Like American Tragedy

"But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..."Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?

This book is as much a story of what it was like living in a newly independent country in Africa in the 1960’s - 1970’s as it is a novel. The book has memorable opening lines: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”The main character is a Hindu from a well-off family, originally from India by way of eastern Africa but now settled on the west coast. He buys a store from his uncle and moves a week’s journey upriver and inland, toward the east. The family has slaves that they are ‘responsible for’ so when he moves inland he has to take a young man, a slave, with him, even though he’d rather leave him behind. His store sells household goods to the locals as well as to those who arrived by the big weekly riverboat and by dugout canoes from the interior. A lot of the town, located at a bend in the river, is burned and in ruins but he and his uncle are confident it will come back. Those who are left in town are like a mini-United Nations: most of the businesses are owned by Arabs, Indians, Belgians, Greeks and Portuguese. But it’s not a melting pot. A major theme is that everyone is of ‘two worlds.” Like the main character being of Indian and African ancestry. And the Africans from the bush are halfway between the bush world and that of the town. The town starts to thrive again and even gets an international burger chain restaurant. The main character befriends a young man whose mother is a trader by dugout. She wants her son to stay in town to get an education. Much of the story concerns his relationship with these two young men who work in his store. The country is run by an African leader. The bizarre behaviors of the African leader provide some humor and horror. The President’s PR person lives in the town with his wife (they are British) but he appears to have fallen from favor with the President. (Eventually the main character has an affair with the man’s wife.) The President uses white Belgian mercenaries to do some of his dirty work. When he decides he wants a change of leadership in the local military garrison, the Belgians come to town and go into the garrison and kill the African commanders. The President creates a type of prep school in the town, to which the African boy from the bush is admitted. But eventually the President loses interest in it and the school falls into disrepair. The President hires a white man to travel with him through the country and always be the first off the boat or train to run out into the crowd and ‘draw off the evil.’ The President makes his mother a universal symbol of womanhood and turns her into a cult figure in a process like a form of Mariolatry.Eventually the main character’s business is ‘nationalized.’ He is still employed as the manager but the firm is now run by an African appointed by the President. He knows it’s time to get out so he starts smuggling gold and elephant tusks on the side and stashing his money in an international bank so he can get out on a moment’s notice – which in the end, he barely does. There is good writing and big thoughts: “The Europeans wanted gold and slaves like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves….they got both the slaves and the statues.”Of the Africans living in the forests: “I knew other things about the forest kingdom, though. I knew that the slave people were in revolt and were being butchered back into submission. But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away.”“It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There is no right.” There are stereotypes of Africans such as of a young man who is employed in a restaurant. “Yet as soon as he was left alone he became a different person. He went vacant. Not rude, just vacant. It made you feel that while they did their jobs in various glossy settings, they were only acting for the people who employed them…the job itself was meaningless to them…”All in all I found it fascinating. A good read that kept my attention all the way through while I learned a lot. I’m adding it to my favorites. Photo of the author (1932-2018) from bbc.com

One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950's. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct.Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, Pnin brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity.

In this series of interweaving stories, Munro recreates the evolving bond between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people's airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo's stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

i have just discovered betterbooktitles.com, so i am including this, but it is a total spoiler, so be warned.(view spoiler)[\ \ (hide spoiler)]

In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model American couple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is now about to crumble. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.

Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, NY, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. Almost magically, the line between fantasy & historical fact, between real & imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud & Emiliano Zapata slip in & out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family & other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler & a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

Written between 1873 and 1884 and published posthumously in 1903, The Way of All Flesh is regarded by some as the first twentieth-century novel. Samuel Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood shines an iconoclastic light on the hypocrisy of a Victorian clerical family's domestic life. It also foreshadows the crumbling of nineteenth-century bourgeois ideals in the aftermath of the First World War, as well as the ways in which succeeding generations have questioned conventional values.Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement," this chronicle of the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex spans four generations, focusing chiefly on the relationship between Ernest and his father, Theobald. Written in the wake of Darwin's Origin of Species, it reflects the dawning consciousness of heredity and environment as determinants of character. Along the way, it offers a powerfully satirical indictment of Victorian England's major institutions—the family, the church, and the rigidly hierarchical class structure.

In this classic, John le Carre's third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he created a world unlike any previously experienced in suspense fiction. With unsurpassed knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, le Carre brings to light the shadowy dealings of international espionage in the tale of a British agent who longs to end his career but undertakes one final, bone-chilling assignment. When the last agent under his command is killed and Alec Leamas is called back to London, he hopes to come in from the cold for good. His spymaster, Control, however, has other plans. Determined to bring down the head of East German Intelligence and topple his organization, Control once more sends Leamas into the fray -- this time to play the part of the dishonored spy and lure the enemy to his ultimate defeat.

The thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity’s capacity for compassion and hope.Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, in debt, and unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all.•New translation• Includes introduction, suggestions for further reading, filmography, chronology, explanatory notes, and glossary

‘I’ve not always been what I am now’In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Subtitled ‘A Story of a Man of Character’, Hardy’s powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town.This edition includes an introduction, chronology of Hardy’s life and works, the illustrations for the original Serial Issue, place names, maps, glossary, full explanatory notes as well as Hardy’s prefaces to the 1895 and 1912 editions.

As described by Atkinson in the NY Times: "A scornful feature editor of a newspaper picks an ambitious young reporter to conduct the advice of the lovelorn column. Ambitious, opportunistic, 'Miss Lonelyhearts,' as the conductor of the column is inevitably dubbed, begins with contempt of the correspondents and confidence in his own cleverness. As time goes on, the genuineness of the agony in the letters that come in gets under the skin of the columnist. He is distressed to find himself presiding over a monstrous swindle. For he is an idealist in collision with humanity, as his diabolical managing editor expresses it."

When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe by her wealthy Aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to determine her own fate, does not hesitate to turn down two eligible suitors. She then finds herself irresistibly drawn to Gilbert Osmond, who, beneath his veneer of charm and cultivation, is cruelty itself. A story of intense poignancy, Isabel's tale of love and betrayal still resonates with modern audiences.

The authoritative version of the brilliant first novel by the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. A great novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried, in a completely revised translation that is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.In this new English-language version of Kundera's classic first novel, completely revised by the author to incorporate the most accurate portions of two previous translations plus his own corrections, the narrator Ludvik wonders, "What if History plays jokes?" This politically charged question, coupled with Ludvik's fate as an unintentional dissident, struck a chord in Czech readers; the novel's 1967 publication was a key literary event of the Prague Spring. Looking back on the tense, McCarthy-like atmosphere of the late 1940s, it chronicles the disastrous results of Ludvik's prankish postcard to a girlfriend criticizing the Czech communist regime. He is expelled from the Communist Party, forced to leave the university and join a special army unit with other enemies of the state. Years later, after he has resumed his studies and become a successful scientist, his lingering anger at the man who engineered his expulsion culminates in an act of destructive sexual revenge that serves only to show Ludvik he has never really understood any woman and is indeed the butt of one of history's many cruel jokes. The fresh descriptions and masterful employment of several narrators testify to Kundera's power as a novelist, unmistakable even in this early work.

Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of the "Daily Beast", has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on a dinner-party tip from Mrs Algernon Smith, he feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising little war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. One of Waugh's most exuberant comedies, "Scoop" is a brilliantly irreverent satire of "Fleet Street" and its hectic pursuit of hot news.

Life is full of missed opportunities and hard decisions. Sometimes it’s difficult to know what to actually do. Dubliners creates an image of an ever movie city, of an ever moving exchange of people who experience the reality of life. And that’s the whole point: realism. Not everything goes well, not everything is perfectly constructed. Life is random and unpredictable. If we’re not careful it may escape from us entirely. There are two types of stories in Dubliners. The first, and by far the most effective, are those associated with despair, nihilism and death. The second type deals with more ordinary aspects of modern life, the representation of the city and social exchanges. As a collection they provide an image of dark, murky city struggling to cope with the problems associated with rapid urbanisation. The stories do not intertwine, but you are left with the impression that they are not that far from each other: their proximity feels close as you read further into each one. The true mastery of Joyce’s writing reveals itself in what he doesn’t say, the subtle suggestions, the lingering questions, as each story closes without any sense of full resolution. And, again, is this not true of real life? In narrative tradition there is a structured beginning, middle and end, but in the reality of existence it doesn’t quite work this way. Life carries on. It doesn’t have a form of narrative closure, a convenient wrapping up of plot, after each wound we take in life. It carries on. We carry on. And for the Dubliners isolation carries on. \ “He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.” \

Samson Young, first-person narrator of this Martin Amis novel, is a somewhat jaded, frequently sarcastic and acerbic 40-something intellectual literary writer from, not surprisingly, New York City. But his hard-edged Big Apple voice is absolutely pitch-perfect for the story he is telling, a story involving a host of memorable and very human characters, not to mention a couple of super-human characters: an Incredible Hulk-like toddler and one doozy of a MAN MAGNET, and, yes, indeed, that’s spelled with all capital letters. Meet the lady at the center of the novel’s vortex, Ms. Nicola Six – modern day Helen of Troy, X-rated femme fatale and manifestation of goddess Kali all rolled up into one – everything you always wanted and everything you never wanted, your most cherished dream and your most dreaded nightmare, complete with Eastern European accent, mysterious Middle Eastern origins, Ms. World face and figure, shiny dark hair and even shinier dark eyes. Oh, my goodness, what a gal. London Fields is a loose, baggy monster if you are looking for a tight-knit murder mystery; but if you enjoy your novels with many characters finely portrayed in gritty, grimy detail along with generous portions of philosophical musing thrown in along the way, then you will enjoy taking your time with its 470 pages. Now, on one level, the men and women are stereotypes representing a particular social and cultural class, but on another level Amis fills out his characters with such vivid, visceral descriptions, their eccentricities, their passions, their intense emotions and desires, in a way, I almost had the feeling I was reading an epic with the streets of London standing in for the walls of Troy – modern city life as the ultimate human blood sport. One major character – Keith Talent, low-class grunge par excellence, a 29-year old addicted to liquor, pornography and sex, has made a life-long career out of cheating and steeling. Any time Keith opens his mouth we hear an open sewer of words – thick, coarse, vulgar and garbled. If there was ever an example of Wittgenstein’s “The limits of your language are the limits of your world.”, Keith is our man. From what I’ve said, you might think Keith would be totally despicable, a character incapable of our empathy, yet, through the magic of Amis’ fiction, we feel Keith’s pain. By way of example, here is a scene after Nicola, posing as a social worker, barged uninvited into his cramped, dirty, pint-sized home and accused Keith’s wife and Keith of being too poor and too ignorant to properly care for their baby girl. Shortly thereafter, Keith is at Nicola’s apartment and he looks at her and in his look he says: “Home was his secret. Nobody had ever been there before. Oh, there had been ingress: rentmen and census people, the police, and cheating electricians and would-be plumbers and so on as well as real social workers and probations officers – but nobody he knew. Not ever. Only the dog, and the woman, and the child: the insiders. They, too, were secrets. Home was his terrible secret. Home was his dirty little secret. And now the secret was out.”Words are exchanged. Keith tells Nicola repeatedly she “shouldn’t’ve fucking done it”. Nicola replies “You didn’t want me to know, did you, that you lived like a pig.”. Keith says, “That’s so . . . That’s so out of order.” We understand the humanness of Keith’s plight – no matter how crappy and filthy his living conditions, to have his private space violated and be called a pig by such a woman. Second major character – Guy Clinch, a wealthy, refined, well-educated gentleman with the heart of a love poet reminds me of the 1950-60s British actor Terry-Thomas. Here is Guy in Nicola’s apartment, letting her know how rude men can be about women and sex: “Guy got to his feet and came forward. In no uncertain terms, and with his mind half-remembering some analogous recital, some previous exercise in illusion-shattering (when? how long ago? what about?), he told her what Keith and his kind were really like, how they thought of women as chunks of meat, their dreams of violence and defilement.” Guy explaining the sexual dynamics of men and women to Nicola is like a university student explaining Machiavelli to Shakespeare’s Richard III. Talk about black humor. Among the many other characters, one of my personal favorites is Marmaduke, Guy Clinch’s son who needs an army of nannies to keep him from tearing the house apart and wreaking havoc on adults, especially his mother and most especially his father. When his wife Hope was pregnant, Guy was worried about protecting his son from the world; after colossal Marmaduke’s birth, he’s worried about protecting the world from his son. Here is a taste of what our first-person narrator Samson has to say about the child: “Turn your back for ten seconds and he’s in the fire or out the window or over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he’s the right height for that, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you’ll usually find him with both hands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of his playpen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that some nanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva.” Lastly, a word about the novel’s structure: Samson Young is in the process of writing a novel about the very novel we hold in our hands, offering ongoing critique and color commentary on the art of his telling and the act of our reading. Metafiction, anyone? Nothing like heaping another layer (or two or three) on top of an already many-layered work of literary fiction.

A New York Review Books OriginalThe lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others—is the subject of this, Tove Jansson’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson takes a darker look at the subjects that animate the best of her work, from her sensitive tale of island life, The Summer Book, to her famous Moomin stories: solitude and community, art and life, love and hate. Snow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody’s talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for the white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, appears to be Katri’s opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has something Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna’s life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusions.