2014: And The Winner Is...

This time last year, while most people were getting drunk and waiting for fireworks to light up the night sky, I was sitting at home, on my couch, with a copy of Jesse Ball's Silence Once Begun on my lap. It was an exercise in self-control, nay self-abnegation, unprecedented in my 37 years (mainly because I've never bothered to delay gratification in the past). There was, however, method to my madness. Although the novel was not scheduled to be released for another month and, moreover, I had received my copy three weeks before, I knew that if I read it before the strike of twelve on the first of January I would have to count it as a book read in 2013. Which meant it would miss out on this year's list if it proved to be as good as I was hoping. I've made no secret of my love for Ball. He is the most exciting young writer at work today. His previous novel, The Curfew, was my Book of 2011. Now signed on with a big publisher (or at least an imprint thereof) and with his first work in hardcover, there was a hell of a lot riding on Silence Once Begun.

Cue past the countdown, the clock chimed twelve, and I cracked open the cover. And read. And read. And read. Until the sun rose and I closed the book in a state of transcendental bliss. Not only had Ball delivered, but he had done so in spectacular fashion. This story of a man who confesses to a series of disappearances then remains totally silent throughout his arrest, trial and execution is brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed. It might seem absurd but absurdity is Ball's stock-in-trade. He makes dreamscapes seem totally normal and the further he leads us down the rabbit hole the more we become willing to give ourselves over to him. Testing the limits of reliability, the voices in Silence Once Begun resonate with utter conviction and persuasiveness so that, by the end, we know very little other than that Oda Sotatsu is innocent and the crimes were not even what they seemed. We are left to shake our fists at a system that runs on its own steam towards the destruction of anyone who slips among the cogs.

Silence Once Begun is, in my opinion, a watershed moment not only in Ball's career but in contemporary literature. I posed the question in my initial review: Is it possible that I read the best book of 2014 on the very first day of the year? The answer is yes. A very resounding yes.

2014: The Final Countdown

The sun is setting on yet another year and, as always, the pile of books I'd intended to read rests forlornly on my bedside table, their pages withering with lost hope. Here at the pointy end, where I rattle off the books I loved most, where I make high faultin' claims based on highly subjective criteria, I humbly apologise to these (probably) great works:

Redeployment by Phil Klay
All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu
The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford
10:04 by Ben Lerner
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

But enough of the jibber jabber. It's time we got to the almighty list.

The Top 10 of 2014: From 10 to 2

10. The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld. I still bristle with indignation when I think of the injustices that play out in Denfeld's stunning debut novel. It's like The Shawshank Redemption but without the redemption and a hell of a lot more shanking. (See my full review here)

9. Ludwig's Room by Alois Hotschnig. Kurt inherits his great uncle's country house and goes through the one door he was never allowed to open as a child. Cue the flood of awful truths about his family's involvement in the operation of a nearby concentration camp during the war and the desperate attempts to bury the evidence afterwards. A ghost story of sorts, where everyone in town turns out to be a Nazi poltergeist.

8. Diary of the Fall by Michel Laub. A gorgeous and structurally brilliant meditation on the fragility of memory, Diary of The Fall centres around the fallout from a childish prank that has repercussions well beyond the children involved. The grandfather's diary of fabrications stands as one of the best narrative devices I've come across in recent years. (See my full review here)

7. The People In The Trees by Hanya Yanagihara. A frightful collision of groundbreaking science and moral ambiguity in this tale based on the Nobel laureate who discovered kuru. How much can we forgive a genius, especially if he turns out to be a monster? Critics might have gone nuts for Lily King's Euphoria, but this was the year's best book about the perils of anthropology (not to mention humanity). (See my full review here)

6. The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis. It beggars belief that the guy who wrote the truly awful Yellow Dog and almost-as-awful Lionel Asbo, the guy who anyone with good sense or taste gave up on a decade ago, managed to pull off one of the most remarkable books of 2014. A Holocaust novel like none other I've read, it brings the everyday operation of Auschwitz to life with droll humour and impeccably observed detail. A high wire act of humanised horror.

5. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. An ordinary marriage plays out in gorgeously crafted nuggets of prose. To see a life reduced like this makes me understand how diamonds are formed. (See my full review here)

4. Falling Out of Time by David Grossman. Grossman revisits the grief of losing a child with this splendid take on the Orpheus myth. Surreal, dark and immensely powerful, Falling Out of Time moved me more than any other book this year. (See my full review here)

3. Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes. Hitler wakes up in modern Germany and becomes a reality TV star. Totally bonkers. Bloody hilarious. And absolutely perfect. (See my full review here)

2. An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine. Step one: Watch this video. Step two: Read An Unnecessary Woman. Step three: Thank me profusely. An hilarious, life affirming celebration of all things bookish set against a backdrop of turmoil, war and personal loss. (See my full review here)

Which, of course, leaves only one. Check back on Wednesday for the Bait For Bookworms Book of 2014.

2014: "Best Of" Bridesmaids

Well, there are only three days left until the end of the year and short of me inhabiting the body of Bill Murray and reliving them on an endless loop I'm going to have to bite the bullet and make some decisions. I had nineteen books in contention for the top ten and, though I failed year ten maths, I still managed to work out that nine had to go. Thankfully, I always allow myself a safety net so that the also-rans get a look in. You will no doubt remember them in the years to come, just like you remember who came second in every sporting contest, or who ran for political office against George H. W. Bush or who came third in the fourth season of Austalian Idol. Or second. Or first. Anyway, here are the books that very almost reached my top ten of 2014:

A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolano. Somewhere in literary heaven I suspect there's a drinking game being played by Roberto Bolano and Irene Nemirovsky. Every time a publisher manages to squeeze another book out of their rotting corpse they down a tequila and run around the table with their pants around their ankles. I'm not sure who is winning but, fair to say, they are both totally smashed, on the floor, with ghost puke dribbling from their mouths. Bolano's posthumous output (so to speak) has been pretty patchy but A Little Lumpen Novelita stands as one of his best. It simmers with all the seediness, melancholy and straight out action that I tend to love about his stronger books. Better yet, it ends well before it wears out its welcome (Hello 2666 and The Savage Detectives). You can almost smell the smoke and hear the frantic clatter of his typewriter.

The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. It was an audacious stunt that really ought to have failed. Three books released over the space of a single year - hard sci-fi nerdgasms positioned for readers of literary fiction. The first, Annihilation, was a creepy delight; the tale of a doomed expedition into the mysterious Area X, where nature has begun to reclaim what we humans have destroyed. The second novel, Authority, was less successful and dragged a little but the world VanderMeer had created was so mesmerising that I was willing to forgive the book's weaknesses. Thankfully, Acceptance proved a return to form, providing many answers but leaving the reader to ponder our collective path to mutual destruction. With echoes of Lem's Solaris and Margaret Attwood at her best, VanderMeer showed us the literary heights to which genre fiction can sometimes soar.

Wolf In White Van by John Darnielle. I'm not a rabid Mountain Goats fan but I was sufficiently intrigued to pick up lead singer Darnielle's debut novel. A surprising work from someone his age (it reads like it was written by a twenty something), Wolf In White Van is a hymn to the golden era of gaming - you know, the pen and paper, D&D, pre-Playstation variety. Sean Phillips is a beautifully rounded, tragic character and though I wasn't entirely convinced by the novel's ending I loved the interplay of Phillips's real and imagined worlds. A tender elegy to loneliness and displacement.

Young Gods by Katherine Faw Morris. When an author chooses to have their publicity shot with a fuck-off monster of a dog you know you're in for a rough ride. When that author happens to be a sweet as pie blonde youngster like Faw Morris you can bet it's time to double down and reach for the biscuits. Young Gods is a brutal knife fight of a novel, fuelled by drugs, booze, bile and double-wides. A suckerpunch debut by a very promising writer. Now get that dog away from me.

The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson. Graham Greene storms Africa in this fast-paced political thriller with serious literary chops. It's the kind of thing we take for granted from Johnson but that doesn't make it any less of a ripper.

A few flower girls: Wherewithal by Philip Schultz, The Boy's Own Manual To Being A Proper Jew by Eli Glasman, To Rise Again At A Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris and Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer.

2014: The Shelf of Shame

2014 saw many wonderful books take root and flourish but, as always, there were a fair few weeds popping up around the garden. So it is, fellow Bookworms, that we strap on our collective garden gloves, grab our secateurs and jump in for some good ol' hack n' slash.

Most Overrated Books of 2014

Brace yourself, Murakami sycophants because I'm going to say it: Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage was far and away the most overhyped book of 2014. The anticipation before its release was Jonestown level feverish. I'll admit to having been swept up in the hoopla, too. Oh yes, I was waiting for this biblical revelation. Then it hit and... well... Okay, it was perfectly pleasant; fun, quirky, kind of cute. It had many of the classic Murakami magic tricks. But when all is said and done it wasn't a patch on The Wild Sheep Chase or Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Indeed, this one had the suspicious aftertaste of Kool Aid.

I was at a loss to understand the plaudits poured upon Akhil Sharma's slim offering, Family Life. It supposedly took him ten or twelve or twenty (or some other multiple of a ferret's average life span) years to complete and drew heavily from his personal experience of grief and dislocation. Stripped of its forest of laurels it is a fair to middling shrub of a novel about about the immigrant experience. I can't help but feel that Sharma has a lot of friends in high places, none of whom could muster the guts to tell him that those umpteen years might have been better spent working on something else.

One other book that rolled around in a well-oiled orgy of love was Ali Smith's How To Be Both. Critics and readers alike were falling over themselves to praise its structural innovation, sly narrative experimentation and ingenious mirroring of two different eras. To be fair, it's not hard to be swept up in Ali-mania. Her writing is absolutely stunning and this book was no exception. Still, I didn't see what all the fuss was about. Another pretty good book put on some unreachable pedestal by those who probably eat a teaspoon of caviar and claim they are full. Or maybe I was just too dumb to get it.

Dishonourable Mentions: Chang-Rae Lee's On Such A Full Sea proved that great authors can choke in unfamiliar surrounds. Sci-fi was not his friend. Also, Peter Matthiessen's In Paradise was good but a little too self-consciously po-faced for my liking.

Biggest Disappointments of 2014
I suppose these are really personal disappointments because I was so excited for these books when I first heard of their impending release and then... *sigh*...

American Innovations by Rivkah Galchen. Okay, seriously: How incredible was Galchen's novel, Atmospheric Disturbances? From the moment I put it down I have been chomping at the bit for something new, something sparkling, something splendiferous from this bright young star. Enter American Innovations. Never mind that it's a collection of stories. That could have been just as exciting. But these show little of the imaginative pizazz that made Atmospheric Disturbances one of my favourite novels of the past ten years. Maybe it was just sorbet. Maybe there's something exceptional waiting in the wings. Another novel to knock me off my feet. Here's hoping.

Consumed by David Cronenberg. I was intrigued when I heard Cronenberg had written a novel. That it was said to lean heavily on JG Ballard, whose iconic masterpiece, Crash, Cronenberg had made into a film filled me with an underlying sense of dread. Still, I kept the faith. It might be good, right? Alas, no. There's "leaning on" and there's straight up imitation. When your model is someone as distinctive and singularly brilliant as Ballard you don't stand much of a chance. And so we end up with this: Fan fiction from a deranged fan.

Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers. Yellow Birds still stands as my all-time favourite war novel. Three years on and I still shiver when I think about it. When I saw that Powers would be following it up with a collection of poetry I was cautiously optimistic. I don't usually go for the form - I'm fairly convinced I just don't understand it - but I trusted in Powers (he is, first and foremost, a poet) and, I heartily reassured myself, one of my other favourites war books, Pink Mist, happens to be an extended poem. Alas, it all went over my head and it has been consigned to the shelf of books I'm glad to own but will probably never pick up again. At least it makes me look more cultured.

I'm not quite sure why I still hold out hope for Ian McEwan. His glory days are clearly well behind him. Solar was a momentary blip of light (sorry) but otherwise it has all been drab greyness from this former master. The Children Act was, however, a new low - a plodding, workmanlike novel of family law that lacked any of the taut plotting, intrigue, danger, excitement or insight that made Black Dogs, Enduring Love or Atonement such modern classics. I'd have to put it alongside Saturday as his weakest novel to date, but at least that had a brilliantly frightening villain. If it weren't for the fact that Martin Amis, who seemed to be on a similar career trajectory, published one of his finest novels to date this year, I'd give up on McEwan altogether.

Dishonourable Mentions: He's always hit or miss, but I'd still hoped for something better from Dave Eggars. Your Fathers Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? was a particularly lame effort at a State Of The World novel. And then there was Damon Galgut's Arctic Summer. Oh how I've longed for something even half as amazing as The Good Doctor. The Imposter was pretty good but this one, while lush and 'classic' in style, was just kind of boring.

2014 Trainwreck of the Year
Oh how the mighty fall. Or stumble. Or at least stub their big toes. Long time readers may recall my unhealthy love for Tom Rachman's hilariously brilliant debut, The Imperfectionists. Not quite a novel, but more than a collection of short stories, it deftly skewered the world of wanky international journalism with its perfectly pitched sketches of all those involved with a failing newspaper. To my mind, it was almost a perfect book. Sad to report that the exact opposite must be said of his follow-up, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers. A meandering mess, with no discernible direction it pained me to plod through the whole thing. I'm still trying to work out what the hell it was actually about but then I am reminded that I just don't care and go back to my Rachman shrine, kneel before the last flickering embers and pray that this, not the other, was an aberration.

The Invasion That Wasn't: A Short Word About the Man Booker Shortlist

Well, I may be totally off my game this year but I'm glad to see that Team Booker have landed on a well-balanced, readable but still literary shortlist. Sure, it's not the heavy handed litwank of some previous years but thank the paper gods it ain't Annus Rimingtonus either. Needless to say, the fear of the great American deluge seems, at least this time, to have been unfounded. No Hustvedt. No Powers. Hardly the barnstorming some were expecting. Chins will no doubt still wag - where the hell is David Mitchell? - but what would a Booker year be without some nasty snarking?

So, without further ado, here are the contenders:

To Rise Again At a Decent Hour - Joshua Ferris
J - Howard Jacobson
The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler
The Lives of Others - Neel Mukherjee
How To Be Both - Ali Smith

The Empire Strikes Back: The Booker Prize Longlist 2014

Rest easy Padawans, Britain has survived the great literary plague. Here is the 2014 Booker Prize long list:

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris (Viking)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus)
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent's Tail)
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre)
J b Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape)
The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound)
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (Sceptre)
The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)
Us by David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Dog by Joseph O'Neill (Fourth Estate)
Orfeo by Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)
How to be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
History of the Rain by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury)

A fair mix of Commonwealth and usurper novels, but a reasonable list overall. I'm particularly excited by the inclusion of Paul Kingsnorth, whose very strange phonetic/Old English novel of the years after 1066 has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of months begging to be picked up. Time to start reading!

Begin the Booker Beguine (Again)

Well, we're just hours away from the announcement of this year's Booker long list and, I can't help but feel, this will be the most hotly debated bunch of books ever. Yep, this year marks the first time that nominees aren't limited to Commonwealth authors but anyone writing in the English language. No doubt you'll recall the big brouhaha when the rules were changed - you'd have been forgiven for thinking the British literary Empire had fallen. Well, we're about to learn how it's going to pan out. Ironically, Team Booker couldn't have chosen a worse (or perhaps better) year to open the floodgates. A quick look at the list of eligible books from just the old Commonwealth countries and I find myself in some sort of book nerd heaven. So many previous winners and nominees have new books - Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Colm Toibin, Phillip Hensher, Sebastian Barry, Nicola Barker, Damon Galgut, Sarah Waters, Edward St Aubyn... hell, even the new Martin Amis looks promising after a run of complete duds. I can't help but smirk at the misfortune of the also-rans who truly ought to be in contention this year but may well miss out thanks to the former colony with the grating accent. On the other hand, whatever the list, we can safely say that literature from the Commonwealth has never looked quite so bloody healthy.

As for my tips... Hmmm... I'd love to see Jesse Ball, Elimear McBride, Darragh McKeon, Phil Klay and Jenny Offill on the list. I suspect Donna Tartt, Joshua Ferris, Dave Eggars or Peter Mathiessen might get a look in. But when the dust settles I'm betting the prize stays in the Commonwealth for at least one more year and I'd say the guy to do that will be David Mitchell. We'll know if I'm even slightly on target in just a few hours.

In, On and For A Book: My Strange Sojourn Into Eli Glasman's The Boy's Own Manual To Being A Proper Jew

HOLY CRAP. I'M A FICTIONAL CONSTRUCT! Ok, so here's how it went down. A few months back, the lovely folk at Sleepers Publishing sent me a reading copy of the rather peculiarly titled The Boy's Own Manual To Being A Proper Jew by Eli Glasman. I'd known about the book for a while - Glasman is someone I see around the traps; we talk writing, he told me he'd be submitting it for publication and was quite rightly very excited when Sleepers took it on.

Fast forward a little bit and there I was ploughing my way through, doing my best impression of an objective reader, when BAM, I appear. Well, sort of. In the scene where some band called Yidcore plays in the courtyard of Melbourne's Orthodox Jewish boys' school, Yeshivah, it is me jumping up and down with the microphone. For the record, that really did happen. It was a Year 12 Muck Up Day prank. The students got us to come in, set up on the asphalt and start playing during class. Kids of all ages started streaming out and before we knew it, classes had been cancelled and there was a crowd of teenage religious kids moshing to a punk band (if only that was the most surreal thing to have happened to us!). Needless to say the scene flew by (it accounts for a single paragraph, but my mum was suitably proud) and I could return to the story. Yes, yes. Enough about me.

This book... what can I say? It's good. Really good. Sure, it's always difficult to read a friend objectively but I am genetically averse to lying, even to friends so when I say I liked it, I really mean it. And not just because of THAT paragraph. From the outset it's clear that Glasman is a talented writer - he's witty, daring and full of heart. The book, about an orthodox Jewish boy in Melbourne coming to terms with his homosexuality, is told with a degree of depth and compassion that ought not be in the wheel house of someone so young. And with Glasman having grown up in the orthodox community, the book also has a level of insight that greatly exceeds anything the casual observer might be able to perceive. There's very little soapboxing - the question of homosexuality in orthodox Judaism is handled without judgement or cheap philosophising. Rather, the full complexity is drawn out in a way that leaves all involved in a dignified space without having to have sacrificed their values or positions. It is a very generous, open and positive portrayal of both young gay men and orthodox Jews.

Leaving aside the flattery of being made into a fictional character, I really recommend Glasman's book. And if you won't take my word for it, just check out the raves on the back cover... Oh... Suddenly, I'm trying to be Shteyngart. How very meta.

2014: The Mid-Year Report

Chalk it up to a crippling case of blog burn-out following 2013's ridiculous "Review Every Book I Read" challenge. Or it might have been the all-consuming insanity of the Melbourne Jewish Writers' Festival. Or maybe it's just that I've had to slow down a bit on the reading to make time for my own writing. Yep, for those of you who don't already know, I've jumped out of the frying pan of literary criticism (and, hopefully, witticism) and into the fire. I'm writing a novel. What's more, I've signed with my absolutely favourite publisher, Text Publishing who, assuming I can meet a deadline, will be throwing my labour of love to the wolf pit of arseholes like me (aka readers/reviewers/bloggers/firestarters) some time next year. Whatever the cause, it's been a slow year on Bait For Bookworms. I know. But I haven't forgotten you, my dear fellow LitNerds. There's plenty I want to say. Heck, I've still managed 92 books in the first six months. And though I only reviewed a fraction of them, some were pretty excellent. Viz:

Books Of The Year
What can I say? Jesse Ball just keeps getting better and his latest novel, Silence Once Begun, was the first, and remains the best, thing I have had the joy of reading in 2014. That's not to say there weren't some pretty close contenders. And the fact that David Grossman was the only other familiar name in my list makes it all the more exciting. His novel in dramatic/poetic form, Falling Out Of Time, was a masterpiece of grief, introspection, rage and regeneration. Then there's An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alammedine which bowled me over with its humour, wisdom and litnerd appeal. Jenny Offill renewed my belief in the beauty of ordinary love with her masterpiece in miniature, The Dept. of Speculation, while Hanya Yanagihara shocked me to my moral core with her dense, harrowing and intellectually challenging debut The People Of The Trees. Michel Laub's multi-layered meditation on memory, Diary of the Fall was another highlight, as was the best prison novel I've read in years, The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld. And mad props to the batshit crazy Look Who's Back, in which German daredevil Timur Vermes imagine Hitler's return to modern Germany with hilarious (and rather frightening) results.

Books of Previous Years
Five months after reading it, I'm still haunted by Hubert Mingarelli's fantastic little book A Meal In Winter, in which a couple of Nazi soldiers sent from their remote outpost to hunt Jews in the forest are faced with an impossible moral choice. Equally complex and powerful was Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation which could well have been written by one of the European greats in the middle of the twentieth century. I got my first taste of Korean literature with Hwang Sun-Mi's superb Orwellian fable, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly while cult Belgian writer Dmitri Verhulst struck again with his excoriating Christ Comes To Brussels, an hilarious collision of religious obsession, delusion and high comedy. And, in my ever growing attempt to expand my literary horizons, graphic fiction has had a strong showing with Rutu Modan's The Property and Jeff Lamire's Underwater Welder both ending high on my list of favourites.

A Brief Message From My Speakers
I don't usually include music in my mid-year reports but I can't in good conscience ignore the album that has single-handedly got me excited about music again. Canadian abrasive melodic punkers PUP's self-titled album is about as incredible as a debut could ever hope to be. In fact I loved it so much that I didn't download a free torrent but actually dragged my lazy arse to the record store and bought a physical copy. I know. That's crazy talk!

Well, I can't say I know what the rest of this year will bring. I suspect I won't be reading quite as much as I race towards my own deadline, but there's still a bunch of books that have me excited including new ones by Javier Cercas, Aharon Appelfeld, Will Wiles, Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Samuel Beckett (ok, so a newly unearthed SB) as well as the rest of Jeff VanderMeer's thus far brilliant Southern Reach Trilogy. I'm also a little late off the mark but hope to get to Pig's Foot by Carlos Acosta, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air by Darragh McKeon and Glow by Ned Beauman. Ah, who am I kidding? I'll be reading just as much. I just won't be sleeping.

To Hell and Back: Falling Out Of Time by David Grossman

Is it a novel? A play? A prose poem? A greek tragedy? Well, yes. I think. All of them. A marvel? Yes, that too.

After his perfectly accessible masterpiece, To The End Of The Land, David Grossman returns to the same conceptual grounds with about as inaccessible a book as you can imagine (short of James Joyce). From its opening page Falling Out Of Time disorients the reader - a man stops eating in the middle of the dinner and announces he is going on a journey to find someone (it is unclear who at first) at the place it happened (again not sure what). As the man and his wife talk, we come to understand their loss - Grossman's own - of having a son fall in battle, of having military police turn up at the door heralding the terrible news. Theirs is a fragile tenderness, a love weighed down by absence. She understands his need, does not stop him. The man begins his walk, narrated by a Town Chronicler, directionless, only forward, in search of his dead son. Along the way he encounters others, townsfolk who have also lost their children, to accident, to suicide, to murder. Fragments of their stories creep in as they join him on the search to find where life and death meet. To the reader, at least, it seems they are simply walking in circles around their town, a slight spiral that takes them a little further out each time without ever really going anywhere. Eventually they hit a wall that just might be the gateway to the other world. Or the impossibility of crossing.

If this all seems a bit obtuse to you then you'd probably best steer clear of this book. Mine is the instructional manual version. The depth of Grossman's understanding of loss and grief is extraordinary. That much was clear in To The End Of The Land. Falling Out Of Time takes it one step further. Drawing heavily on the Orpheus mythos in both form and substance, it explores the human limits of love. How do you make sense of what remains in your heart when the person is no longer here? How can you relate to the dead when they can't relate to you? Grossman doesn't necessarily provide answers but he suggests modes of reason. And he self-consciously breaks your heart. The passage, about two thirds of the way through, where the various parents question their children's fate is one of the most painful I've ever read. And this:

But where are you, what are you?
Just tell me that, my son.
I ask simply:
Where are you?

No doubt many who loved To The End of The Land will be totally alienated by this book. It is their loss. For though you may not always fully understand what you are reading, you will never doubt that you are in the presence of true greatness.
5 Out Of 5 Greek Choruses

Microviews Vol. 49: This Is Your Brain On Ice

Never fear Bookworms. I haven't disappeared. No great disaster befell me - death by a million paper cuts, spontaneous eye explosion, blog burnout. I just took a month to sit back, relax and read. Lots. Twenty one books in January and counting. As you know, I'm off the crazy "Review Every Book I Read" wagon, so it's back to the good old random Microviews of yore. Enjoy!

Andrew's Brain by E.L. Doctorow
Much has already been made of Andrew's Brain being Doctorow's "old man" book. Like Roth's Everyman and Exit Ghost or Delillo's... well... everything after Underworld, it ponders the great existential threat: mortality. The comparisons are, however, unfair. Sure, there's a degree of late life crisis about this book, but it has very little of the rueful belly button gazing that made the others a bit of a chore to read. That said, Andrew's Brain is a pretty strange affair. It opens with some sort of confessional or therapeutic conversation between Andrew (who speaks of himself in the third person) and a mysterious interlocutor. Is it a friend? A therapist? A cop? We learn straight up that his first marriage has failed, that his subsequent marriage - to a student, no less - has also ended (albeit in a less clear cut manner) and that he dumped the child of that second marriage on his first wife before running away. The full story is drawn out by the other speaker and it is one mostly marked by frustration, tragedy and heartbreak. Fate, for Andrew, is a bitch. Andrew's Brain reaches its emotional crescendo three quarters of the way through when we learn what happened to the second wife. Those few pages reminded me of Doctorow's power to profoundly move a reader. Then something weird happens. Something very, very weird. The novel takes such an unexpected left turn that it comes close to careening out of control. Enter Andrew's old college roommate, now the president of the United States, and his cabal of Yes Men. Doctorow doesn't even try to hide their identities: Chaingang and Rumbum. It borders on puerile. Andrew moves into the inner circle but seems to be more of a cog in some elaborate prank. Doctorow takes political aim and fires but, by that stage, I was so far removed from the novel that I couldn't even tell if he hit. Indeed, I was reminded greatly of Delillo's Falling Man - I was watching a brilliant writer grappling with the way the world has changed but not quite able to get the upper hand. I suppose it was all necessary to get to the final chapter which, I have to say, was perfectly pitched. It will answer a lot of your questions but one will undoubtedly remain: What on Earth was Doctorow doing for those forty-odd pages?
4 out of 5 Sparking Synapses

On Such A Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee
Having been raised on a steady diet of JG Ballard dystopias I came to Chang-Rae Lee's latest with a great deal of excitement. Straight up, he is not the sort of novelist I'd ever have expected to attempt this kind of story. His lyricism and sensitivity gave me hope that he'd bring something new, something more, to it all. Could this be The Handmaid's Tale for a new generation? It started well enough - Fan escapes from B-Mor (a future Baltimore) in search of her boyfriend Reg, but not before destroying the tanks of fish that provide vital nutrition to the city. It is a brilliantly realised first chapter, one that firmly establishes the parameters of this strange post Apocalyptic America. The descriptions of Fan swimming through the schools of fish are beautiful - vintage Lee. I don't quite know, then, why the book lost me pretty much straight afterwards. Fan's trek through the "open counties", her search for a brother who has been elevated to the high Charter caste, the various grifters and desperadoes she meets... it all just left me cold. It was as if I was reading the treatment for a novel rather than the novel itself. I can see how Lee has given us a glimpse at the Ghost of America Future with its environmental carnage, socio-economic disparity (especially in terms of universal health care - hello Republican bozos) and governmental collapse. In that sense, this is a harrowing read. But as a novel, a narrative to draw me in and make me truly appreciate the dire state of the world he has created, it just didn't float my fish.
2.5 out of 5 Concrete Islands

A Meal In Winter by Hubert Mingarelli
In one of my all time favourite novels, Schopenhauer's Telescope, two men are locked in tense conversation as one digs his own grave at gunpoint. That is pretty much the entire book. There's an air of Nazi and partisan about them, though it is never clear what war they're fighting or which one is which. One will die, the other will walk away. It is incredibly difficult to know who you should actually feel for - did the good guy win? The author remains silent. Hubert Mingarelli's masterpiece in miniature, A Meal In Winter, has a very similar feel. Three Nazis stationed at some remote outpost are sent to hunt down Jews hiding in the forest. For them it is a reprieve - their willingness to brave the winter chill means that they will be excused from partaking in the daily executions. It doesn't take long for them to find a Jew but before they can bring him back the weather sets in and they are forced to take refuge in an abandoned hut. Cold and hungry, they search the building for a few food scraps and set about making soup, all the while discussing what should become of the Jew. The sudden appearance of a Polish farmer complicates matters - his presence is disruptive but he has alcohol which will warm them and add flavour to the broth. He is allowed to stay. After an interminable wait, the soup comes to the boil and the five men sit down to eat together; enemies breaking bread. Not a single word is exchanged but the dynamic has completely changed. The Jew is now human. Do they release him so that they will have one redemptive memory when the war is over? Or do they take him back to certain death at the outpost? Failure to return a Jew means being put back on firing squad duty. Returning him robs them of redemption but excuses them from ever pulling another trigger. For the three soldiers it is an agonising choice. A Meal In Winter is one of the most harrowing, morally complex works I have ever encountered. Read it. It will strengthen your soul.
5 out of 5 Empty Ladles

Property by Rutu Modan
A few years back, a friend of mine was studying at the Yiddish Institute in New York where she befriended a non-Jewish girl from Poland in her dorm. For as long as they stuck by the great Fawlty Towers mantra "Don't mention the war!", all went well. Then, in what I can only assume was an attempt to curry further favour, the Polish girl happened to mention that Poland is one of Israel's most strident supporters. My friend was puzzled. The conversation went something like this:
"Why?"
"Because if anything happened to Israel the Jews might come and take our homes."
"Well, they're not exactly your homes."
"Of course they are. The Jews abandoned them during the war."
"And where do you think they went? On holiday?"
Thus ended the friendship. Rutu Modan's wonderful graphic novel, The Property, is an exploration of the strange relationship between Jews and Poland, especially the paranoias that itch beneath the surface. Mica accompanies her grandmother Regina from Israel to Poland in what at first seems like a search for the apartment in which her family lived before the war. From the opening panels, Modan is in top form, skewering the hilarity of Israeli airports, affectionately stabbing at the... um... Israeli national attitude. It's funny but tender; Modan clearly comes from a place of love. Things take an unexpected turn when they reach their destination - Regina finds the apartment but there is much more to the trip than she has let on. Meanwhile Mica chums up with a non-Jewish Polish guy (in an Operation Ivy jacket no less) who starts as tour guide but soon becomes much more. And of course, there's the oddball, annoying Israeli following them all - it's not hard to tell that he has ulterior motives, though it takes a while to realise what precisely they are. The Property is a joy to read, beautifully rendered in shifting graphic styles, utterly compelling and, when the penny drops, absolutely heartwarming (if kind of tragic).
4.5 out of 5 Kosher Kielbasas

Leaving the Sea: Stories by Ben Marcus
Ben Marcus has a strange way of popping up randomly in my life. When my band was touring America, a young lady I befriended was raving about this debut short story collection by her lecturer at university (or professor at college, I've never understood the American academic nomenclature). It was called The Age of Wire and String and, she assured me, was at the absolute cutting edge of contemporary literature. Plus she thought her professor was cute. Fast forward a few years and I rate that same author's novel, The Flame Alphabet, as the tenth best book of the 2012 with a tongue in cheek rant against him for not fully realising what I thought was the book's incredible potential. A couple of days later, while I was enjoying a lovely holiday on the Aussie coast, a familiar name popped up in my Inbox. Ben Marcus. To put it mildly, he wasn't happy. Clearly the Australian idiom had gotten lost in translation. I agonised over it for a few hours before editing the review to lessen the perceived sting. I'm still not sure if, in an ideological sense, I did the right thing but I hadn't intended to insult him and felt that ought to be made clear. Bottom line is I think he's a bloody excellent writer. Even if he can't take a joke. Anyway, this is all a round about way of saying that, before I go any further, I will declare that I liked Leaving The Sea. I liked it a lot. It is an uncomfortable collection of stories, to be sure, but I mean that in a good way. Presented in six suites, each stranger than the one that came before, it cements Marcus's place as the modern master of the experimentally surreal. Leaving The Sea starts off with what I can only describe as a narrative honey trap - the writing is gorgeous, the stories quite straight forward. "I Can Say Many Nice Things" stands out, as a washed up writer stoops to taking a creative writing course on a cruise ship. Hell, Marcus seems to be saying, is other wannabe writers. It's funny and sad and, I'm guessing, cathartic. The first suite closes with the rather depressing "Rollywood" (which reminded me of the Ben Folds song Fred Jones Pt. 2), a perfect buffer for the profound shift in comfort that follows with the dual punch of brief interviews that make up the second suite. The shifts turn to tremors and then full on quakes as Marcus throws conventional storytelling to the wind in favour of dazzling experiments in style, substance and atmosphere. That's not to say there aren't many moments that will appeal to the narrative traditionalists amongst you. "Watching Mysteries With My Mother", where a man obsesses over his mother's imminent death, is deeply moving. The desperation of the dying narrator trying out last-chance, probably shonky, treatments in "The Dark Arts" is palpable. Even some of the experimental stuff is quite accessible - the prose is always beautiful, the readily familiar often identifiable within the fabulous. Like any short story collection there are lulls - after all, not every experiment can work - but as another step on Marcus's consistently interesting path, Leaving The Sea is well worth your attention.
4 out of 5 Apocalypse Drills

Sublime Sounds: Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball

Here's a strange thought. Is it possible that I read the best book of 2014 on the very first day of the year?

It took all my self control not to crack it open the moment the package arrived on my doorstep. There were still four days left in 2013. To read this book, like every fibre in my body was telling me to do, would have upset the space/time continuum. A 2014 book read and reviewed in 2013? If it turned out to be as good as I expected, I would be forced to let it fight The Infatuations to the literary death for top position. Would that even have been fair given that a book from the future must have all the disintegration laser Martian technologies you'd expect if, like me, you spent your childhood locked in your room with comic books and computer games and trashy sci-fi novels? Most importantly, could I possibly deny myself the great joy of yammering on about it for the next eleven and three quarter months?

Well, never fear. I resisted. There will be much yammering.

As I watched the countdown on TV, my fingers anxiously skittered across the cover of Jesse Ball's highly anticipated new novel, Silence Once Begun. The follow up to my favourite book of 2011, The Curfew, it is his first novel to be published in hardcover, the first to be published by Pantheon (part of the Knopf publishing family) and, most likely, the first to get the kind of widespread exposure he has long deserved. Put simply, there is a lot riding on this book. The moment the first firework exploded, I began reading.

Allegedly based (albeit very loosely) on true events, Silence Once Begun is the story of Oda Sotatsu, an unassuming man who confesses to a series of disappearances in 1970s Japan. The crimes themselves are intriguing, but what makes Oda's story so unique is his complete silence from the time he is arrested until his execution. Other than a few very minor exchanges with the various other players, he simply does not speak. Even more disturbing, it is quite clear that he did not commit the crimes - only a written confession, handed in prior to his arrest, links him to the disappearances. There is no other evidence.

Ball (or a fictional simulacrum thereof) unfurls Oda's story through a series of interviews with all the others involved in the case: his parents, his brother, his sister, the court reporter, a prison guard and, finally, the two most significant and troubling characters, a mysterious woman called Jito Joo and the very shady mastermind of it all, Sato Kakuzo. Each share their own impression of Oda and his involvement in the crime. Some are crushed by the weight of shame, some vigorously defend him, some accept his guilt but warm to him and the dignity he displays throughout the process. Despite their differences, there is one thing that links them all: a strong belief that nobody else's version can be trusted. Silence Once Begun is not a tale told by an unreliable narrator, it is one told by a whole slew of them.

Ball adds some editorial commentary between the interviews, but for the most part it is just their voices building up to a deafening wall of white noise. The effect is quite spectacular. When it reaches a crescendo, Ball pulls back and gives the stage to the soft, romantic voice of Jito Joo. Now in her late 50s she offers a version steeped in nostalgic poetry, a tragic love story. That is if she is to be believed. The moment Joo signs off, Sato Kakuzo steps in to declare her totally untrustworthy and complicit in the plot. His is the last version, and by far the most disturbing. It is not a chronology but a manifesto; Sato's great plan to shake the complacent Japanese society to its core by subverting its most sacred cultural mores. Think Machiavelli meets the Leopold and Loeb. The very identity of the country will be his victim. Oda is merely the patsy. When Sato does the great unveil, you can't help but be furious at the way the machinery of a developed society can be made to run on its own steam in the completely wrong direction. As Sato says, "The judges are doing what I am telling them to do, simply because I understand better than they do this one thing: the absurd lengths to which human beings go to prove themselves reasonable".

Ball dedicates the book to two of my favourite Japanese authors, Kobo Abe and Shusaku Endo. It's not hard to see their influence. Silence Once Begun is daring in both form and substance. It says a lot about the selective way in which we construct truths, how we don't actually need the central event or player for us to settle on an accepted or acceptable narrative. Japanese society is the perfect prism for Ball's argument, but it would be wrong not to see ourselves in some of the refracted rays.

With Silence Once Begun Jesse Ball has shattered the wall of sound in spectacular fashion. It is a towering achievement and, to my mind, the benchmark for all fiction this year.

5 Out of 5 Lynched Larynxes

Holy Horizons! Doctorow's Back (But Don't Hold Your Breath)

Well, this might be looking forward a little too much, but I just got word that there will be a new E.L. Doctorow book, Andrew's Brain, coming out in January 2014. Looks weird and fascinating. Pretty great way to kick off the year. Could it be that we will have two amazing literary years in a row? Tell me there's also another Cormac McCarthy and my year will be complete six months before it's even started. Oh the joy!