Factotum
– Charles Bukowski
I was assured that Factotum would change my
life. Yet I think there are two other books on this list that had a far greater
impact on me. I cannot for the life of me say why. Factotum is a bombshell of a
book. It follows some part of the life of Henry Chinaski, which consists mostly
of a series of jobs, women, and bottles of alcohol, occasionally interrupted by
some attempts to write.
I think it is more powerful when I think
about it than when I actually read it (though when I read it it was pretty
stupendous). Henry keeps finding minor moments of something that is not
happiness but might better be described as stability, and then keeps fucking it
up. At some point you realise that the point of the book is to make you realise
the pointlessness of it all, and when you do it makes the rest of the book even more soulcrushing.
Jesus. Just thinking about it makes me want
to hide in a hole. Maybe that’s the point?
The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
This book just hit me like a train. I was
in Swaroop’s house, and everyone was sleeping the afternoon away. I wasn’t
really looking for something to tread, and had in fact picked up some other
crime novel that started badly and only became worse. Then I came across this
in his shelf and didn’t put it down until it finished.
What a book.
Diaz writes about Oscar Wao, a second
generation immigrant to the United States from the Dominican Republic. But it
also tells the story of his mother, his sister, his grandfather. Oscar is
overweight and has no friends. He falls in love too easily and is constantly
unable to fall out. He’s forever insisting that he is about to beomce the next
Tolkien. But it is this pathos that endears you to him. As you read the book
you root for Oscar and his every failure only makes you want him to succeed
more.
But throughout the book there’re also
meditations on the history of the Dominican Republic itself. The narrator,
Oscar’s roommate, wonders whether the long shadow of General Trujillo and his fuku, the curse that haunts every family
in the Republic, are what have made Oscar into what he is now. And to some
extent, it has. Yet there is hope, that a zafa
might counter the fuku when it is
most needed.
Yet Oscar’s life is, as the cover says,
brief and wondrous. Following him through his wondrous life is made all the
more heart wrenching for its brevity. When the book ends you’re just left with
a sense that Oscar’s life really could have gone nowhere else.
Peppered with references to the Lord of the
Rings and the X Men, Oscar Wao’s life is in incredible experience. I loved it
from start to finish.
Steelheart
– Brandon Sanderson
Sanderson is Sanderson. He writes fun
things. In this case he writes about the post apocalyptic world where some
people have superpowers and behave like total bastards. They go around killing,
maiming, and looting the world and there’s no one to stop them. And Steelheart
is the worst of them all.
The book is basically ‘What if Superman was
evil?’ Every Epic, as they’re called in the book, has a weakness. But they also
have a ton of strengths. Steelheart is superstrong, superfast, can shoot energy
beams from his hands, and cannot be hurt. Yet David, the novel’s protagonist,
has seen Steelheart bleed. He knows he can be hurt. And if he can be hurt, he
can be killed.
It’s pretty good. Standard Sanderson fare.
The
Alloy of Law – Brandon Sanderson
Largely, see above. Sanderson does his thing. The fourth in his Mistborn
series, it fast forwards a couple hundred years after the end of the last
trilogy and sees some increase in technology and society. Basically a cowboy
novel set on his world of Scadrial.
Honestly, it was well done and all, but I
preferred Red Country.
A
Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki
If Oscar Wao hit me like a train, this was
a tsunami. I saw it coming and could not get out of the way. And when I was
swept up in it, I wasn’t sure I wanted it to let me go.
A Tale for the Time Being is a double novel,
sort of. A novelist called Ruth finds a diary belonging to a girl called Yasutani
Nao. I really don’t want to spoil anything, but the book follows both Ruth and
Nao as one writes the diary and the other reads it. Though actually you know
that the diary has been written long before it ever found its way into Ruth’s
hands, while reading the book you fall into thinking that they’re both
happening at the same time. And that’s part of the reason the book is so
stunning. The way it handles time is superfragilistic. Nao and Ruth are living
in the same time, and yet they’re not.
There’s a lot of mind bending stuff in the book.
Nao starts the diary trying to write the story of her old Jiko, her
great-grandmother, and she’s one of the best characters in the book. She
changed my life, a little. There’s a great deal of Buddhist Zen philosophy, a
smattering of quantum physics, and a whole lot of tears.
This got shortlisted for the Booker. Guys,
it should have won.
