Today.Az » Arts & Entertainment » 10 books to read in 2016
26 January 2016 [16:57] - Today.Az
From Don DeLillo’s 17th novel and a biography of Thomas
Jefferson to an engaging look at Existentialists, Jane Ciabattari selects the
best books to read in the coming year. Dana Spiotta,
Innocents and Others As a teenager, Meadow claims to have had a months-long tryst
with Orson Welles. Determined to become a film-maker, she leaves Los Angeles and sets up a makeshift studio in upstate New York. Her first
film, an eight-hour Betacam video of her boyfriend, wins a jury prize. She
draws acclaim for a 1992 documentary called Kent State:
Recovered. Her high school best friend Carrie follows a more traditional path –
her comedies win Golden Globe nominations and a Writers Guild Award. Meadow’s
penchant for documenting ambiguity and raw emotion draws her into telling the
story of Jelly, a woman who seduces powerful men through phone conversations.
But soon Meadow stops making films – and only Carrie knows why. Spiotta
captures the tensions and contradictions of how we live now in this mesmerising
and innovative novel. (Credit: Scribner) Don DeLillo, Zero K In his 17th novel, DeLillo follows Jeffrey Lockhart and his
father Ross, a billionaire, to a place where Ross’s younger second wife Artis –
“the archaeologist, the one whose mind and failing body would soon begin to
drift, on schedule, into the void” – can preserve her body indefinitely until
medical advances can heal her. While son struggles to reconnect with father,
DeLillo’s characters discuss the nature of time and the consequences of
‘literal immortality’ – “What will poets write about? What happens to history?
What happens to money? What happens to God?” We are even privy to Artis’s
musings in her suspended state: “But am I who I was.” (She is “first person and
third person both,” DeLillo writes.) Zero K is one of DeLillo’s best – audacious,
heartfelt, elegantly shaped and filled with provocative obsessions. (Credit:
Scribner) Elizabeth Strout, My
Name is Lucy Barton In her fifth novel, Strout, whose Olive Kitteridge won a
Pulitzer Prize, brings us young Lucy Barton lying in a hospital bed in view of
the Chrysler Building for nearly nine weeks in the
1980s. She is in a “very strange state – a literally feverish waiting” as she
heals from an infection after an appendectomy. She misses her husband and two
young daughters. Her mother comes to visit, and tells her stories she had never
heard before about their friends and neighbours back in Amgash Illinois. Lucy is a
writer, counselled by a city friend to be ‘ruthless’ and encouraged by a
workshop leader who tells her not to ‘protect’ anyone while writing. As her
mother and father die and her husband disappears, she comes more clearly into
herself. Lucy Barton is yet another indelible Strout creation. (Credit: Random
House) Ethan Canin, A
Doubter’s Almanac Milo Andret is a mathematical genius who grows up in Michigan in the 1950s.
In graduate school at Berkeley he works under
Hans Borland, then the most famous mathematician in the US. With
isolation and effort, he discovers how to harness his remarkable mind. In
passages that illuminate the process, Canin shows how Andret uses mental
projection to imagine a fourth dimension, staking his future on “the higher
dimensions, despite their unseeable complexity”. By the age of 32, he has found
a solution to one of math’s greatest problems. His career soars. His emotional
life is starting to fragment, beginning with a love triangle that lasts for
decades. Canin follows his trajectory through a second generation, with his son
Hans inheriting his mathematical gift and his fearsome flaws. Canin’s seventh
novel is that of a masterful writer at his transcendent best. (Credit: Random
House) Sarah Bakewell, At
the Existentialist Café Bakewell won a National Book Critics Circle award for her
innovative 2010 biography How to Live: A Life of Montaigne. Her equally
idiosyncratic new At the Existentialist Café takes on the intellectual
movements of the 20th Century and the philosophers who shaped them. She opens
in1933 in Paris, when Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone
de Beauvoir and Raymond Aron drink apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on
the rue Montparnasse. Aron is excited about
phenomenology, a new concept coming out of Berlin. “If you are a phenomenologist, you
can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” he says. Bakewell
follows the growth of Existentialism through the decades, adds the influences
of Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and others, and shows how its
emphasis on authenticity, freedom, and responsibility are relevant today.
(Credit: Other Press) Alexander Chee, The
Queen of the Night Chee’s enchanting The Queen of the Night is about a
legendary 19th Century Paris
soprano, inspired by Jenny Lind. Lilliet Berne’s voice was said to “turn arias
into spells, hymns into love songs,” writes Chee. She was the gifted daughter
of Minnesota
settlers who considered her voice a curse. Orphaned, she travels to Paris, where she makes
her way as a hippodrome rider, a courtesan, an empress’s maid and finally an
opera singer. One night a writer approaches her to create a role in a new
opera, based on his novel. When she asks about the story, it seems it’s about
her. It contains her darkest secrets, known only to four people. A coincidence?
A trap? Or a betrayal? Chee’s second novel is a mystery, a meditation, a lyrical
jewel. (Credit: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Paul Goldberg, The
Yid Goldberg’s debut novel opens with a “knock-and-pick” scene
set in February 1953 Moscow.
Three men in a Black Maria leave the “castle-like gates” of Lubyanka to arrest
Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, a Red Army veteran and actor for the defunct
State Jewish Theatre. A Yiddish-speaking audience would have rolled with
laughter, Goldberg writes, at this pure performance, which “merges comedy,
tragedy, absurdity, fantasy, reality…” Levinson performs a triumphant
“pirouette with small-swords,” a stage trick, and escapes. So begins a mad,
comic yet deadly serious adventure in which the “Old Yid” and sidekicks attempt
to assassinate Stalin before he can follow through on his genocidal ‘Final
Solution to the Jewish Question’. Goldberg, a Russian émigré to the US in 1973
whose parents’ names were on Stalin’s lists, pulls off a tragicomic tour de
force. (Credit: Picador) Annette
Gordon-Reed and Peter S Onuf, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs Gordon-Reed won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards
for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008). Onuf is a leading
Thomas Jefferson scholar. Their ground-breaking reinterpretation of the life
and philosophy of Jefferson – the third US president – “explores the roles
he played” and the self he fashioned. They emphasize the “empire of his
imagination – “created out of the books he read, the music he played… the
people he loved and admired, his observations of the natural world, his
experiences as a revolutionary, his foreign travels, his place at the head of a
society and a government, his religion, and his role as one who enslaved other
men and women”. They cover his Virginia
origins, his years in Paris
and his thinking on slavery, race and Christianity. This fascinating study
reshapes our perception of Jefferson. (Credit:
Liveright) Adam Hochschild, Spain
in Our Hearts Hochschild, author of the searing King Leopold’s Ghost,
examines the complex political and social aspects of the Spanish Civil War,
which began when Francisco Franco led a military uprising against the
democratically elected Spanish
Republic. He was backed
by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Hochschild calls the war “a moral and
political touchstone”, and “the opening act of the larger war to come”. He
includes Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell in his narrative (and draws his
title from Albert Camus: “Men of my generation have had Spain in our
hearts… It was there that they learned one can be right and still be beaten…”).
But his primary focus is on the 2800 Americans who went to war while the US, in an
isolationist mode, stayed out of the conflict. (Credit: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt) Marie NDiaye,
Ladivine French-born NDiaye has won the Prix Femina, the Prix
Goncourt, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize. The
consequences of racial passing are at the core of her moving, ultimately
radiant new novel (translated from the French by Jordan Stump). It opens with
Clarisse Riviere traveling for her monthly visit to her mother Ladivine in Bordeaux, passing back
into her girlhood identity as Malinka. Clarisse visits her mother – “the object
of her shame” – in secret, keeping her identity hidden from her family. Her
mother’s neighbours have learned not to speak to Ladivine’s white daughter.
Over time, living a lie makes Clarisse distant and uncaring. Her husband leaves
her, and several years later she is murdered by a lover. Magically, her spirit
lingers as a brown dog following her mother and her daughter, “protecting or
tracking her, body and soul.” (Credit: Knopf) /By BBC/
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