Thursday, January 20, 2011

Review: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson


British author Jacobson won last year’s Booker Prize for this novel. Reviewers have compared his work to Jane Austen (a novel of manners) and Philip Roth (exploring male-female relations, the dark spaces of the male psyche and the dilemmas of Judaism—all with a biting wit). It is an easy and highly enjoyable read even as Jacobson probes many sides of polarizing issues such as modern day anti-Semitism, Zionism and self-loathing Jews.

Story highlights from audible.com: “Julian Treslove is an unspectacular television producer of arts programs and a celebrity impersonator, with two failed marriages behind him and two distant, resentful sons. A gentile convinced that a Jewish identity would offer asylum from his identity crisis, Treslove is acutely envious of his old school friend Sam Finkler, now a highly successful author of glib pop-philosophy best sellers with titles like “The Existentialist in the Kitchen”. For Treslove, Finkler comes to represent Jewish identity: The ‘Jewish question’ (in all its loaded historical ambivalence) becomes the Finkler question, at once sanitized and personalized. Both men regularly meet with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, a colorful Mittel-European transplant who serves as the book’s heart…He is crotchety, funny, and touching in his devotion to his dead wife, even while on hilariously awkward dates. Jacobson has great fun in pitting his characters’ different approaches to Jewishness against each other…There is a sense that the three male leads are facets of one personality with a schismatic approach to Jewishness.”

Monday, January 17, 2011

Review: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer


The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948, when Norman Mailer was just 25 years old. It became a best seller, winning great acclaim as one of the earliest and best personal accounts to come out of World War II. It established Mailer’s reputation, as well as various themes that he would pursue throughout his writing career.

The book is a naturalistic account of a platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the Japanese held island of Anopopei. The battle scenes are vivid, but the deeper drama of the novel derives from the wars swirling between characters, personal histories and worldviews and within the psyches of the men themselves. Mahler recalls through flashbacks the civilian lives of thirteen of the men and shows how they are burdened by their respective pasts as much as by the heavy packs and military equipment they bear. The more ambitious of the men struggle with how to impose their will on their comrades and the great events swirling around them. The more passive struggle to accept their position as followers and scapegoats. In the end, however, all are pawns of the indifferent unfolding of Events, wherein the best laid plans can be “balked” (a favorite Mailer word) by nature or chance. Finally, the campaign is successful without the benefit of either General Cumming’s cunning strategy or the heroism of the platoon.

Mailer’s cynicism about postwar American society, which would come to fuller flower in his later writings, is already in view. His General Cummings is contemptuous of the democratic spirit and determined to mold his subordinates into automatons. He struggles with Lieutenant Hearn, a rich, educated and confused Midwesterner, whose hopefulness about liberal democratic values ultimately proves impotent against both the General’s proto-fascism and the deviousness and determination of Sergeant Croft, the grasping common man. The problems of pluralistic American society are mirrored in the gritty, contentious life together of this small group of mismatched men: Jews and anti-Semites, intellectuals and illiterates, womanizers and family men.

At 721 pages, the novel is long—perhaps too long. Mailer himself, in an introduction to the 50th anniversary edition that I read, muses that “the words came too quickly and too easily” in many parts and that his writing suffers from “over-certified adjectives.” I enjoyed the vigor of Mailer’s language, however, and the audacity of his accomplishment. At 25!

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Reading Resolutions

Laura Miller at Salon.com has encouraged her readers to explore the world of online reading challenges. You sign up, thereby publicly promising to read a certain number of books over the coming year, and then share your reviews of those books with the other participants as you go.

I've been reading anywhere from 60 to 100 books a year for quite a while now, but still seem to have an ever increasing back log of books "to be read." I keep buying new titles (some of them quite old, actually) that create precarious towers around my office and on my bedside tables. So, anything that can help me catch up with my reading intentions will be a welcome prod.

Having explored several of the challenges Laura highlighted, I've decided to throw my lot in with the 2011 To Be Read (TBR) Pile Challenge, which requires reading 12 books taken from your To Be Read stack, each selection to have been there for at least a year. Once specified, the list is fixed, although two (2) alternates are allowed, just in case one or two of the books end up in the "can't get through" pile.

 
My Twelve Chosen are as follows:

01. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer. (Complete 1/17/11.)
02. Democracy in America, by Alexis de Toqueville. (Complete 2/5/11.)
03. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. (Complete 2/7/11.)
04. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. (Complete 5/30/11.)
05. Light in August, by William Faulkner. (Complete 6/18/11.)
06. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway.
07. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. (Complete 9/23/11.)
08. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. (Complete 11/25/11.)
09. Kim, by Rudyard Kipling. (Complete 12/18/11.)
10. All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren. (Complete 9/13/11.)
11. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers. (Complete 12/20/11.)
12. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad.

My Two Alternates:

01. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller. (Complete 5/21/11.)
02. An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser.

Wish me luck!