Well, another five books have come and gone, so it’s time for my thoughts on the same. They run the gamut from experimental fiction to weird memoir and scientific history to gothic fantasy, so you can’t accuse me of being particularly genre-monogamous in the last little while, if that’s even a thing.
Anyway, let’s see what I read. Or heard. Or both.
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.
My rating: four stars.
I have had this book on my TBR for a couple of years now. I even had a copy of the book on my Kindle. But it took a physical copy turning up in a street library to make me actually begin reading it, because I figured that the appearance of an metafictional tome in shelves more usually populated by Thomas Keneally was a portent I couldn’t ignore.
The book essentially involves an amnesiac trying to discover who he is. Or, rather, who he is this time, as when he awakens, not knowing himself, he discovers he’s in a place where there’s communiques from a previous version of himself. The title (raw shark, Rorschach, geddit!) indicates that there’s a certain level of testing and interpretation at work here: the narrator is pitted against a potentially world-ending villain of horrific construction and, er, a typographic shark that stalks the pages of the book.
Yep, I’m serious. Jaws with paper cuts.
The story that unfolds is by turns thrilling and sad, and examines the roles of grief and forgetting in the formation of personality following stressful events. It considers multiple-universe theories of physics, and embraces both the playfulness of Oulipo works and the Quark XPress fuckery of Danielewski’s House of Leaves. There’s moments of stupidity and moments of breathtaking horror, and while I won’t spoil the ending for you, I will suggest that if this kind of bookwank sounds even half appealing, you probably will dig this.
Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog (read by Werner Herzog).
My rating: four stars.
I would expect no less of a baller biography title from Werner Herzog, the noted film director (and man who ate his shoe on film (to satisfy a bet) and who kept his promise to throw himself into a cactus patch post-filming for the delectation of his devoted crew). But knowing that that an audiobook of Werner reading the text existed, I went through the following stages:
That could pretty much be the review of this thing, you know. If you’re a fan of Herzog’s deadpan approach to life, and his idiosyncratic view of the business of filmmaking (which largely seems to involve making a rod for his own back, whether that’s by actively pulling a steamboat over a mountain or repeatedly hiring Klaus Kinski) then you will absolutely love this. If you only know him from his various guest appearances on The Simpsons or The Mandalorian, then there’s quite the education coming your way.
(An interesting wrinkle to this edition is that while Herzog wrote and reads the English audiobook, thee version is itself a translation by Michael Hofmann. I’d be interested to know what differences exist between Herzog’s original text and this one. I assume he’s happy with them, because, well, he’s reading them just fine – but being privy to the conversation that led to this point would be interesting.)
The easiest thing to say about this text is that it’s a great look over the shoulder of a modern master who has zero problems either making himself appear ridiculous, or in letting his experiences rest in the lap of fate. It’s a fragmented tale: it goes from his childhood penury to nicking a film camera, to attending Cannes, to his current role as the film industry’s Goreyesque uncle. He seems to exist in a world where a magical realism pervades, shot through with divided-Germany frugality and a decent dollop of fearlessness. Like Gandalf with a rangefinder, he relies on signs and intuition to bring extensive visions to pass, while appearing faintly ridiculous and incredibly serious at once.
I listened to this on a trip to and from Sydney to pick up some furniture, and it kept me intact through impending physical collapse. Such is the power of the guy. If you even remotely like him, you will fucking love this.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.
My rating: four stars.
Obviously I didn’t get enough of a sense of intellectual inferiority from my reading of that doorstopper on Oppenheimer, so I decided to obtain a more fulsome (read: scientifically rigorous) view of the development of the atomic bomb. Enter Richard Rhodes and the 25th anniversary edition of his intensely researched history, running anywhere from 700 to 1500 pages, depending on type size and whether you think Goodreads lies about pages like they’re dick sizes.
Anyway. This is an enormous work. It features a level of detail even more granular than Bird and Sherwin’s still-unbeaten portrait of the Manhattan Project’s central figure, Oppenheimer. There’s no expectation of a background in physics on the part of the reader, but more understanding than I possess would certainly benefit those curious about this thing. Rhodes certainly can’t be accused of stinting on his sources: the book is incredibly well referenced, and covers the life story of even the most tangential figures in the story of the bombs that would destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There’s so much information in here that it’s easy for eyes to glaze over while getting to the narrative thrust of the thing. There’s an expectation that you’ll have internalised the descriptions of key moments in physics to put some of the breakthroughs in context, and I felt I was falling short in the grey matter department in those moments. But that’s all forgiven when Rhodes describes the destruction wrought upon Japan’s cities: though I’ve been to Hiroshima’s museum to the event (and, more broadly, to the idea of peace), it was shocking again to hear a detailed description of what occurred.
(Smartly, Rhodes ends the book at this point. I am uncertain as to how he might’ve followed such an adroit description without reducing the strength of the passages.)
By the time I ended the book, I was ready to let it go. It was an incredible experience, and it gave me way more information that I needed (or wanted?) and provided an excellent description of one of the key endeavours in modern history, but man I was tired.
This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.
There are another few books in Rhodes’ ongoing investigation into energy: the next one is about the development of the hydrogen bomb, the intellectual genesis of which is briefly touched upon here. I’m certainly going to read it, but I might leave it a while so that my brain can recover a little, and so I’ll look a little less like this while reading:
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (tr. Jennifer Croft)
My rating: four stars.
This is the first of two reads inspired by Elizabeth, who was as enthused about Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead as I was, and who got around to reading this one first. As always, I’d intended to read Flights, a Man Booker prizewinner, pretty much since it came out, before torpor and the size of my TBR pile got in the way .
I’m kind of disappointed that I read this novel after Plow, as I feel that that novel is much more successful. I loved Plow and so Flights – a novel in fragments, some of which reach only a paragraph or two in length – didn’t seem to hit the same powerful notes that I’d believed to be a hallmark of Tokarczuk’s work.
Or, more precisely, it didn’t have the sustained level of excellence which I’d come to believe was key to the author’s style. What Flights is made of is a series of loosely linked pieces about various topics (often involving the body, anatomy, preservation and the understanding of the world) roped together by the idea of travel, of journeying either in a physical or metaphysical sense. I didn’t find a lot to love about some of the shorter vignettes, but did find the longer stories (about missing family members, plastination and one’s choice whether to drop out of society or not) more satisfying. I don’t know – I just expected a bit more from the author given the power of the other work I’d read.
Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots. I’ve tried, a number of times, but my roots have always been shallow; the littlest breeze could always blow me right over. I don’t know how to germinate, I’m simply not in possession of that vegetable capacity. I can’t extract nutrition from the ground, I am the anti-Antaeus. My energy derives from movement – from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.
So why the four stars? Look, when Tokarczuk is on, she’s on. There’s turns of phrase that are just too good. I grudgingly have to admit that while the format didn’t dazzle, elements of the content absolutely did.
(I was delighted to learn that Tokarczuk split the Man Booker’s sizeable prizemoney with the novel’s translator, Jennifer Croft. That’s a cool thing to do, and I’m pretty sure that kind of acknowledgement of the translator’s contribution isn’t exactly common.)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.
My rating: five stars.
Short but sweet, this extended my feelings of bedazzlement by Jackson’s prose, which kicked off with my belated reading of The Lottery.
This time, we’re still in a gothic mode, and the barely-corralled bloodlust of a town features again, but the longer length enables Jackson to provide a portrait of a family in dire straits: they (two sisters, a cat and an invalid uncle) are outcasts in an unnamed town. The stain of murder hangs over the family, and the narrative proceeds from the point of view of a seemingly young girl, known to her sister – and some of the townsfolk – as Merricat.
The fantasy world of the family – held intact by a series of routines of meals and chores, and supplemented by prophylactic magical burials and boundary delineation – comes up against the sharpened blade of reality when Charles, a cousin, visits and proceeds to fuck shit up. He fucks shit up by just being present, by insinuating himself into the family’s life, and I cannot understate here what an absolute chode the guy is. Seriously, the fucking worst.
Anyway, things Do Not Go Well which you probably already knew (given that this was a Shirley Jackson joint) but the way in which a more fulsome narrative is dispensed is masterful. This is not a very long book but it has the emotional heft of something much bigger. Check it out and see if you fancy a visit to the moon as well.
If you’re after some good bookish times, please check out my profile on TheStoryGraph.
If you’d like to buy me some books to review, there’s a wishlist over here.
Yeah nah. 