OVERVIEW: September 2014

September 2014 was a good month: Not only was I able to extensively read into the postmodern canon, I also managed to knock off a few books from the Man Booker 2014 Shortlist.

1. David Cordingly - Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates (319pp, ★★★☆☆)
2. Alexander Theroux - Darconville's Cat (704pp, ★★★★★)
3. Naoki Higashida - The Reason I Jumo: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism (135pp, ★★★★☆)
4. Arno Schmidt - Aus dem Leben eines Fauns (165pp, ★★★★☆)
5. William T. Vollmann - Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan (61pp, ★★★☆☆)
6. Andreas Steinhöfel - Die Mitte der Welt (459pp. ★★☆☆☆)
7. Karen Joy Fowler - We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (310pp, ★★★★★)
8. William Gaddis - Carpenter's Gothic (272pp, ★★★★☆)
9. Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (352pp, ★☆☆☆☆)
10. Donald Barthelme - The Dead Father (177pp, ★★★☆☆)
11. Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (272pp, ★★★☆☆)
12. John Barth - Lost in the Funhouse (205pp, ★★★☆☆)
13. William Gaddis - The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings (160pp, ★★★★☆)
14. William H. Gass - The Tunnel (672pp, ?????)
15. Joseph McElroy  The Letter Left to Me (151pp, ★★☆☆☆)
16. Donald Barthelme - Snow White (192pp, ★★☆☆☆)
17. Christopher Butler - Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction (144pp, ★★★☆☆)
18. Laurent Binet - HHhH (336pp, ★★★★☆)
19. Paul Kingsnorth - The Wake (365pp, ★★★★☆)

On the one hand, there is this huge chunk of postmodern authors (Theroux, Vollmann, Gaddis, Gass, Barth, Barthelme, McElroy), as I have to read most of these for my upcoming thesis. Darconville's Cat is probably one of the best books I have ever read; here is what I wrote when I finished it: 

After 9 1/2 long months, I finally finished Darconville's Cat today. Not because it was bad, but because it was that good. There is no other book since Ulysses which had me under it's spell as this book. It is, more or less, the perfect book. There are several reasons for this: 

1. The language. This is most likely the first thing one will notice about the Cat. Theroux is logorrheic and verbose to the highest degree. At the same time, this is what makes the book so precise. It's pure bliss for a non-native speaker to be thrown into such an enormous amount of new words. I must have looked up more than a thousand words, most of them filling a small notebook I used exclusively for this novel. 

2. The form. Theroux plays with a number of forms and literary traditions: Sonnets, lists, travelogues, diaries, litanies,... Some of the chapters serve both as reading guides as well as a form of mental logbook - a game of what the reader already knows and make sense of. An example for this is the car trip Darconville is on (LVIII: Over the Hills and Far Away): he lists up hundreds of places, real and invented. Three chapters dealing with Dr. Crucifer are similar: LXVII. The Misogynist's Library (nine pages of books dealing with misogyny), LXXXII. The Unholy Litany (names and allusions to hundreds of women, complete with the formulaic repetition "libera nos, Domine") and XCIII. "Why don't you-?" (just as many ways of torturing Darconville's ex-lover, Isabel Rawsthorne). These four chapters alone amount to days and days of research, even in 2014. 

3. The characters. I loved most of the characters. They embody certain stereotypes through their names, as well as their linguistic idiosyncrasies. President Greatracks and Dr. Dodypol were my favourites among the minor characters. Dr. Crucifer on the other hand is, well, one creepy fuck. His speeches were both the most complex passages in the novel, as well as some of the best; while other passages bored me to sleep. All in all, Theroux manages to evoke some brilliant characters. 

I would not advise to read this novel if you want a good story. The Cat is extremely boring and cliched in that aspect. Treat it as a cerebral and exceptionally well-crafted piece of writing instead. It's a shame that almost no one knows about this novel, but that can be changed. I really need to reread this in a couple of years.

This still rings true. The two Man Booker books I read were polar opposites: I loved Karen Joy Fowler's novel, and would still like it to win, while Ferris' novel was one of the worst I read in the last few months. There is just something about Jewish dentists that just does not click with me. Here is what I  had to say about We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Spoilers ahead!):

"Everything in it is true — the truth and nothing but the truth — but not the whole truth." - Wunderbares Buch mit einer unzuverlässigen Erzählerin lotet die Beziehung zwischen Geschwistern aus. 5/5. 

Was bedeutet es ein Mensch zu sein? Karen Joy Fowler's "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves" versucht genau das zu beschreiben. Die Erzählerin, Rosemary Cooke, wächst auf mit ihrem Bruder Lowell, einem Terroristen/Umweltaktivisten und ihrer Schwester Fern, einer Schimpansin. Der Reveal davon nach knapp 70 Seiten trifft einen ganz und gar unverhofft und lässt viele vorherige Ereignisse deutlich anders erscheinen als man zuerst angenommen hat. Rosemary beginnt ihre Geschichte "in the middle", erst nach und nach werden uns die Implikationen dieser Erzählweise klar. Somit kann man das Buch im postmodernen Spektrum verordnen, vermischt es doch mühelos diverse Genres, fragmentierte und unzuverlässige Erzählung. Rosemary ist allgemein eine interessante Erzählerin: Sie wird als frühentwickeltes Nervenbündel stilisiert. Wie Fowler passend schreibt, mit Verweis auf Piaget, Chomsky, Tomasello und Konsorten, ist ihre geistige Entwicklung im Großen und Ganzen geprägt durch den Umgang mit ihrer Schwester und den dadurch resultierenden Lebensumständen. Ihre Sprache wird den einen oder anderen Leser sicher zum Lexikon zwingen, aber genau das ist gewollt. Sie beschreibt was sie weiß, als wahr und richtig erachtet, nur um sich selbst nach zwanzig Seiten zu widersprechen und den Leser zum Umdenken zu zwingen. 

Das etwas versüßlichte Ende gibt dem Roman zwar einen Dämpfer, jedoch nicht so sehr als dass eine Abwertung von Nöten wäre. Da es für mich bis jetzt das Erste der Man Booker Shortlist 2014 war, ist es mein uneingeschränkter Favorit. Die weiteren Bände reizen mich jedoch auch noch, somit werde ich das Urteil vielleicht revidieren müssen.Uneingeschränkt zu empfehlen! 

I am quite content with what I read in September. We'll see what the next month brings.