The Best Books of 2018

In the order which I read them.

Mrs. Osmond.  John Banville.

This book takes off from the point that Henry James's Portrait of a Lady ended:  when Isabel Archer, now wife to Gilbert Osmond, is in England for the death of her cousin Ralph Touchett.  It takes a very confident and ambitious writer to extend a novel by Henry James, and John Banville is both.  Banville is not James, and it would probably be churlish to belabor that fact.  Instead, Banville gives us a 21st century take, revealing explicitly what James only suggests: the specific nature of Osmond's psychological sadism.   He also gives Isabel Archer a potent degree of agentivity, rescuing her from the passivity that bothers many readers of Portrait.  However, in some ways  her feminist strength and the female circumstances in which she is invited to live seem, if not anachronistic, perhaps a little blunt given the subtlety with which James has created her as a character.  Despite some quibbles, I recommend this to any James fan.

  

How to be Both.  Autumn.  Ali Smith.
I discovered Ali Smith this year and read these two books.  They are both stunning.  Smith is beautiful stylist (gorgeous sentences) as well as remarkably provocative at structuring novels that don't read much like anything you've read before.  Both have "plots," but it would be difficult to summarize them in any way that would do justice to the experience of reading one of her books.  She asks the reader to do a lot of the work of making sense of how the novel is constructed.  And to like her, you have to like this sort of thing.  Both are great.  Autumn is the first a planned quartet. 

Katalin Street. Magda Szabo.

Another, newly translated, novel by the great Hungarian novelist Magda Szabo.  This one concerns a group of people who live on Katalin Street in Buda and are displaced, first by World War II and then by the Soviets.  Melancholy and poignant.  I did a kind of companion blogpost based on a fortepan essay  here. 

A Long way from Home.  Peter Carey.

I love Peter Carey and the myriad ways he invents Australia.  This time the book is about a car race around the perimeter of Australia in 1954.  As husband and wife team Irene and Titch Bobs circumnavigate the continent, they learn a lot about their selves, their marriage, and the strange, dangerous and wonderful country they live in. 

The Only Story.  Julian Barnes. 
I also love Julian Barnes, and one of my favorites is The Sense of an Ending (2011).  This book is a kind of counterpart to the earlier one, as it records the story of a young man who falls in love with an older woman and who runs away with her to live together for many years.  If you have read The Sense of an Ending (which I have to say is the better book of the two) then you will know how they relate.  While this is not, to my mind, one of Barnes's very best, it is very good.  And very good Barnes is better than most of what I read.
                                                                    

 

The Counterlife.  Philip Roth.  Asymmetry.  Lisa Halliday. 
Philip Roth died in 2018.  For me, he was the greatest American writer of my lifetime.  I decided to read The Counterlife, one of his books I admired most and one which I had not read in several years.  I also read Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, which is a book in some ways about and in response to Roth.  I wrote about both these books here.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  Giorgio Bassani.
 Set in Ferrara during the years leading to World War II, this novel by the Italian writer Giorgio Bassani recounts the story of Jewish children and later adolescents in the years before World War II.  It centers around a young man, the narrator, who becomes friends with the fabulously wealthy Finzi-Contini family.  Although the families of the narrator and the Finzi-Continis share seats in the synagogue, there are class differences between them.  In the prologue we discover that almost none of the Finzi-Continis survived the war.  This rather astonishing book, published in 1962, examines with extreme subtlety the growing and waning  love affair between the Finzi-Contini daughter and the narrator, a relationship that is negotiated among class differences and the growing effects of the Racial Laws.  The movie was also wonderful.

History of Wolves.  Emily Fridlund.

A creepy but compulsively readable book about a young girl whose parents live on a failed commune in Minnesota.  Linda, the protagonist, comes to know a teacher who is accused of child pornography and a seemingly idyllic family who lives across the lake whose child she babysits.  No one, however, is who they seem to be.  And the resulting tension, particularly in relation to the family, mounts to an almost unbearable tragedy.  Short-listed for the Man-Booker Prize.  Also a debut novel.  

 Mrs. Engels.  Gavin McLeod.
I found this book this book on the long-list for the Booker Prize.  (Looking at prize long and sort lists is a good way to discover new novels.)  It's a fictional account of a real woman named Lizzie Burns who lived with Frederick Engels, first in Manchester, then London while he and Karl Marx were working together.  Burns was a worker in the Manchester cotton mills, functionally illiterate, but very intelligent.  Little is known of her or her sister Mary Burns, who was until her death Engel's lover.  Mary and Lizzie apparently helped Engels navigate the Manchester slums, an experience that led to The Condition of the Working Class in England.  It was interesting (and about something of which I knew almost nothing), and the character of Lizzie was well imagined.

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.  Roberto Calasso.
This book has been on my shelf for quite a long time.  Calasso has been called a "literary institution of one."  His books are wide-ranging explorations of cultural moments and traditions, such as Hindu mythology, Tiepelo, Kafka, Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, Nabokov, Vedic sacrifices--or as in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Greek mythology.  Drawing on an extraordinary number of classical sources, Calasso reads the patterns of Greek mythology, putting various stories together and in perspective to identify broad concerns of the Greeks.  It is the stories of Greek mythology as you have never considered them.  Written in a lyric and allusive style, this book tantalizes the reader.  It is a book you have to fall into.

The Witch Elm.  Tana French.
On a completely different note.  Tana French is famous for her books about a Dublin Murder Squad.  These books are loosely related but all are police procedurals and are very compelling.  French not only constructs intricate plots, she also writes very nice prose.  The Witch Elm,  her latest, is a stand-alone.  Although it involves a murder, it is not narrated from the point of view of the police.  Rather, the narrator is a young man named Toby who has recently been victimized in a vicious robbery and who unwittingly finds himself in the middle of the a police enquiry initiated by the discovery of a body in a tree at his uncle's house, where he is currently recuperating.  Toby, who previously considered himself very "lucky" (lots of friends, nice looking, great family, good job) is now undergoing a psychological breakdown as he tries to reconstruct his life and his sense of self.  Plunged into the middle of this murder investigation, and not always trusting his own memory, he is jumpy, nervous, scattered and perhaps paranoid.  It's quite a tour-de-force, and a challenging but fascinating job for the reader to live in this consciousness.  Once I started it, I couldn't put it down.   you,  


#BestBooks2018

Julian Barnes. The Noise of Time.

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes is a collection of three moments in the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.  The first takes place in 1936 when Shostakovich is 31 years old; the second in 1948, when he is 43, and the third in 1960 when he is 65.  Each section begins with the phrase “All he knew was that this was the worst time.” Each section centers around a terrible event in Shostakovich’s life, but is also the occasion for reminiscing about his life to that time.  And each is in a leap year, which everyone in Russia knows brings bad luck. 

The first section centers on Stalin’s decision to ban Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.  Although the opera had been performed to applause earlier in Russia and in the West, Stalin first heard it in 1936 and left before the end of the performance.  The next day the opera was reviewed in Pravda with the title “Muddle Instead of Music.”  The second section deals with with a visit by Shostakovich (who was then the most famous composer in Russia)  to New York as part of the Russian delegation to the Congress for World Peace.  There he was forced to deliver an anti-American speech which included condemnation of decadent American music, and specifically that of his idol Stravinsky.  In the final section he has been forced to accept appointment as Chairman of the Russian Federation Union of Composers and consequently forced to become a member of the Communist Party.

Julian Barnes shows Shostakovich in these three Conversations with Power balanced among the need to continue writing music that can be performed, his fear that he will be killed if he protests,  and his cowardice at betraying his principles by aligning with Power.  The “solution” Barnes has Shostakovich takes is “irony”: a stance that acknowledges both his need to write music and his need to accommodate his principles and beliefs to an authoritarian system that arbitrarily banishes or murders its supposed opponents (and their families):    

All his life he had relied on irony.  He imagined that the trait had been born in the usual place: in the gap between how we imagine, or suppose, or hope life will turn out, and the way it actually does.  So Irony becomes a defence of the self and the soul; it lets your breathe on a day-to-day basis.

One of the larger questions that has been raised about Shostakovich was the degree to which he believed or opposed  the Soviet ideological positions he was forced to take in public--and concomitantly, the degree to which his music adhered to or resisted a Soviet musicology.  These questions were present during Shostakovich’s life and continue to be a part of his legacy.  They became even more intense in 1979 when a book entitled Testimony, purporting to be Shostakovich’s memoirs, were published by the Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov.  Testimony portrays Shostakovich as a dissident and his music as veiled criticism of Soviet authoritarianism.  The legitimacy of the book—was it really written by Shostakovich or not—became an academic battle, sometimes called The Shostakovich Wars.

Barnes is not writing a biography, and in the Afterword he states that he uses the views expressed in Testimony as those of a “private diary.”  Thus Barnes’ Shostakovich is a complex person who spent his life negotiating the real and  potentially fatal dangers of writing music in an authoritarian regime.  This produces an equally complex novel, where the reader wanders between demonstrable historical fact, potentially autobiographical information, and the novelist’s examination of the responsibility of the artist to music and music to society.

The title of the book is borrowed from Osip Mandelstam’s memoirs, and is hence another irony—because Mandelstam, unlike Shostakovich—was outspoken in his criticism of Stalin and died in a transit camp during the Great Exile.  Shostakovich puts music against the noise of time, but “only that music which is inside ourselves—the music of our being—which is transformed by some into real music.  Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.” 

In Julian Barnes’ novel, Shostakovich’s last wish is that “death would liberate his music: liberate it from his life.”  That it should be “just music” is  “all a composer can hope for.”  The Noise of Time makes one wonder if such a liberation is possible.

#JulianBarnes

#TheNoiseOfTime