Everything is Illuminated.

This novel starts out like a fairy-tale, and never completely leaves that literary domain. Beginning in an unnamed town in an unnamed part of Eastern Europe, and starting out with a humorous though violent death that somehow manages to weave its way through two hundred years of history and act as the starting point of something completely original and absolutely moving, you don’t know what to think about it until well past the first hundred pages.

And by then you’re enamoured.

Everything is Illuminated is the story of the history of Trachimbrod - a town split in two in Eastern Europe. And then it is the story of a trip taken by a character named after the author to Eastern Europe to find a town named Trachimbrod. And then it is the story of the correspondence, by letter, between a character, named after the author, his tour guide during his trip to Trachimbrod. It is in fact all of three of these, told through a half dozen different narrators spanning two hundred years.

The story that it tells - of a thriving small town with a bustling Jewish population, of a bizarre friendship where a lost Eastern European young man finds himself in the wilderness of the Ukrainian Steppe, of that same man who argues for his right to leave his father as a result - is absolutely compelling. And somehow so tightly constructed, so imbued with humour, that it fits together just perfectly - like watching the pods of water collect in the vein of a leaf just before the weight gets to be too heavy and the water is released to the ground below. It is something special.

It is also told in a totally different kind of language. On the back of my edition is a quote from a review, suggesting that the English language had not been so radically used and changed since A Clockwork Orange. That is quite the statement. And though what is accomplished here in terms of language is not quite up to the standard set by Burgess in his masterpiece, it is totally disorienting at times - until you learn the language that is used. One of the narrators is speaking as an English as a Second Language User. Another is using truly language reflecting the Judaic community. And the English that is used is so frequently used to produce conceptual and emotional outrage and understanding that traditional sentence structure is occasionally foregone. This is largely done to the author’s credit - the result is the sense that what is interpreted could only have been presented as it had been.

Everything if Illuminated is also nothing that you expect. It is a fairy tale - somehow magical, and somehow entirely tragic. None of those chapters reserved for the history of Trachimbrod, particularly for the history of Brod (the maybe daughter of Trachim - who may be the first man in the story to die), seem plausible. They are legendary. And they never have to be proven true - indeed, they fit into the reality of myth just as well as they may fit into the reality of truth. Perhaps the history provided is that of Trachimbrod - most likely not. Nonetheless, you do become attached to the town without a name, then given a name, then given another, and then divided into two (and then three) partitions.

And then destroyed.

And then rediscovered. As nothing.

In some of the most heartbreaking language I have ever encountered.


I read the most heartbreaking section in the break room at work. I couldn’t finish it. I put the book down for a few minutes. Picked it up again. Put it down. Left it there and left it there. Picked it up - I needed to know. Couldn’t read any further. Needed to finish it - my break was getting close to being done. Didn’t finish it, and had to come back to it again after work. It bothered me.

What works for Everything is Illuminated is that it is nothing that you expect it to be. You only briefly encounter the Nazis and the threat they pose to the town of Trachimbrod. It isn’t a story of survival, or a story of the gas chambers. In fact - and this is what caught me most off-guard - it has pretty much nothing to do with the Nazis at all. Far more paper is dedicated to the history of the town. Far more paper is dedicated to the vacation to find the town again. Far more paper is dedicated to the letters sent across an ocean as a man in Eastern Europe battles for independence. Indeed, much of this paper is moving - the text that blackens it blooming like a flower of insight and humour and tragedy and joy.

I cannot highly enough recommend this novel. It is not without flaws - but while you are reading it, if you can accept the language and the structure, if you can hear the philosophy singing through the pages, then you will almost surely overlook them. Is it the best book I have ever read? No - not quite. But it is certainly the best I have read all year. Upon putting it down, I immediately wanted to pick it up again and figure out where the fairy tale becomes real and vice versa. Ever since, I have spent time reading some of my favourite passages over and over again.

Read. This. Book.

So Cool!

So the day of my great nation, Canada, is rapidly approaching. I've spent the past three out of the country, so it will be nice to watch fireworks sprayed into and spreading across the sky on July 1st. Eating steak and corn, and hoping you don't get rained out. Going for a hike through one of our many, many beautiful ecosystems (Wascana Trails, I'm looking at you!).

And then I discovered The Book Mine Set. This is a book blog with a Canadian Bias - and it is hosting an event on July 2nd entitled "Under the Midnight Sun Readathon". From noon on July 2nd to noon on July 3rd you read. Not much more than read. Try and finish a book - blog about your progress and your thoughts. Not much more.

So cool!

Now, I've long thought that Canadian literature is some of the best that the world has going for it. I'm totally biased too - but that doesn't stop me from suggesting it is true. There is far, far too much wealth in our literary vault for our population. Thank goodness so many of our authors are sufficiently popular to gain some international recognition.

The other 'So Cool!" part?

The 5th Canadian Book Challenge, also hosted by The Book Mine Set. You grab thirteen books, one for each of the Canadian provinces or territories (though not necessarily coming from them) and you read. You have a year. Starting on the country's birthday. Does not sound too hard, does it?

So what should I read? What Canadian masterpieces are out there for me to yet discover?

Here is a tentative list of what I am hoping to enjoy:

1. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz - Mordecai Richler
2. The Fire-Dwellers - Margaret Laurence
3. Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
4. Three Day Road - Joseph Boyden
5. Pilgrim - Timothy Findley
6. The Love of a Good Woman - Alice Munro
7. A Season in the Life of Emmanuel - Marie-Claire Blais
8. Lives of the Saints - Nino Ricci
9. In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje
10. A Whale for the Killing - Farley Mowat
11. The Golden Spruce - John Vaillant
12. No Great Mischief - Alistair MacLeod
13. Galore - Michael Crummy (the only book on this list that I do not yet own)

Tom McCarthy's Men in Space

I saw this item at my local book store on the shelf reserved for sale-price items. I nabbed it, recognizing the name as that man who had written C - a nominee for last year's Man Booker Prize. I had not yet read that book, but I have heard it is fantastic. And that the other book that people speak about when they speak about Tom McCarthy, Remainder, is also reportedly fantastic (conveniently, it was located right beside Men in Space on the sale-price shelf, and it was also collected for my book shelf). How could I go wrong in picking up this book, reading it - surely I will fall in love with it.

Right?

Men in Space is about life in Czechoslovakia as it becomes a Republic, and the reign of the Soviet States collapses in eastern Europe. Or, that is what the back of the book told me. It is, more specifically, about an attempted art heist, using the confusion of a new state to successfully transport a one-of-a-kind religious icon. Impossible to explain, completely unique. Christ-like but entirely anti-Christ-like. A unique piece of art.

Admittedly, the book lost me early on. There are many characters, many narrative styles. Some of the voices that are used are quite interesting. One of them, the personal records of a surveillance officer who feels increasingly neglected by his commanders and starts to go deaf as a result of his work (he specializes in audio surveillance), is quite interesting. Some golden moments of character are wrapped up in his narration. Others are completely forgettable, interesting in the instant that they are read, but not interesting afterwards.

Men in Space is not one of those books that you read and get slapped in the face with a theme. It feels like a movie plot written out in book form. And it likely would make more sense in that format.

Not that it is nonsensical. One of the features I noticed late in the novel was just how tightly constructed the novel was. And soon after I started reading I realized that I was in for a treat in reading - there are moments where the writing is simply sublime:

Behind these people, perched at tables, groups of American collegiate types. They're talking politics, shouting above the music and each other. They're discussing the splitting of Czechoslovakia that's to take place in - what, less than one hour from now, the reconfiguration of Europe it'll bring about. The phrase transitional geographies keeps coming up: one guy keeps saying it and another jumps up each time and shouts Fuck your transitional geographies! East Coast, probably: Yale or Princeton. Mladen's seen the films: woollen sweaters and striped scarves, clean young boys running after girls in pleated skirts who look like Heidi, only slightly pretier, and clutch books to their chests. Frat parties. Weird rites.

A little further down the bar is some Czech kid whose face is vaguely familiar: classical, high-chekboned, blond locks swept across the forehead. Mladen knows that face, from a gig maybe, only then it belonged to a girl. Or to a girl and a - yes, that's right, it's David, one of those twins Roger, at that party, just before he got his eyebrow cut, said came ftraight off the one-hundred-crown note: the peasants. David's standing at the bar alone, looking down into a beer, morose.

Quite enjoyable to read. And impressive construction of details. So what is missing?

Characters. Setting. Circumstance. Motive.

Nobody, no place, leaps from the pages and fills your imagination. I kept thinking I was missing this in the pages - perhaps there were sentences fit in between the lines of text on the pages that my eyesight was not allowing me to see. Blind to important information, I continued to read that which I could see and was only getting half the story. Half of the ideas. Incomplete characters, flattened.

And the voice, which only occasionally was given to a character that really impressed you, was transferred from one character to another too quickly - so characters never developed a personality. Or circumstance. Or place. They just seemed to be characters in a story about something that was bigger than they were - but still managed to be boring. Boring despite the considerable research that surely went into it; the amount I learned about Art History in Easter Europe in the 1800s was shocking.

And yet I did not care. Nothing clicked.

About 60 pages from the end, exhausted and hoping I could just breeze through it, I turned to the end. Just to see if maybe, just maybe, the book had magically reduced it's size and thus my commitment to it. I started reading the acknowledgements. And this is part of what it shared with me:

The manuscript of Men in Space has had a long gestation. It started as a series of disjointed, semi-autobiographical sketches written in what seems like another era, and grew into one long, disjointed document from which a plot of sorts emerged from time to time to sniff the air before going to ground again. That it eventually found a kind of warped coherence as a novel about disjointedness and separation is to a large extent thanks to the intervention through the years of several people...

Well then, now it makes sense. I am not liking this novel because it was never meant to be a novel. And the novel is about being disjointed - no wonder it makes me feel that way as a reader. What a masterful construction technique - if only the theme had played out that well in the text. Some of these people feel disjointed. Others feel connected, in round about ways, to other characters in unexpected ways. And they are not likeable (lies, three or so of them are. Two of these die, the third, as mentioned above, loses his hearing and starts getting paranoid).

Moreover, you can feel, in the last 20 pages, how Mr. McCarthy tries to connect the novel into a coherent story, drawing on the symbolism of the entire novel. The painting. A man in space nobody wants to take credit for. And these pages are enjoyable, if lacking in power. None of these symbols were used consistently enough, or explained well enough, to justify their involvement in the conclusion.

This novel would likely have been a more enjoyable movie than book. It's pacing and story is more akin to that media - and certainly any novel that makes frequent reference to a painting and it's features would benefit enormously from the visual aids of a film. As a novel, it fails. But I am willing to give the author a second chance eventually - I do already own another one of his works. I just hope that Remainder is much better than Men in Space ever got to be.

Not recommended.

Trying to catch up.

I woke up this morning. Finished my most recent reading (Regeneration by Pat Barker) - only had another ten pages to go, so it didn't take me long. Collected some books, and selected a new novel.

And realized I am now officially three novels behind on this blog.

Expect a note about the quality of Tom McCarthy's Men in Space tomorrow. Hopefully a note about Everything is Illuminated by mid-week, by which time I expect I will have finished my current novel (Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee). Regeneration the following week, putting me only behind by a single novel, and perhaps some Non-Fiction and a note about short fiction.

Regarding the Non-Fiction - I am currently fighting every desire to quit my journey with An Irish Heart. I'm getting close to finishing it though (after months of fighting the reading). I don't have much to say, other than that Sharon Doyle Driedger is not a historian - and the historical training that I have (and will be getting in the near future when I start my M.A. in Canadian History) is somewhat concerned that this piece of work can be regarded as a product of notable quality. But I'll tear it apart later - perhaps it will thoroughly impress me in the final half.

Books you have to read.

As I will once again be a student in the fall, pursuing my M.A. in Canadian History, I have started organizing in my head a list of literature that I have to read between now and then. I'm trying to limit it to 5 pieces of fiction - just to be realistic. Many of them are quite large and will likely take me a week, or two, or three (or more), so I have to be mindful of budgeting my goals.

I also have to accept the fact that, when I am finished my current book, I am unlikely to find one of these books on my shelf and decide to read it. It is just a goal of mine that I will.

The Wars - Timothy Findley
2666 - Robert Bolano
The War at the End of the World - Mario Vargas Llosa
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

Realistic, right?

I wasn't lying when I said that Everything is Illuminated was going to change the way that I read literature - was going to raise my expectations substantially. Since finishing it, I have read one novel, started a series of short stories, started two other novels. Nothing has stuck (though the novel that I have most recently picked up may be worth putting the effort into reading). Nothing has inspired (though another novel that I started reading I could tell needed more time and dedication than I could offer it at the time). No author has had the same originality of voice - reading seems easy and simple.

I still don't know what to say about Everything is Illuminated though. While I was reading it and came across particularly impressive sections or chapters, I marked them. Folded the page in half, lying the outside of the page into the spine and putting a crease in the page. My book is littered with a half dozen of these desecrations. It is a practice that I have never done before - one that I have not felt the need to do again since.

I am slowly reading through these passages again. Just to give me the opportunity to really consider the novel before sharing my views with you.

The novel I have read in the interim, by Tom McCarthy, is deserving of a note or quasi-review. Expect that later this week.

Apples and Oranges

Can you hear that? Its a soft movement, like the way that waves lap over each other again and again on the shore of a Canadian lake. Or the way sound that geese make - their wings really - as they ascend into the sky. flap flap flap flap flap.

The blogger world is all aflutter as a result of tonight's announcement of the winner of the Orange Prize. It seems that every year (or at least over the past several that I have cared enough to follow) the flutter has three wavelengths.

One is a debate about whether or not a major international prize should be available only to women. Judging by the number of female authors that I am committed to reading completely (limited to maybe two or three names), I am going to go ahead and say that we still have a long way to go as literary consumers before there is a semblance of equality in the industry.

One is about the winner. Oftentimes we find ourselves welcoming a 'new giant' to the folds of literature. The historian in me wants to leave the proclamation of monsters in our midst to time - we shall see if we find ourselves reading a modern day, female version of Charles Dickens in fifty years. Or one hundred. Or more.

One is about whether or not the winner deserved the award. And this year this debate seems to be particularly pronounced in the blogosphere.

The winner this year is Tea Obrecht, for her debut novel The Tiger's Wife. I only encountered this book as a result of the Orange Prize, though this is more a result of my recent conversion to literary news. In reality, Ms. Obrecht's debut novel was very hotly anticipated.

Very received with decidedly mixed opinions.

And this is why I have not read it yet. Well, that and my collection of hundreds of other books that are deserving of my time.

But with the acceptance of this award, and with becoming the youngest author to have ever received it (she is only twenty five, a mere one year older than myself), it is nearly guaranteed that I will put the time in to find out what is so wonderful about the novel. I am not sure what to expect.

From what I can tell, it is that I will enjoy it. The writing is top-notch. The story interesting. The metaphor somewhat contrived.

Many are saying that they are hoping that Tea Obrecht's best work is ahead of her. Many are saying that her novel is very, very good. Not many are saying that it was the best book short-listed for the prize, though apparently enough judges were for it to receive the prize (but even there the judges have publicly admitted that the decision was far from unanimous).

Controversy and literature. Definitely going to get me to read this book.

Zeitoun - David Eggers

Many weeks ago, I finished this book by David Eggers called Zeitoun. Before having finished it, I wrote that there is a special place in the world of contemporary literature for a man like David Eggers. This is the second book of his that I have read, and I am quite certain that I will read more by the author in the future.

I remember reading What is the What? while doing my undergraduate degrees. It was a nice diversion from my studies, and I can recall being sucked into the storyline as much as I could possibly allow myself to be sucked into any novel at the time. It likely took me two or three weeks to finish the book because of the amount of time that I could commit to reading, but I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy it. In the end.

What is the What? struggled with the pacing, if I recall properly. There were some really, really painful experiences captured in the book. And captured vividly. But it was only during these moments that I was fully consumed by the power of the novel. I recall one scene, a robbery of Deng's American home, that I found particularly frustrating and particularly frightening. Interesting, considering the majority of the novel was about Deng's flashbacks to the Darfur/Sudan Genocide tragedy.

Zeitoun does not suffer from this pacing problem. Throughout you are drawn in. Right from the beginning I could tell that it was a special novel, though once again I couldn't quite figure out why. The pacing was phenomenal, the dialogue fantastic, the characters thoroughly enjoyable. Zeitoun, the protagonist, is an immigrant from the middle east living in the city of New Orleans when Katriana starts to develop in the Gulf of Mexico. He sends his family away, but himself refuses to leave.

What is captured in the novel is the story of New Orleans' destruction as a result of the storm. The physical world is recreated. It becomes a post-apocalyptic scene - buildings burning, people trapped. Tenuous relationships developing into dependencies, and then being lost. Throughout Zeitoun acts as a hero would - feeding animals that had been left behind by owners who expected to be back sooner rather than later. Getting Americans who needed to leave the city to aid stations. Helping some escape from their flooded homes. Zeitoun becomes a saint. This section of the novel is thrilling to read.

And then somebody arrives on Zeitoun's doorstep, quite literally, and we don't hear about him for more than 60 pages. We read about his wife's distress. His wife is also a convincing character, with complicated family issues as a result of her conversion from Baptist Christianity to a Muslim. She finds that she does not have any people in her family upon which she can depend, she when she flees New Orleans she crosses the continent to meet with one of her lifelong friends, her children in tow.

As her world collapses, her anxiety rises, the pacing of this novel is at its peak. It adopts a psychological magnitude. The tragedy of New Orleans is clearly not just in its destruction of an entire city, or the thousands of lives lost, but also the lives and persons that were changed as a result. This character reveals this. And continues to do so through to the end of the book.

I do not want to give away anything else of this novel. I will tell you that it picks up with Zeitoun. I will tell you that it is in this moment that you become angrier at government than you likely ever thought possible. The post-apocalyptic world adopts a Hollywood-like control scheme that fails - a government trying to maintain control over a world that nobody can possibly control. And doing some terrifying things to accomplish this.

It seems as though Eggers' greatest strength in literature may not be reporting about events around the world, but how the United States, his own government, must be indicted according to the crimes that exist here and the promises to Americans about America that are broken by other Americans. His aim is affirm the American dream and confront it with the American reality. And he does so with the vision of a journalist.

A journalist. Yes. This is what he is trained as. And it shows. Though his writing, his characters, his pacing is all top-notch, it is not literary. You read correspondences from the frontline of America, and they are short and thrilling and short again. It keeps the novel moving, but if you are looking for a story that is imbued with language that lights up the world with colours unimaginative, then i recommend you go elsewhere. Indeed, this style would not fit what he is writing. He is a journalist - what we are reading is essentially very long-form journalism with some liberties taken.

And this is the special place that Dave Eggers has in modern American literature. His dark world is not created by his words - you do not see this environment illustrated in the same way that you do with most other American authors. It is minimal. To the point. Your mind fills in the blanks. What is included though, the dialogue and characters, the events followed by other events. It is all very effective.

Zeitoun is an engrossing read. And it made me angry (I know I said this about Flowers for Algernon, but this is a particularly strong anger - and anger that I had forgotten about.). I imagine it will have the same affect on you if you choose to read the novel. Which I think you should.