(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...)
Showing posts with label Pessl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pessl. Show all posts
Monday, January 11, 2010
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
A descent into...?
Atmospheric Disturbances - Rivka Galchen
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
This book had been on my To Read list since sometime last year, but it got bumped to the library request list when it appeared as a Slate audio book club selection in May. (Then I had to wait to actually get and read the book, so finally just listened to the podcast last week.)
This is one of those books that's so clever that I sort of feel like I won't be able to say anything sufficiently clever about it. But not in an annoying way, just in a "it is what it is" sort of way. Leo is a psychiatrist, which somehow gives him enough mental credibility that you want to believe him when one day an impostor comes home instead of his wife. Despite being right to almost the slightest detail, he knows she's not his Rema. So he goes off looking for here, and gets caught up with the Royal Academy of Meteorologists, with which one of his clients (also missing, like Rema) claims to be a secret agent. Long story short, the line between what is real and what is in Leo's head is constantly shifting as the simulacrum tries to persuade Leo to come home to her.
I expected this to be mostly a meditation on the ways in which we fall out of love, or love changes, and the person you loved is suddenly gone and replaced by someone else. It's a great metaphor. But it's that, and more and less than that too. It's about perception and love and loss and the lies we tell ourselves and those around us, and the impossibility of ever perfectly knowing another person. And it's about the ache you feel for Leo (and his wife) when you see how he almost loves this replacement Rema, and wants to love her, and yet there is this block that prevents him from seeing her for who she is.
Some points:
And so that's it. Clever to be sure. But also quite touching. And disturbing too. But it was melancholy and yearning that stuck with me.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
This book had been on my To Read list since sometime last year, but it got bumped to the library request list when it appeared as a Slate audio book club selection in May. (Then I had to wait to actually get and read the book, so finally just listened to the podcast last week.)
This is one of those books that's so clever that I sort of feel like I won't be able to say anything sufficiently clever about it. But not in an annoying way, just in a "it is what it is" sort of way. Leo is a psychiatrist, which somehow gives him enough mental credibility that you want to believe him when one day an impostor comes home instead of his wife. Despite being right to almost the slightest detail, he knows she's not his Rema. So he goes off looking for here, and gets caught up with the Royal Academy of Meteorologists, with which one of his clients (also missing, like Rema) claims to be a secret agent. Long story short, the line between what is real and what is in Leo's head is constantly shifting as the simulacrum tries to persuade Leo to come home to her.
I expected this to be mostly a meditation on the ways in which we fall out of love, or love changes, and the person you loved is suddenly gone and replaced by someone else. It's a great metaphor. But it's that, and more and less than that too. It's about perception and love and loss and the lies we tell ourselves and those around us, and the impossibility of ever perfectly knowing another person. And it's about the ache you feel for Leo (and his wife) when you see how he almost loves this replacement Rema, and wants to love her, and yet there is this block that prevents him from seeing her for who she is.
Some points:
- I noted some similarities - in title mostly, but also in style - with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and was annoyed with the book club for pointing out the same thing and making me feel less original.
- Completion error: "with any incomplete perception - and needless to say all perceptions are incomplete - the observer 'fills in' by extrapolating from experience. Or from desire. Or from desire's other face, aversion. So basically, we focus fuzzy images by transforming them into what we expect to see, or what we wish we could see, or what we most dread to see." I love this quote in its own right, but I love it even more for Leo's further statement of being reassured that he knew right away that the impostress wasn't Rema instead of falling into completion error, without having considering that he is just committing the opposite completion error.
- Too lazy to check whether Leo's attribution to Freud is accurate, but he credits Freud with the belief that "there's always a thicket of past people between any two lovers." Leo then goes on to disagree, but really, isn't love about sorting one's way through the thicket in order to truly find each other?
- The book gets surprisingly and randomly funny toward the end, perhaps to mitigate how tragic everything is starting to feel, with a set of mistranslated drinks on a menu: Bloody Girl & Bloody Great. Also "I crash." (The first two seem to be sangria, the last maybe cocoa?)
And so that's it. Clever to be sure. But also quite touching. And disturbing too. But it was melancholy and yearning that stuck with me.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Him Her Him Again The End (!) of Him
[Exclamation point mine]
It happens rarely enough that I'm always a little giddy when it does happen. It? you ask. It is one of my favorite reading experiences, namely reading something that makes me laugh or otherwise react aloud. This is particularly amusing (to me) in public.
Aside: the summer after I graduated from high school, I read War and Peace, because I am a big nerd. I was utterly in love with Prince Andrei - we had a deep emotional connection. Anyway, I am in the waiting room at Kaiser, accompanying my grandmother to one or another appointment, and I get to the part where Natasha betrays him. (I'm a little fuzzy on the specific plot point, but I remember a definite sense of betrayal.) How dare she! This is Prince Andrei! So I manage to recall that I'm in public, so my cry of "You hussy bitch!" turned into some sort of strangled grr. (And I still have very strong feelings about how Tolstoy used and discarded this dream man of mine.)
But I digress. On Sunday, after a trek to the Hollywood Farmers Market for reconnaissance (Festival coming up!) I stopped by Groundwork for some iced tea and started reading Him Her Him Again The End of Him by Patricia Marx. (Hmm, I wonder how you punctuate that?) Suffice it to say that in the short time I was there, I stifled laughter several times.
This book is hilarious. It's unsurprising, seeing as how Marx wrote for The Harvard Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. Her heroine is absurd and witty and neurotic and intelligent and ridiculous, and all those things. Like an unabashedly imperfect cousin of Blue Van Meer. While "studying" at Cambridge (but mostly finding ways to procrastinate) she also fixates upon the archetypal preening intellectual, whose all-consuming ego makes him sexy. And over ten years he comes and goes, and strings her along, while she tries with varying levels of success and effort to do something with her life. And deal with a cast of wacky parents, bosses, friends, and colleagues.
But I wanted to share some of my favorite quotes. So despite the growing length of this entry...
*When her father badgers her about making a will: "I was beginning to think that either he knew something I didn't or that he was planning to kill me."
*On we, the reader: "I hope you are not getting fed up with me because, as it happens, I think I'm beginning to like you more and more. You're a good listener. Plus, I bet you have a winning way of turning the page."
*On Eugene, the pompous lover: "he believed that the later work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was derivative of Eugene's early work, which was an audacious theory, in my opinion, since Eugene hadn't entered Lacan's field of work until Lacan was dead."
None of these play as well out of context as they do on the page. (Boo.) But I hope you can read this entry and see how a steady stream of digressions and non sequiturs is exactly my kind of thing. If it's yours too, check out Patricia Marx.
It happens rarely enough that I'm always a little giddy when it does happen. It? you ask. It is one of my favorite reading experiences, namely reading something that makes me laugh or otherwise react aloud. This is particularly amusing (to me) in public.
Aside: the summer after I graduated from high school, I read War and Peace, because I am a big nerd. I was utterly in love with Prince Andrei - we had a deep emotional connection. Anyway, I am in the waiting room at Kaiser, accompanying my grandmother to one or another appointment, and I get to the part where Natasha betrays him. (I'm a little fuzzy on the specific plot point, but I remember a definite sense of betrayal.) How dare she! This is Prince Andrei! So I manage to recall that I'm in public, so my cry of "You hussy bitch!" turned into some sort of strangled grr. (And I still have very strong feelings about how Tolstoy used and discarded this dream man of mine.)
But I digress. On Sunday, after a trek to the Hollywood Farmers Market for reconnaissance (Festival coming up!) I stopped by Groundwork for some iced tea and started reading Him Her Him Again The End of Him by Patricia Marx. (Hmm, I wonder how you punctuate that?) Suffice it to say that in the short time I was there, I stifled laughter several times.
This book is hilarious. It's unsurprising, seeing as how Marx wrote for The Harvard Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. Her heroine is absurd and witty and neurotic and intelligent and ridiculous, and all those things. Like an unabashedly imperfect cousin of Blue Van Meer. While "studying" at Cambridge (but mostly finding ways to procrastinate) she also fixates upon the archetypal preening intellectual, whose all-consuming ego makes him sexy. And over ten years he comes and goes, and strings her along, while she tries with varying levels of success and effort to do something with her life. And deal with a cast of wacky parents, bosses, friends, and colleagues.
But I wanted to share some of my favorite quotes. So despite the growing length of this entry...
*When her father badgers her about making a will: "I was beginning to think that either he knew something I didn't or that he was planning to kill me."
*On we, the reader: "I hope you are not getting fed up with me because, as it happens, I think I'm beginning to like you more and more. You're a good listener. Plus, I bet you have a winning way of turning the page."
*On Eugene, the pompous lover: "he believed that the later work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was derivative of Eugene's early work, which was an audacious theory, in my opinion, since Eugene hadn't entered Lacan's field of work until Lacan was dead."
None of these play as well out of context as they do on the page. (Boo.) But I hope you can read this entry and see how a steady stream of digressions and non sequiturs is exactly my kind of thing. If it's yours too, check out Patricia Marx.
Monday, January 01, 2007
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.
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.
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