Reviews by Neal Kane
The Reader
By Bernhard Schlink
I don’t know about you, but it’s exceedingly rare that a book actually makes me cry. It’s even rarer for me to have this experience while reading a selection from Oprah’s Book Club. Yet this is exactly what happened with The Reader, Bernhard Schilnk’s taut, heartwrenching novel about life in postwar Germany. When 15-year-old Michael Berg falls ill while walking home from school, he encounters Hanna Schmitz, an enigmatic woman in her mid-thirties, with whom he enters into a passionate affair. Later, Hanna disappears from Michael’s life until, as a law student, he goes to witness a war crimes trial and sees Hanna in the dock, where he learns that she once served as a guard in a concentration camp. Both the revelations that arise from the trial, and the role that Michael plays in Hanna’s subsequent redemption, are inextricably linked to the awesome power that words exercise over our lives. The Reader is a spare and deceptively simple novel, but one whose exquisite poignancy lands squarely on the solar plexus, and lingers in the mind.
In Cold Blood
By Truman Capote
On the heels of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Academy Award-winning
turn as Truman Capote in the eponymous film, our book club decided
to take on In Cold Blood, the work that inspired it. Much has
been said about the complex interplay between “truth” and “fiction” in
the work, which was hailed on publication as “the first
non-fiction novel.” (In the ensuing years, the advent of
reality TV, crime show reenactments, Fox News, and A Million
Little Pieces have only served to further blur those fine-grained
distinctions between veracity and invention.) More than 40 years
after publication, the writing is incredibly fresh, vivid, and
compelling; the book has both the urgency of a page-turner and
an astonishing literary flair. In Cold Blood also endures as
one of the most insightful meditations ever written on our uniquely
American brand of violence. In a country where young children
are allowed to witness thousands of fictional (and sometimes
actual) murders, but the sight of Roseanne Barr kissing a woman
on television is beyond the pale, In Cold Blood still manages
to haunt – and move – the reader. In Capote’s
able hands, one comes to understand that while Perry Smith and
Dick Hickock were exceedingly brutal killers, they were complex
characters, not cardboard cutouts. Similarly, the members of
the Clutter family who perished were not plot devices: they were
fully realized human beings who suffered and died horribly (as
described by Capote in a nightmarish, four-page passage that
is both exhaustive and excruciating). During a time when gratuitous
violence litters (if not dominates) our cultural landscape, In
Cold Blood accomplishes the nearly-impossible by enabling us
to identify deeply and emotionally not only with the victims
of a heinous crime, but also with its perpetrators.
Lolita
By Vladimir Nabokov
Since Reading Lolita in Tehran has been making the rounds
of American book clubs lately, I thought it might be interesting
to have my own book group tackle the actual article. While
nearly half a century has passed since the initial appearance
of Lolita, the novel has lost none of its strange powers in
the intervening years. This infamous tale of a European
transplant who abducts his young stepdaughter and transports her across
America (for the darkest purposes imaginable) occupies
a unique place in modern literature. Routinely cited as one of the
greatest American novels of the twentieth century, Lolita
takes one of the most abhorrent subjects in our culture ‚
sexual abuse ‚ and renders it in astonishingly beautiful
prose. By any measure, the protagonist Humbert Humbert is
a monster. Yet in Nabokov's capable hands, the reader is lulled
into a complex narrative that is anything but two-dimensional,
and enveloped by images that linger in the mind and haunt
the soul. Here is Lolita playing tennis: "She would wait
and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before going
into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball once or
twice, or pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always
rather vague about the score, always cheerful as she so seldom
was in the dark life she led at home." In a culture
whose sensibilities are so thoroughly jaded by sensationalism,
Lolita
retains its extraordinary capacity to engender both shock
and awe.
Middlesex
By Jeffrey Eugenides
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Middlesex
traces the story of Cal Stephanides, a 41-year-old hermaphrodite
who begins life as a girl, Calliope,
before experiencing one of the most extraordinary and memorable transformations
in contemporary literature. Continuing the tradition of great fictional "autobiography," such
as Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Calliope takes her sweet time being born;
the first section of the novel focuses on her Greek ancestors (or should I say "incestors"?),
who flee Asia Minor for the United States, and unwittingly seal her genetic fate.
Anticipating the narrator’s destiny, the Stephanides clan slowly metamorphoses
after settling in mid-century Detroit, maintaining a hybrid (and often hilarious)
duality: not quite Greek, not quite American. In the decades leading up to – and
through – Calliope’s almost surreal adolescence, Eugenides offers
us a narrative voice that is truly astonishing: fresh, direct, vivid, poignant,
and utterly unique. For those of us (like myself) who are connoisseurs of the
gray areas in life, Middlesex deftly and delightfully turns many of our most
dearly held assumptions about gender, identity, and intimacy neatly on their
heads. Yet Eugenides never takes the easy road into relativism or simple fatalism.
In a world where historical, emotional, and physical upheaval – both around
us and within us – can obliterate our sense of the familiar at any moment,
he affirms the tenacious pursuit of what is meaningful, beautiful, and honorable.
The Corrections
By Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections is the much-hyped novel that provoked a crisis on Oprah’s
Book Club when Franzen intimated that the grand lady’s endorsement might
harm his literary reputation. I approached the book with a certain degree of
skepticism, which seemed justified for the first several hundred pages. The characters – the
three adult children and elderly parents of a fractious midwestern family – seemed
too negative, too arch, and too harsh in their interactions with one another.
I then encountered a passage in which the parents, Enid and Alfred Lambert, embark
on a cruise to Nova Scotia. After just a few pages of this luminous, captivating
prose, I had surrendered to the book’s siren spell, which carried me
through to its conclusion.
Over the course of the novel, the reader experiences an
extended, multifaceted, and unsparing journey into the
lives of Enid, Albert, and their three deeply
troubled children – Gary, Chip, and Denise. While the dialogue can be almost
painfully lacerating, and the signs of redemption for this clan are few and faint,
The Corrections leads you to a truly profound understanding of how these complex
individuals came to arrive their rather sorry state. Perhaps the greatest feat
of The Corrections lies in the subtle ways that Franzen compels you – often
against your best instincts – to care about these beleaguered souls more
deeply than you ever imagined possible.
Midnight’s Children
By Salman Rushdie
Much of the surge in the popularity of South Asian literature during recent
years can be traced to one revolutionary event – the 1981 publication of Midnight’s
Children. The novel’s protagonist, Saleem Sinai, has the distinction of
having been born at the stroke of midnight on India’s first day of independence.
The rollicking account that ensues, tracing Salaam’s life and lineage,
has something for everyone – magical realism, a picaresque quality reminiscent
of Candide, and a historical perspective on the ongoing struggle between India
and Pakistan, Hindu and Muslim. Rushdie’s insightful, ambitious, and beautifully
realized novel – published a decade before the fatwa that sent him into
hiding – is destined to assume its place among the late 20th century’s
greatest literary accomplishments.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies
By Jared Diamond
Diamond’s book begins with a fascinating and horrifying account of how,
in the sixteenth century, a group of barely 150 Spaniards defeated an Inca army
numbering in the thousands. On its face, this event seems to pose the archetypal
argument for the "superiority" of Western technology (and by extension,
of Western culture). From that point of departure, Diamond embarks on an incredibly
thorough – and equally compelling – deconstruction of the geographic,
climactic, and evolutionary forces that shaped the development of Western culture
in relation to other world regions. He demonstrates how the north/south orientation
of the Americas and Africa resulted in extreme variations of climate and geography
that precluded the sharing of agricultural practices and the establishment of
large societies. He then shows how the physical isolation of the indigenous peoples
in those regions left them at the mercy of the ravaging diseases brought by the
conquering Europeans. (By contrast, the east/west orientation of Eurasia, with
its navigable landmass, temperate climate, and domesticable species, enabled
the advent of technological innovation and other "cultural" factors
to a degree unimaginable in areas with a north/south orientation.) Diamond’s
exhaustive, thought-provoking study debunks the myth of Western cultural superiority,
and exposes the brutish tendencies inherent in the West’s efforts to impose "civilization" on
the "backward" peoples subjugated by its empires.
©Copyright 2008 Libretto,
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