#11: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Best of the Millennium
September 22, 2009 | 6

coverA few months ago, I got a poke to do one of those silly “do this now” things on Facebook. We were asked to pick up the book lying nearest to us and quote a sentence from it on a particular page–I think it was page 58. The book near me at that moment, though I’d read it sometime prior, was Junot Díaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I grabbed it, flipped open to the directed page–and found there one perfect sentence. I remember thinking, “Damn, you can flip this book open anywhere and find perfection. Wow.” This book has gotten tons of attention–major prizes, big reviews, bestselling status–but it’s nice to see that a novel so well-crafted, so funny, so idiosyncratic, so…wondrous, can still capture the imagination of large audiences. If you haven’t read it yet, you should.

Junot Díaz’s Year in Reading.
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is the author of numerous articles and essays and of four novels. Her latest, The Taste of Salt, will be published in September. You can find out more about her work at her website www.marthasouthgate.com.

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#10: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Best of the Millennium
September 23, 2009 | 1

They say that most novelists end up writing the same book over and over again: a truth which manifests itself differently in the work of different novelists. In the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, it takes the form of an incredibly elegant formal unity.

Never Let Me Go, like The Remains of the Day and, to a lesser extent, When We Were Orphans, is a mystery in which a Martian-like, yet strangely affecting first-person narrator (a young female clone, an aging butler, a middle-aged celebrity detective) deciphers the dimly sensed evil (human organ-harvesting, Nazi collaboration, a family crime) underlying an idyllic quintessentially English institution (a beautiful manor house, a posh boarding school, the British colony in Shanghai). Despite the radically different settings, all the three novels share the same key formal elements: a painstakingly unraveled historical mystery, constructed on the time scale of a single human life; a journey to track down characters from the past who have survived, inconceivably, into the present; an unhappy love story; the haunting sense of a decayed idyll that remains, despite its historical rottenness, the locus of all the most beautiful and meaningful impressions in somebody’s life.

In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro brilliantly and heartbreakingly executes the same retrospective plot in the unlikely chronotope of science fiction. This book made me cry for days. Did I feel a little bit exploited—did I feel that sci-fi rule-bending had been used to construct an otherwise inconceivably tragic story of doomed young love? I did, but it was worth it.

Read an excerpt from Never Let Me Go.
The Lion, The Witch and Ishiguro
Krin Gabbard on Never Let Me Go
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6 comments:

  1. I liked this book a lot, but I think I might have loved it if it had come with a Spanish/slang glossary in the back. Or is the point to not really know what these things mean, and to just let the sound of the words and their context sort of imply a feeling/image?

    Ugh, I hate talking about literature. I always feel like the one idiot who didn’t get the joke.

  2. Am I the only one who read this and thought it was pretty good, until the ending? It’s like Diaz got bored at the end and just rushed it out. It felt like a big cop out.

  4. Pingback: Coming in at No. 11 « Meanderings

  5. The ending also gave me shivers. And made me happy. I thought this book was completely magnificent. I also have Drown, a collection of short stories by the same author. Definitely reccommend it!

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#3: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Best of the Millennium
September 24, 2009 | 13

I read Cloud Atlas with two contradictory impulses: first to let loose a yodel, dance a fandango, wrestle an alligator, seize strangers by the hair and hold them firmly until they, too, read this shockingly beautiful Matryoshka doll of a book; second, to pout alone in the darkness under my desk. My first reaction was as a dazzled reader who saw each movement of the book as David Mitchell one-upping himself with his genre-bending (historical, mystery, science fiction), his sublime prose, his broad and breathtaking ideas. The other was as a writer who was intimidated almost to petrification by the mere idea that such a book exists and was written by someone of my generation. It is hard not to make sweeping pronouncements after having lived this book, and, still under its spell three years after I read it, I would say: yes, yes, yes, this is the way novels should be written, with such electric ambition, with such exhilarating sweep.

Read an excerpt from Cloud Atlas.
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#12: Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

Best of the Millennium
September 22, 2009

Life is impossible; it can’t possibly continue; and then it does. Existential despair accretes; time passes; the color of one’s despair changes. Time seems to change its velocity, its direction. Suddenly everything is different. The title story in Twilight of the Superheroes describes this problem so gently and bravely: “And yet, here he is, he and his friends, falling like so much landfill into the dump of old age. … Yet one second ago, running so swiftly toward it, they hadn’t even seen it.” Deborah Eisenberg’s stories remind me of William Maxwell’s; they are wise, kind, careful, benevolent.

The Millions on Eisenberg.
Eisenberg a literary genius.
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