I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it."  So begins Pat Barker's novel, Regeneration, with a letter from Siegfried Sassoon to the "Times" of London, July 1917.   A lot of parallels in Barker's novel of World War I to what's been going on in the U.S. and the world since before September 11.  We could stand to read books from and about WW I.  Might change our aggressive responses to anything and everything not American.

 Here are the fiction books I read during 2011.

The new year started with Thomas McGuane's Nobody's Angel (very funny) and James Salter's A Sport  and a Pastime.  Says Jesse Kornbluth of James Salter: "He’s considered a “writer’s writer” --- that is, too good for the masses to appreciate. There are worse things to be called. Still, to be a "writer's writer" for 35 years...."  These books are very different from each other. Both are extremes in the same world.  I liked them.  I recommend them.


In February it was more of McGuane, Driving on the Rim, and a short one from the Master, Henry James' Turn of the Screw.  I'm liking McGuane more each time I read him.

In March I read a good historical novel called Conspirata by Robert Harris, who gave us Pompeii, which I read in 2010, and liked very much.  Conspirata is the story of the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar.  You know me and gladiators, Romans, and aquaducts, just can't get enough.  Also read Colum McCann's Zoli, a very moving novel of a gypsy woman and her clan. I got lost in the time shifts, but the critics seemed to like it a lot.

Also read Jim Harrison's The English Major.  I tell you, I've read a lot of Harrison; and I wish my blog could be a brilliant and luminous billboard for the works and life of Jim Harrison.  I love his books.  His life-view is widesweeping, or widestretching or something wide, big, sprawling like Montana and Nebraska and Arizona.  He loves food and wine, and so do I.  He loves literature, and so do I.  I wish I started reading him years ago, but there's just so much a person can do.  I wish Harrison could get a postage stamp.  I wish more people would read him, especially people in power, in academia, or in hotels (instead of watching ESPN or "Two & a Half Men" and drinking expensive cocktails in the bar).

If March goes in like a lion and out like a lion, that's what it was like to read Henning Mankell's The Man From Beijing (a murder mystery of worldwide stature, brilliant, historical, well-written) and The Possibility of an Island from my man Michel Houelbecq.  Houelbecq has become my alter ego, without him knowing of course, and I've read The Elementary Particles and Platform, both of which have offended readers and critics, and I'm so glad. I've got my hands on his new book, The Map and the Territory, and can't wait to start it.

French novelist Michel Houelbecq

In June I read Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark and Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang.  Laughter in the Dark, I must admit, is not one of Nabokov's better books.  It contains his penchant for older man younger woman, very young woman, and I'm still to this day trying to figure out the "why" of the book.

  Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang is a great book.  It is a book of movement, hilarity, drunkenness, saboutage, sex, the hot hot sun of the southwest, and I tell you, while I scratched my imaginary five o'clock shadow and squinted as I took a pull on the sixth beer I wasn't drinking, I loved every minute of it.

In July I read James Jones' Some Came Running, which I got at the Santa Monica Library's bookstore for $2.00.  I've been wanting to read it for a long time, and I was not disappointed, except for the irritation factor which Jones employs by not using apostrophes when he writes contractions, and then there's this style he likes of stating a noun in a sentence, and then in the same or next sentence using that noun's adverbial form, and then adverbially again, and again.  Mr. Jones it appears was not in the habit of listening to his editors.  (Sorry, that's just me being an effete intellectual snob.)  I liked the book and hope it continues to draw readers. 

Also in July I read The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. In August I read Pat Barker's World War I novel Regeneration, the first in the trilogy, with appearances by Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen. I really enjoyed this book and am looking forward to the next two.

Also in August I finally finished Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, the first in the Cairo trilogy series.  It was a very long book, but it was also very good.  Mahfouz's expose of the male-dominant, male-hypocritical dominant culture of WW I Egypt, its occupation by the Allies, its Ottoman Empire backwardness, and its social customs that suppress women to the point of a scrap metal crusher can sometimes make for frustrating reading; but it is important to read him, I feel, it is very important. Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize, was (toward the end of his life) shot by a would-be assassin's bullet, an Islamic fanatic who didn't like the author's parodies, to say it mildly.  But he continued.  Individuals with a voice for individual freedom and the freedom of others often get in the way of the violent swing of the moralist's hammer.  The characters in Palace Walk are very likeable, and the misfortune of living in an occupied country and being hamstrung by religious fundamentalism causes one [the reader] compassion, not condescension.  Christopher Dickey of Newsweek writes:

"Palace Walk, first published in 1956, is the best of Mahfouz's work. He drew heavily on autobiography (like the character Kamal, he was the youngest son in a large merchant clan). He writes about family, and to understand the Egyptian family is to understand, more clearly than any political treatise can explain, the soul of the country."

Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz

Also read Anne Enright's The Gathering and Daniel Woodrell's Tomato Red.  Lots of anger and yelling in Enright's book, especially at a time of death; lots of anger and blame and melodramatic stuff that you need more than tea to swallow down as you read it.  Tomato Red however is a horse of a different color.  It's a very strange book, set in Ozark country, told in powerful prose with the strange leaking bizarreness of smaller than small-town life. I'll read more Woodrell for sure.  Then came Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot.  This was more interesting (for its biographical sketchs of French novelist and national hero Gustav Flaubert and his contemporaries) than it was meaningful reading (as a novel).  I haven't given up on Barnes, so don't worry.  But Flaubert's Parrot I feel was written for the academic literati, and therefore not as clever and brilliant as everyone thinks.  But that's just me being an effete intellectual snob.

Vlad Dracul, the Impaler, Count Dracula

September found me reading Muriel Spark's The Only Problem, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, Long Last Happy by Barry Hannah, and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.  Let's just say that I liked all three of these books.  Kostova's novel about the search for Vlad the Impaler remains fairly true to legend and revealed an immense amount of scholarship mixed with flashbacks and country-hopping.

  The Only Problem is unusual, "an extremely sophisticated account of the perils that surround our unsuspecting lives in the world today and a disputation on the subject of the Book of Job, which she calls 'the pivotal book of the Bible.'" [Anita Brookner, The New York Times]

Joseph O'Neill

 I liked Netherland more than I expected; lots of Brooklyn, shady immigrants, post-September 11 anxiety, and a troubled marriage.  I'm not doing the author justice (but I recommend it highly)  Netherland is the "story of a family. The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a Dutch-born equities analyst who lives in a TriBeCa loft with his British-born wife, Rachel, and their son. When 9/11 forces them to flee uptown, they end up living...in the shabby-glamorous Chelsea Hotel, and it is there that their marriage slowly cracks apart.  The book’s second story line is about the solace Hans finds in the vibrant subculture of cricket in New York, where he is among the few white men to be found on the hundreds of largely West Indian teams in the city, teams that fan out, in the hazy summertime, across scrabby, lesser-known public parks." [Dwight Garner, The New York Times]

One of the most enjoyable and entertaining and empowering writers I read this year was the late Barry Hannah.  I kept quoting passages from these stories to my friends, laughing out loud while I did so; I could not get over how good this book is.  (Sorry about the tense variations within one sentence.) I can unconditionally say that, except for my friend Joe Savino, and perhaps the late Larry Brown, Barry Hannah's work was singular in its influence upon my short story writing efforts in 2011.  I haven't read a lot of Hannah's books, just a novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan and the collection of selected short stories featured at left, Long, Last, Happy, but in 2012 I'm going to. 

October was a busy month for reading, probably because like August and September, the six furlough days I had to take from work gave me down time and escape time.  Only negative there is escaping into literature isn't going to pay the bills.  Nevertheless, here's to October:  The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley; The Great Leader by Jim Harrison; On Beauty by Zadie Smith; and A Man of Parts by David Lodge.

Author photos:  James Crumley, David Lodge, H.G. Wells

The Last Good Kiss is not the kind of book I would have picked up in years gone by, unless it came highly recommended by someone I know.  But I tell you, this book is hilarious.  You've got the pervading presence of an alcoholic bulldog among a cast of whacked out other characters while our protagonist is trying to solve a mystery and trying to do so while intensely inebriated.  I loved this book.  A Man of Parts, another book by one of my favorite authors, David Lodge, this time about H.G. Wells.  Lodge also gave us Author Author about the Master, Henry James, so you can bet your bottom dollar he's aces in my book, and has been for many many years.  I have posted on the wall above my big chair, in which I read, some codes of narrative coherence that Lodge feels one should, as a writer, adhere to.   A Man of Parts gives one insight into H.G. Wells that quite frankly astounded me. And I'm not going to share them here either, you have to read the book.  Zadie Smith's On Beauty is a very good book; well-written, intelligent; her prose places the cheek of another human face close to your own skin to prove that we are not all that different.  Feel the warmth.
The Great Leader by my hero Jim Harrison is subtitled a faux mystery.  But it wasn't so; he followed the structure of a good mystery and entertained us (as he usually does) with his love of food and poetry and drink, and his love of the exquisite bottoms of young women; so many sexual meanderings to the point of well, damn, the book had to come to an end someplace.  Unfortunately.

November gave me Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna; Pete Dexter's Paris Trout; Sam Lipsyte's The Ask; and Jim Harrison's Warlock.  This was some month, aside from Thanksgiving.

 My friend Barbara Mock Autry and I, one fine spring evening in San Diego, shortly before she and her family moved East, were talking books and I brought up Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, which she read and loved; "...then you have to read The Lacuna.  You will love it, Mark," she said, "I know you will." And I did.

Artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

The sections with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were very entertaining, I enjoyed quoting them to my friends.  The historical points of reference concerning the Mexican communist party movement, the sanctuary given to Leon Trotsky by the Riveras, even though Trotsky's on Stalin's hit list, and the hypocrisy of American govenment and culture during the HUAC period, together with a young man's blossoming writing career based on his life with Frida and her bunch, all made for a wonderful book. And I haven't even explained the half of it.

Barbara Kingsolver

 I am a great fan of Barbara Kingsolver, to be sure.

 Paris Trout.  What can I say about the meanest sonofabitch I've come across in a long time, not since Larry Brown's character of the father in Joe.  Paris Trout is a true believer; he's also a despicable human being. This is a great book.  At times it was a nightmare.

  "Things look different ways when they ain't clear," Trout said.  "I don't forgive debts," he said.  "I pay my obligations, and I am paid in return.  ...you forgive one debt, ain't none of them going to pay you ever." 

The nastiness of Paris Trout sent me through the roof, especially when he declares, "I don't have a cruel heart."  Well, my friends, read the book.

I also read The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, which had some moments, I must admit.  And then Warlock by Jim Harrison, about an unemployed foundation executive whose life becomes unhinged.  I enjoyed this book very much.  It's Jim Harrison.

 In December it was McEwan's Black Dogs. This is a strange book, and McEwan often makes me uncomfortable, which is the pleasure I get from reading him. "The story revolves around a dramatic and terrifying event which changed the whole life of the narrator's mother-in-law, affecting her rather as Paul's vision on the Road to Damascus did him, although the experience was one of darkness, not of light. ...Black Dogs is curious and at times unpleasant. In the end, you can, as Bernard would, dismiss it as just a story, or, like June, you can look deeper and ponder the ideas further." [Courtesy of Ann Skea]
Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat was crazy; a crazy Englishwoman in Rome. So far it's by my least favorite book from her.  Cross Channel by Julian Barnes is a collection of short stories about English people who have settled in northern France, and I'm talking Middle Ages, post-World War II, any time.  It's a pretty good collection. I'm looking forward to reading more of Barnes.

And that, as they say, is that.