Saturday, December 30, 2017

10 Good Books I Read In 2017








A Horse Walks into a Bar


Israeli author David Grossman’s funny as well as unsettling novel wholly set in an underground Israeli club and unfurls around a 57 year old stand-up comedian named Dovaleh Greenstein’s performance. David Grossman is one of prominent Israeli peace advocate who had repeatedly condemned daily brutalities of the Palestinian occupation. A Horse Walks into a Bar is his 11th novel, which starts off as a distractingly funny story, but ends up being a courageous parable on the inhumanity and complicity of those who cower in front of injustice.




Little Fires Everywhere


Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (published September 2017) literally begins with fire blazing. An elegant house in an opulent suburb is set in flames. The Richardson family, owners of the house witness the scene with a dazed and detached expression, just as the firemen reports ‘Not an accident’. Who set the fire and Why? There’s not much mystery on ‘who’, because the Richardson couples and their three teenage children are certain that 14-year-old Isabel Richardson aka Izzy, the youngest member of the family, is behind this arson. And, as if to confirm their suspicion, Izzy is conspicuously missing. To know the ‘why’, the story is re-winded back to the months, when a Bohemian mother and her teenage daughter shifted to affluent planned community of Shaker Heights, in Cleveland, Ohio.  Author Ng explores the layered emotions of motherhood and censures the allegedly liberal (mostly-white) suburban communities, whom despite their parade of ideals remain blind or unsympathetic to race and class issues.




Pachinko


Min Jin Lee’s sprawling inter-generational family saga tells the story of Korean immigrants living in Japan between 1910 and 1989. Through the disparate set of well-realized characters, the author gracefully blends in national histories with personal suffering.  Like any immigrant story, Pachinko deals with themes of in-between identities, ostracism, female empowerment, and generational discord, while also examining the effects of poverty, war on civilian society. Despite the coincidental twists and few melodramatic notions, Min Jin Lee brings her large ensemble of characters alive (she spent nearly two decades in conceiving, and writing the novel).  Altogether, it’s a epic exploration of the immigrant experience.
 

  

Satantango


What if existence is a recurring, empty dance directed by Satan and staged in hell? A brooding question skillfully put forth by Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai in his first novel ‘Satantango’ (aka Satan’s Tango, written in 1985 but translated to English in 2012). Krasznahorkai’s literary world is persistently riddled with desolate mundanity and existential angst. It is set in a collective farm (the estate); the one which has been formally closed, yet its semi-crazed inhabitants live off their savings and by ‘rounding up the cattle’.  The novel was published four years before the fall of communist dictatorship in the East European nations. A lot of parallels could be drawn from the story’s destitute backdrop to incompetent, creaking system. Moreover, by avoiding paragraph breaks and usage of long sentences, the writer delightfully traps us inside the characters’ perturbed existence.


Station Eleven


Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (published in 2014) is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where 99 percent of human population is wiped out by an unforeseen pandemic disease. Despite the increasingly familiar post-apocalypse sub-genre and getting pigeon-holed as sci-fi, Station Eleven is much more distinct and understated than the usual survivalist exercise. Emily Mandel herself believes her novel doesn’t belong to any particular genre. Unlike many apocalypse novels, the narration here is deeply introspective, wallowing less on the dystopian horror elements and rather hopefully focuses on the fresh culture that emerges once past the climate of mayhem. On the whole, it’s a superior literary work, which takes a trendy genre setting to get at the fundamental truth of art and human condition.  



The Changeling


Sometimes myths and supernatural forces can adequately address the reality of our globalized societies. It’s what Victor Lavalle’s recent novel The Changeling best does. It’s a dark fairy tale, rooted in ages-old folklore and myth, which actually takes a subtly profound look at racism, fatherhood, paternal anxieties, marriage, and most importantly the dark crevices of internet universe. The book’s veneer of magic plunges us into the chaos as well as the beauty of life. At its best, writer LaValle’s prose is as simple, raw and powerful as the works of Haruki Murakami and Neil Gaiman.


 


The Devil in the White City



The 1889 Paris World Fair (‘The Exposition Universelle’) shrewdly captured the attention of the Western nations. A one thousand feet high phallic iron structure (Eiffel Tower) that was erected at the center of Paris Exposition thought to be the symbol asserting the supremacy of French architecture and culture. Deeply perturbed by the European showcase, American architects, engineers, artists, and politicians, designed the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (to commemorate 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ landing on the American mainland). This fair which exhibited many prodigious material achievements of humans was spearheaded by the super-talented architect Daniel Hudson Burnham. Nevertheless the fair gained its notoriety in the later decades due to the charming serial-killer H.H. Holmes. Erik Larsson’s spectacular 2003 non-fiction book tells the history of Chicago Fair and the story of these two polarizing individuals. Larson was best known for presenting non-fiction material in a very engaging novelistic style. He beautifully turns history into a vast canvas for portraying myriad of human stories.





 
The Southern Reach Trilogy 


American author and literary critic Jeff VanderMeer’s new weird fiction (an eclectic mix of dark fantasy, scientific speculation, pulp fiction, and surrealism) The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) is about broken systems, transitioning environment, and limits of human reasoning and moral imperatives. The story revolves around the mystery of Area X -- a forgotten coastal area transformed into a ‘pristine wilderness’ by an unknown transformative event 3 decades ago and spawns weird organisms. The book one is narrated by an introverted biologist, who is one of the four members of 12th expedition, investigating Area X. The 1st book is being adapted into a movie by British author and film-maker Alex Garland with Natalie Portman playing the biologist role. 





The Tsar of Love and Techno


American writer Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno uses fictional characters and set-ups to explore the past and present realities with utmost clarity. The book consists of nine tightly interwoven vignettes which read more like a novel than short stories. The intricately linked web of stories are set in Siberia, St. Petersburg (Leningrad), and Chechnya between 1937 and 2014. The structure of The Tsar of Love and Techno resembles that of a mix-tape with eight stories divided into Side A and Side B, and an intermission story in the middle (which is the longest). The stories are full of little lived-in details which authenticates the characters’ desolate world. 



The Underground Railroad


Using the speculative premise of a literal Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead exposes the United States’ perpetual crimes against the black body and conscience. The Underground Railroad actually represents different covert methods, secret routes, and secret signals employed to help escape African-American slaves into Canada and northern free American states. The ‘railroad’ operated between early and mid 19th century (terminated with American civil war in 1861), and rough estimates state that more than 100,000 slaves had escaped via the unorganized network. Through the eyes of determined heroine Cora, the novel takes us across America’s grotesque display of slavery sins.


Books I re-read this year: Solaris (by Stanislaw Lem), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K Dick), The Atrocity Exhibition (J.G. Ballard), Catch 22 (Joseph Heller), and Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad).