Five books # 1

I've only read five books in the last two months. I had been busy shopping and getting ready for the holidays. Now I'm back to that frenzy, that state fueled by caffeine and cigarettes wherein I read, and do nothing but that. So, while I'm watching The Tonight Show with Jay Leno without his writers (he's a hit so far), I'm giving short opinions about these five books.

1. Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Probably the most depressing and pessimistic novel I've ever read, and I've read some. Here's a passage:

"As long as we're young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the score, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more for fairy tales; if you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you. Life is keeping body and soul together."

I was drawn to buy this novel because of this French writer's influence on Charles Bukowski, a writer I admire. Yes, the prose is good - excellent, even, but it's also as beautiful as a car crash. And, like all car crashes, it's compelling in the beginning, but gradually you lose your interest and just turn away, not out of its ugliness, but of boredom. The novel has 435 pages' worth of the passage's disposition and tone, and I had to grind my way to finish it. It may seem contradictory to an earlier post where I stated that depressing but well-written novels are to be lauded, but this has just crossed the boundary. Not a single moment of redemption was made, no hint that life, for all its bitter struggles, may be worth living after all. It's just a long and monotonous tirade of hatefulness and resentment. I hated it, pure and simple. A self-indulgent piece of merde.

2. The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I devoured this in two sittings, and as I was reading it I let out a sigh of relief after the headache the last novel gave me.
This is my fifth McCarthy novel, and he never disappoints. A Pulitzer Prize winner, it's his most popular novel yet, and with good reason. It's simply a very absorbing tale about an unnamed man and his son on a road trip to nowhere. The writing is spare, never using four run-on sentences when a three-word sentence would suffice, and the prose is beautiful. Sometimes I would reread a paragraph five times before moving on, just relishing the elegance of his words. Every comparison to William Faulkner is justified. Give the man the Nobel already. If there's an American writer still living who deserves it, it's McCarthy.
An excellent novel, but not my favorite of his. No Country for Old Men is still the novel to beat, and I can't wait to see the film based on it. The Coen Brothers, creators of my favorite movie of all time, Fargo, adapted it, and just the mere thought of the McCarthy-Coens combo gives me the shivers. I'm excited.

3. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson - An almost 1,200-page behemoth, I felt like I was exiled on Nerd Street, and actually, it was pretty good for what it was. The most fascinating aspect of the novel is its detailed explanations of the most mundane things, the most memorable of which, in my opinion, is the mathematical equation to mental clarity. Unfortunately, it took me three times to pass College Algebra, so it read like gibberish to me (it could have been useful). Which is also, incidentally, what I didn't like about the novel. It's constant use of mathematical and computer jargon, although interesting to a certain extent, lost me; my knowledge of computer programming and math is elementary at best. Still, I liked it. I couldn't take Thomas Pynchon out of my head though, since its structure was obviously taken from Pynchon's novel V., which I had read a few months earlier, but again, I liked it, and the length was worth the time invested in reading it.
Most of the novel was set in the Philippines, alternating from World War II and the present day (in this case, the late 90's). I loved how Stephenson depicted the country. It was not, as my best friend so beautifully put it, "exoticized" (I looked it up and it's not an actual word, but who cares. It sounds great). Meticulous research was put into this book, and all the credit goes to Stephenson. I had also read another great book of his, Snow Crash, which is considerably shorter and a more fitting introduction to his work.

4. Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson - Forget Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. This is its less hip, more poetic counterpart. If you ever find a copy of this book, buy it immediately. It doesn't glorify the drug culture, unlike Trainspotting, and doesn't give its characters any reverence, but it succeeds in giving them qualities that captivate the reader, in prose that is lean and succinct. The greatest achievement of this collection of short stories about an unnamed narrator and his adventures of drugs and mischief is its giving the narrator and the supporting cast riveting characterizations in so few words. It's a short 175 pages, but full of sentences that I would love to reread and go back to. It's a classic.

5. The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro. After reading a slew of guy books, I think it was about time to read some quality chick-lit. Alice Munro is one of the finest short-story writers today. She has released a dozen or so collections, and I suggest picking up Runaway, which was published in 2005. This earlier collection is not as good, but still, it's Alice Munro. If you have a yearning for making a big deal about personal secrets of ordinary people in rural Canada, then I'm sure you would enjoy her. As for me, she just writes how I would like to write when I'm not feeling crazy: gorgeous, flowing prose without being erudite and pretentious, just telling the tale of its characters, and ending it without a bang - just enough to convey its emotions.

So much for that. Time to start a new book. Right beside me is Don DeLillo's Libra, and I hope it's as good as I would expect it to be. Let's move on.