A brief recap:
A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
There were so many delights in this book I don't even know where to begin. Ignatius (there's one-- the main character's name is Ignatius Jacques Reilly!) is a morbidly obese, over-educated and understimulated slob, whose self-righteous rants and selfish, myopic worldview is at once the perfect pitch of obnoxious and hilarious. I'm learning that this was a dude book, the kind of conversation that will generally garner blank stares from most women I've spoken with but produce the kind of giggly, wide-eyed affection from men that is usually reserved for The Big Lebowski (interestingly enough, I do see some glimmering thread connecting Ignatius and the John Goodeman character in that almost every time they speak they are confrontational and, more often than not, in the wrong). I was recommended this book by a dude with supreme reading tastes (and a booklust that I find both intimidating and impressive) and though it took me a few bumpy tries to get the ignition to turn I couldn't put the thing down by page 25. It's large but reads incredibly quickly, with a wit that lurks behind every exchange of its dense population of characters whose intricate webbing throughout the story is both surprising and satisfying. Also, I've heard that the perfectly written Creole dialect could also phonetically produce a Boston accent, though I'm not familiar enough with it to do the math. Much of the notoriety for this work undoubtedly comes from the sad story about the author's suicide and his mother's posthumously shopping around the manuscript, though I promise that even without the juicy circumstances contributing to its existence, the book is a good one, all on its own.
Tinkers, by Paul Harding
Anything that I say about this book will sound bumbling and silly and horrible, like the slobbering cries of a boy band devotee with a free back stage pass. It's a perfectly formed snowflake, an ice-dream of such a sad unfolding of the quiet, rich lives of a father and son. The language is stunning. Like Confederacy of Dunces, it is also a small press Pulitzer Prize Winner. Unlike Confederacy, it's small and will take much longer to read if you're anything like me, when a moment on a lake will become the quietest explosion you've ever experienced in a single written line. The way Harding drifts from narrative to a character's interior life and then to his out-of-body consciousness is astounding. I read it twice and felt almost as though I'll need to read it ten more times before I'll be able to appreciate every jewel. Read this, read this, read this.
Open House, by Elizabeth Berg
Okay, I couldn't love everything I read, right? If ever there was a reductive, trite attempt to explore the unfolding of a women stunned by divorce, this is it. Every craft decision was transparent and predictable, and the main character is anything but sympathetic-- an unapologetic housewife with a sometimes-racist outlook whose flimsy connection to some hardcore past is not only unbelievable but totally uninteresting. When she becomes suddenly confused by the freedom from serving her husband I found myself just wanting to shake the shit out of her. Her post-divorce relationships are meagerly developed and cliche at best. The only thing I liked about this book was that I could read it in a single sitting.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
One of the many pleasures I got out of this book was the digressions, which held all the magic and wonder that I feel the love story probably sought to possess. I just wasn't compelled by the lovers at all-- not a single one, or any combination of their relationships-- but I found myself reeling when Kundera wandered off to talk about kitsch or subtly jab the over-enthusiastic, demonstration-for-demonstration's-sake tendencies of liberal parties. The characters were only mere vehicles for these delightful moments, and the lush texture of their individual intimacies held more weight for me than any amount of grief over Tomas' infidelities and Teresa's resulting sadness. What I loved: the repeated Es muss sein! which had the richness of an idea undergoing several translations and interpretations. Of course, the philosophy behind the title-- the question of cyclical, repeated time, whether our actions are singular and therefore unimportant, or endlessly repeated and thus of the heaviest of burdens-- is a pleasurable thing to ponder. Also, Sabina's bowler hat, Teresa's symbolic dreams, Tomas' matter-of-fact correspondence with his abandoned son, a man he'd given life but felt no love for, only fear and discomfort of the man's having and using his own mouth right before his eyes.
And I actually cried when Karenin was put down, though thanks to Kundera's timely relaying of the famous Nietzsche story (where the philosopher ran crying into the neck of a horse as his bewildered owner looked on) I didn't feel as embarrassed about it.
I am not a critic, but I am a reader. If you're a reader too I'd love to hear what you're reading, and am always looking for recommendations. I've just been to the library to pick up my next stack: Robert Lowell's Life Studies and Notebook (for the class I'm teaching in January); Annie Dillard's Pilgrim on Tinker Creek (because I've only ever been able to read it in parts before); and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, last year's Pulitzer prize winner and of which one of the girls in my program has been singing the praises all summer.
Happy Reading!
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