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| Invisible by Paul Auster Joanna Briscoe reads a novel that rocket-charges the reader through games and structural devicesPaul Auster has created what amounts to his own, self-referential fictional world over the years, and Invisible is packed with typical Auster tropes. This is his 13th novel, and at times he seems to be both celebrating and lightly mocking his own oeuvre. There is the oddly detached male narrator roaming New York; a random dramatic incident that alters the course of a life; ruminations on the nature of writing, language and identity; multiple narrators; stories within stories; and general intertextual gadding about. And, as ever, fragments of Auster himself seem to feature – in this case, divided into two characters.Invisible concerns the young Adam Walker, "a tormented Adonis", a notably gorgeous and intellectually gifted Jewish American born in the same year as Paul Auster, who studies at the same university. Or does it? And is he? And does he? As so often with such playful meta-fiction, we are increasingly uncertain. As is later revealed, there are different takes on the past, as well as projections of desire that warp or reveal, and Invisible is not so much a tale told by an unreliable narrator as a series of harmonising and clashing testimonies.However, this makes the novel sound more arcane than it is. It is so well paced that it rocket-charges the reader through all its games and structural devices, and is a tantalising page-turner of great – if deceptive – lucidity. If we follow the initial and most persuasive version of the story, we are in Manhattan in 1967, where Adam Walker, Columbia undergraduate and aspiring poet, meets visiting professor Rudolf Born and his girlfriend Margot. The subject of Vietnam is ever present, and Born is a man of contradictory and frequently explosive political opinions. Born flatters Adam by proposing that he finance a literary magazine to be edited by the gifted student, and so begins an alliance that sees Adam engage in an affair with Margot and witness the increasingly unstable Born murder a young man who threatens him.The book segues within moments from dinner party chatter to calculated slaughter. This is the incident on which the novel turns, and which skews Adam's life, its legacy of guilt and fury determining the direction he will take. Born, "a burnt-out soul, a shattered wreck of a person", evades arrest by decamping to Paris. Shortly thereafter, Adam follows, clearly subconsciously impelled to seek retribution, and soon he's back in Margot's bed and on Born's radar. Born, with his "blur of sophistication and depravity", is such an extravagantly creepy character, given to brilliance, manipulation and rage, that both his presence and absence cast a shadow over the entire novel. Adam's plot to exact revenge on him is so ill devised that it fails to be entirely convincing.The story is unexpectedly taken up in 2007 by an acquaintance of Adam's at Columbia, who is now a famous author. Enter Paul Auster Mark II (possibly). Decades are covered in a sketch: the happily married Adam Walker has never achieved literary success, working instead in legal aid as a result of his role in Born's escape from justice, and he is now writing his memoir as fast as he can before he dies. In the chapters and notes he sends to the author, he writes about the death of his brother in childhood, and his own consensual sexual relationship with his sister, an episode that is later reinterpreted by the sister herself.With the satanic Born still at large, a desperate need to know – that primitive but vital fictional engine – sends the reader scurrying to a conclusion that is more satisfying in terms of its ideas than its emotional resolution. By this time, the voices of the two possible Paul Austers have merged into one, the tale returning to the first person via the second and third, the momentum of menace increasingly powerful. Some of our assumptions come clattering down around us in a strangely satisfying way and, in exposing the mechanics of his storytelling, Auster paradoxically achieves an intensely felt authenticity. This is a fascinating and highly accomplished novel.Joanna Briscoe's novel Sleep with Me is published by Bloomsbury.FictionPaul Austerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Crime hotspots From Carl Hiaasen's Florida to Sara Paretsky's Chicago, novelist CJ Box identifies the US's best criminal tour guidesCJ Box's series of Joe Pickett novels, as well as standalone books, have made him the winner of the Anthony Award, the Prix Calibre 38, the Macavity Award, the Gumshow Award, the Barry Award and the Edgar Award for the Best novel of 2008. US bestsellers, they have been translated into 21 languages. Box lives with his family outside Cheyenne, Wyoming. Visit his website at www.cjbox.net. Three Weeks to Say Goodbye, hailed by Harlan Coben as "a non-stop thrill ride" is his UK debut, and is published this week.Buy CJ Box books at the Guardian bookshop"The dirty little secret about the very best contemporary crime novels is that it often doesn't matter much who did it and why, but where the story is set. Solving the crime is simply a vehicle to travel through the territory. Reading the best crime novels about specific locations by authors who live there and own their home turf is like visiting with the ultimate know-it-all guide who moonlights as a voyeur."I write thrillers set in the Rocky Mountains because I want to shine a clear-eyed light on the region, its issues and people. That light can alternate between loving and harsh, but it must provide clarity. My latest novel, Three Weeks to Say Goodbye, is based on a true story in which a young couple is ordered to return their adopted baby to certain danger. It's set in Denver and Montana. When you read it I want you to feel like you're there – struggling, suffering, and plotting righteous revenge with the characters while the snow falls and the mountains loom over your shoulder and your life and hopes plunge into a death spiral. And feel, once the book is over, that you've been someplace very real."1. Washington DC / George Pelecanos No one writes about race, class, crime, and urban dreams and nightmares in the US capital better than Pelecanos. By turns brutal, nuanced, and tender, this is the DC visitors rarely experience. Suggested titles: The Night Gardener, Right As Rain, Hell to Pay.2. Montana / James CrumleyThere's a reason why so many first-class crime novelists revered the late James Crumley. Crumley resurrected the tough but literary crime novel and set it under a Big Sky and practically defined contemporary American noir. Suggested titles: The Last Good Kiss, The Mexican Tree Duck, The Wrong Case. 3. Los Angeles / Michael Connelly Although it's almost sacrilegious not to give this one over to Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy, Connelly's Harry Bosch novels capture the contemporary feel, look, sights, sounds, and politics of The City of Angels with unerring accuracy and verve. Suggested titles: The Harry Bosch novels, starting with The Black Echo.4. New York and New Jersey / Richard PriceA language star, Price specialises in intense long-form cinéma vérité –style novels of fully realised characters in a you-are-there urban world. By the time you finish his novels you feel like you grew up in the Big Apple. Suggested titles: Lush Life, Clockers, The Wanderers.5. Louisiana / James Lee BurkeBurke incorporates the sights, smells, weather, politics, villains, and multiple histories and tangled racial storylines of south Louisiana into a world of its own that would be otherwise impenetrable. You'll find yourself sweating and smelling swamp water along with flawed hero Dave Robicheaux. Suggested titles: Purple Cane Road, Tin Roof Blowdown.6. Baltimore / Laura LippmanLippman is a former journalist who grew up in Baltimore and returned to write about it from the inside out. Like a painter, she illustrates the mean and kind streets of this fascinatingly American city on a big canvas. Suggested titles: Baltimore Blues, What the Dead Know, To the Power of Three.7. New Mexico / Tony HillermanWeaving the American Indian culture as well as the landscape of the desert south-west into crime fiction, Hillerman pioneered his own outdoor/mystery genre. Grounded in real-life problems and local colour, Hillerman's novels are a psychic guidebook to the region. Suggested titles: Skinwalkers, The Thief of Time. 8. Boston / Dennis Lehane This is not the Boston of Brahmins and blue-bloods, but blistering tour-de-force examinations of the gritty neighborhoods of Dorchester and multi-generational relationships that are the beating heart of the city. The past is always present and passions run deep, dark and long. Buckle up. Suggested titles: Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone.9. Florida / Carl HiaasenCarl Hiaasen satirises the changing culture of his beloved Florida in huge, hilarious, and bitter brush-strokes. No one is safe: tourists, developers, politicians, rednecks, do-gooders, or the overly zealous (although environmentalists come out OK). Eccentrics abound. After all, it's Florida. Suggested titles: Double Whammy, Stormy Weather, Sick Puppy.10. Chicago / Sara ParetskyFor those curious about "The Chicago Way" and the most American of all American big cities, Paretsky's flinty female protagonist VI Warshawski charts a particularly tough-minded course through some very authentic neighborhoods. Filled with unapologetic opinions and sharp elbows, this is the Chicago visitors love, loathe, or both.Suggested titles: Toxic Shock, BlacklistCrime booksguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Hardcover Nonfiction Top 5 at a Glance1. GOING ROGUE, by Sarah Palin2. STONES INTO SCHOOLS, by Greg Mortenson3. HAVE A LITTLE FAITH, by Mitch Albom4. ARGUING WITH IDIOTS, written and edited by Glenn Beck, Kevin Balfe and others5. OPEN, by Andre Agassi feeds.nytimes.com |
Nuclear Monopolist An examination of the brief period between August 1945 and August 1949 in which only the United States possessed atomic weapons. feeds.nytimes.com |
Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel | Book review Robert Collins is impressed by the Bafta-winning film director's Kafka-like depiction of brutalityReturning to Alsace-Lorraine at the end of the Second World War after two years in a concentration camp, Brodeck, a meek surveyor of flora and fauna, is commissioned to write a report of how people in his village came to murder a travelling artist who had settled in there, a man they called only the Anderer (the "Other"). This beautifully composed Kafkaesque fable, by the writer and director of the Bafta-winning film I've Loved You So Long, offers a sensitive meditation on persecution and brutality. Though the fable-like depiction of pogroms and concentration camps can feel strangely sanitised, Claudel's narrative of violence lurking below the surface of a small community is enchanting.Robert Collinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |