Paul Auster

I was in my friend's apartment in Syria the other day, browsing through his bookshelves, and I was delighted to find a copy of a book by Paul Auster, which I borrowed and read from cover to cover that very night (finally going to sleep at 0730). The book was Oracle Night. It's about a writer who has just recovered from a serious accident, about his relationship with his wife and about some of his writing. But like other Auster books, it's really about ideas.

One of the main themes of the book is about starting a new life. The main character, inspired by an anecdote in a Raymond Chandler novel*, tries to write a story about a man who is nearly killed in a freak accident, and who then spontaneously abandons his family life in New York in order to start from scratch in a new city. Leaving the house to post some letters, the main character of this story within a story ends up taking a plane to Kansas City to embark on a new and bizarre existence, working in an underground room filled with telephone directories.

Like other Auster books, Oracle Night zips along and is very easy to read, and raises plenty of existential philosophical questions in the reader's mind without ever really pinning anything down. For me, Auster's trademark is the juxtaposition of a set of complex themes about what it means to be human with a straightforwardly written narrative about the day to day activities of a central character. On one hand, his books are very entertaining and earthy, and on the other, it's never quite clear what exactly he is getting at. In the case of Oracle Night, Auster refers to "the power of the random, purely accidental forces that mold our destinies", and the motif of abandoning your life and starting again afresh is an attempt to embrace the randomness of life.

Paul Auster

Auster also writes about writing. Many or most of his protagonists are writers, and I noted one very nice passage in Oracle Night about the process of writing which may evoke feelings familiar to anyone who has searched in vain for inspiration:

"I put down the book and started pacing around the apartment, walking in and out of rooms, scanning the titles of the books on the shelves, parting the curtains and looking through the window at the wet street below, accomplishing nothing for several hours.

Now I'm off to do some reading about Auster online...

* PS: I just learned it's actually Dashiel Hammet rather than Chandler...

Orwellian reading

I recently finished George Orwell's Coming Up For Air, which I bought on the street in Syria for about €0.70. Good to get back to some Orwell. He's one of my favourite writers, to the extent that I can say that he has had a formative effect on my thinking. I would recommend anyone to check out some of his essays, such as 'Politics and the English Language', which are available online. I love his simple, clear writing style. He seems to really hold to the belief that you shouldn't use a big word where a smaller word will do, and that sentences should be short. A big problem with a lot of writing - and particularly academic writing, I'd hazard - is that people like to use very complicated sentence structures. Clarity suffers as a result.

Eric Blair aka George McOrwell

Coming Up For Air is the story of 45-year-old George Bowling, a man who is pissed off with his lot. It is set in the run-up to World War II. Bowling has a wife and family and a job that is unexciting, and he goes back to his village of origin to try to capture something about himself. However, the trip is entirely disillusioning and deflating because his village has been swallowed up by the march of the urban.

The book has been referenced as a forerunner to 1984, and I can see the similarity, although the society depicted in Coming Up For Air is less extreme and the story less intense. Politics are to the forefront however, and the novel deals with a newly emerged middle class of sorts in inter-war England, evoking the misery and defeat of the capitulation to wage slavery. This is my take on it, at least. There isn't really much hopeful coming out of the narrative that I can recall. But maybe there's some hope in the protagonist's vague realisation (which is far from epiphany) that the human experience contains the potential for a more meaningful existence. So there is hope but not redemption methinks.

World War II looms large over the plot, and Bowling's memories of his service in World War I colour his pessimism and apathy.


Listening to Charles Mingus Fables of Faubus in my favourite cafe... Beautiful.

Books I read in 2006

And now I present the long-awaited follow-up to 'Books I read in 2005'. Since 2005, I've been keeping a record of the books I've read each year. Unfortunately this habit kind of fell apart around the end of 2007, but I'm going to try to resurrect it as it's always good to catalogue these things, I find...

Introducing Critical Theory - Stuart Sims & Boris Van Loon

Generation of Swine - Hunter S Thompson
(The great Gonzo journalist's take on the 80s. Lots of stuff about Iran-Contra as I recall.)

Hunter S Thompson

The Plague - Albert Camus
(Supposedly a metaphor for the French resistance to the Nazi occupation, but for me it's more effective as a straight up story about the human condition. It's quite a straightforward narrative about a town that is hit by the plague. First the disease emerges, and then the town is quarantined, and we are treated to an account of life under quarantine and the constant threat of infection. I had high hopes for this book, as The Outsider is one of my favourite books of all time. I'm glad to say that Mr. Camus did not disappoint.)

Tar Baby - Toni Morrison (an audio book)
(This was an amazing book - one of the best I've come across. I've read a couple of Morrison's other books since then and they had nothing on this. But I wonder if that was because it was an audio book? Lynne Thigpen read the text and did a great job of it. But the content of the book was really great. It's centred around the interactions between six characters living in close proximity, along with flashes back and forward from this core setting. There's an elderly white rich guy; his seemingly shallow former beauty queen wife; two of his black servants, themselves a married couple; their niece, a fashion model; and an additional stowaway. The action is primarily set on an island where the elderly rich guy lives in colonial-style luxury. Each of these six characters is drawn in exquisite and believable detail, with all their motivations and inclinations immediately accessible to the reader (or listener). The story basically illustrates how the different filters through which our identity is formed - such as race, gender, age, and social class - shape our interactions with each other. The dynamic between all the characters and the little conflicts between them portray these tensions beautifully.)

Toni Morrison

Reading Lolita in Tehran
(Excellent, but hard not to notice that it's very one-sided politically.)

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
(This was a great account of a society's colonial transition.)

The Cherry Orchard - Anton Chekhov adapted by Tom Murphy
(I went to see this in The Gate. Irish playwright Tom Murphy had adapted this classic to bring in some Irish lingo, most memorably when one of the characters exclaims "Merciful Hour!!")

Roadkill - Kinky Friedman
(Didn't like this at all.)

Beloved - Toni Morrison

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress - Ross O'Carroll Kelly

Inside Track - John Francome

The Namesake

The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri
(This is an absolutely beautiful book about an Indian couple who emigrate to the USA, and about their son's travails as a man who is neither Indian nor North American. Really captures the immigrant experience (not that I've first hand experience of this, of course).)

Firestarter - Stephen King

The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
(Another very worthwhile read.)

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - John McGregor
(A promising book throughout absolutely ruined by a crappy, saccharine, cop-out of an ending. Total rubbish.)

Dancer - Column McCann
(A novelisation of the life of Rudolf Nureyev. McCann is one of the best writers around, and one of the few novelists all of whose books I've read. This was very interesting but I prefer his other books. However, my Russio-Lithuanian friend Sasha assures me that he really captures what Russia is like.)

Nureyev

The LBJ Brigade - William Wilson
(An engaging account of the Vietnam conflict.)

Last Exit To Brooklyn
(Bleak and brilliant - touches what it means to be human.)

Ghostwritten - David Mitchell

Clockers - Richard Price
(A great book made into an even better film by the maestro, Spike Lee.)

Woody Allen - Interviews

From Hell - Alan Moore (a graphic novel)
(This is about Jack the Ripper and was made into a film I really like, directed by the Hughes Brothers, who made a pretty impressive transition from portraying the African American urban ghetto of the US in 'Menace II Society', to the Whitechapel district of 19th century London.)

V for Vendetta - Alan Moore

The Dublin Korean society

To my eternal pride, I am now featured pictorially on the website of the Dublin Korean society, courtesy of my friend Donghyeok. The pictures look a lot better on the society's homepage if you really want to peer closely at pictures of me.



This privilege has inspired me to resurrect my long-defunct blog, which I hope will now blossom again to share my brain activity with the world. But we'll see...