Small Memories

With Jose Saramago (1922-2010), I begin at the end, which is also his beginning. The autobiographical Small Memories is the first of his books I've read; it's among the last he wrote; and it covers his childhood. "Luminous" is a word that appears on too many dust jackets, but there isn't a better word to describe the opening pages of this brief memoir. Even when it settles in to a more matter-of-fact account of Saramago's childhood, Small Memories is studded with poetical hooks that catch the reader. The use of long parentheticals, generally an annoyance, here takes on a conversational aspect that is entirely pleasing. I will have to move forward and go back into Saramago's earlier works.

Anatomy of Injustice

Raymond Bonner's account of a mildly retarded man convicted in 1982 of a murder he did not commit and sentenced to death is sobering, especially as the rest of the Western world abolished capital punishment decades ago. Bonner cites a Supreme Court opinion from the 1930s that sets a standard that is ignored at a nation's peril: It is not victory at all costs that prosecutors must seek, but justice. For me, the best arguments for abolition are still to be found in Arthur Koestler's Reflections on Hanging.

Hooking Up

It is odd that the title essay in this collection by Tom Wolfe, which describes America at the turn of the millennium, seems musty and stale only a dozen years after publication, while Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (recently re-read) still comes off fresh as morning. The easy explanation is that Dos Passos is a far superior writer. Where Dos Passos collects facts and synthesizes, Wolfe collects facts and shows them off. The best things in this collection are two essays: on the microchip inventors, and on the "three stooges" who attacked Wolfe's A Man in Full.

Me and Kaminski

A new author to watch: Daniel Kehlmann, whose novel I picked up on a hunch at Dollar Tree. He's not as interesting as Bernhard and not as deep as Frisch, but this breezy book about a bumbling journalist, an elderly artist, and their picaresque adventures is sharp and at times very funny. His big seller, Measuring the World, looks good and is on my list.

The Song of Roland

Action, treachery, bravery, and greed are the elements of a ripping yarn, and the author whose name is lost to history cooked all of these into The Song of Roland, an account of the betrayal of Charlemagne's army and the valiant death in battle at the hands of the Saracens of his beloved Roland. The "clash of civilizations," much threatened today, comes to life in eighth century France and Spain. To keep the excitement going, there are popping eyeballs, spilled brains, and "pagans" being split in half vertically by jewel-encrusted swords.

Remembering Laughter

Aside from hearing of the title Angle of Repose, my knowledge of Wallace Stegner was null before picking up this short novel from 1938, his first. Featuring hidden family pain and written in clean, evocative prose, the story succeeds and will, I suspect, linger in the memory.

Rabbit, Run

On page 7 of this novel, John Updike uses the adjective "crisscrossing." On page 14, he uses it again. I think it was too soon, but maybe it was intentional. I have a hard time believing it was laziness. Updike can be annoying in the way he pumps out a gusher of adjectives, and more than once I found his metaphors strained, or odd. But then he comes out with a pure, beautiful sentence like this one on page 81: "In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature." And far from being annoyed at the use of the same adjective -- twice in the space of five words, no less -- you are stunned.

Nineteen Nineteen

The second volume of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy immerses the reader in the non-military world of the Great War era. The conflict intrudes on the fictional characters in ways that manage to be both realistic and intensified, while some of the biographies, Paxton Hibben's for example, rescue important figures from obscurity. If there was such a thing as a time machine with an all-seeing intelligence to provide commentary, it could not do much better than Nineteen Nineteen.