TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Hardcover Fiction Top 5 at a Glance1. FORD COUNTY, by John Grisham2. THE LOST SYMBOL, by Dan Brown3. KINDRED IN DEATH, by J. D. Robb4. THE GATHERING STORM, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson5. THE LACUNA, by Barbara Kingsolver feeds.nytimes.com |
Invisible by Paul Auster | Book review Paul Auster's latest suffers from a surfeit of clashing voices and lack of credible characters, says Edward DocxPaul Auster is a writer with many skills: a disarming directness of style, a subtle ability to render subtle psychology, a connoisseur's feel for the novel form – its limits and its play – and much besides. Invisible is the story of Adam Walker who, while a student at Columbia University in 1967, meets a visiting Swiss professor, Rudolf Born. Born offers him money to found and run a literary magazine. Walker then sleeps with Margot, Born's girlfriend, for "five straight nights" while Born is away.On Born's return, they are held up at gunpoint; Born pulls a knife and Walker is horrified to see him use it. Walker runs off to fetch an ambulance, but Born and the would-be mugger are gone. Walker later discovers that said mugger died of multiple stab wounds "gouged into his chest and stomach". Freaked out, Walker moves in with his sister and starts sleeping with her. Freaked out even more, Walker moves to Paris where he sleeps with Margot again and decides to exact revenge on Born (who escaped New York for Paris) by revealing to Born's new woman, Hélène, the truth about the man she is set to marry – which plan he will execute through winning the friendship and confidence of her frumpy daughter, Cécile.The story is told as three parts – a manuscript that has been written by the dying Walker in 2007 and then sent bit by bit to Walker's old college friend, Jim Freeman, himself an author. Freeman thus narrates passages relating to the modern-day Walker. At the end, Cécile takes over the narrative to describe her trip to visit a fat and elderly Born on the island of Quillia in the Caribbean.The problem is that not enough of this contortive plot is realised as vivid or vital writing on the page; the novel feels gestural, assembled, a simulacra with neither the power that such subject matter should pack nor the prose-master persuasiveness that another structurally playful author – Nabokov, say – might deploy.The writing has an anonymous neutrality: at one point Born, "flashed another one of his enigmatic smiles"; at another, Freeman doesn't want to "entrust [his] letter to the vagaries of the US Postal Service". All three narrators are obsessed with cultural citation. When Walker goes to see Carl Dreyer's film Ordet, it reminds him "of a piece of music, as if the film were a visual translation of a two-part invention by Bach".The novel is forever pirouetting around such cultural totems, and characters are elucidated by the listing of which authors, composers, painters they like. The result is that there is something irredeemably campus about the reading experience – like listening to a postgraduate trying to impress female first years. I realise Auster's fans will be screaming that I have missed the point. Walker is a student – and he's the narrator, not Auster! Walker is precocious! And he's dying and not a very good writer! Come on, Docx, doesn't Freeman (a cipher for Auster) consider the writing of Walker (another cipher) and remark that he had "noticed a slow but ineluctable dwindling of strength, a loss of attention to detail"?Well, yes, he does. But against this, all of Auster's narrators share the above traits. Additionally, what exactly is a good author doing hiding behind a bad and diminishing narrator for the greater part of an entire book? Besides which, in the end, this meta-fictive point (if that is what we are dealing with here) about the unreliability of narrators, fiction, identity is a rather tedious one these days – and, in any case, long ago and better made by other writers: Joyce, Borges, Wilkie bloody Collins…It won't do. Auster's various post-modernisms seem so many strategies for evasion. That's how the whole book feels: evasive. And that's what, I think, lies at the root of all the games – the cultural totems, the narrator sleights, the don't-look-at-me-guv'nor prose style: they are all a way of avoiding the nightmarishly difficult task of actually writing about character, rendering a scene vividly, describing incest. I cannot help but compare Invisible with Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater (Roth was also 62 when he wrote it) or Coetzee's Disgrace (Coetzee was 59) and feel the lack of all that is powerful, incandescent, disturbing, mighty and Shakespearean in their works, both of which deal in the real stuff of very human agony – death and disturbing sexuality. Instead, reading Auster feels like watching one of those actors who wants you to admire their performance rather than forget that it is a performance at all.Edward Docx's most recent novel is Self Help (Picador)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 |
Books on Science: A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing A new book is a tribute to a Microsoft researcher, lost at sea in 2007, who argued that computing was transforming science. feeds.nytimes.com |
Too much rap, not enough proper poetry, says former laureate Teachers underestimate pupils' intelligence and deprive them of challenging writing, says Andrew MotionTeachers are failing to stretch children's imaginations by giving them football chants and raps in literature lessons rather than poems that challenge them, the former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion said today.Schools are underestimating pupils' intelligence and stifling their creativity by only offering them chants and raps or the verses of children's poets, such as Spike Milligan and Roald Dahl, Motion told the North of England Education Conference in York.Motion, poet laureate for a decade until last year, said many English teachers were not "equipped" to teach poetry and simply passed on their anxiety for the subject. Less than half of teachers are English graduates, he said, and lack confidence when teaching poetry.He attacked the education system for its "tick box" culture, which he said put too little emphasis on fuelling the imagination and pupils' emotional response to literature.Teachers are being trained to tell children that to explain a poem all you did was "add up the similes, spot the alliteration and say something about the verse structure," he said.Schools should hold a national poetry recital contest, similar to the spelling bees in the US, he said. He called for a revival in learning verses by heart and for pupils to be taught "more challenging" poems, such as those of Geoffrey Hill and Don Paterson."The best poems for children are not necessarily those written with children in mind," he said."Our challenge now is to make sure that our pupils enjoy the range of writing available to them … It's very tempting and especially with students who are already frightened or suspicious or disliking of poetry, to coax them towards it by offering something that appears to speak directly to their experience, by choosing a poem about football for a football-loving boy, a rap for a fan of Eminem."There's nothing wrong with this tactic, provided we recognise that matching like with like is only the beginning of a process. If we give our students only one kind of poetry to read, a kind they immediately recognise, it would be like taking someone to a palace, parking them at the door, and telling them to go no further … Why, after all, should we pretend that poetry is always and inevitably easy; it isn't … Get over it. We need to better equip teachers to engage with a range of poetry – wider than is presently on offer."Motion said while many teachers hold poetry writing classes for their pupils, many others believed that if they paid significant attention to children's imaginations, "they were betraying their duties to their charges by straying off-piste".He said: "At the moment, our teacher-training programmes are producing people who are simply not equipped to teach it. Worse than that, I'd say we are producing a lot of teachers who remember being anxious around the reading and writing of poetry when they were children themselves, and who are therefore very likely to end up communicating that anxiety, rather than anything else."By developing children's imaginations, teachers gave children confidence and insight into their characters, Motion said."To develop the imagination is self-validating as well as self-extending," he said. "Poetry is at once a very primitive and a very subtle thing – an expression of our fundamentally human and passionate delight in rhythms, sounds and patterns, and also of our sophisticated need for ingenuity. It is the written form that puts us most deeply in touch with ourselves, because it is a hotwire to our strongest feelings. … The appetite for poetry is fundamental to us as human beings. What on earth have we done, producing an education system in this country which allows the majority of people, by the time they hit puberty, to think otherwise?"In 2007, Ofsted said pupils in England studied too many lightweight poems in primary school and that many teachers did not know enough about poetry. This led them to teach a limited range of work by poets, such as Spike Milligan, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.Schools were encouraged to hold contests for the worst and best football chants and invite a rapper into lessons as part of the government-inspired National Year of Reading in 2008.EnglishPrimary schoolsSecondary schoolsSchoolsTeachingPoetryPoet laureateAndrew MotionJessica Shepherdguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Paperback Nonfiction Top 5 at a Glance1. THE BLIND SIDE, by Michael Lewis2. THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin3. EAT, PRAY, LOVE, by Elizabeth Gilbert4. ARE YOU THERE, VODKA? IT'S ME, CHELSEA, by Chelsea Handler5. THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls feeds.nytimes.com |