2004-12-10 19:51:15QQQ
THE BEST BOOKS OF 2004 (3) LA
THE BEST BOOKS OF 2004 (3)
Pushkin and the Queen of Spades
A Novel
Alice Randall
The novels of Alice Randall are deliberate reinterpretations of classics refracted through a Negro-centric lens. Her first novel, "The Wind Done Gone," was a strident rebuttal to "Gone With the Wind" told from the point of view of Tara's former slaves, who, in contrast to Margaret Mitchell's simple-minded "darkies," outwit their weak white masters at every turn. "The Wind Done Gone" is a little ditty compared with "Pushkin and the Queen of Spades," Randall's operatic, far more audacious and accomplished second novel. In the guise of a mother's rant against her son's choice of bride, her new novel is an impassioned aria on the ferocity and consummate importance of parental love. It is also a complex manifesto on why and how race and roots matter, especially "in the face of love." This is a stunningly gutsy, literate and original novel.
— Heller McAlpin
Soldiers of Salamis
A Novel
Javier Cercas
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
It is difficult to give "Soldiers of Salamis" the serious attention it deserves without making the novel sound ponderous and unappealing. This is a shame. The book is funny and gripping and a tear-jerker in the best sense of the word. I laughed and cried while reading it, even though I didn't quite fall in love. The key to the novel's charm is that it works on so many levels. On one level it is the story of a man without direction who finds meaning in his life; at the same time it is the history of a curious incident in the Spanish Civil War; it is also a meditation about what makes someone a hero, or a decent human being; finally, it is a story about how and why we remember the past. It has sold more than 500,000 copies in Spanish and been made into an equally well-received movie. The novel's success in France, Germany and England suggests that it strikes a chord in any country or individual with ghosts to face.
— Rebecca Pawel
The Stone That the Builder Refused
A Novel
Madison Smartt Bell
In any bin marked "historical novels," one is likely to find two diametrically different kinds of reading. The first bulging pile consists of collages of good-to-middling research and stagy period drama. A second, much smaller stack glows with unquenchable life. These are the true time machines, books that completely transport, that seem not so much to have sprung from a writer's imagination as to have taken possession. It's here one would find, say, Robert Graves' "I, Claudius," Gore Vidal's "Burr" or Yukio Mishima's "Spring Snow." Now the stack is a little taller with the addition of the final volume of Madison Smartt Bell's sweeping trilogy of the life of Haitian liberator Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the only slave colony to throw off its own shackles. The great beauty of this work is its language, the authoritative formal lilt of English and French, the weaving in of Creole as spoken then. Just as characters in "The Stone" are possessed by the lwa — spirits who guide souls — so too has Bell opened to the spirits of his characters, imagined and real.
— Kai Maristed
Sweet Land Stories
E.L. Doctorow
In this age of skepticism, when a writer uses the word "sweet" in a title, our irony detector shifts to high alert. We know not to expect saccharine sentimentality. A wistful aura of disappointment pervades Doris Lessing's "The Sweetest Dream," Russell Banks' "The Sweet Hereafter," Reginald Gibbons' "Sweetbitter" and Tennessee Williams' "Sweet Bird of Youth." What is sweet in the land of the free and the home of the brave for the misfits in E.L. Doctorow's new book, "Sweet Land Stories," is mainly the freedom to nurture their personal delusions. In the tradition of the best American fiction, "Sweet Land Stories" prods the beached whale of the American dream in order to examine its underbelly. Less complex and tangled than his recent novels, these are deceptively simple but subtle morality tales that showcase Doctorow's deftness as a storyteller.
— Heller McAlpin
True North
A Novel
Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison may well have started out to write a book about greed, sex and religion, but what he has given us is a story about love and forgiveness and the trials they entail. For all the hype about this writer's machismo, Harrison consistently commands our attention for his humanity and tenderness. That he can create such tension in the process — a tension not released until the last page — and in the end forge such violence shows his skill as a storyteller and makes "True North" a great achievement. When the book was still a work in progress, Harrison described the plot as a "tight little knot" combining greed, sex and religion. The task of untying that knot has fallen to the novel's narrator, scion of a family of timber barons.
Is the past ever really past? In "True North" this question is played for all it's worth. Here lies the great paradox of American life: In a country created on the premise of escape and reinvention, there is no real freedom, and the dreams of one generation are often a curse for the next. Such is the peril of being an American: The more we understand the past, the more we are haunted by what can never be. Our lives are gripped by forces we only dimly understand. The real effort, Harrison implies, is to act in spite of those forces, correct for deviance and find our own true north.
— Thomas Curwen
Pushkin and the Queen of Spades
A Novel
Alice Randall
The novels of Alice Randall are deliberate reinterpretations of classics refracted through a Negro-centric lens. Her first novel, "The Wind Done Gone," was a strident rebuttal to "Gone With the Wind" told from the point of view of Tara's former slaves, who, in contrast to Margaret Mitchell's simple-minded "darkies," outwit their weak white masters at every turn. "The Wind Done Gone" is a little ditty compared with "Pushkin and the Queen of Spades," Randall's operatic, far more audacious and accomplished second novel. In the guise of a mother's rant against her son's choice of bride, her new novel is an impassioned aria on the ferocity and consummate importance of parental love. It is also a complex manifesto on why and how race and roots matter, especially "in the face of love." This is a stunningly gutsy, literate and original novel.
— Heller McAlpin
Soldiers of Salamis
A Novel
Javier Cercas
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
It is difficult to give "Soldiers of Salamis" the serious attention it deserves without making the novel sound ponderous and unappealing. This is a shame. The book is funny and gripping and a tear-jerker in the best sense of the word. I laughed and cried while reading it, even though I didn't quite fall in love. The key to the novel's charm is that it works on so many levels. On one level it is the story of a man without direction who finds meaning in his life; at the same time it is the history of a curious incident in the Spanish Civil War; it is also a meditation about what makes someone a hero, or a decent human being; finally, it is a story about how and why we remember the past. It has sold more than 500,000 copies in Spanish and been made into an equally well-received movie. The novel's success in France, Germany and England suggests that it strikes a chord in any country or individual with ghosts to face.
— Rebecca Pawel
The Stone That the Builder Refused
A Novel
Madison Smartt Bell
In any bin marked "historical novels," one is likely to find two diametrically different kinds of reading. The first bulging pile consists of collages of good-to-middling research and stagy period drama. A second, much smaller stack glows with unquenchable life. These are the true time machines, books that completely transport, that seem not so much to have sprung from a writer's imagination as to have taken possession. It's here one would find, say, Robert Graves' "I, Claudius," Gore Vidal's "Burr" or Yukio Mishima's "Spring Snow." Now the stack is a little taller with the addition of the final volume of Madison Smartt Bell's sweeping trilogy of the life of Haitian liberator Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the only slave colony to throw off its own shackles. The great beauty of this work is its language, the authoritative formal lilt of English and French, the weaving in of Creole as spoken then. Just as characters in "The Stone" are possessed by the lwa — spirits who guide souls — so too has Bell opened to the spirits of his characters, imagined and real.
— Kai Maristed
Sweet Land Stories
E.L. Doctorow
In this age of skepticism, when a writer uses the word "sweet" in a title, our irony detector shifts to high alert. We know not to expect saccharine sentimentality. A wistful aura of disappointment pervades Doris Lessing's "The Sweetest Dream," Russell Banks' "The Sweet Hereafter," Reginald Gibbons' "Sweetbitter" and Tennessee Williams' "Sweet Bird of Youth." What is sweet in the land of the free and the home of the brave for the misfits in E.L. Doctorow's new book, "Sweet Land Stories," is mainly the freedom to nurture their personal delusions. In the tradition of the best American fiction, "Sweet Land Stories" prods the beached whale of the American dream in order to examine its underbelly. Less complex and tangled than his recent novels, these are deceptively simple but subtle morality tales that showcase Doctorow's deftness as a storyteller.
— Heller McAlpin
True North
A Novel
Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison may well have started out to write a book about greed, sex and religion, but what he has given us is a story about love and forgiveness and the trials they entail. For all the hype about this writer's machismo, Harrison consistently commands our attention for his humanity and tenderness. That he can create such tension in the process — a tension not released until the last page — and in the end forge such violence shows his skill as a storyteller and makes "True North" a great achievement. When the book was still a work in progress, Harrison described the plot as a "tight little knot" combining greed, sex and religion. The task of untying that knot has fallen to the novel's narrator, scion of a family of timber barons.
Is the past ever really past? In "True North" this question is played for all it's worth. Here lies the great paradox of American life: In a country created on the premise of escape and reinvention, there is no real freedom, and the dreams of one generation are often a curse for the next. Such is the peril of being an American: The more we understand the past, the more we are haunted by what can never be. Our lives are gripped by forces we only dimly understand. The real effort, Harrison implies, is to act in spite of those forces, correct for deviance and find our own true north.
— Thomas Curwen