2011 - Books of the Year

Yes, you may have already noticed that 2011's end of year post is just about books rather than also including my favourite music, films and other cultural highlights. The reason for this is quite simple: I've barely listened/watched/been to any as any regular readers will have noticed over the year. It has in fact been all I could manage to maintain a steady stream of book reviews this year and I have my fingers crossed about being able to do the same next year. It hasn't been easy. But every time I think I'm about to throw in the towel something comes along to make me persevere and I'm always glad that I do. The books below are all brilliant for different reasons and a couple of them are so good that they're worth writing the blog for alone. And then of course there's you and your comments.....

Many thanks to every single one of you who has read my blog this year and a seasonal hug and kiss to everyone who's left a comment. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.


A Taste of Chlorine by Bastien Vives

It may be at the bottom of the pile in the photo above but this graphic novel is right at the top of my books of the year. If you want to read a graphic novel that truly uses pictures to tell a story that words wouldn't have been able to then this book is perfect. The story of a boy using swimming to help treat curvature of the spine is all about body-language, gesture and movement. There's hardly any text and yet volumes are spoken in Vives' exquisitely drawn panels, with the underwater environment particularly well presented, you can almost smell the chlorine. Like reading a perfect short story it is enigmatic, moving and left me with a warm glow in my heart.

The Death Of The Adversary by Hans Keilson

A genuine masterpiece about tyranny and control from a writer who may only have produced two novels in his long lifetime but who made sure they were both in their own ways completely brilliant. This novel examines the symbiotic relationship between a man who is clearly Jewish (though never named as such) in 1930's Germany (though this is never made explicit) and the leader, or adversary, (clearly Hitler though again he is not named) who tyrannises him. Brave in its hypotheses, brutal in its psychological insights and honesty, this novel is a classic because it manages to be about all situations in which one group makes a pariah of another. Indispensable.

Great House by Nicole Krauss

This novel is by no means perfect but its failings come from ambition rather than lack of talent which Krauss seems to have in spades. There is a feeling that comes from reading the work of a mature writer, an ease that you are in the hands of someone who has something to say. This usually comes from writers far more experienced than Krauss but her maturity is just one of the attractive features in this novel about a desk and the various hands it passes through, characters created with such detail that they cease to feel like characters at all, and the novel as a whole written with a complexity that forces the reader to slow down and appreciate the thought, intelligence and humanity that has gone into creating it.

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

A collection of stories so unique, so specific, so perfect as to need little more than that from me to send you straight out to buy a copy. Pancake died without ever really knowing just how good a writer he was and too young for us to know just how good and influential he might have become. As it stands several writers cite him as an influence and the warmth and reverence with which they do this is worth noting. His stories embody the area of West Virginia in which Pancake grew up, with authentic details and voices but these aren't simply stories rooted in a particular geography so that we can indulge in a kind of literary tourism, he also shows with a couple of stories just how formally inventive he might have been. Just buy the damn book, ok?

The Summer Of Drowning by John Burnside

I have no shame in admitting that I am a fan of Burnside and take a small amount of pride in being one of the voices that has helped convince John Self over at Asylum to read more of him and realise just how good he is (although in his own end of the year round-up he mentions that he did so in order to shut people like me up). This latest novel shows a writer at the height of his powers returning to a story he failed to complete a decade ago and delivering a novel filled with atmosphere, unease, myth, storytelling, artistry and writing so good it sometimes make you want to take a moment and nod your head in appreciation. Set in the Arctic Circle and drawing on the folk myths of the area this is a book infused with the spectral light of the midnight sun; deeply unsettling, wonderfully complex, another weapon in my arsenal to make sure that you all make the effort to pick up one of his books. Soon.

The Rules Of Civility by Amor Towles

An unalloyed pleasure from first page to last, Towles debut is a perfectly mixed dry Martini. Set in 1920's New York it tells the story of a life-changing year for Katherine Kontent, the only fictional character I have ever fallen in love with. Taking inspiration from Walker Evans' candid subway photographs Towles effortlessly recreates an era and peoples it with characters in which I believed totally and couldn't hope to forget. It's the kind of novel where you genuinely care about what happens to them and can't help but wonder what happens to them after the final page. Witty, funny, smart and beautiful: that's just Katey Kontent, but also a good description of the novel as a whole.

Lazarus Is Dead by Richard Beard

One of the most exciting reads of the year for the way in which its form was hard to pin down, Beard's 'novel' is a re-examination of the story behind one of Jesus' miracles. By taking an almost forensic approach Beard manages to tell the story more fully than ever before, bravely hypothesising about the childhoods of both men, drawing inspiration and evidence from other artistic sources, research into the period and of course the invention of the author. Structured around the number seven the chapters count down to Lazarus' death and then back up again after his resurrection, where Beard is brave enough not just to imagine what happens to the story of Lazarus after its usefulness in the Bible ends but to posit an even greater significance for the man who came back from the dead. If you want to know why fiction can still be exciting then pick this book up.

New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani

If I had a pound for every novel that takes a male protagonist, wipes his memory and then starts from there then I'd have a load more money to spend on books, but this novel from linguist Marani is ingenious and far smarter than most. A man is found badly beaten on the quay in Trieste in 1943. When he comes to he has no memory of who he is or even which language he speaks. The Finnish doctor on a German hospital ship that treats him presumes that he is also Finnish after spotting a name inside his coat and an initialled handkerchief and so begins to re-teach him his language in the hope it will unlock memories and lead him to recover his identity. This relatively slim novel covers huge themes around memory, identity and truth and manages to intrigue even further with the perspective from which it is written. Exactly the kind of novel I would hope to unearth on this blog (although Nicholas Lezard gets the credit on this one).

I Am A Chechen by German Sadulaev

A book that melds memoir with fiction, folk tale with fantasy, Sadulaev's account of the conflict in Chechnya doesn't fit into any easy categories and is all the more exciting for it. It may not be consistent but the early sections in particular are stunning in the way they weave Chechen myth with personal testimony to create something that manages to be grand and specific at the same time. Infused with the guilt of a man who wasn't there when things were at their worst, Sadulaev uses his creativity instead to speak on behalf of a people and give voice to a conflict the like of  which all too easily passes us by on the ticker tape of rolling news.

The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker

This is hardly news to anyone as the book was already well regarded by the time I came to read it at the very beginning of this year but it has remained very strong in my mind, a perfect example of why we should all read more literature in translation. Bakker's novel is written with the kind of quiet confidence that let's the reader relax in the knowledge that they are in safe hands. Reserved to the point of repression, the prose mimics the flat landscape of rural Holland but gives little hints along the way of the power that lurks beneath the surface. A farmer and his father inhabit a lonely farmhouse and the son's appalling treatment of his father leads us to wonder what might have happened in the past. Bakker expertly releases fragments from the past in his examination of love, loss and the special bond between twin brothers.

The Horseman's Word by Roger Garfitt

I don't tend to read an awful lot of non-fiction but I'm lucky that when I do it tends to be first rate. This memoir was literally forced into my hand by an excited publicist and her enthusiasm wasn't misplaced. The prose is beautiful as you might expect from a poet and its evocations of childhood innocence are heart-warming and comforting. When it follows Garfitt's misadventures at university and beyond it becomes a fascinating portrait of a mind unravelling and the writing shows the tissue-thin barriers between lunatic, lover and poet. A book that took many years to write and hone, and the passion of one publisher in particular to finally bring to print, this is a labour of love and madness that rewards the effort.

Disgrace by J M Coetzee

Over a decade after it was originally published and won the Booker Prize I finally get over my Coetzee hoodoo and discover just why this book, and writer, are so well regarded. A Cape Town university professor is forced to leave in disgrace after an affair with a student and goes to stay with his daughter on her smallholding. When the two of them are subjected to a brutal assault by three black men South Africa's fragile new politics are laid bare for examination. A brave and uncomfortable read that retains its ability to shock, this is a novel filled with anger and love, containing so many ideas and themes that you could happily discuss it for hours and hours. It has also of course made me want to read more Coetzee. Ah well, there's always next year....


And a few books that came close and deserve honourable mentions: At Last by Edward St Aubyn, A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, From The Mouth Of The Whale by Sjón and Today by David Miller.

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'borrowed from ghosts'

He burned the house of God, the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; even every great house he burned with fire.

Great House
by Nicole Krauss

Sometimes you need a gentle nudge to engage with an author for the first time (and sometimes a bloody great shove) and for some reason this is even more the case with authors that you suspect are actually very good but just haven't tickled your fancy enough. Huge thanks then to @wayfaringreader (as she's known on Twitter) for convincing me to read this superb novel (something she backed up rather hilariously with a tweet from Ivanka Trump who was enjoying Great House by the side of the pool). All of the reviews I have come across have been wonderfully positive and a belly band that came wrapped around my copy included one that mentioned Krauss as being Philip Roth's most likely literary heir. I wasn't quite sure what a comment like that was supposed to mean but as I read I began to have an inkling what Yevgeniya Traps meant in the New York Press. Krauss is the kind of writer who creates characters with such detail and specificity that they don't feel like characters in a novel at all, but real people whose stories we long to hear. She does this with the kind of mature psychological observations, emotional detail and interconnectedness that you can find examples of time and again in Roth's work. Regular readers of this blog will know that when I come on strong in the opening paragraph it's because I want to save you the time (if time is a luxury) of reading on and speed you towards a purchase. I'll join the chorus of approval and recommend this novel wholeheartedly: complex, engaging writing that slows down the reader; characters that live and breathe and even have the ability to affect your own breathing; a novel that deals with loss and memory so tenderly that it makes itself unforgettable.

The novel has four main narrators all of which are united by a desk. This piece of furniture holds an unusual amount of power over those who encounter it, there is something totemic about it, coming to represent different things to each of them. The first of these is Nadia, a novelist in her fifties, who was given the desk after the end of a relationship left her in a virtually unfurnished apartment and a single encounter with a Chilean poet called Daniel Varsky found her then guardian to his donated furniture when he left for a trip back to Chile. Having shared their love of poetry and interest in each other a relationship of sorts continues with Varsky's postcards but when these dry up and it is discovered that Varsky has been arrested, torutured and killed by Pinochet's goons the desk remains with the rest of his furniture as a haunting reminder of him 'sometimes I would look at it all and become convinced that it amounted to a riddle, a riddle he had left me that I was supposed to crack.'

Nineteen drawers of varying size, some below the desktop and some above, whose mundane occupations (stamps here, paperclips there) hid a far more complex design, the blueprint of the mind formed over tens of thousands of days of thinking while staring at them, as if they held the conclusion to a stubborn sentence, the culminating phrase, the radical break from everything I had ever written that would at last lead to the book I had always wanted, and always failed, to write. Those drawers represented a singular logic deeply embedded, a pattern of conciousness that could be articulated in no other way but their precise number and arrangement. Or am I making too much of it?

She isn't making too much of it. Having always thought of herself as 'only a temporary guardian' she remains unprepared for the impact of its removal from her life, something that happens when she is contacted by someone claiming to be the daughter of Daniel Varsky. Having happily written seven novels on it she finds her creative routine disturbed sufficently by its absence to encounter something close to a breakdown, finally settling on a trip to Jerusalem where the desk itself has travelled after she let it go.

The next section is narrated by an elderly man, Aaron, who has recently lost his wife and regained his son, Dov, who left Israel after his stint in the army and trained in law in America, going on to become a judge. This isn't a happy reunion, Aaron's narration is angry, impassioned and frequently hilarious as he wrestles with his complex feelings towards his children. One of the novel's themes is the impact of parenthood and how we relate to our offspring and Aaron's frustration with Dov's childhood histrionics will be familiar to any parent who has been confronted by a stroppy toddler who seems to be screaming for no clear reason (his hilarious response to one bathtime incident is to lift Dov clear of the water and deliver a lecture about the privations suffered by his ancestors during the pogroms and persecutions of the twentieth century). Now that Dov is an adult and his widowed father approaching the age of dependence there is a shift in that dynamic, something humorously undercut once again as Aaron sees his two sons talking confidentially

...trying to figure out what to do with me now, your old man, without having a clue, just as once you had no clue what to do with a pair of tits.

From New York and Israel we travel next to England where the two other narrators are based. First is Izzy, who remembers her time as an Oxford student and her relationship with fellow-student Yoav. Their intimacy always seems to be compromised by Yoav's unique familial relationships. His domineering father, almost always away with his work (of which more in a minute), is kept at a distance even on the few occasions he returns to London. Most unusual is the intense connection he shares with his sister Leah, a bond close enough to appear incestuous to many observers including their former school principal and enough, although it remains platonic, to have an impact on his relationship with Izzy. Their father's work looks from the outside like the dealing of antique furniture but is in fact slightly more specific than that. His speciality is the re-location of furniture confiscated from Jews during the Second World War so that those survivors and descendants might reclaim 'all that furnished the lives they lost or the lives they dreamed of living.' He himself is on a mission to recreate his own father's study exactly as it stood on the day in 1944 when he was forced to flee Budapest, 'As if by putting all the pieces back together he might collapse time and erase regret.'

We also meet an elderly man who has recently lost his wife. Always secretive about her past in mainland Europe it is only after her death that he begins to discover the full extent of what she had kept to herself and we will learn even more about the history of that desk and how it came to be in Varsky's possession in the first place. Not all of the sections are given an equal weight. There is no doubt that Aaron's narration is the strongest from a character point of view but it is Nadia and her meditations on writing itself that really held sway for me. This is where Krauss really deserves her comparison to Roth for providing a story that not only satisfies on its own terms but also has something to say about the act of writing itself. In her sections, begun and punctuated by the appeal Your Honor so that she is almost like a witness on trial, Nadia is unapologetic about the process of writing. Knowing that she has not been free in her own life she is strident that 'the writer should not be cramped by the possible consequences of her work. She has no duty to earthly accuracy or versimillitude. She is not an accountant; nor is she required to be something as ridiculous and misguided as a moral compass. In her work the writer is free of laws.' Later in the novel she has to admit how that isolation may have turned her into the kind of person so singularly obsessed that they neglect even the closest relationships in the the real world.

...someone so selfish and self-absorbed that she had been unconcerned enough about her husband's feelings to give him not even a fraction of the care and attention she gave to imagining the emotional lives of the people she sketched out on paper, to furnishing their inner lives, taking pains to adjust the light on their faces, brushing a stray hair from their eyes.

And like every great writer, having dedicated so much of her life to the creation of art she is struck by the most paralysing question of all about her belief in its validity: 'What if I had been wrong?'

Each of the strands is built around the idea of how we construct narrative around memory. The novel's title is taken from the Book of Kings (the phrase quoted at the top of this review) and more precisely the idea that 'every Jewish soul is built around the house that burned in that fire' - when the Temple was destroyed as the Romans laid waste to Jerusalem. A people without a Temple or even a homeland must turn 'Jerusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple into a book. A book as vast and holy and intricate as the city itself. Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form.' Each narrator is bent around the shape of something lost and in this intricate, mature and deeply resonant work, where the different stories mirror and echo each other, Krauss has created a book of her own to follow that Talmudic ideal.

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