Year in Books - Part 1 (Fiction)

Following is pretty much everything I read in fiction this year. There were few more which I left incomplete either disappointed or postponed for future. First section contains masterpieces (Five out of five stars) followed by good book and finally a list of disappointments though still interesting books.

The Melancholy of Resistance (Laszlo Krasznahorkai): This Hungarian novel will certainly be the book of the year for me. I was aware of the events described in the book and had read about Krasznahorkai's style (long, serpentine sentences, paragraph-less chapters and no dialogues only monologues, everything I look for in a novel these days by the way) but I was still startled by it -- by its vehemence, its depth and complexity of vision, its humour, the satirical skill and the seriousness of Krasznahorkai's intent. It is not an easy book to read (it took more than three weeks of dedicated reading) and the subject matter and conclusion couldn't be darker and bleaker, it is almost like a three hundred page illustration of the philosophy of nihilism but it was still exhilirating. It is also one of funniest novels I have read in a while. At more than a few occasions I had to sit upright, fold the book, had a good laugh and then get back to reading again.

Krasznahorkai is still more known in the anglophone world for his collaboration in Bela Tarr's film projects, though Tarr himself remains a highly obscure and marginal figure in the international art house cinema. But still if you search on the internet you will get to read a lot of the movie Werckmeister Harmonies but very little about the novel. The back cover of the novel rather proudly carries enthusiastic endorsements from such eminent personalities like W G Sebald ("its vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing") and Susan Sontag ("An inexorable, visionary book by the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville. Krasznahorkai’s novel is both an anatomy of desolation, desolation at its most appalling, and a stirring manual of resistance to desolation – through inwardness.") I also agree with Waggish's comment about Krasnahorkai's only other novel translated into English War And War which was published earlier this year. He says, "Krasznahorkai's achievement is to draw from the deepest, thorniest tradition of European novels, that of Musil, Bachmann, and Bernhard, and give it contemporary political relevance." The same can be said of this novel too. It eloquently reminds us of the grim political situation of the contemporary world, when the only choices that remain open to us are either the self-righteous fascism of Bush And Company on the one side and the anarchy and chaos of religious terrorists on the other. I really don't think I should add my own enthusiastic recommendation when such intelligent people have already done the same, but anyway I will urge you to read it, give this book the patience and effort it requires and you won't be disappointed. Krasznahorkai's official website is also worth browsing.


The Emigrants (W G Sebald): The Rings of Saturn was my favourite book of last year and this year it is The Emigrants. In between I have also managed to read Vertigo, Austerlitz and his two essay collections Campo Santo and Natural History of Destruction (so far as I could understand parts of it, unfamaliar as I am with most of modern German literature which is the subject of these essays). The Emigrants is I think my favourite book though The Rings of Saturn is perhaps the most ambitious and accomplished. It is an extremely painful book to read, the way Sebald plumbs the depths of unimaginable grief in his four "biographical" narratives about lives thwarted and wasted by arbitrary forces of history, I have never encoutered anything like it before.


The Loser, Wittgenstein's Nephew and Frost (Thomas Bernhard): I don't think I should bore my regular readers with more Bernhard enthusiasms. I am glad I discovered him this year. I am looking forward to reading his other books soon. If you have some doubts about how relentless pursuit of negativity can ever be meaningful you should get hold of some of his books.

The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth): Another death obsessed Austrian. The Radetzky March starts like a conventional nineteenth century realistic novel but you soon realize how everything that Roth describes in the book is filtered through his dark vision of history as a sequence of one destructive event after another. A dark masterpiece.

The Complete Short Novels (Anton Chekhov): This was a collection of five short novels all around a hundred pages or so that I read early this year. The emotional terrain and the style is the same he uses in his stories but I found these longer works more interesting. I specially loved the first two novels, The Duel and The Steppe. Rest are also quite good. Wonderfully evocative writing about lives wasted by melancholy, thwarted ambitions and all kinds of quiet desperation.

Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin):Eugene Onegin is notoriously hard to translate. It famously ended the decades long friendship of Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Reading it is frustrating in a way because you never know whose voice it is that is coming through. But still the wit, the character portraits and the psychological insights make it more than just worth reading. And if you, like me, are old fashioned and illiterate enough to prefer poetry with rhyming stanzas you will love it even more.

The Possessed (Fyodor Dostoevsky): A dark masterpiece from the great Russian master. It also contains a lot of really hilarious caricatures and is quite funny.

A Hero Of Our Time (Mikhail Lermontov): It is almost like an illustration and sketch of a self-consciously Byronic type. After reading it and Onegin I felt so close to these two heroes. I felt like going to a duel too but alas, we live in such philistine and shameless age! There are no duels anymore!!

By Night in Chile (Roberto Bolano): I am eagerly waiting for Bolano's The Savage Detectives which is getting published in April. It won all the major prizes of the Spanish speaking world a few years ago and it should create lots of news here too. By Night in Chile is a brisk and breathless read, a fantastic tour through the grim recent history of Chile. It is also sad and ironical in a way that Pinochet managed to outlive Bolano. But there is at least no doubt who history will judge more favourably.

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Saturday (Ian McEwan): We all think about most of the same things as Henry Perowne but we never quite manage to find words and sentences like McEwan does for his protagonist. The novel suffers only when McEwan decides to turn into a regular novel by introducing a presposterous thriller element into the plot in the last act. He could have kept it essayistic and it still would have been a great success.

Embers (Sandor Marai): Another very good Hungarian novel with lots of wisdom about love, friendship and life, though I thought it perhaps suffered in translation because it was a little inconsistent in its style and the prose sounded flat, plain and feature-less at places.

Enduring Love (Ian McEwan): How far a scientific view of life can go to? Ian McEwan analyses brilliantly in this novel about love and obsession.

First Love/Spring Torrents (Ivan Turgenev):Bitter-sweet love stories from another Russian master. I loved both of these novellas.

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (Mario Vargas Llosa): A grim political novel set in author's home country Peru, a fantastic portrait of a Trostkyist revolutionary. It is sadder once you realize that Mayta is not just an individual and isolated figure but also a type and a template.

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Never let me go (Kazuo Ishiguro): Ishiguro is a great writer but sorry, this was mostly mills and boon stuff. Reading it I also felt as if he learnt all the science in it by reading B-Grade sci-fi books. It is just a bundle of sci-fi cliches. There are moments of authentic emotion but they are not enough to salvage it. It is still a good timepass though.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark): Why is this book so famous? I found it so shallow and the writing was so plain!

Lust (Elfriede Jelinek): I feel bad about putting the only two women writers I read this year in the disappointment category but really I found this book to be written in an extremely cavalier style. She even mixes metaphors and in order to drive away cliches she drives away coherence too. I felt bad about it because I couldn't be more sympathetic to Jelinek's basic idea that Capitalism and Male Sexuality they both are dehumanising forces and they both work by commodifying human beings into property to be owned. But it really doesn't work at that level of feminist polemic either.

Solaris (Stanislaw Lem): I read it in less than ideal circumstances so it may be that I missed something. I found it extremely boring and this from someone who is a big fan of the movie adaptations, both by Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh.

Amsterdam (Ian McEwan): How did it win the booker?

Some Hindi Books: I had gone home to Patna in the summer and read some hindi books there. I wrote about some of them here. I wanted to write about some more hindi books but couldn't do it. It is so difficult to find the contextual information about hindi literature if you are away from the cowbelt (and even there it is actually very difficult) which is needed to fully understand any work. I hope more educated and informed readers would add more resources to websites like wikipedia and make it more easily avaialable to other people interested. Phanishwar Nath Renu's entry on the wikipedia for example has some information about him, I added and corrected a few things too. Will try to find something to write about later.