Category: Fiction

So, Afghanistan pretty much sucks.

Not inherently, of course. (I’m sure it’s lovely in the springtime.) But it’s had various inhabitants over the past 30-odd years that have made it really hard to kick back and enjoy the scenery. Especially if you’re a girl.

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns has oft been described to me as “the sequel to The Kite Runner, told from a woman’s point of view.” That’s half true; it’s not a sequel (as I mentioned in an earlier post), but it is told entirely from the perspectives of two women. The novel begins with Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man. Forced to marry, Mariam finds herself wedded to a strict husband whose brutal tendencies begin to emerge as she proves incapable of bringing a child to term. After nearly twenty miserable years, Mariam’s husband takes another wife, Laila—a beautiful young woman, newly and secretly pregnant, who agrees to marry so she can save her reputation and protect her absent lover’s unborn child. The relationship between the two imprisoned and abused wives is the essence of the story.

I’m having a hard time pinpointing what I think about this novel. The writing is good; the story is good. And it does an excellent job of exposing the misery and helplessness endured by women in the clutches of an extremist society. But I do think Hosseini veers toward the simplistic in both his books, creating bad men who are too one-sided to be interesting. Of course, his subjects are abusive husbands and Taliban bigwigs: what choice does he have? Still, I would say that at times his “big” stories and “bad” characters undermine the best parts of his novels—those that bypass the inarguable evils and explore simple humanity.

…this is what it seems we can expect from Khaled Hosseini. I just finished the man’s second work, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and will review it here soon. But the book got me thinking about the relationship between branding and creativity, and I just had to share.

Hosseini of course is famous for his super-selling first novel, The Kite Runner, a story about a boy growing up in Afghanistan who later comes to the United States, eventually returning to his native country to fight (one member of) the Taliban and make amends for childhood crimes. Then came A Thousand Splendid Suns in 2007. I can’t count how many people have told me that this was the sequel to The Kite Runner.

But I just read it. And it’s not a sequel. It’s a book that happens to be set in Afghanistan, a book whose cover has the same color scheme and typesetting as Hosseini’s first—but a book with completely different characters.

It may be a simple mistake, yes. But I wonder how much the “branding” of literary authors affects what they write and how readers perceive what they write. It used to be that only genre authors were expected to produce the same kind of book over and over, but more and more I see literary authors being “tracked” in the same way. Oh, Khaled Hosseini writes about Afghanistan. Oh, Mitch Albom writes sappy stuff. So-and-so writes about lonely coal miners. Every book might as well be a sequel because the major characteristics don’t change.

I think it says a lot about our shifting reasons for reading literary fiction. The repetitive nature of genre fiction makes some sense: readers are often looking for a certain kind of repeated experience when they pick up a thriller, mystery, or romance novel. But the reasons for reading literary fiction used to be, I think, quite different: readers wanted a unique experience each time. They didn’t want the same book. They didn’t want the same themes. They didn’t want the book to conjure the same emotions. They didn’t want to look at a novel’s cover and instantly associate it with the author’s fourteen previous offerings.

Maybe it’s just me. I have always admired authors with broad talent, those who tackle varied subjects, characters, and approaches. That’s not to say writers don’t have their favorite themes and trademark styles; that’s always been the case. But today’s authors—at least the bestselling ones—seem to write in a much narrower range than writers of yore. And I wonder if the current obsession with branding is increasingly going to prevent talented authors from branching out, pressure them to remain within one tiny niche for the duration of their careers.

I truly hope not. One of the best things about reading literary fiction—about reading anything, in my view—is the element of surprise. And I don’t mean which bad guy will die first or how. I mean what the book will really be about, the questions and themes it will raise in my mind. For reading to be intellectually valuable, I think it has to be at least somewhat diverse.

So if Khaled Hosseini writes another novel about Afghanistan, I probably won’t read it. Not because I don’t like his writing. But because I don’t want a brand—I want a book.

Sometimes it’s just nice to read a book about people. Even if they are sort of spoiled, whiny people. I liked Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, though for the longest time I thought it was a book about China. You know, emperors…China. And since I’d just read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I held off.

But I was so wrong. Instead it’s about a handful of rather self-indulgent New York literati, their neurotic insides entertainingly illuminated by Messud’s witty hand. I didn’t think it a particularly profound book, but it’s a good character novel nonetheless—a great way to disappear for a while in the heads of some charming strangers and their secrets and lies.

Messud does take a bit too long, in my opinion, to bring all the storylines together (about half the book), but once they meshed, I was hooked. I always find it fascinating to read about young East Coast writers, who seem to score appointments at national literary magazines just by flashing their English degrees and tossing their hair. That s*** just doesn’t happen in California, no matter how good you are.

I just knew that something really sick and wrong would happen to me if I wrote Why We Read What We Read. All this knowledge had to come at some serious spiritual cost; and while I knew I looked at books differently than I had before, I didn’t fully realize just how deeply my depraved new mentality had taken hold. Not until the other day when, for absolutely no explicable reason, I found myself checking out Kingdom Come, the sequel to the Left Behind series, from the library.

I am the last person who has any business reading this book. I bitched and moaned through all 12 volumes of Left Behind. I was so happy when Jesus finally showed up in Glorious Appearing, the last book, gutting all the nonbelievers and saving me from reading any more.

And yet there I was with the sequel in my hand.

What I have since come to see is that even when the devil is locked up tight, the world and the flesh still wreak havoc on our tender and temptable souls. (I learned from Kingdom Come that Satan, the world, and the flesh comprise the legs of the “three-legged stool of evil” (51)—a terrifying piece of furniture indeed!) The world got me big time, that’s for sure, taking advantage of the ragingly morbid curiosity that keeps me reading bad books and avoiding my formerly wholesome ways.

But enough on my spiritual decline: A summary/refresher is in order! The Left Behind books are the literary offspring of a minister, Tim LaHaye, and a writer, Jerry B. Jenkins, who teamed up to present their vision of the Rapture—the day that God whisks his Christian faithful to heaven and leaves everyone else to deal with plagues and general persecution. Called the “most successful Christian-fiction series ever” by Publishers Weekly, the Left Behind books have sold about a bajillion copies, converted thousands to Christianity, and pissed off countless others with their hardcore fundamentalist values and unapologetically literal interpretation of the Bible.

The original 12 books of the series detail the events of the Tribulation—the seven-year period between the Rapture and the reappearance of Christ on earth—focusing on a handful of principal characters and a full ensemble cast as they attempt to thwart the Antichrist and turn as many souls to Jesus as they can. Kingdom Come, then—the sequel—covers Jesus’ 1000-year reign of peace after the Antichrist is gone, Satan confined, and nonbelievers snuffed.

You’re probably wondering why a book needs to be written about a thousand-year reign of peace. But the authors have heard this one before and, as always, they have a ready answer:

Do you ever wonder whether this thousand years that precedes the new heaven and the new earth might be boring? Yes, Jesus will be there, He whom we all have longed to see and worship in person ever since we became believers. But with only the like-minded there—at least initially—what will everyone do? Sit around and worship? (xliii)

That’s a good bit of it, but the authors encourage us to “imagine euphoria that shows no sign of abating” as an antidote to the repetition. Still, they seem to realize that endless euphoria does not a novel make. After the characters get settled in the new world—where the rivers literally run with milk and wine, where leopards eat leaves and snuggle with bears, where humans too are vegetarians except for the occasional random festival when Jesus gets a hankering for a hearty rib-eye (38)—the book jumps 95 years later to some (marginally) more troubling times.

Aging works differently in the Millennial Kingdom. Those who were Raptured, or who died during the Tribulation, have “glorified bodies” and forever look their hottest. But those who were still alive when Jesus arrived simply age more slowly. People less than a century old look and act like adolescents, and it is these squirrelly youngsters that cause the book’s main conflict.

See, at this stage God allows all children 100 years to become believers. Anyone who doesn’t will die on his or her hundredth birthday. And yes, even though Jesus is a flesh-and-blood reality for everybody at this point, there are still those who refuse to accept His dominion over their lives. They keep their doubts hidden, forming a secret society called The Other Light (TOL) where they worship Lucifer and hope to pass their message on through the remaining nine centuries—even though they themselves will die—to the day when Satan is released and (they retardedly think) will somehow take God’s spot and bring them all back to life. They spend their remaining few years livin’ it up with drugs and whores.

These are typical Left Behind tactics. Some of the holdouts make good sense, explaining that God offers them no true free will, only a choice that is no choice at all. The authors seem to understand this complaint, but then they can’t resist muddying up its adherents with devil-worship and drug use. Questioning why it’s God’s way or the highway is portrayed as nothing more than teenage rebellion. And, let’s face it, the nonbelievers in this book just look like empty-headed twits. What’s needed here is what’s been missing all along in this series—an acknowledgment that a God who does things like send plagues, viciously slaughter unbelievers, and impose arbitrary time limits for conversion just might not be all that nice a guy. Admitting that doesn’t actually mean one has to worship Lucifer.

But the point of Kingdom Come, ultimately, is not really to explore these questions, or even to tell a compelling story. It pretends to do both, but it honestly offers about half the depth and effort of the earlier novels (and that’s, holy crap, really saying something). On it own, it won’t convert and it won’t entertain. All it can really do is make today’s real-life Christians feel good about 1) themselves and 2) their proselytizing by further simplifying the religious debate, basically eliminating the intriguing emotional struggles that the protagonists experienced in the preceding books. Even Jesus seems lazy this time around: at the end of the Millennium, He vaporizes the billions of devil-worshippers in an instant, rather than spilling their blood by hand as he so enjoyed doing in Glorious Appearing.

So, I gotta say, this is just a book that didn’t need to be written. All of the Left Behind novels lack suspense—mainly because the characters are always telling us what is going to happen—but this one is by far the most wanting of dramatic tension. Nothing happens! Nothing matters! Let’s hope Kingdom Come was exactly what it seemed to be: a final dabble that allowed the authors to say goodbye to these characters and move on. With any luck their future efforts will lie elsewhere, but as long as the three-legged stool of evil is in the world, one can never tell.

(My own closure came in the form of this little parody of “Jesus Loves Me.” Enjoy!)

Much of our recent trip to Madrid was paid by conference organizers, who had booked John to teach a workshop and give a talk the last three days we were there. How exciting! we thought. Four free nights in a fancy hotel!

It turned out to be the Worst Hotel in Europe. By “worst,” I don’t mean shabbiest or scariest. That’s what was so devilish about the Auditorium Madrid. When you pull up, it looks fine. But just a few steps past the respectable lobby and you start to notice the weird decorations and creepy paintings (dead dogs! how inviting!), the looming warehouse feel. After negotiating block after block of stacked halls, you finally turn down the one you’ve been assigned, shards of cheap berber carpet burrowing into your nostrils. Your room holds a pair of mattresses with bulging springs, everything drenched in stale choking smoke and the kind of lighting that makes you want to drink yourself to death.

This place. Man, what can I say? From a distance, it looks like a Soviet prison. From the inside, it looks like The Shining.

But all I had to do was sleep there, right? If only! The hotel is charmingly located off a freeway near the airport in nearby Barajas. You literally cannot walk out of there safely. The hotel has no store (!), no vending machines (!!)—and the city of Madrid is a 15-minute drive away, a $30 cab ride each way. There’s a restaurant in the hotel, but it’s equally expensive and bordering on inedible. Trapped, depressed, and starving, I took to hoarding crumbs in our room, trying to make meals out of tiny oranges and stale bread.

Yet this soul-sucking place turned out to be the perfect location to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Always on the brink of death, McCarthy’s postapocalyptic protagonist shepherds his young son through a poisoned world. Ash falls constantly from the sky; plants and animals have ceased to exist. And other human survivors are no consolation: most have become murderous thugs, teeth “claggy with human flesh” (64). The man and the boy (their only appellations in the book) must be smart and wily, searching constantly for preserved foods that somehow eluded earlier seekers—and evading the depraved survivors who would kill and eat them.

By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. (152-53)

Never have I envisioned such an ugly world, yet rarely have I encountered such beautiful writing. McCarthy’s style shifts from spare to breathless and back again, its diction always delightful. His frequent use of fragments upset me at first, but I soon fell into the rhythm of the narrative—a combination of brief dialogue and the man’s stream of consciousness—and forgave the author all his grammatical indiscretions. (This is not an invitation to my writing students, however, to follow suit.)

The writing makes this book. The vision is disturbing; the premise is compelling; but it’s the writing that makes the story a Pulitzer Prize winner. Even at its simplest, it conveys not only the horror, barrenness, and loneliness of McCarthy’s ravaged planet, but the unflinching devotion between parent and child, the struggle to maintain both morality and dignity in a world that rewards only the most inhuman and ruthless.

The boy looked down the road.
I want you to tell me. It’s okay.
He shook his head.
Look at me, the man said.
He turned and looked. He looked like he’d been crying.
Just tell me.
We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?
No. Of course not.
Even if we were starving?
We’re starving now.
You said we weren’t.
I said we weren’t dying. I didn’t say we weren’t starving.
But we wouldn’t.
No. We wouldn’t.
No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we’re the good guys.
Yes.
And we’re carrying the fire.
And we’re carrying the fire. Yes. (108-09)

The Road had a powerful effect on me. On the one hand, trapped in the Worst Hotel in Europe with no food and some seriously grim lighting, I related wholeheartedly to the man’s struggle. On the other hand, I actually enjoyed escaping into McCarthy’s fictional landscape, which was so much worse than my real-life one and yet so beautifully rendered that I couldn’t stay away. Still, it was all so dark. Shifting my attention back and forth between hotel and book, I grew increasingly depressed and really started to sympathize with the protagonist’s long-gone wife, who took herself out when she realized that being raped and eaten was not really how she wanted things to end.

Luckily, in the brink of time, a plane came and whisked me out of that hellhole and returned my suicidal depression levels to normal. But The Road is definitely still with me, perhaps even more so now that my stomach is full and my lighting is cheerful. The Road is haunting. It’s wonderful. Look at it this way: it was so good, even staying at the Auditorium Madrid Hotel was worth it.

*

John’s song about the hotel, sung to the tune of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”:

Trapped here in the Hotel Auditorium
Only five years old and strangely drab
Lord I hope the hotel shuttle bus will come
Because it’s 20 euros just to catch a cab.

There’s no doubt gonna shout let me out – BRA!
La la la la let me out
There’s no doubt gonna shout let me out – BRA!
La la la la let me out

Bridge:
In a couple of hours you are feeling negative
In a couple of days you are so depressed
You’ve lost your will to live

(At that point he lost his will to live and couldn’t finish the song.)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We’re in Madrid for the holiday. I’d love to say I picked up the #1 Spanish-language bestseller, Ayuda! Hay un perro loco en los pantalones! —but that would require some Spanish skills about 1,800 levels greater than my own. We’re really great at starting conversations—”una mesa para cuatro, por favor”—but inevitably the target responds, dousing us in light-speed syllables that sap us of all hope and self-esteem. “No entiendo,” we finally whimper. At least, unlike John, I have not ordered a goat instead of a beer.

In between gross faux pas I have been reading the books I carted along with me, starting with Suite Francais by Irene Nemirovsky—a woman whose name contains unsettling, multi-directional accents that I am far too lazy to figure out how to recreate. I can honestly say I’ve never read a novel like Suite—namely because it’s only 2/5 of one, the only sections that Nemirovsky was able to finish before she was arrested by the Nazis and murdered at Auschwitz. A Russian-born Jew living in Paris, Nemirovsky was a popular and well-regarded novelist in Europe when the Germans invaded France. Suite Francais was her attempt to capture the events she was witnessing firsthand, to explore the complex feelings and experiences of people in wartime.

Part one, “Storm in June,” follows several characters of varying classes as they flee Paris and the advancing German forces. The more narrowly-focused second part, “Dolce,” centers on a few important characters living in the French town of Bussy, where each family is forced to house a German soldier. Here Nemirovsky explores the relationships between the occupiers and the occupied, the struggle between nationalism and individualism that the French experience as they begin to get to know—and like—and even love—the conquering warriors.

Nemirovsky takes no sides here. She does not vilify either the individual German soldiers or the French women who warm to them. In fact it is usually the most huffily nationalistic and adamantly unsympathetic that serve as antagonists in both “Storm in June” and “Dolce.” Concern for others, openness to emotion, acknowledgment of a shared humanity—these are the characteristics that mark her protagonists.

Nemirovsky’s charity becomes chilling as one moves on to the appendices of Suite Francais. The first contains excerpts of her notes on the novel, showing how the first two parts—somewhat disconnected—were to cohere later on; the second is a collection of letters chronicling Nemirovsky’s steadily worsening situation and eventual disappearance.

I’m not usually one to care about author biographies, but in relationship to the unfinished novel I found the appendices both moving and terrible. They play the part of the unwritten three sections, reinforcing Nemirovsky’s thematic intentions, but also somehow making an even larger, stronger statement about the senselessness and evil of prejudice and hate. Nemirovsky had no illusions about what would befall her; as early as 1941 she suspected her end. Yet she wrote in her notes: “I swear here and now never again to take out my bitterness, no matter how justifiable, on a group of people, whatever their race, religion, convictions, prejudices, errors” (342).

As we’ve seen throughout contemporary fiction, villains are those without empathy; heroes are the ones who maintain the wisdom and grace to sympathize, connect, and forgive. Reading Suite Francais, I see more clearly than ever that such distinctions are not confined to imaginary worlds alone.

…says J.K. Rowling. I guess the events of his past—Grindenwald and all—now make a little more sense. But you know, I don’t think sexual orientations should be available to archetypal wizard types. They’re not supposed to need anything but their own hocus-pocus and beards.

Still, in honor of Dumbledore’s coming out, I have to post a link to our favorite Harry Potter-related YouTube video. I can’t tell you how often we walk around here chanting, “Snape, Snape, Severus Snape…”

I have long believed that Nora Roberts is a cyborg. She does things that no human can do, namely write a full-length novel about every six weeks. It’s weird and creepy and there is no other explanation except that she is a cyborg.

So I was hoping that Morrigan’s Cross, which was the #1 Mass Market Paperback of 2006 with some 2.7 million copies sold, would provide some evidence to back up my theory. You know, like a reference in the introduction to her charging station. Or a character that has a robot butler. You know, something.

On this note I was disappointed. Roberts continues to obscure her true identity in her text, though I would argue that her awkward photo on the back of the book suggests she is hiding something big, probably mechanical insides. I’ve got my eye on you, Nora.

But anyway, on to the novel at hand. Morrigan’s Cross is the first of a fantasy-paranormal-romance series called the Circle Trilogy, the other two books of which were also released in 2006 and sold in similarly astounding quantities. Roberts begins with a reverse deus ex machina: Morrigan, Celtic goddess of battle, visits her earthly beloveds in different places and times, informing them that there will be a great war that will decide the future of mankind and they have been called to fight it. This pending conflict will be the dastardly work of Lilith, queen of the vampires, who has charged her demonic subjects with the task of exterminating all humans from the earth. For limited time, free shipping; Use coupon FSWR120. Take a deep breath. Prescription Celecoxib We have the answers you seek. Next-day delivery and privacy asCelecoxib: FDA and Health Canada Actions – December 24, 2004 The incrCelecoxibApr 23, 2008 The five-year results of the Adenoma Prevention with CelecSep 12, 2008 This risk will increase the longer you use celecoxib.

Morrigan’s warriors are a motley crew: Hoyt, a sorcerer from 1128 Ireland; Hoyt’s twin Cian, a vampire himself who was claimed by Lilith a thousand years before but agrees to turn on his own kind; Glenna, a modern-day witch; Moira, a scholar from a mythical land called Geall; Larkin, a shape-shifter; and Blair, a professional warrior and vampire hunter. The gang travels through time and space to meet up in Ireland, where they begin honing their skills and teamwork for the great battle.

Of course, there is also love. Sparks instantly fly around Hoyt and Glenna; by the end of the first month—and the book—they are married. The book features typical romance-novel passion and pacing, with the same flying tempers, swift commitments, and unsafe sex we’ve come to know and love. Or at least expect. How much you wanna bet that Cian and Moira, and Larkin and Blair, will follow suit in the later books?

I did think this book was a little skimpy on plot; not a whole lot happens except training, a few scuffles with vampires, and the building of relationships between the characters. Making this story into a trilogy feels like a stretch. But then, Roberts probably needs the money.

Ha ha.

Still, I have no argument with Nora Roberts, and if people have to buy a million billion romance novels a year from one person, readers could do a lot worse. Roberts is a good writer, and more importantly, her books don’t creep me out. Unlike many other authors in her field, she really does create strong female characters who resist possession and rescue by the men in their lives. Indeed, most of the conflict between Hoyt and Glenna in Morrigan’s Cross erupts because he tries to treat her like a woman of medieval Ireland, which she will not tolerate, no matter how recently he may have crawled into the 21st century. I liked how Roberts actually explored the difference between wanting to protect someone you love and acting like a macho dick. Most other romance authors I’ve encountered have treated the latter like a woman’s dream come true.

So if I had to rank my preferred romance authors or styles (and I’m talking about official romance novels here), Roberts would come in third. First would be Janet Evanovich, because her books are so goofy, and second would be some kind of regency romance, because they are light and cute. The serious romance, I’m sorry, I just find to be dreadful. Roberts walks the line at times: she does inject humor into her novels, which I appreciate, but she can be a tad overdramatic too. When Glenna and Hoyt kiss, for example, all the candles and fireplaces in the room automatically ignite. I burst out laughing when this happened the first time, but apparently it wasn’t supposed to be funny because the same thing happens about ten more times. Remind me to date a sorcerer in my next life! Starting fires with kindling can be such a pain.

While I won’t be continuing on to the remaining books in the trilogy, I can head off to other pastures assured that the world is going to end up OK. The nice thing about reading a genre like romance—for a reviewer, anyway—is that you always know how every book is going to end. Just let me know, people, if you find a reference to a robot butler later in the series. We have to get to the bottom of this cyborg thing.

Well, I finished up The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at just the right time. Bookman asked some questions on my last post about what constitutes “literary,” and this is the perfect book to help me explain further.

Over the years, many people have of course objected to the term “literary” because it connotes higher quality, a connotation that I agree is unfair. While it does seem to me that overall writing standards tend to be higher in the literary sphere than the genre sphere, any individual work of genre fiction—thriller, romance, fantasy, whatever—can absolutely be a fantastic book, a better book than lots of literary novels. So I try to avoid those implications.

What I find to be a much more helpful way of distinguishing a literary work from a non-literary one is to determine whether the book contains themes. A theme, in the literary analysis sense, is an issue that the author is exploring in the text, the larger idea that is going on beneath the surface of the story. A theme is what the book is really about. So an author might write a book about a man escaping from prison, but use that plot to explore themes such as the possibility of redemption and the true nature of humankind. The themes, rather than the plot, are the essence of that story.

Most top bestsellers do not have themes of this kind. John and I used the word “themes” frequently in Why We Read What We Read—but most times we meant “underlying assumptions or values,” because those authors did not deliberately explore any issues in their books; the novels are not “about” anything other than their plots. Again, this is not a value judgment. The two types of books just have different intents.

I enjoy both types, though the lit geek in me especially loves working with themes, so I was excited to spot them as I began reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. This is an old book, published in 1940, but also an Oprah pick and thus #14 on the bestseller list in 2004.

Heart takes place in a Georgia mill town during the Depression. The book jacket says the main character is Mick Kelly, a 14-year-old tomboy who yearns to be a musician (a character modeled after the author, apparently—no wonder Oprah chose this book!). But I believe the central character is John Singer, a deaf-mute who befriends Mick and the three other important characters in the novel: Benedict Mady Copeland, a black medical doctor desperate to increase the opportunities for his people; Jake Blount, an alcoholic, socialist, and part-time crazy; and Biff, a soft-hearted restaurant owner (and less prominent character overall) with a dead wife and a thing for the arresting young Mick.

This book isn’t big on plot. Stuff happens, the kind of stuff you’d expect in a small town, most of which isn’t important. But what the novel is really about (here comes the theme part) is enduring loneliness and the often futile struggle to connect to others. Each of these characters is passionate about his or her cause, and each finds comfort in pouring out his or her feelings to Mister Singer, the benevolent, lip-reading mute. Each believes that Singer understands him or her like no other. Singer becomes the one white man Doctor Copeland has ever trusted; Jake Blount is convinced that Singer is one of the few who knows—that is, who understands that capitalism is inherently poisonous and unfair.

I have always enjoyed benevolent mutes, ever since I got to know Nick Andros in Stephen King’s The Stand. But the folks here take it a step further. Each person who comes in contact with Singer “described the mute as he wished him to be” (268). Doctor Copeland, wanting to see in his friend a history of oppression similar to his own, believes Singer to be Jewish, while Blount is convinced otherwise. Mick thinks Singer understands music even though she knows he has always been deaf. For each character, speaking with Singer is like speaking with God or the universe: he is a presence that is compassionate, wise, ever-understanding—and silent.

Singer’s friendship is also so significant because the characters have difficulties relating to others. Mick’s hard-working family understands little about her musical aims. Blount doesn’t have much luck convincing others of the merits of socialism (the stench of liquor surely doesn’t help). Doctor Copeland is respected but also isolated in the black community, believing “Our mission is to walk with strength and dignity through the days of our humiliation. Our pride must be strong, for we know the value of the human mind and soul. We must teach our children. We must sacrifice so that they may earn the dignity of study and wisdom” (233). Few others, even his own children, understand or agree with Copeland’s vision. And though one of his sons is named Karl Marx, Copeland can’t even see eye-to-eye with Blount on how best to counter social injustice.

Singer cannot be, of course, all that others see in him. He doesn’t understand these people as they think he does. He likes them, but finds them repetitive. And while they are obsessed with him, he is in turn obsessed with another deaf-mute, his best friend Antonapolous, who has been sent away to an asylum by his cousin. Though Antonapolous appears to be quite self-centered and have few merits, Singer thinks that he is “wise and good” and the only person who understands him (244). “The only thing I can imagine is when I will be with you again,” he writes to Antonapoulous. “I am not meant to be alone and without you who understand” (259-60).

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter became a classic because of its realistic presentation of southern small-town life in the ’30s, and its somewhat landmark focus on the misfits of society. But I like it best for its themes, its unsentimental exploration of life’s hopes and sorrows. It’s often a bit weird reading an unearthed older book, because whatever was original about it at one time usually isn’t any longer. And I think that was the case here. (You know how many books are about misfits these days. It seems like every other one.) But neither John Singer nor any of his motley followers is meant to be pitied, which is a vast improvement over many contemporary offerings. While I didn’t find the book entirely riveting, I appreciated its aims and characters a great deal. Its commentary on how we seek love and connection—and often miss the mark—is both thoughtfully rendered and all too true.

There must be something wrong with me. Millions of people read things that make me want to curl up and die.

I’m not being a snob here. It’s not like I sit around stroking my chin and reading Yeats. It’s just that there are beloved, bestselling genres I simply don’t get. And one of them is “random New Agey spiritual advice disguised as novel.”

Normal people pick up such a selection and say, “Goody goody gumdrops!” I say, “God help me, I can’t read another one of these.”

But it turns out I can. So take everything I say about Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist with a grain of salt.

Actually this book didn’t make me want to curl up and die, which coming from me is really high praise. It’s about a shepherd boy who dreams of treasure and sets out to pursue it, meeting a variety of kooky characters that aid him in his quest. On the way he learns that each of us has our own Personal Legend—our calling or mission on earth—something that most people fail to achieve. If we do have the courage to reach for our dreams, however, the universe “conspires in our favor” because the “Soul of the World is nourished by people’s happiness.” It’s a hard road, fraught with obstacles (mostly emotional) and peril (mostly thug-oriented), but the moral is that we can all attain our Personal Legends if we keep at it. And frankly, we should, because “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only real obligation.”

The ideas in The Alchemist are not new. There are traces of almost all the bestselling New Age books in here, and an especially large dollop of The Celestine Prophecy, what with the conspiring universe, handy omens (“Omens are the individual language in which God talks to you… They are this strange, but very individual language that guides you toward your own destiny”), and the whole format of the book (fictionalized spiritual lesson). Fortunately, The Alchemist is much better written than The Celestine Prophecy; it’s a real novel, even if a thinly veiled one. And Coelho is a real writer, with a dozen novels in print (“one of the bestselling and most influential authors in the world,” proclaims his book bio). Still, as with all the New Age books, there’s a bit of the “blaming the victim” mentality here: if you fail to achieve your biggest dream for your life, it’s your own dang fault. I mean, the universe was conspiring to help you, for god’s sake! What more could you want? But no. You were too cowardly to see it through. You were too chicken. Way to go, loser.

My favorite aspect of the book (besides the term “Personal Legend,” which I am going to start appending to my name) was how the boy’s journeys took him to unexpected places that seemed to be completely unrelated to his mission, but sooner or later led him to acquire new skills and acquaintances that sent him off in new directions and ultimately shaped his life and his quest. The path wasn’t predictable, and I found it very true to life (I’ve had some pretty unexpected jobs in my day), even if I’m not sure that achieving one’s greatest goal is always at the end of that rainbow.

I was less thrilled with this passage, taken from Coelho’s introduction:

First: we are told from childhood onward that everything we want to do is impossible. We grow up with this idea, and as the years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear, and guilt. There comes a time when our personal calling is so deeply buried in our soul as to be invisible. But it’s still there.

Okay. Maybe that was true in Coelho’s boyhood. But I live in a community where everyone is told from childhood onward that everything we want to do is possible. No dream is too outlandish, no child too unfit. Nobody here is stupid, graceless, or inept. Our children are all special, gifted, eternally capable. Virtually every Little Leaguer in Menlo Park makes an All-Star team. The regular math class is now called “Advanced.”

It’s just ridiculous. And it’s not healthy. True self-esteem balances a basic belief in one’s ability to achieve goals with a realistic picture of one’s strengths and weaknesses. It acknowledges that to do something extraordinary, you’re probably going to have to work really hard, whether or not the universe pitches in to lighten the load. And it acknowledges that there are certain things most people can never do and never be.

I know I’m never going to be an Olympic athlete or a supermodel. I’m too old to try out for American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance, even if I were talented enough (which I’m not) for either one.

Yet somehow I manage to get out of bed in the morning. (Although I usually don’t get dressed. Freelance writing has its benefits.) They say that these coddled kids are going to have nervous breakdowns when they realize they aren’t special and gifted and eternally capable. I hope they do. Because it’s in the honest analysis of who we are—our real gifts and passions—that we find something like The Alchemist’s Personal Legend.

I’m not blaming a generation of spoiled yuppie offspring on Paulo Coelho. In fact, I think he would probably agree with me; you have to know yourself well to know (or stay in touch with) what you truly want in this life. I just think it’s interesting that, once again, we have a bestselling book hinging on the premise that the society around us is constantly beating us down, sapping our strength, and telling us “no.” I just don’t buy it. I see a culture inundated with happy endings, yes-you-cans, and inspiration of the sappiest kind. This is a world desperate to convince itself that life is good. But I think we’d be far more likely to believe that if we stopped hiding from reality and accepted that we live in a world that hands out yes and no in equal measure. Only by acknowledging life’s potential disappointments can we really appreciate the goodness around us—and be truly grateful for the joys and blessings we do have.

Sincerely yours,

Lisa Adams, Personal Legend

My bestseller-reading frenzy of the past few years has stamped out many of my misconceptions about popular literature, but I have to say one of my biggest surprises throughout the project was learning that fantasy is not a mega-bestselling genre. I thought it would be right up there with the romances and thrillers. But no. Fantasy—like Westerns and sci-fi—is a genre that doesn’t make the end-of-the-year lists. (A few stragglers from these three lonely genres do climb onto USA TODAY’s top 150 most weeks. Right now there’s a Western up there, #116, called Matt Jensen: Last Mountain Man. I love it.)

Of course, the very top sellers of the entire previous 16 years are fantasy novels. But Harry Potter doesn’t appear on the Publishers Weekly lists, no matter how much wizardy goodness he doles out, because his is a series for children. And Publishers Weekly, it turns out, hates children.

In their relentless attempt to suppress America’s youth, they also banished another miracle title from the list: Eragon by Christopher Paolini, a young adult fantasy novel that soared to popularity in 2003. (It spent 170 weeks on the USA TODAY list. Unlike Publishers Weekly, which has all these different categories and rules, USA TODAY is sort of the whore of the major bestseller lists. Kids’ books, atlases, stick figures etched on binder paper—USA TODAY could care less. If people buy it, and it loosely resembles a book, it makes the charts.) Since our mission in Why We Read What We Read was to conquer the Publishers Weekly lists, we just didn’t have time for Eragon.

But times have changed and I finally got around to it. Dragons! Elves! Magic! Woo! Eragon takes place in a traditional fantasy universe populated with, well, dragons, elves, and magic. The eponymous hero starts out some random poor kid (an orphan, naturally); but when he finds a mysterious stone that turns out to be a dragon egg, his dragon-ridin’, magic-usin’ destiny begins to unfold. As I often explain to our daughter, the most profound stories always involve both magic and orphans, so Eragon had to be at least as good as, say, the film Like Mike.

The comparison turns out to be apt. While NBA superstars never show up in Eragon, it’s hard to say which work is more predictable. Eragon is chock-full of stock characters and plot devices, not to mention a blatantly Tolkieny backdrop complete with an invented, quasi-Celtic language. Thinking all this might be essential to the genre—like happy endings are to romance novels—I checked out some reader reviews to make sure I wasn’t missing the point. But no—adult reviewers are pretty quick to point out the derivative nature of the book, calling it a blend of The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the works of a couple prominent fantasy writers. I was disappointed to learn that the two things I found most compelling about Eragon—the psychic connection between dragon and rider, and the physical cost of magic use—had also been borrowed from other authors.

Young reviewers, on the other hand, give the book high marks—presumably because they have not read most of the other works from which Eragon‘s conventions are derived. Someday they’ll probably read Tolkien and wonder why he so flagrantly ripped off Christopher Paolini.

Of course, there can be a fine line between a rip-off and a reference. Many, many books, after all, make use of archetypal characters and the myth cycle. But what we expect from such stories—and what Eragon lacks—is an original take on those concepts, an infusion of new ideas to broaden and refresh the old.

That being said, I did think the book was competently written as far as plot-driven adventure novels go. The language (which also garnered criticism from adult reviewers) is actually more sophisticated than that of many other bestsellers out there. The characterization is seriously lacking, but again, so is that in the books of Danielle Steel and Mary Higgins Clark.

A lot of the praise for Eragon seems to revolve around the author’s young age. You see a lot of, “wow, it’s great…for a 15-year-old!” (How insulting is that?) It seems to be me people just don’t read the work of 15-year-olds much—I would suspect that most talented writers are capable of penning plot-driven works as teenagers. At any rate, books should stand on their own. I don’t buy that we should judge a novel differently because its author is young. Paolini chose to publish Eragon, to put it up against others in the marketplace. That means we should assess it as we would any other.

And whether Paolini will develop into a great writer someday is hard to predict. I believe he has talent; I also believe (from the numerous references in his author’s note) that he leaned heavily on others for assistance with basic grammar and punctuation, which makes me wonder if he’ll ever really master the language (a born writer should have pretty strong English intuition by age 15). Would this book ever have seen the light of day if Paolini’s parents hadn’t owned their own publishing company, if they hadn’t funded their own tour through schools and libraries? Impossible to say. Paolini got lucky—as every author of a bestselling book does—but his books also genuinely resonate with young readers, which is a feat fewer and fewer writers seem to achieve. I didn’t love Eragon, but it’s not the worst bestseller out there by a long shot. With any luck Paolini will outgrow his mimicry, pull himself together grammatically, and give us something original next time.

Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen proves that you don’t need tiny little chapters and excruciating cliffhangers to create suspense. The novel follows a battered woman as she escapes her abusive husband with their young son and creates a new identity and life in a new state. The book does an excellent job of thrusting the reader into the world of the protagonist; just as Fran/Beth is constantly on edge, so was I, certain the murderous brute would be coming for her on every page.

I avoided this book for a long time, thinking it was one of those “men are so terrible, women are so awesome” type stories, which I hate-hate-hate, but it wasn’t. It was a good story with good writing, one that made me terribly sad that people actually have to live like this: abandoning their friends, family, jobs, homes, and hair colors—disappearing but still never feeling safe. Too bad Fran/Beth didn’t know the girls from the Dixie Chicks’ hit “Goodbye Earl”—if she had, things might have turned out very differently for old batterin’ Bobby Benedetto.

Okay, I will admit that the title of this post has nothing to do with anything. I just like imagining this novel set in a Chinese restaurant. (I find the idea of secret sauces very amusing for some reason. Maybe because my first job was at a deli where they slathered every sandwich with something openly named “secret goo.”)

Anyway, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See totally horrified me. Not because I didn’t like it, but because I’m apparently an ignorant doofus. I never knew what foot-binding actually was.

I mean, sure, I’d heard of it. The Chinese want their women to have tiny little feet. Okay, seems weird, but we all have our fetishes. I pictured cute little tootsies bundled in those cloth bandages that athletes wrap around their ankles before a game.

Well, that’s not what it is. If you happen to be an ignorant doofus like me, I would highly recommend that you read about foot-binding. I can’t even watch Mulan anymore, this whole thing makes me so sick.

Okay, moving on. I think this book presents a nice portrait of nineteenth-century China. It’s one of those learn-something novels, good in a “If you liked Memoirs of a Geisha, you’ll love Snow Flower and the Secret Fan!” type of way. I wouldn’t call the writing exceptional, but then (like Memoirs) this book is more about plot and setting than gorgeous language.

What I found most notable is how this book took the standard themes of contemporary bestselling literary fiction and kicked them up a notch. Unsurprisingly, Snow Flower features a central female character (Lily) and focuses on the lives and feelings of China’s cloistered and unappreciated female population. The main relationship in the novel is that between Lily and a woman named Snow Flower; the two are chosen to be laotongs — “old sames,” lifelong friends — at the age of seven.

Here’s where the notch-kicking comes in. Not only are Lily and Snow Flower bosom buddies, but their special female relationship is described as more important than even marriage:

“A laotong relationship is made by choice for the purpose of emotional companionship and eternal fidelity. A marriage is not made by choice and has only one purpose—to have sons.” (43)

Snow Flower was my old same for life. I had a greater and deeper love for her than I could ever feel for the person who was my husband. (119)

Other bestselling literary novels imply that female friendship is vitally sustaining, but I can’t think of another book that explicitly states that it is the truest of loves. While it makes complete sense that women of 19th century China would have stronger emotional relationships with other women than they would with men, it still begs the question why so many books like this are popular now. We live in an age when men and women can be companions and equals in every way. So it’s curious that women are reading books that celebrate a time when that wasn’t possible, books that claim that romantic love is less important and fulfilling than friendship. I suspect that some women flock to these stories because their spouses are louts — because friendship is indeed the source of their greatest emotional sustenance. But do they really believe that friendship is more important than marriage, or are they just trying to make themselves feel better about their husbands’ emotional distance? Like reading a romance novel, is reading a “female friendship” novel just another coping mechanism?

And what is it about female friendship that readers seem to find so endlessly compelling? The last sentence in the book jacket description says the novel “delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendships.” I laughed when I read that, but could it be true? My friendships with other women are not mysterious. They are not difficult or hysterical. But then, if this adventure through bestselling books has revealed anything about me as a person, it is that I have little in common with the average female reader. So perhaps I am the wrong person to ask about this.

There were a couple of departures from your standard literary themes/content that I thought I should mention. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan doesn’t celebrate the mother-daughter bond — Lily’s mother is actually a sort of villain. More intriguing, Lily and Snow Flower share an erotic moment as teenage girls. In my mind this is the next logical step after one declares “I had a greater and deeper love for her than I could ever feel for the person who was my husband,” but the tender exchange never blossoms into anything explicitly sexual. Is Lisa See suggesting that there is romantic/sexual potential between women who have such powerful emotional bonds? Or are we to take Lily and Snow Flower’s caresses as nothing but innocent experimentation? I’m really not sure. There were certain moments in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood that raised the same questions for me. I can’t tell if these authors are deliberately flirting with these issues or if they think there is nothing unusual about presumably heterosexual women touching their naked female friends. I would think, past puberty, such behavior would not be common…but again, maybe I’m wrong.

But enough about hot girl-girl action that never materializes. Overall this is a pretty interesting book, and if you love stories about female friendship, you’ll probably really dig it. Pick up a copy, head to your favorite Chinese restaurant, and enjoy the book over a steaming platter of Snow Flower in Secret Sauce. But just watch out for those foot-binding scenes.

by John Heath

“Hermione dies.”
“She does not.”
“Yes, she does.”
“How do you know?”
“I read it on a website.”
“Hermione dies?”
“Would I lie?”

For several days, as my daughter (Emma) was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I’d see her head buried in the book and feel compelled to tell her that Hermione was about to perish. Horribly. My daughter didn’t really believe me. She’s my daughter, after all. But now it’s become impossible to stop Hermione from dying. If I ask Emma about any book she’s reading, she’ll simply answer: “It’s pretty good; but Hermione dies.” If I wonder how her school went, she’ll answer, “Fine—but Hermione died.” Hermione dies at least once a day in our house. Even Lisa has been infected. If I ask her if she wants to go see a movie—say The Bourne Ultimatum—she’s likely to respond, “Sure—but I hear Hermione dies.”

The rumor of Hermione’s death was inspired, of course, by the months of frenzied pre-publication speculation about the fate of the major characters in Harry Potter. We submitted our final version of Why We Read What We Read just a few weeks before the publication of the last in J. K. Rowling’s wonderful series. And we were a bit worried. We had written that we fully expected Harry and “good” to be victorious over Voldemort and “evil.” It never occurred to us that Harry would die. But suddenly everyone was saying Harry wouldn’t make it out alive. And then the day before Harry Potter VII appeared we were interviewed by one of the producers for the News Hour with Jim Lehrer in preparation for a segment on the effect the series has had on children’s literacy. (We never made it onto the actual program. We have no idea whether more children are reading because of the books. Not that we weren’t willing to make up all kinds of statistics—I mean, wouldn’t it be cool to be on the News Hour? But apparently the show has standards. Go figure.) At any rate, we found ourselves in a quite engaging conversation with the producer, who was pretty certain that Harry was doomed.

After we hung up, we looked at each other. Could it be? Could Rowling really do that? As it was, in some cities here in California grief counselors were already on 24-hour call for children likely to be traumatized by the loss of a favorite character. Of course, as everyone now knows, Rowling cleverly has it both ways: Harry leaves his disciples, confronts his enemies alone, “dies,” goes to some sort of heaven/hell where he converses with a bearded father-figure, and then chooses to return to deliver the faithful from evil. (Hmmn—that sounds familiar.) Harry dies and lives, and “good” does in fact win out in a relatively sophisticated fashion that we have come to expect from Rowling.

In Why We Read What We Read, we commented on the increasing ethical complexity of the Potter books, with both the wavering character of James Potter, Professor Snape, and Harry, and also the more subtle kind of institutionalized evil as found in the Ministry and Daily Prophet. In the final volume, even the great white (he is Albus, after all) wizard himself, Dumbledore, is discovered to have led an early life of less-than-stellar choices and dark ambitions.

So don’t get me wrong—this last book was just about everything I had hoped for. (Although I’m still puzzled about that Elder Wand thing. It’s a great wand—indeed, the greatest wand—so how come so many powerful wizards bite the dust while wielding it? And its genealogical journey from Dumbledore to Harry is still a mystery to me.)

But there are a few things that have been troubling me and perhaps someone can assuage my concerns. First, as Lisa has mentioned to me as well, why are the Slytherins universally creepy? Surely one Slytherin must have some Gryffindor in him or her, just as Harry had some Slytherin in him. And why must Harry and friends try to rescue Crabbe and Goyle? The latter are all bad, the former all too good. Voldemort is pure evil, of course, but is there not a trace of good in any Slytherin? Even Mrs. Draco’s important lie to Voldemort is motivated by purely selfish reasons—she could care less if Harry lives or dies.

But she LOVES her son, you object. Surely there’s some good in that? Okay, now you’ve put your finger on my real struggle with this book. I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy that love is the answer to everything. Love is swell, but the myth of salvation through love, from Christianity in its sappier manifestations to Tuesdays With Morrie, sidesteps the messy, tragic, and far more interesting questions about life. In this obeisance to love’s redemptive power, Rowling provides a happy ending but lets her refreshingly subtle look at good and evil slip into the mainstream.

EVERYONE is saved by love. Harry is saved by his mother’s love (as is Draco). Mrs. Weasley defeats Bellatrix, driven on by her visceral desire to protect her children (one of whom has already been killed). Heck, even Neville’s ancient grandmother is miraculously rejuvenated in her defense of the last family progeny. Percy’s love of family brings him back just in time to do, well, virtually nothing. His appearance merely retrieves him from what was the more terrifying (because so mundane) evil of youthful ambition. Kreacher becomes a model servant under Harry’s nurturing treatment: the nastiest of house-elves, he evolves quickly into a virtual Stepford Wife, fetching and cleaning and polishing and cooking wondrous things, eventually leading the other elves into battle against the Death Eaters. And most revealingly, his vicious racism (depicted throughout the books as the hatred of “Mudbloods”) is seemingly eradicated under Harry’s loving tutelage, as the reformed elf begins to treat Hermione with respect. And even the (off-stage) deaths of Lupin and Tonks serve primarily to serve up a godson for Harry, thus bringing his tragic family life full-circle.

But most annoyingly, it turns out that Snape’s fascinatingly indeterminate position derives from his eternal and unrequited love for Harry’s mother. Snape’s basically a devil who makes a deal with higher powers to do everything possible to preserve Harry, the son of his great love and his hated rival. Personally, I don’t buy any of it. Maybe I’m just missing an important gene. But love overcomes the Dark Lord and his crew of bad guys in way too many ways for me. I miss the struggle in this last book with the evil that comes from within us all. Harry was once the messenger of this battle, sharing a mind and blood with Voldemort. But now Harry only feels Voldemort’s anger and sees through his eyes—He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named no longer looks into Harry’s mind as well and apparently has no idea Harry is in his brain. They don’t really share anything, even though a central plot point hinges on their intimate connection.

Harry, it turns out, is a hero of love. As Dumbledore tells him on the seven hundred and twenty second page of the seventh novel: “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all, those who live without love. By returning you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart. If that seems to you a worthy goal, then we say good-bye for the present.” Harry is not to be so much an epic adventure hero defeating his rival so people can live free (and intact), but a messianic messenger of love.

I like romantic comedies. I actually believe in true love, the “wuv, twoo wuv” of Princess Bride. But there’s a necessary wink in this genre, a nod in agreement between text and audience that we’re avoiding the whole story. When Westley asks Buttercup why she didn’t wait for him, she replies: “Well…you were dead.” To which Westley gives the classic response: “Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.” But Harry Potter—and most other bestselling fiction—does not participate in this irony. Why do we so desperately want to believe that love is not only emotionally possible (true) but also psychically redemptive (doubtful), and—against most of our daily experience—inevitably victorious in even the most vicious battles against evil? Oh—and it will clean your house at the same time. If only.

Love. Oh well. It could be worse. Bestsellers could all focus on finding cheese, for example. Or on discovering The Secret. But that’s for another day.

Now I will admit that I am not the world’s biggest fan of magical realism. I like magic and I like realism, but for me these are not two great tastes that go great together. So I wasn’t entirely sure how much I would enjoy One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I wanted to read at least one of the books Oprah had chosen during her classic-literature period, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s famous tome was the lucky winner. After all, he was the guy who put magical realism on the map.

Turns out I liked the darn thing. Maybe it was because, this time, I was prepared for people’s toenail clippings to turn into bats and dine on duck a l’orange with local fishermen. So when that actually happened in chapter two, I was all over it.

Okay, so that didn’t happen in chapter two. But it might as well have.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of five generations of the Buendia family, whose myriad screwed-up members all have variations on the same couple of names (it’s even worse than the Dirkfest mentioned in John’s previous post — Jose Arcadio Buendia, for example, is the father of Jose Arcadio who is the father of Arcadio who is the father of Jose Arcadio Segundo who is the uncle of Jose Arcadio). Yes, the name thing is totally maddening. But here — unlike in Clive Cussler — the repeated names actually serve a literary function. These are people whose sorrowful history repeats itself over and over, not only because they inherit the same names as their forefathers but also the same personalities. As one reads along, the characters blend together; it’s difficult to remember who is related to whom and how, reinforcing the vicious circle that ensnares the hapless Buendias for one hundred years.

Boy would this book never have been a recent bestseller if not for Oprah. It’s not emotionally driven. It’s not inspiring. It doesn’t have evil cackling villains and it doesn’t even have the number seven in it. It’s weird! It’s a book about lust and failure and obsession and unhappiness (and most of all, human nature, which so many of our bestsellers try to avoid). It didn’t make me feel good; honestly, it didn’t make me feel much of anything. I’m down with that, of course, but we all know Oprah isn’t. The little I can glean from her web archives suggests that she picked the book because she got “swept away by the magic.”

I don’t think that happened to me, but there is magic in the writing: a seamless blend of the mundane and fantastical, which is a storytelling style Marquez apparently absorbed from his grandmother. As a result the prose can shift from straightforward to sad and even quite funny (one of my favorite lines: “It was around that time that Fernanda got the impression that the house was filling up with elves”).

Despite my diligent attempts to keep all the characters and stories straight, what I will probably remember most about this book is that people had a lot of sex in hammocks. Darn it, there are just too many Arcadios.