The Map and the Territory

The map — Michelin, blown up and manipulated by artist Jed Martin — is more beautiful, complex and profound than the territory itself, photographed from the sky. Martin says near the end of this Michel Houellebecq novel that he wants "to give an account of the world" with his paintings and photographs and, finally, videos. As in previous novels, Houellebecq delivers detours, shocks and gloom, but there is less explicit sex and random violence than before. It is a more autumnal, which is not to say mellow, Houellebecq.

Death and the Penguin

The hapless man at the mercy of forces beyond his control -- and who isn't, really? -- always makes a good subject for fiction. Here, Viktor is a writer of advance obituaries in Kiev whose subjects compliantly perish. He has a pet penguin, takes care of an orphan girl, and conducts an affair with the girl's nanny. He also is being trailed by gangsters or government thugs or possibly both. Andrey Kurkov's novel captures the melancholy and hustle of the immediate post-Soviet years, with a splash of humor.

African Psycho

In African Psycho, the French Congolese novelist Alain Mabanckou follows an aspiring criminal plotting his first murder. Gregoire, an orphan who bangs out dents in car fenders when he is not prowling his run-down neighborhood, He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, is inspired by the nation's recently deceased and most notorious criminal, whose grave he visits for inspiration. There is something of the solitary, independent intelligence of the unnamed protagonist of Hunger in Gregoire. He is a political and social critic, a bit of a sex fiend -- an angry young man who yet appeals, as he must for the book to be a success. Mabanckou has written a fine novel of pungent satire wrapped in a thriller.

Horseman, Pass By

Larry McMurtry's first novel, watered down into the film Hud, can be a tough slog for such a short tale (179 pages in paperback). The repeated descriptions of sunlight and moonlight and dew wear thin as dressings for a bare trunk of story. The characterizations are sharp, however, and the set-pieces convincing.

The Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford's novel deftly peels away the layers of its characters until there is nothing left but a raw, usually ugly core. His metaphors and similes are memorable, as here: "Florence was a personality of paper ... she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies, and with emotions only as a bank note represents a certain quantity of gold." And when he dilates on the human condition from the particular to the general, his conclusions usually strike a note of uncomfortable truth, as here: "But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued ... is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported."

End Zone

This early novel by Don DeLillo contains several striking, cinematic scenes, but it is mostly arid, snide, and repellent.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

This autobiographical novel by Mario Vargas Llosa is probably his most light-hearted. A young man's love affair with his aunt (by marriage) is interwoven with increasingly bizarre radio soap opera tales by a Bolivian writer in Lima in the 1950s. Like all of Vargas Llosa's books, the construction would put a fine Swiss watch to shame. The sly humor and humbling biographical content make Aunt Julia especially appealing.

Nobel

Haydn's music can produce a kind of ecstasy. This year's Nobel winner, Tomas Transtromer, in his poem "Allegro," gets at that:

After a black day, I play Haydn,

and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.

The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists

and someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets

and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:

“We do not surrender. But want peace.”

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;

rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house

but every pane of glass is still whole.

Literary Life: A Second Memoir

This Larry McMurtry book is tossed-off, episodic, half-assed, anecdotal, and entertaining. You could say a lot worse about a memoir.

A Palace in the Old Village

Tahar Ben Jelloun explores the immigrant experience in this novel of dislocation and longing. The Mohammed of the story, a largely unassimilated Moroccan living in France, retires from an auto factory and dreams of building a palace back home where he will be surrounded by his children and grandchildren. But the world cannot cooperate with the simple, decent demands of a man now lost both abroad and at home. Based on this book, Ben Jelloun appears to be a cold and pessimistic sort on the subject of reconciling Muslim and Western societies. His accounting of Mohammed's genuine devotion to his faith nonetheless serves to humanize a people often seen as stock characters.

The Assignment

Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Assignment contains 24 chapters -- and 24 sentences. At 129 pages, that amounts to about five pages per sentence. It is a credit to Durrenmatt that this technique rarely feels forced or awkward. The story itself is a metaphysical exercise on the meaning of observation, existence, God, identity, and much more -- in short, a mind-bending or possibly mind-blowing journey.

Comedy in a Minor Key

This short novel by Hans Keilson tells the story of a Dutch couple who hide a Jew in their home during the war. Saved from the Germans, Nico, a perfume salesman, dies of ordinary pneumonia. "He had defended himself against death from without, and then it had carried him off from within." Keilson's spare, elegant prose puts a reader in mind of Par Lagerqvist.

The Pledge

"Our rational mind casts only a feeble light on the world." This statement comes near the end of Friedrich Durrenmatt's engrossing and polished novel. It is a detective story in form; a philosophical exercise in substance. A police inspector's theory about a girl's murder may well be correct, but events will not bend to fit his desired conclusion. His resulting descent into the void is a chilling object lesson.

Room

This novel by Emma Donoghue falls into a category I wouldn't have previously thought existed: tedious page-turners. It is also staggeringly unambitious. Anyone who has endured relentless questioning from a five-year-old about everything in the world can multiply that experience by 321 pages to get an idea of Room's effect. The book is structurally elegant, following a boy who has lived his whole life with his mother in an 11-by-11 storage shed as they escape and confront the world. But it could, and should, have been done in 40 pages.

Conrad and the Web

A Bookman's Daybook by Burton Rascoe includes a noteworthy item on Joseph Conrad. Rascoe wondered how someone who lived in an "inland hamlet" seemed to know everything that was going on -- unlike most novelists, he said, "who are concerned only with themselves." The answer was that Conrad used a clipping service to send him news that might reasonably interest him. This saved him the time of plowing through all the papers himself. Convenient, yes, and also preceding by about 90 years the "invention" of the RSS feed.

Scott-King's Modern Europe

When Mr. Scott-King, a middle-aged schoolmaster in the classics, hears that parents "want to prepare their boys for jobs in the modern world" and that "you can hardly blame them, can you?" he replies: "Oh yes. I can and do." In Evelyn Waugh's 88-page story, Scott-King travels to the fictional nation of Neutralia to deliver a speech on a late Renaissance poet. His travails in this ex-Hapsburg state that evinces all the grubbiest aspects of modernity are told with Waugh's typical dry wit and elegant style. Returning to this author will never disappoint.

Books: A Memoir

Larry McMurtry's bookshop in Archer, Texas, contains nearly 400,000 volumes; his personal library about 30,000. This slim, entertaining memoir about reading and the pursuit and sale of books carries an ominous undertone, neatly captured in a line from Cyril Connolly that reading has become a mandarin pursuit.

The Excursion to Tilsit

The title story in this collection by the German writer Hermann Sudermann is the basis for F.W. Murnau's great film Sunrise. Sudermann's ending is more poignant: The husband accidentally drowns after, full of regrets, he abandons a plan to drown his wife. In the film they both live happily ever after. The stories, set in Prussia's borderlands where Germans and Lithuanians mix, are full of strange, harsh elements. In Jons and Erdma, a couple builds a home and life in a marsh, rising literally out of the muck. They survive half through hard work and half through pilfering and cunning. These are the European Snopses and Bundrens.

The Moviegoer

There is something overheated and unattractive about The Moviegoer. The novel is rich in ideas, contradictions, poetical prose and sly humor. And yet.

Acquainted with the Night

Heinrich Boll's novel of postwar Cologne depicts a ruined city and its half-ruined people struggling to emerge from the rubble and dust. There was a Blitz here, too, as non-Germans may forget. Fred and Kate, whose marriage has been deformed by the destruction of the city, narrate alternating chapters. They are both ordinary and exemplary, as good literature requires. With Boll, too, there is a Catholic element that leavens the text.

The White Tiger

After reading putrid novels by Ian McEwan and J.M. Coetzee, both of whom have been honored with the Booker Prize, it should not have been a surprise that this novel, the 2008 prize winner, is a disaster. It is less challenging and less subtle than many comic books. Stylistically, it is inert. There is plenty to learn about modern India in its pages, but it is hardly literature. Or is the Booker Prize for children's books?

The Incomparable Atuk

After three overheated and over-serious "young man's novels," Mordecai Richler found his voice in 1959 with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Atuk, published in 1963, is an attack on human folly of the type that Richler would soon come to perfect in both novels and essays. "I'm world famous," one character says, "all over Canada." That one-liner sums up Richler's wit and his purpose perfectly.

Presence

The six stories in this collection by Arthur Miller are direct and engaging. Themes of loss and longing are treated with transparent sensitivity and flashes of humor. A New York Times reviewer gets it exactly right in saying that the stories "depend little on the pared nuance and carefully staged epiphanies" of much contemporary literature.

One More Story

A few of the stories in this collection by Ingo Schulze are slight or drizzle to an end, but others show the polish and concluding snap that the best short stories require. Schulze's insights into human connections are commonplace, but his settings -- rural Estonia, a Germany in transition, Egypt -- often provide the needed spark.

Therese Raquin

This early work by Zola was called a "sewer," and, truth be told, some of the scenes are gruesome even by today's standards, particularly the chapter set in a morgue. The novel, a story of adultery that could appear on any given Friday on an episode of NBC's Dateline, heralded the birth of naturalism. If early practitioners could be crude, they should also be thanked for clearing the air and setting the stage for the realist, unblinking novels of Anderson and Dreiser and their ilk, who in turn cleared the way for the modernists. As Orwell said, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

Now All We Need Is a Title

Titles catch the eye and remain in the imagination, but their origins and meanings can be lost. This collection by Andre Bernard offers brief explanations of several dozen famous book titles. One anecdote will give an idea: Somerset Maugham noted that people complimented his titles but often didn't know what they meant. In the case of The Moon and Sixpence, he said, "It means reaching for the moon and missing the sixpence at one's feet."

Green Thursday

Julia Peterkin's connected set of stories tells of the travails of rural blacks at the beginning of the 20th century buffeted by every kind of misfortune: natural, man-made, and spiritual. A rooster plucks out the eye of a child in a crib; an old woman burns down a neighboring house to preserve her own; pangs of an unmentionable love stir in an adolescent girl. Peterkin's use of black dialect -- "ebry," "gwine," etc. -- is a legitimate technique, but taken to extremes it brings a choppiness to the text that dialogue pitched slightly more toward standard English would avoid. Still, Peterkin was the one who lived on a plantation, and listened to the stories, and her sensitivity shines through.

Lanzarote

Michel Houellebecq's short novel contains themes developed further in Platform (tourism, sex) and The Possibility of an Island (cloning, sex). Easily read in one sitting, Lanzarote will give the uninitiated appetite for more Houellebecq. Its descriptive passages could even inspire a trip to the island itself.

2030

Albert Brooks's dystopian novel of the near-future wins points for plausibility: It is easy to imagine conflict between old people, who consume an increasing share of society's resources, and the young, whose piece of the pie keeps shrinking. The rise of China, likewise, is not an original concept. But 2030 shows why celebrities, even perceptive ones, should probably leave novel writing to the professionals. Brooks's dialogue is as flat as his characters. Even judged as a potboiler, 2030 lacks suspense, with every twist crudely telegraphed.

I Could Love You

William Nicholson's bid to become the Balzac of Sussex now consists of two novels, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life and this follow-up set in 2008, eight years after the original. The challenge facing most of the characters here is banishing loneliness. Nicholson delivers an enjoyable if not especially challenging tale, but much of the dialogue in this dialogue-heavy novel has a cloying, stagey aspect. It could probably be re-sold as young adult fiction if all of the (many) four-letter words were struck out. Rather than Balzac, in fact, Nicholson more resembles J.B. Priestley and his 1930s novels featuring large casts of ordinary Londoners, each with a problem that gets resolved by the final page.

Thank You for Not Reading

If Dubravka Ugresic didn't like what she saw in the book world a decade ago, when this collection of essays was written, she must be apoplectic by now. All the trends she identified -- the treatment of books as commodities, non-writer celebrities dominating the bestseller lists, literature's infantilization -- have only gotten worse. But this is not a sour book. It is leavened with humor and wit. I would describe Ugresic, in short, as Croatia's answer to Mordecai Richler.

Whatever

Michel Houellebecq's first novel, published in 1994, contains in embryo some of the themes developed more fully in his later books. There is extravagant pessimism, a critique of trash culture, and an argument that sexual liberalization has had the same result as economic liberalization: mass pauperization. How far the author has traveled since this debut is an open question, but he is a guide whom astute readers will happily follow over the same ground again and again.

Write It When I'm Gone

Thomas DeFrank's private conversations with Gerald Ford reveal less of the bumbler of popular imagination and more of the shrewd politician who, after all, was at or near the center of things in Washington for 30 years. These interviews, kept sealed until the former president's death, paint a Ford who was not above holding grudges (against Carter and Reagan) and cashing in after leaving office by giving speeches and serving on corporate boards. He even took a cut from Franklin Mint coins depicting his swearing in. But mostly Ford emerges as an honest, diligent plodder. There is plenty of gossipy material, as when he says that Bill Clinton has a "sex sickness" and needs treatment, or wonders why no one in the Clinton Cabinet resigned during the Lewinsky scandal. Ford was astonished that they could continue to work for a president who had lied to them. In this era in which federal legislators distribute pictures of their genitals, that can be filed under Quaint.

All the King's Men

All the King's Men is widely considered to be a great political novel, but the deeds of Willie Stark and his crew won't surprise anyone who has paid even scant attention to the workings of the world. What makes this a great novel is the beautiful writing describing the personal odyssey of Stark's fixer, Jack Burden. There is also the the 19th century tale of a Burden relative, Cass Mastern, an episode that could make a novel in itself. Robert Penn Warren's skill at imagery and simile lights up these passages. Everything is connected in this novel, and so in life; a ripple from a stone dropped into a pond will spread out with unforeseen and sometimes unthinkable results. That, more than the ambiguous perfidy of Willie Stark, is the idea that will linger long after this novel is put down.

Invisible

Hugues de Montalembert, a painter and photographer, was blinded by paint thinner during a robbery in New York in 1978. This impressionistic memoir is a reminder that the senses must be fully engaged to be useful. It is not good enough to look at something without seeing it, or to hear without listening. Montalembert is not courageous, although that is how it seems at first glance; he is simply irrepressibly alive.

The Dream Life of Balso Snell

In its first few pages, Nathanael West's short novel gives hopes of being an exercise in fantasy and fine writing in the manner of James Branch Cabell. Ultimately, however, the reader is imprisoned in an annoying fever dream from which wakefulness cannot come soon enough.

Same Difference

As mentioned below (March Violets), the plots of detective stories don't interest me as much as the dialogue, characterizations, and atmosphere. As Philip Kerr spun out a believable version of 1936 Berlin, so Martin Harris creates an alive and gritty New York City of 1976. The details are right even when they seem wrong: I did not think the NFL had playoff wild cards back then, but it did. Most important, from the first page the reader believes that what he is reading really happened. That is a basic hurdle that many of today's overpraised literary types (Franzen, Tower) never clear to my satisfaction, so it is refreshing to see it done by a writer toiling in relative obscurity.

A Cool Million

Nathanael West's satire on the Horatio Alger myth takes literal chunks out of its hero -- eye, leg, thumb, scalp -- who nonetheless maintains his guileless hopes. West's aim is so wide that no one is spared. For example, a certain Sylvanus Snodgrasse is neatly dispatched: "Like many another 'poet,' he blamed his literary failure on the American public instead of on his own lack of talent, and his desire for revolution was really a desire for revenge. ... Having lost faith in himself, he thought it his duty to undermine the nation's faith in itself." And that may be the secret of the best satire: It cannot merely be a outpouring of bitter humor and scorn. At its center there must be a tiny, flickering spark of love.

March Violets

March Violets, set in 1936, is the first book in Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir series. The plots of the best writers of detective fiction, Chandler and Ross Macdonald for two, tend to lose me about halfway through, but the story isn't really the point. Like those predecessors, Kerr weaves a tangled tale while excelling in atmosphere, characterizations, and similes -- although some of the similes are head-scratchers. The whiff of anxiety and menace in Hitler's Berlin as the Olympics approach is ever-present, reinforced by Kerr's careful detail work on places, people, and society.

Alfred A. Knopf: Quarter Century

This slim volume, published in 1940 by friends of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, contains tributes from H.L. Mencken, Willa Cather, and others on the occasion of Knopf's 25 years of publishing. The best summary of Knopf's contribution probably comes from fellow publisher B.W. Huebsch, who writes: "A creative publisher ... wakes the public to what it has been missing; he waits for no cue from readers, he gives it." Knopf's achievement in bringing seven Nobelists, including Thomas Mann and Knut Hamsun, to the American public would be enough for any publisher, but he also insisted on making lasting books of quality and superb design. And I cannot recall ever having found a typographical error in a Knopf book from the teens, 20s, or 30s.

Solar

To judge from this novel, Ian McEwan is a fraud. The character of Michael Beard, the scientist protagonist, is utterly false. It is impossible to regard him as anything other than a novelistic invention. None of his sentences, or actions, ring true, and although McEwan acknowledges scientists who helped him with the photovoltaic aspects, even those sound as though written by a half-assed student trying to bluff his way through an exam. I liked On Chesil Beach, although the characters there weren't entirely believable either, and Saturday built to an excellent climax. But this one has an air of preciousness and a stink of falsity that will not dissipate.

In My Father's Shadow

William Faulkner, responding to his daughter's disappointment that he had missed an important (to her) birthday party, snapped that no one remembers Shakespeare's daughter. Orson Welles's daughter, whom he named Christopher in the womb, had a similarly difficult time catching the attention of her famous father. A memoir like this needs two things at least: great anecdotes and previously unseen family photos. Chris Welles Feder delivers on the second and tries hard at the first, but the fact is that Orson Welles was too busy to give his firstborn much of his time. He moved on to other marriages, other continents, new projects. Welles Feder gives little insight into her father's filmmaking but adds some facts around the margins, such as that Welles despised being praised for Citizen Kane and thought Chimes at Midnight was his best film.

Out of Sheer Rage

Geoff Dyer's book on D.H. Lawrence is one-half Lawrence, one-half Dyer. He is just about incapable of writing a bad sentence, and his adventures (mostly misadventures) on the trail of Lawrence are funny and entertaining, throwing off sparks of enlightenment here and there. In a brilliant stroke, the book plunges into Lawrence's letters and travel writing, ignoring the novels. I will read anything by Dyer, no matter the subject, knowing full well that at least half of the subject will be Dyer himself. A recent Nation article complains about this aspect of his writing, saying he has written only one "first-rate" book and that his last novel was "over-praised." But you keep reading them, right?

Good Bad Writing

A couple of submissions to Britain's Spectator, which asked for "toe-curlingly" bad analogies:

"The main course was as sinful as if loin chops cut from the Beast of the Apocalypse had been marinated in ambrosia and then flambeed over the fires of Hell itself."

"Watching this film is like snuggling amorously down into a warm four-poster and then finding that the other occupant is the unwrapped mummy of Rameses II."

What Paul Meant

By stripping away centuries of varnish applied to Paul's letters, and by discarding the false ones, Garry Wills reveals an apostle who hardly merits being called a "corrupter" (Jefferson) with a "genius for hatred" (Nietzche). What Paul meant, Wills shows, is what Jesus meant: that love is the only law.

The Loser

Thomas Bernhard's triangular character study includes an unnamed narrator, a fictionalized Glenn Gould, and the loser of the title. The three are pianists, but only Gould succeeds in becoming a piano artist. The loser kills himself, and the narrator writes endlessly about Gould. Stylistically, the novel thrums with repetitions, bald sincerity, and blazing judgments. On Page 1, the narrator steps toward an Austrian inn; by Page 100 he is barely inside, the intervening 10 seconds having been stuffed with surreal characterizations. The final 99 percent of the book consists of a single paragraph, or perhaps more accurately, no paragraphs. The reader may tire of Bernhard's rashness in expressing his loves and (many more) hates, but the author does not permit attention to flag.

What the Gospels Meant

Garry Wills's choice of tense is instructive: He is not explaining what the Gospels might mean to us today; he is excavating the writers' purposes. He translates the original Greek himself, clearing away centuries of holy smoke clouding the original intent. Even the Lord's Prayer looks fresh as taken apart by Wills, who writes with scholarship, clarity, and brevity.

Room at the Top

The theme of a young man on the make had already been done better by Thackeray and Dreiser when this novel by John Braine was published in 1957, but Braine succeeds as an agreeable stylist with a sharp eye for the details of human behavior. The dated rendering of some of the dialogue into overblown, faux adult flirting can be excused given the novel's timelessness in other aspects, such as demonstrating the eternal and related pulls of greed and love.

Then We Came to the End

It shouldn't take 200 pages to warm up to a novel; it should take two or three. Joshua Ferris's decision to write most of this book in the first person plural is damned by the fact that the only effective section, starting around page 200, uses the third person singular. The rest is stuffing.

Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light

To submit to a tyranny or to challenge it head-on are the binary choices. The Czech writer Ivan Klima's novel follows a character who takes a third, less comfortable way: accommodation combined with revulsion. The book falls within the tradition of Darkness at Noon and contains that predecessor's psychological insight and cold realism.

Losing Mum and Pup

It may be inaccurate to call Christopher Buckley's account of the death of his parents "breezy," but only just. Easily read in a sitting or two and full of name-dropping anecdotes, it is both blunt and affectionate.

Balzac

Balzac resonates so strongly down the years. From his introduction to Droll Stories:

Bear in mind also, ye wild critics, you scrapers-up of words, harpies who mangle the intentions and inventions of everyone, that as children only do we laugh, and as we travel onward laughter sinks down and dies out, like the light of the oil-lit lamp. This signifies, that to laugh you must be innocent, and pure of a heart, lacking which qualities you purse your lips, drop your jaws, and knit your brow, after the manner of men hiding vices and impurities.

Madeleine

Andre Gide must be held at least partially responsible for our age's magnification of ordinary life into overheated prose. Although he wrote books about Montaigne and the Congo, much of his work is extravagantly self-obsessed. A line can be drawn between Gide and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. In this volume, he recounts his marriage to his cousin, a decent enough woman who mostly withstood his pederasty and tawdriness in stoical silence. An exception was when she told Gide, "I loathe indescretion," to which he self-importantly replied that he hated falsehood more. She also quoted at him a line from the poet Paul Claudel: "Better hypocrisy than cynicism." As is so often the case in relationships like these, Madeleine, the simpler person, was the better one.

An Answer from the Silence

English-language readers are now able, 74 years after its publication in Stuttgart, to read this early novel by the Swiss writer Max Frisch. Withheld by the author from his collected works in the 1970s, An Answer from the Silence has tell-tale signs of youth like sincerity and iconoclasm. In this respect it could be classified as a lesser Hunger. But there is more here, such as subtle and lyrical imagery of the mountains, where the young man of the story goes in a search for meaning.

The Possibility of an Island

Michel Houellebecq throws futurism, sociology, sexuality, psychology, politics, culture, and philosophy up against the wall and just about all of it sticks.

Why Books

I went to the antiquarian book fair this weekend and bought two books I'd never heard of (one by Andre Gide, the other by Heinrich Boll), a pair of bookends, and a small bust of Schubert. Digital books don't interest me. I require the artifact, preferably with an attractive dust jacket and on good paper. Alfred A. Knopf made such books for the mass market starting in 1915; he was stickler for bindings, typefaces, and artwork. He also brought important foreign writers to the American public in translation. Horace Liveright's oversized editions, including the Black and Gold Library, are elegant and durable. A wall lined with books brings energy to a room: It is both accusatory (Why haven't you read X, Y, and Z?) and reassuring (as old friends should be). With a book in your hand you know exactly where you are in relation to the end. A digital book is a solution looking for a problem. Digitization goes hand in hand with commoditization. It's bad for books.

What's to Become of the Boy?

Heinrich Boll's brief memoir of his adolescence in Cologne at the outset of Nazi rule is notable for its description of his family living simultaneously "below and beyond" its means. It was a big Catholic family in a time of deprivation. They detested the Nazis, but some accommodations had to be made: Among them, Boll's elder brother Alois joined the Storm Troopers. Boll's opposition to the Nazi Youth was adamantine, and he ducked into doorways when their parades went by. He hauntingly describes a time not entirely devoid of joy, "However, that gaiety was often of the desperate kind seen in some medieval paintings, where the laughter of the redeemed is sometimes akin to the expression on the faces of the damned."

String of Pearls

Priscilla Buckley wasn't exactly Zelig, but she was witness to several important moments in history, as this entertaining memoir of her years with United Press in New York and Paris attests. Decades after the events depicted in this volume, when Buckley was managing editor of her brother's magazine, she was kind enough to drop a note of encouragement to a pompous college student on the occasion of his launching of a right-wing campus newsletter.

Platform

Both of the novels I've read by Michel Houellebecq, Atomised and this one, contain a lot of sex. "Serious" novelists are notorious for being unable to write a sex scene -- Updike's stuff, of which I've only seen excerpts, comes to mind -- because of the danger of unintentional hilarity, among other things. Houellebecq's sex scenes are entirely matter-of-fact, graphic, slightly pornographic, and yet utterly serious. He also sprinkes through the text philosophical aphorisms and disquisitions on culture, religion, and politics. His tone is slightly bemused, world-weary, and frank. The whole effect is enormously entertaining.

An example: "Anything can happen in life, especially nothing." Or: "It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it's that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable." No one I know of is writing with this energy in English, except maybe Geoff Dyer.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

I wonder what the chances would be of "A Day's Wait," one of the stories in this volume, being published today in, say, Harper's were it submitted by an unknown. I would estimate them to be close to zero. What has always struck me about Hemingway is his combination of directness and strangeness. The sentences are mostly simple, but the combination of words is sometimes odd, and the occasional mannered speech serves to heighten and intensify reality. I neglected Hemingway when I should have read him, in school, but it is rewarding to find him in middle age.

Miss Lonelyhearts

It must have been a relief for writers like West and Faulkner (Sanctuary came out around this time) to publish books examining society's lurid and depraved aspects and have them treated (at least by some) as literature and not smut. Miss Lonelyhearts, the story of a newspaper advice columnist, reads a bit showoffy with its mannered dialogue and overheated religious aspects, but there are acute observations worth mining throughout. As in this passage: "Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio, and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this was the worst."

Nickel and Dimed

Barbara Ehrenreich's account of her experiences doing low-wage work was published in 2001, and it seems almost quaint today to complain about jobs that actually exist. The book is a useful snapshot, but it would have been interesting had Ehrenreich asked even a single co-worker if she was aware of the one thing that no ugly boss or lousy landlord could ever take away, namely, education.

The Day of the Locust

It cannot have been difficult to find enough sordidness to fill a novel about 1930s Hollywood, but Nathanael West manages to cover all the bases -- stardom, whoredom, alcoholism, fanaticism -- in a neat and artful package. There is black humor as well, as when starlet Faye Greener says of her father: " 'He's crazy. We Greeners are all crazy.' She made this last statement as though there were merit in being crazy. 'He's pretty sick,' Homer said, apologizing for her. 'Maybe he had a sunstroke.' 'No, he's crazy.' " The set pieces, including a cockfight, drunken party, and the climactic film premiere, are carried off with skill. The book was also made into a fine film in 1975 directed by John Schlesinger.

Atomised

After reading two restrained novels from northern Europe that moved at a microscopic pace in addressing microscopic, interior issues, Michel Houellebecq's Atomised arrives as a full-force gale of filth, humor, science, sociology, and psychology. The author's audacity in tackling everything from quantum physics to the sexual revolution in telling the story of two half-brothers -- one a scientist, the other a failed hedonist -- is rare in a world of cautious introspection and irony. Here, happily, is a novelist bold enough to provoke fights, and hatred.

The Twin

Gerbrand Bakker's novel is endurable, just, because of its coolness. But I despair at his need, like Per Petterson's, to write in the first person and at his numbing catalog of activities: I milked the cows, I looked at the canal, I mended the fence, I made coffee, I tore up a letter, I took food to father, and so on, and on. The germ of the story, about a surviving twin, is interesting enough, but the canvas is stretched past the breaking point.

In the Wake

Per Petterson's novel about a man living in the aftermath of a sea disaster that killed his parents and two brothers has passages of great strength, but these appear only rarely from amid vast banks of fog. A novel of memory is always going to be one of imprecise, fleeting, and shifting images, but vagueness will wear down even the most sympathetic reader. In the Wake has been compared to Knut Hamsun's Hunger, but in that latter novel, also entirely interior, the central character is a beacon, not a cloud.

The Jokers

The French do well with irony -- Anatole France proves that. Albert Cossery, a Cairo-born Frenchman who died recently at a great age, has the same lucid, elegant style as France. In fact, this novel of political pranksterism reads as if it was written in English. The subject matter is especially appealling at a time when the Arab world is beginning to awaken and throw out its doddering potentates, but Cossery would be the first to poke fun at revolutionary earnestness. His philosophy is laziness and fun, and the jokers of this novel's title seek to undermine a buffoonish governor in a nameless Arab city not by attacking him but with extravagant praise. There is a sneaky poignancy, too, when the ringleader, Heykal, finds in a friend's senile mother a person to hold in awe. The purity of this childlike madwoman is, for him, the highest expression of human meaning. The Jokers is polished, subtle and wise.

King of a Small World

The number of great poker novels can be counted on the fingers of no hand. If this effort by Rick Bennet is the best one out there, the field remains wide open for a talented writer to exploit. Bennet gets points for realism (he is a poker player), but realism isn't enough. Paradoxically, too much authenticity -- as in his reams of routine dialogue ("Hey, what's up?" I ask. "My ex there?" "Yeah." "Damn, man. How did she find me?") -- can ruin a novel as easily as too much imagination. The characters never come to life. For that a novelist needs to intensify reality, not merely duplicate it.

Don Juan: His Own Version

Peter Handke's short, strange novel is a little too fond of its own strangeness for my taste. Its abstract, dreamlike sections and labored tentativeness are as apt to induce nausea as elation. And yet there are fine descriptive passages and a poignancy to Don Juan's sadness at the loss of his child. "What drove him was nothing but his inconsolability and his sorrow. To transport his sorrow through the world and transmit it to the world."

Peter Yates

Film director Peter Yates died this week at age 81. He is best known, perhaps, for Bullitt, but also has The Dresser, Breaking Away and The Friends of Eddie Coyle to his credit, along with some good popcorn flicks like The Deep and Mother, Jugs, and Speed.

Curtis Tsui on the Criterion Collection site puts it well: "His kind of visual storytelling has gradually disappeared as 'unique voices' and 'visionaries' flaunting overblown pyrotechnics and equally overblown running times get touted by Tinseltown every other week. Yates wasn't just the 'Bullitt car chase guy.' He was a true craftsman, someone who believed in efficient storytelling and a rigorous attention to detail."

My Prizes: An Accounting

The Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is known as an enfant terrible, but what he really is, as evidenced by this collection of essays on the literary awards bestowed on him, is blindingly sincere. The acidity of his wit is tempered by complete ingenuousness. The money connected with prizes was always welcome, but the ceremonies and speeches gave occasion for some uncomfortable truths. "Writers' chitchat in the hotel lobbies of provincial Germany is the most distateful thing imaginable. The stink however is even stinkier when it's being subsidized by the state." Bernhard stood, defiantly, outside the whole writerly racket, which is reason enough to investigate his other books.

Fat City

Leonard Garnder's 1969 novel about small-time boxers in Stockton, California, has achieved the status of a classic. That would not have happened to a realistic account, a la Zola, of fruit-pickers and barflies. Garnder instead manages to intensify the characters' entirely natural dialogue into, at times, epigrams. He takes a cast of strivers on the low and middle rungs of a bleak place and imbues them with the sunniest optimism imaginable. The boxing trainer Ruben Luna might stand for all of them when he admits to anxiety about his fighters, who mostly lose or quit, but never despair. Gardner does not sentimentalize or condescend in this book full of life, hope, and heartbreak. John Huston's 1972 film of the novel, also written by Gardner, is equally excellent.

Poker

Al Alvarez's 2001 book, subtitled "Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats," is not strictly necessary, repeating as it does many of the stories from his earlier classic, The Biggest Game in Town. But it is worth having for the illustrations alone, including 17 photos of poker players by Ulvis Alberts. Those photos were published in a 1980 volume that sells today for around $1,500, making Poker a good bet.