Simone: A Novel, by Eduardo Lalo

 

Some worthwhile, relatively recent fiction (translation 2015) out of Puerto Rico. The narrator maybe talks a little too much early on, but once the character dynamics kick in, the narrative has some surprising turns in its development and some fascinating cultural dynamics built around the presence of the Chinese in Puerto Rico.

The second half of the book is riveting and intertwines literary politics, cultural politics, and globalist and economic politics into some wild and emotionally crushing moments. The book feels like it has echoes of Bolaňo and the cultural politics of many other Central and South American novels of earlier generations, but the social environment, and the dynamics of its younger age group characters, make it feel fresh. All of it, especially the literary politics, shows a very new Puerto Rico.

My teen years book list

These are books that I recall reading and enjoying in my teen years. I’m sure I read many others that I don’t remember, including books I didn’t like. In fact I took a high school Advanced Placement English class my senior year and don’t remember the book list from that class at all, and that’s true even if some books from that class are on this list (who knows? not me). These are the authors and books that stuck with me, proved by the fact that I still recall them.

Edgar Allan Poe, Complete Tales and Poems (from 8 on)

Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear (from 8 on)

Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, ed. Cerf, Wagner, and Wise (Penguin Books anthology)  (from 11 on)

Arthur Conan Doyle, nearly all of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels (from 11 on)

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (read the trilogy every summer from 13-15. Probably read The Hobbit at age 11 or 12)

Agatha Christie, nearly all (read between the ages of 13 and 18; picked up again in my 40s)

William Faulkner, most (from 13-forever; first read Sanctuary in 8th grade on my own because it was considered a “dangerous book” and read all the others over some years after)

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird (14; ninth grade English)

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, and other stories (14? Ninth grade English maybe? Not sure)

Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of  Frederick Douglass (14; ninth grade English)

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (14? 15? Not sure)

William Golding, The Lord of the Flies (14? 15?)

Stephen R. Donaldson, Lord Foul’s Bane (15). I read the second and third books in this series and didn’t like them.

A.A. Milne, The Red House Mystery (15? 16?)

Nikolai Gogol, selected stories (15? 16?)

C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, That Hideous Strength, Perelandra (15-17)

John Barth, The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor (15-17 and ongoing. The summer I was 16, The Sot Weed Factor replaced The Lord of the Rings as my summer epic)

Flannery O’Connor, all (from 15 on)

John Updike Rabbit, Run, The Centaur (16)

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, the sonnets (16; some in 11th grade English)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Double, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov (16-18)

Frank Herbert, Dune (16; tried the second book and didn’t like it)

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (16; it was legendary in my family how much I hated this book on my first read because of the Linton family; by my college years, it had become one of my favorite novels.)

Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (16)

Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure (16-17)

Ngaio Marsh, many titles (16-18)

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath (16-17)

James Wright, Native Son (17)

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake (17)

Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio

 

The stories of Pu Songling (1640-1715) are some of the most gorgeous fantastic tales I’ve ever read. They’re full of surprise and grotesquerie and startlingly vivid textures. While they express the ideology of their time, they also manage to be subversive in many ways. The precision of their style is a great vehicle for the somehow culturally logical absurdities of the narratives. Unforgettable. I could read these stories over and over.

The Blizzard by Vladamir Sorokin

 

In the novel The Blizzard (2010, English translation 2015) by Vladamir Sorokin, events take place in dangerous and potentially deadly cold and snow and ice. The book features a lot of human brutality, exploitation and indifference to other humans and displays the essential grimness and frequent desperation of human behavior. It has satiric, comic elements that are sometimes nearly slapstick and often involve equipment not working in the dangerous weather. The question is whether the journey is going anywhere or will end up being a hopeless loop of absurdity that may lead to death. There is probably a message about the hopelessness of living in a totalitarian society with a cold climate for which alternatives seem mostly fantasy.

I’ve long been a fan of Russian literature, and while I liked this book I didn’t love it because the features above are so much like so much other recent Russian fiction that I find in English translation. It left me wondering what might be some recent Russian novels that are not about coldness, brutality, indifference, and political hopelessness. But I suppose Russian fiction about warm weather is probably hard to come by.