Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa

Conversation in the Cathedral was a challenging read. Partly because I felt underinformed about Peruvian political history, but largely because it has a very confusing narrative style. For the first hundred (or couple hundred, if I'm honest) pages, I kept wishing it was one of those books that had a cast of characters that explains who's who and how they're all connected. New characters would pop up with no introduction. And aside from the little bits of the book that make up the present-day titular conversation (an actual conversation, between two people, at a bar called la Catedral), it was often hard to know when anything was taking place. (The bulk of the book's narrative spans a decade or so around the 1950s.) The same paragraph might include - in alternating sentences - multiple narratives, among different characters, around events taking place years apart. It takes effort to unpack, but the effort is worth it. The way the stories are woven together in the narrative reflects the complex interwoven relationships among the characters, and feels very true to life.

Conversation in the Cathedral is divided into four large sections and I found the reading easier after I got through the first section. I did something I rarely do while reading this book: I took breaks and read other books in between. Between the first and second sections, I read Richard Price's The Whites. Between the second and third sections, I read Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches, and between the third and fourth sections, I read the remaining two books in Deborah Harkness' All Souls trilogy. Part of me wishes I had read Conversation in the Cathedral straight through. I think I probably missed or lost some things by spacing it out the way I did. However, if I had read it straight through, I think I would have felt it was quite a slog. (I felt that way a bit anyway, and maybe it was exacerbated by the fact that it took me so long to finish... because I kept breaking to read other books?? idk.) Anyway, stopping in the midst of books is not something I do often. I did it earlier this year when I was reading The Obscene Bird of Night and I felt like it was the right decision at the time. The only other time I recall having done this successfully was many, many years ago when I read The Long Day Wanes. In that case, I stopped (at a well chosen, between "books" stopping point) without entirely intending to go back, and found I was really glad I did so. Maybe I should go back and read those last 150 pages of Moby Dick (which I abandoned in 2008)?

The Whites, Richard Price

I guess I've been avoiding writing about The Whites. It was well-written and the plot was super engaging and it all felt very real, but it also left kind of a bad taste in my mouth and I've been struggling to articulate why. This book was good, but it wasn't for me.

Maybe it hit too close to home: crime fiction that reads very true set where I live featuring extremely fallible NYPD cops is just a little too real for me. (Though I will say New York in the book felt a little more like the New York of my teenage years than current New York.) Maybe it was just a touch too dark and gritty for my taste. But my biggest complaint about The Whites was something very particular. The titular Whites are people whom the police know to be guilty of a horrific crime but who -- for one reason or another -- were not successfully prosecuted for that crime. Each of the officers at the center of the book has a personal white: the one who got away with it on their watch. What irked me was that there was no doubt. I kept waiting for the plot twist where the person whom the cop has long assumed killed a teen basketball player actually didn't, or regretted it, or wasn't just plain evil. And, well, that twist never came. Most of the characters in this book were really complex, conflicted people, but the whites were just straight-up bad guys with no real back story. It's true that (title aside) the book isn't really about the whites, but this just kept bugging me.

Funiculars I have funiculated

I haven't even been on that many funiculars.

I was well into my 30s before I totally registered what a funicular even was.

Then I had a crazy year (2012) where there seemed to be funiculars everywhere I went.

I think there are more, but these are the funiculars I have taken pictures of between Clare's Year of the Funicular and the present:

• Funiculee Funicular, Park City, Utah
• Bom Jesus do Monte Funicular, Braga, Portugal
• Funicular dos Guindais, Porto, Portugal
• Old Quebec Funicular, Quebec City, Canada
• Cremallera de Montserrat, Montserrat, Spain
• Funicular de Sant Joan, Montserrat, Spain
• Budapest Castle Hill Funicular, Budapest, Hungary

I love funiculars.

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

I read The Big Sleep a few years ago during a foray into genre fiction I was making at the time. I liked it fine, but I can't say it left much of an impression on me. Sometime later, someone I follow on Twitter recommended (generally, not to me personally, in the context of like, essential noir novels or somesuch) The Long Goodbye, so I added it to my PaperbackSwap wishlist and a couple weeks ago it showed up in my mailbox. The timing was perfect: June was a busy travel month for me and engrossing, plot-driven books are about the only books I can manage to read when I travel. (This was also the reason behind my selection of The Death of Roger Ackroyd immediately before The Long Goodbye. I finished both books on planes.)

For a long stretch as I was reading The Long Goodbye, things felt slightly familiar, but I wasn't certain that I had seen the movie. Then, when I was finally sure I had, I found that the book diverged quite a bit from what I remembered happening in the movie. I looked into this after the fact, and it turns out it's not so much that my memory is faulty but that the movie is quite different from the book. Several characters are missing from the movie and most notably, the ending - which I remembered and was expecting - is totally different. The mood of the movie is also different. As the Wikipedia page explains, the movie was updated to be set in the present day (1970s), when a character like Philip Marlowe was anachronistic. Anyway, the differences meant the book felt almost totally new to me.

So, about the book: I loved it. The writing was incredible. This is the language that is both imitated and spoofed in detective stories everywhere. Reading The Long Goodbye, I felt like I was experiencing the real thing for the first time. It was beautiful, and funny, and evocative, and stunning. I couldn't get over it. Everything else about the book felt sort of incidental. The story was good, but not nearly so good as the telling. Good or bad, I found I could read right past and forgive the flaws and bits that made me uncomfortable. It was just such a pleasure to read.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie

As I've discussed before, detective TV shows are like comfort food to me. However, as I've also discussed before (like one sentence later in the same post), I haven't read a lot of detective fiction. This was the third Agatha Christie novel I'd read and my first featuring Hercule Poirot.* It should come as no surprise that I have watched the full 70-episode run of the BBC Poirot series. Luckily for me, they all sort of muddle together so I can read the books without remembering whodunit. When I started The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I immediately remembered which episode it was (the one where Poirot decides to retire to the country!), but I didn't remember the crime at all.

To read Poirot after watching hours upon hours of the TV show was a little surreal. I could see and hear David Suchet perform every affectation written on the page. I was almost surprised to find that I didn't feel this detracted from the book at all. What did surprise me was that the book was written in the first person by one of the other characters. It had never occurred to me that the Poirot books might be first person narratives. (While reading Roger Ackroyd, I inferred that many of the books are probably narrated by Captain Hastings.) Seeing this in action, it's clever and makes perfect sense. The narrator is in the same position as the reader: neither of you ever know quite what Poirot is up to until the big reveal. Anyway, it was fun to read this. Yay!

As an aside, I HIGHLY recommend this LA Review of Books article from a few years ago on the occasion of the end of the Poirot TV series, but about Poirot more broadly.


* I read And Then There Were None in middle school, adored it, and sought out another Agatha Christie novel at random. I don't remember which I ended up with, but it was a Poirot book and 13-year-old me just couldn't get into it. I don't think I quite got what Poirot was supposed to be. I never picked up a Christie book again until last year when I found a Miss Marple book at a thrift store, but I have watched every BBC adaptation of her books I can get my hands on.

Stoner, John Williams

When I was a kid, I thought the word melancholy sounded all wrong for what it meant. To me, melancholy sounded like a happy word and I thought it should represent a happy feeling. Many years later, by which time I had mostly reconciled myself to the definition of melancholy, I learned about literary traditions of melancholy, wherein it was seen as a mark of genius or a prerequisite to artistic production. This somehow jibed with my old childhood idea of melancholy, and so I've continued to think of melancholy as a sadness that is tinged with joy. The feeling of melancholy for me is similar to nostalgia, or the particular feeling of remembering past happiness in the face of loss, or simply the enjoyment that comes from wallowing in sad songs.

The overwhelming feeling I got while reading Stoner was melancholy. At times while reading it, I would think, "my god, how depressing," but I would read on and as I went I would find it not so depressing after all. What it really felt was normal and true. Stoner reads as the biography of a man who led a life that was more defined by frustration than fulfillment. He is constantly thwarted, but at the same time, you never feel he is all that disappointed in his lot. Which is not to say he's happy with it; it just is. In the end, I didn't even think the sadness quite outweighed the joy in this book, or maybe what joy there was seemed all the more joyful because of the pervasive sadness of the book. And that's what I liked best about the book; you could feel sorry for Stoner (and I definitely did - a lot!), but you could also read it and feel that this is what life is and that it's not so bad.

The City and the City, China Miéville

The City & the City is a total mind-fuck -- in the best possible way. It's a mystery novel set in two cities that share the same physical space (grosstopical space, in the language of the book), but are in fact in different countries. The mystery is not what's interesting about this book (in fact, I found it confusing and ultimately unsatisfying), but the fascinating conceit of these two overlapping cities nearly makes up for anything that's lacking in the plot. The citizens of each city must constantly "unsee" the people, buildings, vehicles of the other city. The idea of living in a city where you must studiously ignore something like half of what surrounds you seems like an incredible allegory of urban life. Besides urban life in general, I kept wondering what actual places informed the cities. Istanbul was the first place that came to mind. Also the states of what was Yugoslavia (which some clues in the book suggest may be the approximate location of the fictional cities). The idea of a city overlaid on a city felt very familiar, but I couldn't pinpoint from where.

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

I loved this book.

In the Country of Men, Hisham Matar

Although I told myself -- and my reading public (ha!) -- that I wasn't going to limit or pressure myself into reading only books from countries I hadn't read before, I was starting to feel like I'd been reading too much in familiar territory. The prior 6 books I read were from countries I'd read before -- one was even a book I'd read before. Somewhere in the middle of that run, I started, then set aside, a book from a country I had not read. So, when I finished My Brilliant Friend and was on the fence about whether I should go straight into the next book of the Neapolitan Series, I decided instead I should check off another country from my list. To that end, I pulled out In the Country of Men, which I had picked up several months ago to represent Libya.

One thing this book brought to my attention is I don't know much of anything about Libya or its history. At some point I must have learned it had been an Italian colony (as a student of Africana Studies, I had to know all the African countries' colonial histories, though my coursework tended to emphasize sub-Saharan Africa), but that knowledge was long gone when I read this book. (Oddly, because I remember as a child thinking the name Tripoli sounded Italian, which of course it's not, but this association seems like it could have served me mnemonically.) I had no idea that it had a Roman history (which, again, should not have been so surprising, given all the Roman ruins I have personally visited in Morocco). I have what I have to admit is only the barest knowledge of the Gaddafi era. So, anyway, when I started this book and discovered it was set in the wake of the 1979 revolution, my initial reaction was, "Oh, they had one that year too?"

My ignorance of Libya aside, this book did a really good job of getting into the mind of a child who does foolish things that have potentially terrible consequences out of naivete, attention-craving, desire to please. I found the narrator's 9-year-old self often infuriating, but also utterly believable. Kids do dumb and mean things despite themselves. As you get into the narrator's head, you see that he has compassion, he just can't seem to show it. My frustration with him got in the way of my enjoyment of the book, though it was a times really lovely.

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

The last of the Neapolitan novels only came out a few months ago, but I feel like I'm late coming to Ferrante. Last year, she was everywhere and the near-universal praise of her books left me unsure whether I wanted to read or avoid them. My dad gave me the first three volumes, as well as her The Days of Abandonment, some time ago and they've been sitting on my shelf, largely forgotten, since. Last Friday scanning quickly for something to read, I first pulled out The Days of Abandonment, then wondered why I was putting off starting the Neapolitan novels and pulled out My Brilliant Friend instead. Some books are better than others for reading on the train, or other places where there are lots of potential distractions. Just before starting Ferrante, I tried for 2 days to read The Book of Disquiet on my commute, but I decided it was more of a weekend-in-a-cabin read than a subway read. My Brilliant Friend was totally absorbing. I read it from platform, to subway, to street during all my commutes for the last week. I read it for 2 hours in my doctor's waiting room despite the pop soundtrack in the background (something I would normally find exceedingly distracting). At the same time, I had no particular urge to read it once I was at home. (I did in fact finish it right before bed last night, but mostly to get it out of the way and start a fresh book this morning.) It's not usual for me to find a book so absorbing and yet not to want to lie on the couch and read it all day during the weekend. In the case of My Brilliant Friend, I think this has mostly to do with the simplicity - for lack of a better word - of the story. This isn't a criticism! There were life-changing events, there was drama, and yet it was somehow very quiet. I wasn't compelled to keep reading for hours to find out what happened next. Instead, I was content to put the book away when I got home and to be instantly reabsorbed in the book when I pulled it out on the subway the next morning.