Mr. May. Ciccio’s brother is a third tier character, but Lawrence captures his essence in a few sentences: “There would sometimes be a strange passivity on his worn face, an impassive, almost Red Indian look. And then again he would stir into a curious, arch, malevolent laugh, for all the world like a debauched old tom-cat.”

Brooklyn – Colm Toibin
I like quiet characters and a simple prose style, so I wanted to like this book, and for a good stretch I did. First we’re with Eilis in Ireland just after WWII; though she’s fairly content with her life, she leaves home when she gets a chance to better her situation in America. She lives in a boarding house and works as a salesgirl at a department store; she takes night classes in bookkeeping at Brooklyn College. All was okay so far, though there was no discernible direction forming out of the scattered events. We get a Jewish professor Eilis seems interested in, and her lady boss makes unwanted lesbian advances, but neither of these characters turn out to play any role. Gradually I began to be bothered by Eilis’s emotional tepidness. I expected her to show some spirit when a love interest arrives, but Tony is a bland, middle-of-the-road Nice Guy and her response to him is flat. At this point, halfway through the book, my reading became as plodding and dutiful as Toibin’s writing. When Eilis’s sister dies it seemed like a weak contrivance to advance a stagnant plot. Before she returns to Ireland for the funeral Eilis loses her virginity to Tony (an excruciating scene) and the two secretly marry. Back home she gets interested in Jim; she decides that Tony’s Nice Guy love is just a burden. She wants to stay in Ireland, but she’s forced (by way of another contrivance) to go back to Brooklyn and give up Jim. I could care less. Tony, Jim, Tom, Dick, Harry – none of them matter. Quiet characters interest me only when they reveal their depth, and depth is what Eilis lacks. This is a shallow book posing as a deep book, and therefore it’s a phoney book. Yet – and here we come to a few side issues that contributed to my resentment – the Scribner paperback is saturated with forty-two (42!) blurbs. Have Scribner and Toibin no shame, and has the literary world lost all discrimination? But there’s more. After the end of Brooklyn there’s a sixteen page preview of Toibin’s upcoming novel, Nora Webster. So they’ve finally found a way to insert a crummy commercial in a book that you can hold in your hands.

Weights and Measures - Joseph Roth (German)

This novel is lightweight – it’s only 150 pages long – and the edition I have is midway between the size of a mass market and a trade paperback. Oh, you want to know about content? Well, there’s hardly anything to it. In a review of Roth’s The Radetzky March, which I liked very much, I described the characters as “muted” and wrote that they proceeded to their fates like “dumb animals.” The same can be said for W&M, yet it lacks the panoramic social aspect of March. We get Inspector Eibenschutz and little else. He’s supposed to be extremely unhappy, but he comes across as emotionally inanimate. The book is sloppily constructed; only near the end do we find out that the Inspector is thirty-six (all along I thought he was in his fifties). It’s also silly. Eibenschutz is obsessed by a gypsy woman (those gypsy women!); when she first appears “her dark blue-black hair led him to think of southern nights, which he had never seen but had possibly once read or heard about.” The prose is simple and precise, but in a self-consciously studied way; you know this when you’re constantly thinking, “How precise and simple!”

Immortality - Milan Kundera (Czech)

Kundera isn’t a novelist. He’s a thinker whose writing serves as a forum for his ideas. He has attained such eminence in the literary world that he can do whatever he wants; this shapeless grab bag of a book is what I’ll call philoso-fiction. In it the author plays a role, as does Goethe and other real-life figures from the past. The fictional modern-day characters are subordinate to Kundera’s larger aims, so they aren’t fully-developed. Free rein can liberate or lead to self-indulgence, or it can do both. Immortality may offer up a unique potpourri for the intellect, but it lost its luster for me (and it did have luster for a while). The overall perspective on human nature is a cynical one. An example: a woman is given the choice (it’s one or the other) of spending the next life with her husband of many years or of never meeting him again; her answer is “We prefer never to meet again.” (She phrases it as “we” because her husband is sitting next to her.) The point being made (with Kundera everything has a point) is that her love is an illusion, and with her answer she’s made to face that fact. Despite invigorating moments, I grew weary. The fictional side wasn’t holding up, and ideas that were intriguing and insightful were examined so rigorously that the freshness was leeched out of them. Plus I had my fill of Goethe; when he reappeared at the beginning of Part Four I called it quits. I did so with absolutely no curiosity, no regrets. I just wanted class to be over.

The Test - Pierre Boulle (French)

In France there’s a test youths must take to get their General Certificate. Or maybe the government has curtailed it due to this 1957 novel, in which it’s depicted as a scourge worthy of use by the Inquisition. Marie-Helen is uniquely unprepared to digest the work of the intellectual giants of the western world. She had lived in a Malaysian fishing village from age nine to seventeen; at that point she was kidnapped and returned to “her people” (white people). But she considered the villagers to be her people. Not only was she assimilated into their culture, but she was happily married. Boulle clearly believed that his heroine should have been allowed to carry on her life in Malaysia. Certainly she should! – all that happens after the kidnapping borders on the ridiculous. Her failure to pass the test leads to her breakdown, a number of murders and a suicide. The agony and despair the various characters feel is rendered in prose that would make a writer of Harlequin romances cringe. At first I thought the translator might be responsible, then I thought he might be partially responsible, but finally I put the blame on Boulle. How could a novelist whose work I’ve admired (The Bridge over the River Kwai, Planet of the Apes) come out with something as clumsy as this? I read those other books long ago. Was I lacking in discrimination? I find it reassuring that the edition of Kwai I have is from the Time Reading Program, and they made excellent choices. 

Life and Times of Michael K - J. M. Coetzee

Michael K is like Robinson Crusoe, yet his isolation takes place in the midst of war-torn South Africa. The opening sentence presents us with one factor that will separate him from others: “The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip.” His life passes in solitariness, which he finds easier than dealing with people. At age thirty-one Michael is thrust into the turbulent world when he tries to return his dying mother to the place where she was born. After her death we follow his wanderings. I was involved with the problems he faced and his attempts to solve them, and the unadorned prose was effective in conveying facts. But Coetzee wasn’t satisfied with facts, nor with the character he had created. He wanted to impart a higher meaning to Michael’s existence. As a result, things go badly off course. First he has Michael reject life by rejecting food. Not only didn’t this ring true, but following a person’s loss of bodily substance wasn’t interesting. In a brief Part Two, Coetzee changes the point-of-view to that of a doctor treating the emaciated Michael in a camp; through this deep-thinking character the author tries very hard to inject significance into the situation. In the even briefer last section we return to Michael, but everything – particularly a sexual encounter – seems fabricated. Ultimately we wind up someplace murky and inconclusive. The path Coetzee chose to take – one in which he aimed for profundity – led to a dead end, both for the novel and for Michael K.

Sanshiro - Natsume Soseki (Japanese)
I was surprised at how this novel – Japanese, written in 1908 – seemed so modern (including the direct, clear style of writing). Pleasurable throughout. The main character is real and appealing; what concerned him concerned me. The other, secondary male figures are strong too. Yet there’s something elusive about this novel: I couldn’t understand Mineko. I found her to be an intriguing character, but I could never gain access to her emotions and motivations. What were the demons troubling her? She made mysterious statements that were never resolved – and I wanted them to be. Perhaps the mystery surrounding her is one Sanshiro, and thus the reader, can never penetrate. One more note is struck here – Soseki recreates the golden world of youth, just before disillusion sets in. At the book’s end it seems that Sanshiro has undergone an experience that he’ll look back at with deep regret, yet he remains resilient and hopeful. I’ll read more of Soseki. *

The Farewell Party - Milan Kundera (Czech)
Kundera is a cerebral writer, more a moral philosopher than a novelist. Plot is subservient to his intellectual pursuits, and though we’re constantly in the minds of his characters, they function mainly to convey his ideas. Because they aren’t fully-developed individuals, I was only mildly involved in their unlikely predicaments. Still, if you’re in the mood for a cynical look at human nature in the abstract, Kundera does it at a high level.

All the Little Live Things - Wallace Stegner
An elegant prose stylist, an intelligent mind at work. Yet this novel suffers from tidiness – everything is arranged too perfectly; I was aware of the author fussing over his craft. And once Stegner sets up his premise, there’s no forward momentum. We get the main character’s thoughts in monotonous and repetitive detail. I couldn’t finish the book.

Chatterton - Peter Ackroyd
Everything in this novel is aggressively bizarre. Initially this quality was intriguing; the plot had mystery, the main character was interesting. Then other characters were introduced who were exceedingly nasty. The book took on an ugly aspect; even the humor was distasteful. When Chatterton finally made his appearance he was a crucial disappointment – just another bizarre and nasty player on a stage already crowded with them. At this point I had enough of an author whose aim is to fascinate and repel.

Life Is Elsewhere - Milan Kundera (Czech)
Other books don’t go where this one does. Kundera explores his characters at a deeper level. To read this is to experience something new – and honest and brave. Brave because Kundera brings up things – such as Jaromil’s relationship with his mother – that other writers (and readers) avoid out of “good taste.” Not that Kundera is vulgar. He’s concerned with a degree of intimacy that we mostly look away from, even in our thinking. That’s a problem in reading the book – it’s often ugly and hits uncomfortably close to home when it exposes cruelties and selfish motivations that are common in human interactions. Also, Kundera demands a rigorous attention – he can tire you out. It’s not a fun read, but I was left mostly with respect. *

Wickford Point - John P. Marquand
This novel’s main virtue is the elegance of the writing. Though the plot held little intrinsic interest for me, I was carried along pleasantly for over 400 pages. I was never vitally engaged; rather nicely lulled, fairly interested in the cast of characters – maybe, at times, doubting their authenticity, but never enough for me to lose faith. Yet, days after I finished the book, it turned out to be more than a diverting read; I found myself missing its people and wanting to be with them again.

A Month in the Country - J. L. Carr
A short book, well-written (simplicity, ability to catch the essence of a person or place with a few words) and a big theme: how life passes us, our regret at that loss. The plot interweaves the mysterious uncovering of a sacred wall painting with the mundane aspects of country life. An evocative novel, gentle, loving, melancholy. However, the feelings evoked are diffuse; it’s a mood piece, and as such it lacks force.

King, Queen, Knave - Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)
Nabokov reworked this book, which he wrote in his twenties. It’s brilliant – its colorfulness, verve, audacity. The characters and scenes are vivid, the language glitters and dances, maniacally at times. He takes the shopworn theme of a love triangle/murder plot and, about two-thirds way through, the reader finds himself in the middle of a nightmare. That’s where a ferocity sets in. Things turn horrendous, sickening – moral corruption emerges as the theme. But Nabokov is not a moralist; he’s a cold and cruel writer, examining people like he would chloroformed butterfly specimens. His only mistake in this tour de force is that he overdoes the fantastic element. (Did he need the human-like dummies and the crazy landlord?) *