Why do I do things? My head is filled of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy stuff right now, so I feel like Zaphod when he realizes he’s locked off part of his brains from himself. But, instead of stealing space ships, I’m like why did I request a six hundred page Austrian satirical play from the 1920s to read? What possessed me to do that? At least I managed to request it in English and didn’t get six hundred pages of Austrian-German vernacular when my German skills are roughly on par with reading books in German that have one noun per page, i.e. Katze (underneath picture of cat), Hund (underneath picture of dog), etc.

So why do I do things? I don’t know.

So I spent the past week reading my six hundred page Austrian satirical play from the 1920s. I read an act a day, plus the intro and the glossary at the back. I have an epub and there doesn’t seem to be any clever way of getting back and forth between the glossary and the play itself (am I missing something on my kobo or is it really just not possible to do this simply), so I simply read the glossary after finishing the play. That was no real problem. Likely I missed a lot of the specific political jokes, but I don’t feel like I was really missing that much. Most of what the play says is this: the war benefits the rich, manipulates the press, and sends the poor to their deaths. So lots of fat men bemoaning a lack of butter while war amputees wander about in the foreground. About five hundred pages of this reiterated, then a descent into a Boschian bacchanal of talking hyenas and Martians. I seem to read a lot of books where aliens suddenly appear. Do I have some subliminal interest in surprise aliens? I’ll add that question to the why do I do things one.

Basically The Last Days of Mankind is an unperformable play. There are stage directions such as continue for two hours and I think something like forty googol characters. I don’t even know how one would stage certain parts, although I guess projecting film on a screen behind might solve that problem. I couldn’t help thinking that if one is going to write an unperformable play, why not recast it as a novel? I guess art comes to the artist as it comes, but essentially, long soliloquies in the play are taken from newspaper articles of the time, so there are pages and pages that already reads less like a play and more like a creative non-fiction essay. But it’s a play. So a play it is.

I know I’m sounding really down on The Last Days of Mankind, but it ends up transcending a lot of my complaints (not the one about surprise aliens though). I gave it four stars out of five. It’s surprisingly prescient for a play from the 1920s. There’s the foreshadowing of Nazis with the casual antisemitism (although Kraus was ethnically Jewish, so it isn’t necessarily his antisemitism, more a comment on the antisemitism of the time). There’s a harsh critique of globalisation. The Grumbler, Kraus himself inserted into his own play, has media critiques that would fit into any modern issue of AdBusters. It’s surprisingly readable, in part due to Kraus and in part due to the translation, which has been, as the translators explain, modernized for an English speaking audience. But it is long, and it hits many of the same points again and again: War is Hell, in a democracy we are all complicit, and those who profit from it aim to keep it going for as long as they can. I don’t know if I needed six hundred pages to hammer that point home.

And Martians.

The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus, newly translated by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms went on sale November 24, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I took my Brownie troop to the Observatory last week (twenty-four seven year olds in a tiny, enclosed space — not my smartest idea), so it seemed fitting that the next book I reviewed was about the Cosmos. In German, the universe translates to das All, which I also wonderfully appreciate. Einstein spoke German, so there we have it — tying everything in together!

So The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe (ellipses in a title; really? Really?) reads like a science article run a little amok. It has quite a readable, polished, and leisurely tone; a bit chummy, which isn’t a problem. The odd changes in tense to present whenever something happens is off-putting. But, basically, even for a short book, it seems too long. I can see it being an article in a magazine. A book seems a stretch.

The title too seems a bit of misnomer. Einstein’s destruction of Vulcan, a purported unsighted planet between the Sun and Mercury necessary to account for Mercury’s orbit under Newtonian laws of physics, was hardly a Godzilla-Einstein coming in and purposefully stomping out Vulcan. Vulcan’s non-existence came as a consequence of Einstein’s theories of relativity, and ends up being almost a non-event. A good deal of the book is about pre-Vulcan: the initial sightings of Neptune and Uranus and how those fit so perfectly into Newtonian physics, so not even falling into the title at all. For me, I didn’t need the huge background sections on earlier astronomical outings. I mean, ha ha ha Edison shot a stuffed jackrabbit, my life isn’t changed for knowing that.

Finally, we get to Einstein and the two halves of the book: the hunt for Vulcan and let’s follow around Einstein for a bit, came together rather ineptly. It seemed like Levenson was torn between which story he wanted to tell. Both are worth telling. In a magazine article maybe. Or in a longer book with deeper focus. But in this book, it feels both like a tease and like a slog.

I don’t often read popular science books, so this was good for me, at least, even if I wasn’t particularly taken with the book. I expanded mein All, but I often skimmed the science explanations. I should work on learning how to read science. As a former scientist, I am quite lazy about that. I don’t know if, in this case, it’s me or Levenson. Did I gloss over the science because I need to work at reading non-narrative or because Levenson’s explanation didn’t grab my interest?

And, from a technical standpoint re: epubs; someone’s got to get footnotes and endnotes less awful on my kobo. Computer scientists: you have your goal!

The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe by Thomas Levenson went on sale November 3, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A few months ago, when I reviewed The Skeleton Road by Val McDiermid, I mused a little on what it would take to put something horrific into your novel. The Skeleton Road had the Balkans conflict, and I used the word, albeit kindly, disrespectful to describe its inclusion. I don’t think I’ll use words like that to describe the inclusion of the Balkan conflict into The Little Red Chairs. There’s nuance here. The horror here doesn’t supplant character development. There is horror in this world, The Little Red Chairs says. And I don’t have to justify or relativasize or explain it to you. O’Brien is smart enough and trusts us enough not to need explanation. We can be confronted with it. She trusts us to do that.

I’ve only read O’Brien once before, The House of Splendid Isolation, which took me something like six tries to get past page twenty. I couldn’t see it with that book, but with this one, I can see why she is considered one of the greats. She takes apart the narrative, the point-of-view, the tense, like threads all placed next to each other. But instead of a jumble, it’s like an abstract painting you can’t turn away from. A car wreck. You can see it coming, the downfall. O’Brien doesn’t hide who Vuk is from the reader. He’s a wolf. He’s a criminal. He’s an exterminator of people. He exists as he is, without, as I said before, explanation or justification. Evil is there. How easy it is though, like Fidelma who starts an affair with Vuk when he arrives as an alternative healter in their sleepy Irish town, to see something different. It isn’t that Fidelma is willfully blind to her lover’s past. It isn’t that she knows but chooses not to. She just doesn’t know. But can you know someone though? Ever? Truly? Always? Does Fidelma know her husband Jack? Does she know the people she meets in London? In The Hague? Anywhere? Do we know her? We all keep things from each other. The beauty of The Little Red Chairs is that what we are given of the characters is enough to support a novel that shimmers and clings like gossamer. It makes you sick but you keep reading.

So it would be perfect but isn’t. There are *shudder* dream sequences. Dreams that have meaning. Dreams that offer insight into characters. I hate that. I hate it so much. So I took away a star. The Little Red Chairs is four stars out of five. Please don’t put dreams in your novels.

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien went on sale October 29, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Since one of the stories in Past Habitual has the word topology in the title (a rather surreal story about dental cleaning and a meditation about M and W’s and dental hygienists’ bosoms), I feel justified in using topology to describe my feelings of Past Habitual by Alf Machlochlainn.

Yay math!

Let’s take the earth. I’m going to assume that most of you agree the earth is round. But locally, it doesn’t feel round. It, generally, feels pretty flat wherever one is standing. The curvature of the earth is so massive compared to a teensy-tiny person that it can feel mind-boggling that really, we’re on a big (almost) sphere when it really seems, in our perspective, to be a flat plane. Such is it with my enjoyment of Past Habitual: give me a page of the book and I’ll like it. I’ll like the writing. I’ll like the words. I’ll like the way each page pulls you right into Ireland, one of my favourite places to read about, with its complex history and shifting loyalties. But pull back far enough and I’m like “What the f*ck is going on?” because the stories tend to jump, these massive, unprepared, leaps of logic and time and characters and style and I just don’t know. I do not know how to describe it other than baffling. Globally, in respect to Past Habitual, I spent a fair deal of time being baffled.

As for style, there’s a lot of almost stream-of-consciousness, memory. The ones focusing on Ireland’s past could all be linked, all told from the same characters one may suppose. Themes reappear: the Irish War of Independence and Civil War of the 1920s, Germans coming to Ireland during the Second World War, the Catholic Church, sentences here and there in Irish. The book doesn’t explain Ireland for the non-Irish. I don’t mind that. I like the narrator’s voice most of the time — not so much when he offers to kill the kittens, but most of the time. It’s rural without being idyllic. Most of it feels true, at least, as I’ve said, locally. Globally? Incomprehensible.

Past Habitual by Alf Machlochlainn went on sale April 13, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

(I haven’t even managed to read my O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 and already 2015 has come out. I’m never going to catch up.)

I like short stories. They’re my potato chips or candy, snacking for my brain (even the serious short stories that should be more like a lump in my stomach). I pick up short story books or request them as ARCs because I like reading them. That’s why I asked for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, okay Introduction? I don’t need twenty pages of an English professor rah-rah-brigading me about short stories, then summarizing each story, then explaining to me why each story merits inclusion in the collection. Just let me at the stories! I hate introductions.

So let’s get to the stories. Hooray! Stories! But they are American. I always struggle to articulate my feelings towards American fiction. The best I’ve ever come up with is insular. There’s a self-importance too, but no one that is mean-spirited. It’s not bragging or even humble-bragging. But it’s whatever comes with the knowledge that due to population and money and global positioning and power: that being American can mean forcing an influence on the rest of the English speaking world that say me, as a Canadian, cannot force. The stories here vary between US-born to those who have chosen (or are in the process of choosing, as in Manuel Muñoz’s “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA”) to locate themselves in the States, and this tone of American-ness washes the stories out. Even the ones that are stylistically different (the first person plural of Naira Kuzmich’s “The Kingsley Drive Chorus”, the fairy tale world of Elizabeth McCracken’s “Birdsong from the Radio”, the East Africa of Lionel Shriver’s “Kilifi Creek”) are still similar. One might believe that these were all written by the same author, each story investigating the subtle. It’s like there was a memo in 2015: Forget what they told you in high school about short stories. No changes, epiphanies, or surprises. I can’t say there are a lot of surprises here. There are a lot of abrupt endings in surprise’s place. Many of these stories simply stop in another shared stylistic quirk. I can’t be satisfied with a story that simply stops. I feel ripped off.

I should also crown my favourite, simply because the three person jury each wrote a little paragraph at the end regarding their favourite and I guess that’s the thing one is supposed to do in collections like this. I’ll pick the fairy tale monstrousness of Elizabeth McCracken’s “Birdsong from the Radio”. That one didn’t need to be an American story, in the way some of the other stories needed to be set in the States or inhabited by US-ians. It chose to be an American story. That made me like it best.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 edited by Laura Furman went on sale September 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Let’s be honest: I don’t really understand how publishers choose reviewers on Netgalley. When I signed up, I figured I’d mainly get books from small-time, Canadian, publishers, but no, they reject me more often than not. Penguin Canada rejects me a lot too. But Random House seems to like me, and so gives me a new David Mitchell book to read, in August, asking nicely for me to wait to review until the week of the release. I put off reading it for as long as I could, even though the book sat there on my kobo, mocking me while I read books I didn’t really like.

You can read me Slade House whispered. But you can’t talk about me yet.

You can read me Slade House whispered. But I’m a secret.

But now, in two days, release date! I can talk talk talk about Slade House all I want!

So we have the new David Mitchell novel. After the dumb-bell weight of The Bone Clocks, Slade House is a much slighter commitment. My epub has 151 pages, 6 of which are copyright and publishing info and TK‘s. So it’s a quick read and now this is what I’ll say:

It’s a David Mitchell novel. We have the chummy, lad-like style, not too approachable, and not too posh. Like every David Mitchell novel, characters from other David Mitchell novels pop-up, mainly from The Bone Clocks. Our characters are soul vampires that appear every nine years, with a shifting narrative told three-quarters by the people they will feed upon, somewhat like Under The Skin from the victims’ standpoint. Slade House could be read as a companion, or a prequel/sequel to sections of The Bone Clocks. If you haven’t read The Bone Clocks though, it likely stands-alone. Everything is more-or-less self-contained, and the ties to The Bone Clocks (Horologists and schisms and Atemporals) don’t really need more explanation than what Mitchell gives here. The fact that this is less daunting that The Bone Clocks works in its favour: one doesn’t have to remember loads and loads and loads of stuff to enjoy the creepiness.

And, of course, I love creepiness. I also love solid, literary writing. Slade House gave me a solid, literary, creepy story, so I was happy. A+, thumbs up. Of course, nothing’s perfect — there was some weird, dream, logic and after The Unconsoled, I’ve had enough of weird, British, dream logic to last a reading lifetime. But, come on, there’s an info dump that feels natural. I could never write an info dump so beautifully. I was halfway through the dump before I realised I was in an info dump. David Mitchell is my writing G-d.

Good writing. Spooky story. It’s almost Hallowe’en. A book to read on a rainy, October evening, curled up in bed, with my USB slippers on my feet (they warm your toes!).

Slade House by David Mitchell goes on sale October 27, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

So look out boy you’re heading for the mainland

In 1985, Jack and Angela take their family from The Rock out to northern Alberta to work in the gold mines. Of course, nothing good comes of it because this is a morose melodrama, like a bad CBC tele-movie from the eighties. If one enjoys melodrama, then Saltwater Cowboys is almost a textbook example of it: exaggerated characters, caricatured villains, sensationalist plans for wealth, sex (although off-page), punishment for said sex (a very graphic detailing of a miscarriage in very stark contrast to the complete non-description of the extra-marital coitus almost immediately preceding it), poverty, despair, the pounding of chests and the falling to the knees surrounded by shouts of Why God why?

Okay, that last bit is somewhat of an exaggeration. No one bemoans God directly. But had they, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I am not the audience for melodrama. I almost always choose characters over plot, and the characters here exist only as tools of the plot. Plus the plot is nothing special. The writing is too flowery (is there a page that doesn’t have either a metaphor or a simile on it? I can’t tell). Almost from the get go, the writing has all those tics that annoy me. Let’s take an example: we start off by learning Jack has arctic-blue eyes; for some readers, knowledge like that helps them build the character. For me, I’m like Unless the colour of his eyes becomes a significant plot point later on, I do not need to know about it. And I’m not a fan of the point-of-view used here. It’s third-person veers in and out of focus, going down into one person’s world, then zooming back out to focus in on another. I would have done a tighter, sole-focused narrative, but that’s just me. And as I said, I don’t think I am the audience for this book.

The acknowledgements section says she did the Humber School for Writer’s Program. I did too, and didn’t have a helpful experience, and definitely didn’t get a novel out of it. I’m glad Dayle Furlong got a book out of it though. That warmed me up to her and made me want her to succeed. But Saltwater Cowboys read like a first draft that needs serious, and difficult, edits. Or it needs to be made into a bad CBC tele-movie staring Paul Gross. It’s that type of thing.

Saltwater Cowboys by Dayle Furlong went on sale February 28, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Man, I wish I could just be wandering about and a wood sprite would give me golden thread and then I owned a castle and also a magic sword that could chop the heads off any of my enemies. Plus a frog that talked and some rubies. And be able to fly. Or change into a donkey. Really, anything from The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, except being one of the ones ones getting my head cut off and or drowned in a barrel. Fairy tales are weird. The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales publishes a whole stack of them that were collected by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth from Eastern Bavaria in the 1850s. A puppeteer (amongst other things) found them in the files of a municipal archives in 2009. That alone seems like it could be made into a fairy tale, or at least a National Treasure. The movie could have really cartoony Nazis, like in that Indiana Jones movie I never saw (which would be all of them), and then the magic from the stories could come to life, and maybe Gorbachev could be there, and I’m focusing more on this because I don’t really have much to say about this book. They are traditional, oral, German, fairy tales. People get tricked and turned into animals and then curses are lifted and things happen for really no reason whatsoever. Characters act sort of like random particles, bumping into each other, and causing odd chaotic effects to ripple through. And no one has any real internal psychological thought; people just live and do. They don’t think.

In the car this summer, we listened to The Collected Works of The Brothers Grimm; The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales was a nice comparison piece to go along with that. You could see the tropes that linked these stories to those. It’s definitely not Disney-fied stuff, but it isn’t R-rated either. Kind of a fun diversion from the regular stream of depressing, internal-monologue, novels I read.

The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth went on sale February 24, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

My last few reviews, I feel like I’ve had something pithy with which to start off. I don’t have anything pithy here. This isn’t a novel of levity that I can summarize with a few bon mots (or a Tom Lehrer song). This is an earthy tome of a family deep in Pakistan’s tribal region. We are given three brothers, each of whom is sketched only enough so that we understand that one is The Collaborator, one the The Avoider, and the final one The Revolutionary. They are such chosen to ultimately to make the point that it is meaningless to pick a role within a corrupt system; such a system, no matter the choice, grinds everyone in it to dust.

And so, the brothers in The Shadow of the Crescent Moon make lofty speeches to each other, interrupted by an omniscient narrator eager to explain away some points. Motivations are simplistic because, in a struggle to survive, the characters lack the privilege of debating philosophy and nit-picking details. So that works. But then the simplicity and shallowness worms its way through the plot. An example: The characters are Shia and against the military Pakistani government. The Revolutionary has blown things up, targeted politicians, etc. Their cause is presented as, not just exactly, but understandable. But in an encounter with Sunni Talibs, the novel almost ridicules them and their anger. You could draw something out of that, these parallel yet separate revolutions, but nothing is. We have a novel where things are told and shown to you but it’s all shadows; nothing underneath. We have been given lyricism without depth.

The novel ends, somewhat abruptly, with one of those vague, cloudy, endings seemingly preferred by first-time novelists (does Hayat know was is going to happen?). That’s it? I thought. Times I was reminded of Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, with the ending that is that maybe shouldn’t be and the lack of markers of time. Not for the core of the novel, which takes place over the first morning of Eid, but for the past. I could never get a grasp on when exactly anything before this first day of Eid happened — a few days, a few weeks, a few months? Like in Dead Souls, with how long was Chichikov in the village, how long ago did the father die in The Shadow of the Crescent Moon? Is it important? Does it matter? It adds to the feeling of ethereality, of incredulity of the novel.

A timely novel, but a little uneven.

The Shadow of the Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto went on sale March 24, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I knew you would.

Is it strange that I am describing a book about a dead teen restricted for fifty years to an afterlife reserved exclusively for thirteen year old Americans as just as peppy as The Periodic Table of the Elements Song? (Although perhaps anything set to the tune of I Am The Very Model of a Model Major General would be peppy. Let someone record Eichmann In Jerusalem to it and we’ll see.) Of course, this comparison is set off by the fact that Oliver, the protagonist and ghostly spiritual successor to Christopher from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, has memorized the periodic table of the elements and the chapter headings are each little element boxes from the chart. But I stand by my peppiness. We have a surprisingly peppy novel.

Now I’ve looked up peppy in a thesaurus because I should probably move onto another adjective, but I don’t like any of the synonyms listed. Pep. A novel that should be as dour as not allowing yourself to kill yourself until your dead son’s cat dies is almost life-affirming instead. It’s kind of odd. Or amazing. Or odazing (my new portmanteau!). But basically, whatever it is, it works really well as a novel. The third (I never know to divide books into acts the way fancy reviewers do, so I’ll just say from around page 259 in my copy of 292 pages, which is a relatively useless measure to anyone not with my kobo) act falters slightly, knocking us down from five to four and a half stars, but that’s hardly a strike against a first novel. I’m sure Neil Smith is hardly going to shed tears because unknown-me knocked half a star off. I can’t even write my first novel. His first novel gets an A+, with a big gold sticker since he doesn’t drag out the revelations all to the end so he can have a big bang, shocked you senseless, who cares about all the character development, ending. It’s a progression that trusts the reader to keep going. I like it when writers trust me enough to let me be and don’t spend their time trying to fool me unnecessarily. Each new piece of information is unexpected but expected both. My kobo notes at the front give my guess as to what happened. They were right. But I didn’t mind as it all rolled out. I enjoyed finding out the plot.

Plus it looked like someone actually tried to make the ePub look pretty, rather than just ran a Word file through a converter. A nice change for once.

Boo by Neil Smith went on sale May 19, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.