Sunday Supplement 1: New books and immanent trips

I've never quite got the hang of this blogging business. Too retiring, perhaps, to share much of myself here. But I'd like to try. Having watched Julie and Julia a couple of week's ago, I'm inspired by - and a little enraptured with - the idea of emotional honesty in blogs, of using them as a journal of experience. Schmaltzy movies always get to me; they tend to feature characters that I want to be more like.

There's so much more to reading than simply reviewing, and that is what I wish to capture here. The joy of discovery, random thoughts that drift through one's mind while reading, how where and when one reads a book impacts on the response to it.

It was my Birthday a couple of weeks ago and I got a few books I'd been hoping for. From Megan, I got The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, which I discovered through reading Jonathan Safran Foer's die-cut Tree of Codes, and because it was then recommended in The Book Hive, the premier independent bookshop in Norwich, by acclaimed poet George Szirtes. I haven't yet read it, but I will get there soon. Also unwrapped was a signed copy of A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, that I borrowed from the library and read earlier this year but wanted a copy of my own to keep . It is a beautifully produced book, one I could flick through for hours just looking at the illustrations. Like the art of Shaun Tan, it would be suited to enlarging and framing and hanging from the wall. Well, if it weren't so dark and foreboding, anyway.

From my parents I also received the latest Andrey Kurkov novel to be translated into English, The Milkman in the Night, and a work of sociology that my mum mentioned reading when she was a student and which had an impact on her thinking. Written in the 1970s, it is called The Gift Relationship and looks at the value altruism plays in a healthy society, considering specifically blood donation. With David Cameron's supposedly radical Big Society in the news at the moment, I was interested in looking back at what altruism can offer and how it can be harnessed for the good of society, rather than coerced for small government ideological reasons. I don't read many academic studies, so I don't know whether I'll get around to reading this or not, but much of book buying, for me at least, is aspirational, reflecting the person I want to be rather than the person I am.

As if that wasn't enough books to keep me busy, on returning to work I found a mound of books that I had requested from publishers. Forthcoming and recently published books by the likes of Joe Dunthorne, Dalgit Nagra, Hari Kunzru, Anna Funder, Esi Edugyan, Erin Morgenstern, and more. It was like having my birthday all over again, and when I came to the last pile I couldn't believe my luck. There, on the bottom of the pile, were proofs of Murakami's forthcoming 1Q84. I hadn't expected there to be proofs, much less that I would be sent one!

Expecting to get something I've put on my birthday list, lets me anticipate it, get used to the idea of wanting it, and plan when to read it. I love it. But presents are best of all when they anticipate what you most want, and give you a complete surprise. Nothing could have beaten the excitement I felt on finding the Murakami proofs. 

I'm off to Edinburgh this week, to check out some authors at the International Book Festival, and play an ingenious place specific poetry game at the Fringe Festival. Run by Cambridge poet Ross Sutherland and social games entrepreneurs Hide and Seek, Hinterland is, according to their website, "about the space that appears when we speak languages that aren’t our mother tongue. And maybe also a bit about how rubbish so many of us tend to be at speaking languages other than English." I don't fully understand it, as yet, but it sounds intriguing, and the collage poem Ross created as a result of their last collaboration recreated the atmosphere or walking alone through an urban night, and is well worth a listen.

I'll let you know what it's like, and which authors caught my eye, next week. In the meantime I have twelve hours or train journey's ahead of me in which to read some of the books I haven't had a chance to yet this year. I'm definitely taking Naomi Wood's The Godless Boys, and probably The Echo Chamber by Luke Williams. But what else I haven't yet decided. Could go for highly rated The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, or possibly The Street of Crocodiles. I'm saving 1Q84 for a luxuriant treat when I get back home.

Happy reading!

Book Review: The Good Angel of Death by Andrey Kurkov

Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield.

The Good Angel of Death is probably the most bizarre of Andrey Kurkov’s novels yet translated into English. It’s a rambling, episodic narrative, difficult to pin down and even more so to summarise. Indeed, the blurb on the back gives a long-winded synopsis that, it turns out on reading, covers only the first fifty pages! Like the best Kurkov, it also defies easy categorising. Reminiscent of Gogol and part satire, part surreal adventure, part heartfelt romance, part bibliophilic investigation, it juxtaposes the surreal with the mundane, satirising the dichotomy between Ukrainian nationalism and Russian chauvinism in an entertaining yet illuminating manner.

When Kolya moves into a new flat in Kiev, he discovers a small book covered in annotations hidden inside a volume of War and Peace. Intrigued, and curious to discover the identity of the scribbler, he sets out on a typically absurd Kurkovian adventure  that soon comes to involve grave-robbing, hallucinogenic baby milk, mysterious criminal gangs, a chameleon, and a quest to recover an item of great national importance.

Kurkov uses this rampaging plot as a foreground for more pertinent considerations, particularly issues of nationalism and identity in post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia. Kurkov is Russian born, Ukrainian adopted, multilingual but writes in Russian. There has been significant criticism of him in Ukraine for doing so, and The Good Angel of Death is his response. It’s written in a polyglot blend of the two languages, mostly Russian but featuring Ukrainian nationalists who speak only in Ukrainian and who are determined to prevent the mysterious item of national importance falling into Kolya’s hands at any cost. And what starts off as an adventure soon progresses towards romance and a very different sort of ending.

It’s a strange and wonderful tale, unlike anything else you will read. What I love most about Andrey Kurkov is that his fiction presents an undistorted view of a society I know nothing about. Reading his work is like being dropped in the middle of a foreign city, lost and alone, and having to discover the world around for yourself. He makes no attempt to explain or simplify for the outsider. There are illusions here that never make sense – the link between the smell of cinnamon and Ukrainian nationalism, for instance, or what exactly happens with the sand – and because of this you come away from it feeling that you’ve learned something about a part of the world you otherwise wouldn’t have.

There’s a sense of unease that travels with the book, too, a wildness that accepts that death could be just around the corner so you might as well sit down and brew a cup of tea. The Good Angel of Death was first published in Russian back in the late 1990’s, in the midst of the post-Soviet era when the mafia stepped in to fill all the roles once occupied by the state. As in much of Kurkov’s fiction, at least those that have been translated into English, lawlessness, and corrupt mafia involvement in every aspect of life, are prominent features. What once was KGB, is now mafia, what once was state run enterprise, is now run by mafia. Former Soviet officials have found power through new channels, and everything has a price. As usual, Kurkov has a joke for it:

“It wouldn’t have been logical to link the presence of the car with the murderer of the photographer. It was clearly just the times that we lived in. Tense times, with lots of murders.”

Andrey Kurkov is a writer for whom no situation is too ugly for humour to cut through. He’s a joy to read, amusing as much with the strange counterpoints he smashes together as the words he uses. In Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer wrote that “humour is the only truthful way to tell a sad story” and that rather seems to fit Kurkov’s approach perfectly.

There’s mythology here too, in the story of the good angel of death, an angel that accompanies solitary travellers and sometimes appears to them in the form of a scorpion (if she doesn’t like them) and sometimes as a chameleon (if she does.) Through it all, as with Misha the penguin in Death and the Penguin, the chameleon wanders in and out of the plot like some benevolent God, invisibly guiding Kolya through his adventures.

The Good Angel of Death is possibly not the most engaging of Kurkov’s fiction. At times it feels messy and a little long. However, in return it gives a unique, interesting, and enjoyable insight into post-Soviet Ukraine and it’s relationships with neighbouring countries. Well worth a read, particularly if you haven’t read any Kurkov before. You’re in for a great experience.

The Good Angel of Death was first published in Russia in 2000. The first English translation appeared by Harvill Secker in trade paperback in 2009. Edition shown is the first paperback edition, published by Vintage in 2010. Pp 376, ISBN: 9780099513490

Book Review: Eating Animals - Jonathan Safran Foer

Read: January 2010

Eating Animals in one tweet-sized chunk:

Eating Animals is about the stories we tell about the food we eat. But also the gaps between the stories we tell and the stories as they actually are.

“Stories about food are stories about us - our history and our values.”

When I sat down to write this review I did so with 16 pages of notes and ambitions to compose a review that would change the eating habits of every person who read it. Only such lofty goals, I felt, could do justice to a book that casts the debate around the meat industry in a fresh light.

But what I soon realised as I considered how to achieve this gargantuan feat, was that the brilliance of Eating Animals is the extraordinary realism Foer injects into the debate. His master-stroke is to get away from the all-or-nothing vegetarian versus carnivore debate in favour of a third way, a way that promotes a reduction in our collective consumption of meat to a level that is conducive to stable and lasting farming practices. This is not a fundamentalist case for vegetarianism, or a moralistic case against eating meat per se, but an exploration of why the choices we make about what we eat matter – to ourselves, the animals we do or don’t eat, the planet, and the lives of all those who inhabit it.

Those who have enjoyed either of Foer’s sublime novels – Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – will find the same inventiveness is at play here, alongside a familiar appreciation that what matters most is not facts and figures but the stories that surround them. He lets a factory farmer speak for himself, devotes an entire chapter to a debate between a farmer, his vegetarian wife, and a vegan PETA activist. He has an inherent understanding that there is no such thing as unequivocal truth, merely lots of different stories that collectively make up a whole.

Eating Animals is about the stories we tell about the food we eat. It is about their importance to our communal experiences of eating, our cultural ways of life. But it is also about the gaps between the stories we tell ourselves and the stories as they actually are. And it is about the stories we want to tell about ourselves in the future.

These stories begin with Foer himself. Having spent the first twenty-six years of his life disliking animals and oscillating between vegetarian and omnivore, between feeling guilty about eating animals and savouring the taste and smell of meat, the prospect of becoming a father made him reconsider the person he wanted to be. Taking his cue from Michael Pollan’s assertion in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that “eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing,” and faced with the responsibility of deciding what to feed someone more important than himself, Foer set out to understand what sort of repercussions the decision to eat meat had. But what started as a curious bit of research soon grew into a mission to expose factory farming and the culture of cheap food that drives it. He joins an animal rights activist in breaking into a factory farm under cover of darkness, and what troubles him most is not the horrific living conditions of the birds, though they are bad enough, but the secrecy, the locked doors and hi-tec surveillance.

“In the three years I will spend immersed in animal agriculture, nothing will unsettle me more than the locked doors. Nothing will better capture the whole sad business of factory farming. And nothing will more strongly convince me to write this book.”

Above all else Eating Animals is a bid to burst open that secrecy and end the whole barbaric practice of factory farming once and for all. Part investigative journalism, part scientific study, and told through a variety of literary mediums, it is difficult not to be convinced by the passion and conviction of his arguments and the panache with which he conveys them. Of all the arguments in the book it is the assertion that what we chose to eat matters that reverberates longest. He recounts a powerful conversation with his grandmother about how she survived the holocaust:

“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”

“He saved your life.”

“I didn’t eat it.”

“You didn’t eat it?”

“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”

“Of course.”

“But not even to save your life?”

“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

One must make choices based on our own conscience, and Foer never deviates from this central assertion. However, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t do everything in his power to shape our consciences. Much of Eating Animals makes uncomfortable reading. He tells of turkeys genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, to a state where there are virtually none left in America that could survive in the wild. “What we do to living turkeys,” he asserts, “is just about as bad as anything humans have ever done to any animal in the history of the world.”

He tells of the pigs slaughtered in stages, of cesspools filled with animal excrement, and the often-overlooked seafood industry’s mind-boggling war on the seas. He breaks down statistics into conceivable metaphors. At one point he asks the reader to imagine being served a plate of sushi that also holds all the animals that were killed for that one serving, concluding that “the plate might have to be five feet across.” Another chapter begins with its title - ‘Influence / Speechlessness’ - repeated roughly 840 times over five pages. Why? Because “on average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime – one animal for every letter on the last five pages.”

Some consider this sort of approach glib and distracting, but it is this exuberance to communicate in a variety of ways that has always made Foer’s work so engaging, and it is as powerful here as ever it has been.

Not all the book is made up of tales of animal abuse, though. Far from it. Much time is devoted to the environmental degradation that results from factory farming. “Just as nothing we do has the direct potential to cause nearly as much animal suffering as eating meat, no daily choice that we make has a greater impact on the environment.” He explains how factory farming is implicated in the spread of global pandemic illnesses such as bird flu, how it produces terrifying quantities of waste which has no sewerage system through which to be disposed, and how meat is injected with so many hormones that it is strengthening the resistance of viruses to antibiotics and thereby damaging our health. His argument is that cheap meat is a false economy as factory farms do not pay for the mess they create, that they pass on all the associated costs of environmental clean-up and health-care to taxpayers without taking responsibility for either their actions or the consequences.

It would be difficult not to reach the conclusion, as he does, that industrial factory farming is a horrendous blight on our world that cannot even begin to be excused by the cheap meat it produces. While it is important to recognise that Eating Animals deals almost exclusively with the American industry and that the situation there is more extreme than in the EU, the picture he draws is reflected to a lesser or greater degree in every meat industry in the western world. It would be a travesty if the focus on the American system were taken to give readers reason to adopt the sort of arrogant superiority that so often underpins our reactions toward America. After all, the UK has some of the cheapest food prices in the world and those savings have to come from somewhere.

The problem Foer quickly encounters is that we consume too much meat - about 150 times more chicken than we did eighty years ago. And that sort of production is only possible through factory farming.

“We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the number of ethical eating options available to most of us. There isn’t enough nonfactory chicken produced in America to feed the population of Staten Island and not enough nonfactory pork to serve New York City, let alone the country. Ethical meat is a promissory note, not a reality. Any ethical-meat advocate who is serious is going to be eating a lot of vegetarian fare.”

Foer spends an inordinate amount of time searching for an ‘ethical farm,’ a farm whose meat he would be happy to feed his children. Though he finds better farms whose work is based on traditional animal husbandry and organic rearing, he still witnesses what he considers barbaric and unnecessary practices such as branding and concludes that there is no such thing as humane farming methods. This is the closest he comes to stating openly that he believes eating animals to be wrong. Yet still, he doesn’t say ‘don’t eat meat’ but rather, ‘eat less meat’. He separates his personal decision to become a committed vegetarianism from a universal demand that others follow. Because of this many hard-line vegans have criticised Eating Animals for its refusal to explicitly support universal vegetarianism. He is wise enough to know that an absolutist argument of this kind would be counter-productive. So he couches his argument in storytelling, in a journey of discovery. He pitches this book not at a distant utopian future of universal vegetarianism but a first-step incremental reduction in meat consumption for all

Eating Animals is a rallying call to unite in opposition to the factory farming method of meat production. Yet it is typical of the book that Foer doesn’t sugar-coat this message in moral absolutism, but rather a return to stories.

“To give up the taste of sushi or roasted chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory creates a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting – even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember animals and my concern for their wellbeing, I may need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.”

As a reviewer I am guilty of describing books as ‘must read’ far more often than is strictly true. Indeed, it is arguable whether any fiction is ever must-read. However, if there is ever a book that warrants the moniker then it is Eating Animals or another book on the ethical and practical questions raised by the food we eat. Aside sleep and death, there is nothing that can be said to unite the entire global population as eating does. What we eat, and the impact it has on the lives we live and the world around us, is a fundamental question of our existence.

Eating Animals ends with its author hosting a meat-free Thanksgiving for family and the acceptance that they will need to develop new stories for this new diet. But, he contends, that is a small price to pay for not living with the shame of supporting such a profoundly abhorrent meat production system. During the course of his journey he repeatedly returns to an emblematic story about Franz Kafka staring into a fish tank and, on seeing his own reflection mingling with the animals he once ate, saying “Now at least I can look at you in peace.”

Life is about recognising the person you are and the person you want to be. It is about making decisions based on knowledge rather than routine. Without ever being overly preachy, Eating Animals asks us all to stare into a fish tank, to see ourselves reflected, and to decide what stories we wish to tell in the future.

9 out of 10

Eating Animals is published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton, March 2010. ISBN: 9780241143933. 352pp

Book Review: Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day 7 it is a chance to relive Everything is Illuminated.

Read: January 2008

Everything is Illuminated in one tweet-sized chunk:

Vast in scope and iridescent in execution, not to mention fearlessly inventive, Everything is Illuminated left me wondering when I would read a novel quite this good again.

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Any novel which takes its title from a Milan Kundera novel has a lot to live up to. And sometimes, in this startlingly original and diverse debut, Jonathan Safran Foer exceeds even an optimistic readers wildest dreams. Such is the dexterity and invention of his writing that one gets the impression there are no challenges to which he couldn’t rise.

I barely remember the last time I savoured every word of an entire novel. From the hilarious opening pages in which Alex introduces himself in his uniquely translated English – “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.” – to the inevitable conclusion to their “very rigid search,” this is a novel that engages the reader throughout, eliciting an emotional response of one sort or another on almost every page.

The plot is multifarious, but essentially follows a character named Jonathan as he arrives in Ukraine to investigate his family history. He hires a local tour agency and sets off in search of the village of Trachimbrod and the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazi’s fifty years before. Accompanied by his translator, Alex – America obsessed and speaking English as though he has swallowed a thesaurus, - his ‘blind’ grandfather, and their ‘seeing-eye bitch’ Sammy Davis Jnr, Jnr, their journey into the heart of rural Ukraine takes them into a past hidden from view by fifty years of concerted and deliberate forgetting. You could say this is a novel about the holocaust, but it is not. Like Art Spiegleman’s exquisite graphic novel, Maus, it is about how the past effects the present, and how we are defined by the ways in which we remember and deal with the horrors of the past.

There are three concurrent plot lines woven together, each illuminating and offering commentary on the others. First we have the actual journey, recounted in his beautifully mangled English by Alex, hilarious, shot through with peculiarly profound descriptions and eye for the heart of the matter. Then there is Jonathan’s family history novel of Trachimbrod, brilliantly imagined, full of bizarre magical realist twists, religious writings and intense, slightly otherworldly characters. Finally there are Alex’s letters to Jonathan, now back in America, commenting upon each of their novels, offering oversight to the work as a whole and a pleasing post-script to the main action of the plot.

Brought together by Foer's amazing ability to hold multiple themes in the air and bring them together seamlessly, Everything is Illuminated is a beautifully written, hilarious and moving novel which will illuminate the reading of anyone who chooses to pick it up.

The oft used criticism for Everything is Illuminated is that the author is being too clever: that his invention and wit and conceptual scope are the results of a smart-alec show-off, the kind of intellectual posturing which fiction can do without. But when on earth did being clever become such a faux pas? There is nothing more commendable than an author willing to experiment with their writing, to reach for the stars and try and say as much in as meaningful a way as possible. Perhaps it is because the prose is so eminently readable that his intellect conflicts with some. Because it is when the simple meets the profound that this novel really illuminates the room. I read much of this in the bath and frequently wanted to jump up, suddenly enlivened with a phrase or idea, and shout ‘eureka!’ For suddenly the world was that little bit clearer. There are some beautiful phrases, beautiful in how they relate to the themes of the novel, the characters and the plot. They are not easily recreated because they do not exist in and of themselves, but are made great by the novel in its entirety, every single word and phrase eventually draws together, circular and profound. From the slow evolution of Alex’s language to the subtle fissions forming along the fault lines of history, Everything is Illuminated replicates itself throughout. The tone fits the events, the characters evolutionary arc delineates the emotional heart of the novel, the humour makes possible the tragedy.

Indeed it is the relationship between humour and tragedy that sums up all that takes place. Not only does humour make it possible to glance at the tragedies of the holocaust but those self same tragedies demonstrate just how hollow and fragile the humour can be. Nothing is set in stone, ideas evolve and develop with the intense experience of the characters, and the reader is invited along for the duration. For example, early on, in his letters Alex writes:

“I know that you asked me not to alter the mistakes because they sound humorous, and humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story, but I think I will alter them.”

Then, later in the novel, Jonathan offers the other interpretation:

“I used to think that humour was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is…but now I think it’s the opposite. Humour is a way of shrinking from that wonderful world”

What begins as a very funny, witty and irreverent novel is slowly overtaken by a gloomy appreciation of history and the characters are transformed in ways that can never be reversed.

“‘There is time for all of them,’ I told him, because remember where we are in our story, Jonathan. We still thought we possessed time.”

A celebration of the writing process throughout, each of the characters takes up their pen to try and shed light upon the experiences of the past, and it is the process of writing which makes them stare right at it, to understand their lives through the process of writing them. As Alex says: “With writing, we have second chances.” And echoed in history comes the repeated phrase from Trachimbrod, “We are writing, we are writing, we are writing.” Conserving the past so as to live in the present.

One thing Everything is Illuminated cannot be accused of is understatement. Very little is left to the imagination of the reader, or to speak for itself without having its purpose comprehensively enunciated. But, though this usually annoys me, here the vast, brash, luridly grandiose intentions of the author come shining through. It is a novel that could only be written by a young writer, vast and iridescent, fearlessly inventive, it left me wondering when I would read a novel as good again. I have spent the last week flicking through the pages, desperately trying to assimilate it all, reminding myself of an event here, a phrase there. Perhaps I will even read the book again, immediately, afraid to forget a single detail.

For in a novel which is all about memory, the one thing I can say for certain is that I shall not forget it in a hurry. It is a book which gets under your skin and they are characters you take to heart. As Alex sums up at the culmination of the excellent movie adaptation:

“I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out.”

10 out of 10

53 Books You'll Want to Read in 2010

This post is inspired by the excellent list produced on Bookmunch. I have always been frustrated by how difficult it can be to cobble together a list of books released in the future so am delighted that someone has already done the hard work and saved me the hassle! I have simply added three additional titles, and some comment to the ones I am particularly excited about. 

1. The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall
2. The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner
3. Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor
   
   
   
   
   Sounds like classic McGregor territory: the search for truth about the past in the objects and people of today. His first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things was a beautiful snapshot image of life on one street, and although the Booker longlisted follow-up wasn't quite as good, he remains an incredibly talented and powerful writer. One to look out for.
   
   
   
4. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
   Philip Pullman does my head in at times, with his endless hatred of C.S. Lewis and his militant hit-you-over-the-head-with-it atheism. But he remains a wonderful storyteller and any new book from him promises a wonderful adventure. Billed as being particularly aimed at those who know their gospels (which I don't!), I'm nonetheless looking forward to learning something more about a subject (theology) which I find endlessly fascinating but can easily become dense and dull. Basically, Pullman is doing what I wish everyone would do: putting non-fiction into fiction, so that my impatient brain can take it in and enjoy the process at the same time.
   Bring on April!
   
   
5. Naming the Bones by Louise Walsh
6. Known to Evil by Walter Mosley
7. Monster 1959 by David Maine
8. Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
9. It Feels So Good When I Stop by Joe Pernice
10. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
11. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
12. Nemesis by Philip Roth
13. Wild Child by TC Boyle 
14. Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison
15. Solar by Ian McEwan
    I was lucky enough to hear Ian McEwan reading from this in June of this year, and it is genuinely very funny. I was in a horrible mood going into the talk, but somewhere in the almost campus-novel comedy of his reading, my perception of Ian McEewan as a 'serious' writer was blown completely out of the water. An early tip for Booker success next year, I think.
    
    
16. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
17. Point Omega by Don DeLillo
18. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
19. The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
20. Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
21. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
    
    
    
    
    When 1Q84 was published in Japan earlier this year it led to a rush of interest akin to that which greeted the release of Dan Brown's new book. The print run was raised from  100,000 to 480,000 and with the plot kept completly secret bookstores were inundated with pre-orders and queues on the day of release. The first of a two volume novel, 1Q84 is described as 'classic Murakami - a "complex and surreal narrative" that "shifts back and forth between tales of two characters, a man and a woman, who are searching for each other".
    No author reminds me why I love reading quite as well as Murakami.
    
    
    
    
22. The Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell
23. This Party’s Got to Stop by Rupert Thomson
24. Beatrice & Virgil by Yann Martel
    Well, it's Martel's first novel since the 2002 Booker winning phenomenon that was Life of Pi. Promising another mix of fable, fantasy, and theology this is a book that will attract huge public attention whenever it is released in 2010
    
    
25. All That Follows by Jim Crace
26. The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle
27. Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes
28. Lean On Pete by Willy Vlautin
29. The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
30. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
31. Castle J Robert Lennon
32. Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis
33. The Canal by Lee Rourke
34. Canada by Richard Ford
35. The Leaping by Tom Fletcher
36. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
    
    
    
    
    Already published in the U.S. where it has attracted a massive controversy and no little praise, Eating Animals sees Jonathan Safran Foer's on the verge of fatherhood and facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf. His investigations into the meet industry ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.
    Not published here until Spring 2010, I am hoping that one of the many lovely people I know in the states might see fit to send it to me for Christmas this year (hint hint, wink wink!)
    
    
    
37. King Death by Toby Litt
38. Light Boxes by Shane Jones
39. The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
40. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Simm by Jonathan Coe
41. The News Where You Are by Catherine O’Flynn
42. The Greek Affair by Simon Van Booy
43. Nazi Literature in the Americas – Roberto Bolano
44. Rupture by Simon Lelic
45. The Art of Pho by Julian Hanshaw
46. George Sprott by Seth
47. Taurus by Joseph Smith (author of The Wolf)
48. The Widow’s Tale by Mick Jackson
    
    
    
    
    Mick Jackson is an author who never ceases to surprise. From the charming madness of Underground Man, to the fabricated beastiary in Bears of England he never quite gives you what you expect and his work is all the better because of it. What you can be sure is that The Widow's Tale will be an enjoyable read, full of humanity, warmth, and a little dollop of the unexpected to boot.
    
    
    
49. The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan
50. In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
51. Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie
    The Sequal to Haround and the Sea of Stories, Luka promises another fable on the power of stories, and a life-affirming quest for life and passion. Published in October 2010 by Jonathan Cape, CCV publisher Dan Franklin has described it as “brilliant... as good as [Philip Pullman’s] Northern Lights”. I'm a huge Rushdie fan, next October can't come soon enough for me now.
    
    
52. Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness
    
    
    
    
    
    The final part of Patrick Ness's excuisite Chaos Walking trilogy, Monsters of Men promises another morally nuanced and occasionally disturbing tale of Todd and Viola, not to mention the very fate of New World itself.
    The Knife of Never Letting Go is the most exciting and thrilling young adult novel I have read in many years and The Ask and the Answer was a worthy sequal. Told in a gritty acerbic voice, and shot through with moments of utter beauty, Chaos Walking will be a classic trilogy read for many many years to come.
    
    
    
53. Ellipsis by Nikki Dudley
    
    
    
    
    Last but by no means least is this thrilling debut from London poet and novelist Nikki Dudley. Exciting, phsychologically complex, and disconcerting, it is a powerful tale of two misfits trying to uncover long hidden secrets about themselves and their pasts'. Dudley has an often startling eye for description and her simple poetic prose will delight readers looking for something slilghtly different in the crime thriller genre.
    
    

A Convergence of Birds - Jonathan Safran Foer (ed)

Read: Januray 2009

There are few authors who inspire such breathless excitement in me as Jonathan Safran Foer. And even though his contribution to this intriguing book is only 19 pages long, it is worth buying for this alone. ‘If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe’ is quite possibly his most supremely written work. It is a masterful work of atmospheric storytelling told in rich vivid prose and packed with spectacularly evocative metaphor. It begins with this sentence, and the quality never wanes from there on.

“If the ageing magician should admire the ribs of his hungry gondolier, it’s only because they look like wands.”

My problem with reviewing Jonathan Safran Foer’s work is that I do not possess the requisite number of superlatives. There are only so many times I can use words like ‘spectacular,’ and ‘mesmeric.’ So just go and read this book instead. Alongside Foer's story there are 21 other fascinating contributions to this compendium, all creative responses to the life and work of collector and assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. Foer started writing to famous poets and writers, asking them to create original works based on their responses to the work of Joseph Cornell when he was still a college student and long before Everything is Illuminated was published. So to see so many of the leading lights of American letters included here is amazing. Where else can you find Joyce Carol Oates, Barry Lopez, Siri Hustvedt and others all included within the covers of a single book alongside 28 full colour illustrations of one of the most intriguing artists of the twentieth century?

8 out of 10

The Unabridged Pocketbook of Lightning - Jonathan Safran Foer

Read: December 2008

“There's no greater feeling than inspiring someone. That might even be the point of art.”

So writes Jonathan Safran Foer in the introduction to The Unabridged Pocketbook of Lightening. It is a view I thoroughly agree with and believe should be at the forefront of all discussion on art. Art is about creating something new which makes the world a better place to live in. In my opinion this is sometimes forgotten in the modern obsessions with the marketplace and making money. But that is an argument for elsewhere.

The Unabridged Pocketbook of Lightening is a tiny pocket sized book produced as part of a Penguin's 70^th birthday celebrations and now pretty difficult to get hold of. But never fear, its contents can all be found elsewhere. Indeed, almost all of it is made up of sample chapters from what became Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The remaining ten pages comprise a short story entitled 'A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease' which was originally published in the New Yorker in 2003 and can now be read here:

It is a powerful work which imagines a set of marks which could be used to express on paper the ebb and flow of conversation where the present punctuation is insufficient. So we have marks for silence, marks for willed silence, marks for what should have been said but isn't, marks to express resigned acceptance, and marks to convey the tone a voice something is spoken in. It is a fantastically perceptive little list, reading it you get the impression of how many gaps there are in the English language and how much we could improve. I sometimes wonder whether other novelists shouldn't just adopt these marks en masse and include this little primer in the back of their books to explain it to their readers.

What Jonathan Safran Foer does in much of his work is to experiment with new ways of looking at language, and new forms of communicating on a page. His inventive approach is exciting, liberating, and enjoyable. Put simply, stop reading this review, click on the link above, and spend 10 minutes reading this fantastic little story.

And if you enjoyed it, why not read these other great short stories too?

A Beginners Guide to Hanukkah

About the Typefaces Not Used in this Edition

Cravings

8 out of 10

A brief interlude before I review The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Despite the fact that Jonathan Safran Foer is one of my favourite authors, or perhaps because of it, I put off reading anything by Nicole Krauss for a long time. Repeatedly I was told that she was a fantastic writer and that her style was reminiscent of that of that of her husband. When I started reading The History of Love I did so in the inherent knowledge that she was the wife of Jonathan Safran Foer. But that was the problem: unconsciously it appears that I was falling into that age old gender trap of subsuming the wife to the husband. Had it not been for her husband, I probably wouldn't have ever read it. At the very least I was guilty of failing to recognise her as a writer in her own right. (I am ashamed to say that this is not an isolated instance having only considered reading Victoria Hislop's The Island after learning that she was married to Ian Hislop).

This is a shameful state of affairs, but it strikes me that I am probably not the only well meaning person whose instinctive reaction to modern female authors is to presume they are light weight chic-lit type books. It doesn't matter that this assumption is consistently proved false when I actually read the book, for the judgement is made in the first instant when I first see a book.

Why is this?

Am I inherently sexist in my judgements? Probably. But not deliberately. All books, but particularly those by female authors, are marketed to a very female readership – paperbacks especially are marketed directly to women over the age of 35, who watch Richard and Judy, belong to a local book group and like to talk about the political and social issues in a novel. Let me be perfectly clear, I am not saying that this is the real readership, but it is the 'ideal' reader that the books are marketed at. As a result, a gender split in reading habits is developing which is every bit as worrying as the converses situation was in years past where male literary authors were made austere looking to reflect the calibre of their supposed learning.

Rather than reflecting something of the character of the book, jackets these days are increasingly designed in order to ensure generic and widespread interest. As with much of the rest of the media, quality has been subsumed to quantity. What is important is not the extent to which someone enjoys a book, or getting people who would enjoy it to read it, but ensuring that as many people as possible who see it on a 3for2 table take it with them to the counter.

This is nothing new. It has all been said before. But in writing a review of The History of Love I have begun thinking about the preconceived notions we all take with us into a book. Better reviewers than I have been unable to see past the incredible resemblances which the works of Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer bear to each other. Has the knowledge of their relationship affected the reviews produced as a result?

Sadly for the purposes of this article, it seems the answer is no. Each has received widespread praise in their own right. But I want to dwell on their similarities nonetheless, for no other reason than to get it straight in my head. Not only do they have similar styles of prose, thematic concerns, inventive treatment of the past, and even characters, but at times they actually use sentences that have echoes in the others work. For instance here in The History of Love Nicole Krauss has Leo Gursky say: “we met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.” This strikes me as echoing a passage from Everything is Illuminated in which Alex comments: “‘There is time for all of them,’ I told him, because remember where we are in our story, Jonathan. We still thought we possessed time.”

And all of this links back to their shared fascination with one of the most beautiful words in the English language: nostalgia. It is there referenced in Foer's title for Everything is Illuminated which is taken from a passage in Milan Kundera's masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in which he writes: “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” Krauss too has talked about the forever lost history of her ancestry and the the epiphany she felt at the discovery of the word nostalgia which seemed to be a ready made definition of her mindset.

But what is most amazing of all is not the similarities in their work – she has said that they do not compare notes and nor do they read each other's books until they are in proof form – but in how similar they were as people even before they met. As she says: “I think we come from such a similar place. His grandmother survived the Holocaust. I think we intuited a lot of the same things in the silences of our childhood.' (Guardian, 15 May 2005)

They were each born of Jewish parents on the East Coast of the US, Krauss in New York, Foer in Washington DC, and each enjoyed a largely routine nuclear childhood. Naturally creative as children they each studied literature at University where each received direct and positive mentoring from a literary legend (Foer from Joyce Carol Oates, Krauss from Joseph Brodsky). Krauss wrote a these on Joseph Cornell at Oxford and Jonathan Safran Foer edited a collection by leading American writers based on Cornell's work. They each published their début novels to widespread acclaim in 2002 and followed these up by startlingly similar second novels in 2005.

But despite all this they only met in 2002 when their Dutch publisher noticed these remarkable similarities and introduced them to each other. They were married in 2004.

More than anything it seems to me they are each representatives of the fantastically vibrant young US literary scene from which they have emerged. What I like most about each of them is that they demonstrate a rare belief in the power of written communication and are willing to test the limits of what is possible in a novel. They each clearly love novels, and believe in their ability to change people's lives. They each understand and can enunciate the desire to write which is at the heart of why people need to write. It is for this reason, not to mention their considerable linguistic talents, that I love reading each of them.

So what is the point of this post? I honestly don't know. They are just some thoughts and bits of research which occurred to me when I tried to write about The History of Love. They don't really go anywhere, which is why I decided not to use them. But nonetheless, they might be of interest to someone out there. And that's what a blog like this is for: pointless ramblings which seem relevant at the time but quickly fade into utter irrelevance.

Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

Read: January 2008

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being


Any novel which takes its title and central concept from a Milan Kundera novel has a lot to live up to. And sometimes, in this startlingly original and diverse debut novel Jonathan Safran Foer exceeds even an optimistic readers wildest dreams. Such is the dexterity and invention of his writing that one gets the impression there are no challenges to which he couldn’t rise: Everything is Illuminated is absolutely fantastic.

I barely remember the last time I savoured every word of an entire novel. From the hilarious opening pages in which Alex introduces himself in his uniquely translated English – “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.” – to the inevitable conclusion to their “very rigid search,” this is a novel which will draw you in, strip everything from you and leave you ravished and wanting, pleading for, more.

The plot is multifarious in the extreme but essentially follows a character named Jonathan Safran Foer as he arrives in Ukraine to investigate his family history. He hires a local tour agency and sets off in search of the village of Trachimbrod and the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazi’s fifty years before. Accompanied by his translator, Alex – America obsessed and who speaks English as though he has swallowed a thesaurus but never heard anyone actually speak it, - his ‘blind’ grandfather, and their ‘seeing-eye bitch’ Sammy Davis Jnr, Jnr, their journey into the heart of rural Ukraine takes them into the past, a past hidden from view by fifty years of concerted and deliberate forgetting. You could say this is a novel about the holocaust, but in reality it is not. Like Art Spiegleman’s exquisite graphic novel, Maus, it is about how the past effects the present, and how we are defined by the ways in which we remember and deal with the horrors of the past.

There are three concurrent plot lines, woven together, each illuminating and offering commentary on the others. First we have the actual journey, recounted in his beautifully mangled English by Alex, hilarious, shot through with his own peculiarly profound descriptions and eye for the heart of the matter. Then there is Jonathan’s family history novel of Trachimbrod, brilliantly imagined, full of bizarre magical realist twists, religious writings and intense, slightly otherworldly characters. Finally there are Alex’s letters to Jonathan, now back in America, commenting upon each of their novels, offering oversight to the work as a whole and a pleasing post-script to the main action of the plot.

But do not be put off by this confusing summary; it all makes more sense when you are reading it. Brought together by the authors amazing ability to hold multiple themes in the air and bring them together seamlessly, it is a beautifully written, hilarious and moving novel which will illuminate the reading of anyone who chooses to pick it up.

The oft used criticism for Everything is Illuminated is that the author is being too clever: that his invention and wit and conceptual scope are the results of a smart-alec show-off, the kind of intellectual posturing which fiction can do without. But when on earth did being clever become such a faux pas? There is nothing more commendable than an author willing to experiment with their writing, to reach for the stars and try and say as much in as meaningful a way as possible. Perhaps it is because the prose is so eminently readable that his intellect conflicts with some. Because it is when the simple meets the profound that this novel really illuminates the room. I read much of this in the bath and frequently wanted to jump up, suddenly enlivened with a phrase or idea, and shout ‘eureka!’ For suddenly the world was that little bit clearer. There are some beautiful phrases, beautiful in how they relate to the themes of the novel, the characters and the plot. They are not easily recreated because they do not exist in and of themselves, but are made great by the novel in its entirety, every single word and phrase eventually draws together, circular and profound. From the slow evolution of Alex’s language to the subtle fissions forming along the fault lines of history, Everything is Illuminated replicates itself throughout. The tone fits the events, the characters evolutionary arc delineates the emotional heart of the novel, the humour makes possible the tragedy. The relation between humour and tragedy is a close and fascinating one, with each used to shed light on, to illuminate, the other. For not only does humour make it manageable to glance at the tragedies of the holocaust but those self same tragedies demonstrate just how hollow and fragile the humour can be. Nothing is set in stone, ideas evolve and develop with the intense experience of the characters, and the reader is invited along for the duration. For example, early on, in his letters Alex writes:

“I know that you asked me not to alter the mistakes because they sound humorous, and humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story, but I think I will alter them.”

Then, later in the novel, Jonathan offers the other interpretation:

“I used to think that humour was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is…but now I think it’s the opposite. Humour is a way of shrinking from that wonderful world”

Because what begins as a very funny, witty and irreverent novel is slowly overtaken by a gloomy appreciation of history and they are transformed in ways that can never be reversed.

“‘There is time for all of them,’ I told him, because remember where we are in our story, Jonathan. We still thought we possessed time.”

And in a sense this is the point of the novel. As each of the characters takes up their pen to try to shed light upon the experiences of the past, it is the process of writing which makes them stare right into the past, to understand their life through the process of viewing it. As Alex says: “With writing, we have second chances.” And echoed in history comes the repeated phrase from Trachimbrod, “We are writing, we are writing, we are writing.” Conserving the past so as to live in the present.

One thing Everything is Illuminated cannot be accused of is understatement. Very little is left to the imagination of the reader, or to speak for itself without having its purpose comprehensively enunciated. But, though this usually annoys me, here the vast, brash, luridly grandiose intentions of the author come shining through. It is a novel that could only be written by a young writer, vast and iridescently, fearlessly, inventive, it left me wondering when I would read a novel as good again. I have spent the last week flicking through the pages, desperately trying to assimilate it all, reminding myself of an event here, a phrase there. Perhaps I will even read the book again, immediately, afraid to forget a single detail.

For in a novel which is all about memory, the one thing I can say for certain is that I shall not forget it in a hurry. As Alex sums up at the culmination of the excellent movie adaptation:

“I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out.”


10 out of 10

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

Read: February 2008

9/11 changed everything for nine-year-old Oskar Schell. He went to school in the morning only to return home soon after, alone, to discover his father's last messages from the World Trade Centre on the answerphone. And then nothing. He never saw his father again. Unsurprinsingly, he has ‘heavy boots’ all the time now. He is scared of tall buildings, the subway, men with beards, and boats. He doesn’t want to get over the event, and refuses to let his mother get over it either. He gives himself little bruises to punish himself for his fathers absence. Then Oskar finds a strange key hidden inside an envelope in a blue vase in his father’s wardrobe and begins a quest to discover which of New Yorks 162 million locks it opens. His only clue is the word ‘Black’ written on the envelope he found the key in. Oskar’s quest takes him across the whole of New York, into the lives of strangers who guide him along the way, and bit by bit he begins to uncover a family mystery that stretches back more than fifty years.

Interlocking with this story there are secondary narratives, alternate plots which slowly tie together to build an overall picture of Oskar’s family. These narratives follow the lives of Oskar’s paternal grandparents who, having survived the Dresdon bombings in 1944, try to rebuild their life in America. In a series of letters their story is told, full of unspoken love and unspoken need and unspoken events which never could have happened. Except they did. And like a movie composed of short films, these three stories converge around themes and places, by saying so little they convey so much.

But there is a problem. Jonathan Safran Foer’s second outing is frought with every problem that gives rise to the phrase ‘difficult second novel.’ Where his debut, Everything is Illuminated, seemed at times to invent a whole new method of writing the novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tries to rehash it, to reproduce what has already been successful. You have the same disrupted, scrapbook narrative, similar characters in search of historical truth who discover something about themselves in the process of investigation of the past, disfigured language which conveys so much in such an unusual manner.

As with Everything is Illuminated, it is written with multiple viewpoints, crisscrossing and overlapping and eventually tying into each other in unpredictable ways. However, unlike Everything is Illuminated, I did not feel that the secondary stories here lived up to the main plot. Foer seems to be trying too hard to create something original, to make it all as quirky as possible. But for about half the book I was unsure which of their letters were written by who, and who they were written to. The periods were confusing, did not engross me in the novel. I was always waiting to return to Oskar's quest. And although the parallels that these passages were trying to make are integral to the novel as a whole – the cataclysmic impact of a destructive event, the way it changes you forever, the power of love to survive in some shape or form no matter what – their story itself did not hold my attention in the way that Oskar’s did.

And you know the biggest problem with this book? It is that it is still pretty damn good. A whole lot better than most books published. With a vast array of characters and different narratives, Foer has perhaps created the first multimedia novel. It is almost as though you step into the novel itself: through a series of photos you see the things Oskar sees, there are blank pages, pages with just a few words on, pages when the writing grows so small with so much to fit in and so little space that it begins to overlap itself. At the end Oskar even creates a flipbook mirage of time flowing backwards, an inversion of Lyle Owerko's shot of the Falling Man, falling up from the street, back into the safety of the building. In that way, he says, “we would have been safe.”

The spectrum of the catastrophe of 9/11 looms large throughout, but it is not necessarily a book about that cataclysmic morning. At no point does it deal with the politics or wider issues of the event but focuses rather on the effect it has had on delightful young Oskar. It is a book about family history and the Second World War, about one child’s refusal to let the memory of his dead father die within him.

The characterisation is absolutely first class. Oskar is a thoroughly likeable young man for whom the reader develops an almost familial bond with: you want to protect him, and make his world better again. His constant need to give himself little bruises, to invent things that will make the world better, his overwhelming sadness, the tenderness he shows to those he meets, it is all heartbreakingly sad. He is also very funny, charming and full of little titbits of interesting information. He takes pictures of things he sees to stick in a scrapbook called ‘Things That Happened To Me.’ He even carries a calling card with him:

“Oskar Schell
Inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur entomologist, francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist, percussionist, amateur astronomer, computer consultant, amateur archeologist, collector of: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memoirabilia, semiprecious stones, and other things.”

Similarly in his 103 year-old-neighbour Mr. Black, Foer creates a character who seems almost the personification of the twentieth century with his career as a war correspondent, rolodex of famous figures reduced to one word descriptions - ‘husband,’ ‘son,’ ‘money,’ or, most often, ‘war’ – and conflict between career and home life.

Then there are Oskar’s parents, the absent presences who haunt the book. His mother, who appears only briefly, sometimes neglectful, sometimes like a great masterminding schemer. And you never get a chance to know who she is. She exists in the words of other characters, has no voice of her own, no life away from what the other characters see. She is the unwitnessed victim of 9/11, the widowed spouse, unable to get on with her life. She is fascinating because we never know her, she is a blank canvas, could be almost anything in the world and the reader would have no idea.

And finally, last but not least, Thomas Schell – both the father and the son. It is nice to see a positive portrayal of a father in literature. Too much media seems to present fathers as always out at work, or uncommunicative, or boring. It is such a pleasure to read about the adventures of the father and his son, his creativity and inspiration, his caring and nurturing. And I loved the story of the Sixth Borough. It is when Safran Foer steps into this sort of fantastical fable that he is at his most intriguing, he has the story telling capabilities of Salman Rushdie and the inventiveness of a Russell Hoban.

Foer certainly has a way with words. He is a great communicator, consummately able to convey exactly what he is trying to say. There is one great moment of description, one moment I loved, so exact is the image it creates.

“It was silent and still and I couldn’t see my own hands in the darkness. One hundred planes flew overhead, massive heavy planes, pushing through the night like one hundred whales through water.”

The passage comes just as Dresden is about to be flattened during World War 2, and Oskar’s grandfather is trying to find his childhood sweetheart. That image of bombs as huge whales, the sky as thick as an oily, sluggish sea. Somehow that seems to sum up the entire novel: the huge truth of it all emerging from something almost invisible, until it is there in your face, extremely loud incredibly close, and there is nothing you can do to escape it.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close confirms Jonathan Safran Foer as a prodigious talent, as a writer who can make you laugh, cry and think in the same sentence and who is not afraid to push the boundaries of narrative to create something fascinatingly original. His multimedia approach to story-telling makes the book come alive in a way few novels do, and being able to see exactly what Oskar sees allows the reader to step into his mind in a very intimate way. Already Foer has a style which is all his own. I will excitedly look forward to the publication of his third book with an air of expectancy reserved for very few select authors. I just hope that he does not try to write the same book for the rest of his career.

8 out of 10