A Memory Palace

Great House - Nicole Krauss (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010)

Nicole Krauss blows my mind. (I have mentioned this before.) A few years back, I gushed about The History of Love, and her latest novel employs a similar plot devise, being a sort of biography of a thing. In this case it's a desk, this monstrosity of a desk that is confiscated during Nazi occupation, and touches the lives of a surprising number of people. Strangely, I kept seeing the desk as almost like an organ - all the different drawers like pipes and .... I don't know.

Her stories are lyrical and haunting, and it's no surprise that many of the narrators are either authors or loved ones of writers. They speak in a high-flown language that doesn't really bear any relationship to how most of us talk, but carries the weight of intense sadness, loneliness, emptiness, and a struggle to know those we love.

I noted less than I would have liked, and this makes me sad. I'd probably direct you to the entire (long) chapter "Lies Told by Children." The first narrator, the author who owned the desk most recently, comments on how the things she loves she is reluctant to share with others, unlike those who want to share the music and literature that makes them who they are. She also has a lovely line about her youth: "I had been young and full, bursting with feeling, overflowing with desire; I lived closer to the surface of myself."

This is, perhaps, a book better meant to be reflected upon in conversation - or silence - than in a blog. It consists of interwoven parts, and leads to interwoven thoughts. I want to talk about it, and digress, and bring up other points, and wander down tangents. (That last might have been redundant.) So go read, and then come talk to me about it, okay?

Free books!!!

I am still not reading (sigh) but I did get my hands on a free copy of Nicole Krauss's Great House. Yay. Yay yay yay!

Best of the 00s

(Reposted, a bit late, from Facebook, b/c clearly I have my priorities straight.)
This list was impossible to put together. In the end, I just went back through my blog, which only covers the second half of the decade. So it's my favorite books that were published 2000-09 that I read in 2005-09, with one exception, which was my favorite book of the decade and thus had to be included. It ended up being a slightly surprising list, because some of these I didn't particularly seem to like that much when I first read and posted about them. Who knows how favorites are made?

10. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
9. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (which prob benefited from an Infinite Jest bounce)
8. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
7. The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta
6. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
5. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
4. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
3. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
2. The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver (2)
1. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (no review, but here are a couple other posts...)

Blank Slate

Man Walks Into a Room - Nicole Krauss
New York: Anchor Books, 2002

After the excitement of Stanford and Venice Blvd, I was able to get down to concentrating on the rest of Krauss' novel. It's haunting and minimalist and bizarre. It's not as deeply moving as The History of Love, but beautiful and interesting in its own right. The main character, Samson, a lit professor in his mid-30s, is found walking through the desert with no idea who he is. After a brain tumor is removed, his memory returns, but only through age 12. The last two dozen years: empty. But he embraces the emptiness, and his experiences as he puzzles through what it means and what it's worth to make connections with others make for a challenging and thought-provoking read. A couple moments that I highlighted:

• wanting to say to his estranged wife, with whom he cannot remember falling in love:

  "Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point out certain constellations, standing behind you so that you had the advantage of leaning and looking up? and so on [...] But he didn't ask because he didn't know if he wanted the answers."

• on loneliness: "How can a mind know how alone it is until it brushes up against some other mind? [...] and now the magnitude of his own loss was impossible for Samson to ignore. It was breathtaking."
• and do I agree with this or not? How can you know for certain? "The mind cannot abide any presence but its own."
• Oh, and the epilogue. Which I wasn't expecting, but which completely fit.
  

Dislocation

I am currently reading Man Walks Into a Room, by Nicole Krauss. (I've written a little before about how I am terribly jealous of her.) Apparently sometimes I am bitchy. Case in point: when amnesiac Samson flies into LA, he tells the neuroscientist who picks him up, "I probably came [here] once or twice when I was a kid. I feel like I've been here." And the response: "You watch a lot of movies? Because it unsettles even people who live in L.A.: the nagging sense that they've seen a part of the city before, exactly like this." Um, I really don't feel that way. I recognize things, and am pleased or not, depending. It's certainly not unsettling. So minus points to Krauss.

Except then... 12 pages later another character tells Samson about sticking around at Stanford after finishing his degree, and hanging out with guys in Symbolic Systems. SymSys?? I didn't expect to see that in a book. And then, in another 4 pages: "They ate dinner at a plastic picinic table outside the India Sweets and Spices Mart on Venice Boulevard." Wait, where? The cheap Indian place down the street where they yell at you if you don't order quickly enough? The one I walked by this afternoon on my way back from Trader Joe's? And there, perhaps, is the feeling the neuroscientist mentioned. Unsettling, as though characters have been walking through my world.

So in the end, Krauss (if I attribute her character's observation to her) is right. Except for me, it happens in books, not in film.

I have no self-control

Books that I have acquired on or since Christmas:

Fire in the Blood, Irene Nemirovsky
Man Walks Into a Room, Nicole Krauss
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

I have already read Bros K, so this is only for my library, but for the other five, any bets on how many will actually get read in 2008?

The Curse of the Supersmart?

There is a list of authors who make me mad. Chief among the members are husband and wife team Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss. Really I'm just jealous because they are incredibly talented and doing something they love and are just about my age. Added to the list is Marisha Pessl, the precocious-seeming author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

This book enjoyed a good deal of buzz, although less than Claire Messud did for her book (see my review below). Like Foer and a growing number of young authors, she is a master of the gimmick. In this case, her protagonist is hyper-read, perhaps even more precocious than Pessl herself. Blue Van Meer narrates (from the distance of a year) her senior year in high school, the first time that she and her itinerant lecturer father have settled in a place for an entire academic year. Blue fills her narrative with in-text references to other works - of fiction and non-fiction. She mixes real and fake works willy-nilly. (I was particularly disappointed to note that "British chick-lit classic 'One Night Stand' (Zev, 2002)" does not seem to exist.) But these details add humor and insight to Blue's observations, and strengthen Pessl's characterization of Blue as a preternaturally smart young lady who really only knows things based on books, her father's proclamations, and her distanced analyses of her peers. When life gets "real" on her, she can barely cope.

But luckily (I guess), real life for Blue Van Meer is bizarre as f***. We know we're in a murder mystery, but the first 300 pages of what really is a tome are lead-in. With Blue as the Lindsey Lohan character in Mean Girls, more or less. It's a stronger and more sympathetic satire of (privileged) high school culture than Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep (more here and here). And then we get to the murder mystery and all hell breaks loose. I spent the last 200 pages wondering what on earth was going on. Blue has an over-active imagination, and it's a good thing she does, because otherwise she'd never keep up with real events.

That's it. I think anything more would start to give too much away. Blue and Pessl both take some getting used to. But if you take the time to get into it, you'll be rewarded with a strange and funny and almost Usual Suspects-like mystery.