Before You Sleep

Before You Sleep is Linn Ullmann's first novel, translated into English in 1999. Like her three later efforts, all of which I've enjoyed, it is worldly-wise and a bit strange (not too much), and filled with the kind of honesty about people and families that is all too rare in contemporary fiction. The story is unimportant; it is the characterizations that are key: of three generations of a family, split between New York and Norway. There are hidden nuggets strewn through the book, for example when Karin Blom, the narrator, says that she "read somewhere" about all the different kinds of thunder: rolling, crackling, echoing, and so on. I am quite certain that she is referring to Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene, where those descriptions occur. For someone not so old, Ullmann gives the impression of have seen, read, and lived much. Being the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman seems to have served her well in becoming a novelist.

Strait is the Gate

Andre Gide's novel has moments of great power and beauty, but its earnestness can wear on a reader. A story of human love thwarted by the desire for spiritual perfection, Strait is the Gate presents its two main characters in all their dimensions and frailties, but with barely a lightening touch. Thus a book so slim, and with such elegant writing, feels uncomfortably heavy.

The Ministry of Pain

This novel by the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic examines the lives of exiles without a country to return to: the former Yugoslavia. Set in Holland, a flat land that absorbs pains of the past like a blotter, as the author neatly puts it, the story follows a Croat language and literature teacher and her Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian pupils as they attempt to navigate a limbo in which they cannot be truly at home anywhere. This is the type of novel -- sincere yet knowing -- that reconfirms to me that the best literature is being practiced far from American shores these days.

Scum of the Earth

At the lowest point of Arthur Koestler's account of his confinement in France at the outset of World War II -- he is imprisoned by the French as an alien and then, after his release, goes on the run from the Nazi advance -- he wonders, "Will we ever be on the winning side?" He is speaking of himself and his allies on the Left, hounded from place to place throughout Europe. The Soviet Union was not yet any help, having signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis and calling the war against Germany a fight for "imperialism." It was a bitter irony that those who were the most anti-Nazi in France in September 1939 were those most likely to be punished by France. Scum of the Earth is an indictment of the old men like Petain but also the whole bureaucracy down to the lowliest clerk. Koestler details his days at the infamous Vernet camp, where he and his comrades slept on straw in barracks with no heat. Throughout his entire ordeal, enountering hundreds of Frenchmen, he finds maybe one or two who could be called, at a stretch, admirable.

The Sibyl

In his deceptively simple prose style, Par Lagerkvist reimagines the tale of the Wandering Jew and sends him to meet an old woman, a former pythia, who had been expelled from the temple at Delphi. Her attempt to find god, and the reason for her expulsion, make up the bulk of the narrative. Her god emerges as cruel, jealous of man, and served by mendacious professional acolytes. The Wandering Jew, likewise, saw Christ's cruel glare when He was denied rest on the way to Golgotha. The universality of religious experience was explored by Anatole France in books set in the transition between the pagan gods and Christianity. Here Lagerkvist follows that path to a profound result.

Pornography and Obscenity

This 40-page tract by D.H. Lawrence, published in 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf, takes aim at the "dirty-little-secret" pornography of the day, those films and novels that no censor touches because of their patina of purity but which serve only to provoke an unhealthy sexuality -- specifically, masturbation. By contrast, Lawrence finds the healthy and open attitude toward sex found in, say, Boccaccio, praiseworthy. He blames the whole destructive attitude toward sex on the "gray ones" of the 19th century, "the eunuch century, the century of the mealy-mouthed lie." And he offers a forceful and philosophical argument against masturbation, an act which produces "nothing but loss." He laments its effects on culture: "The sentimentalism and the niggling analysis, often self-analysis, of most of our modern literature, is a sign of self-abuse. The author never escapes himself, he pads along within a vicious circle of himself." An exhilarating book.

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

In seven biographical vignettes spread over a mere 135 pages, Danilo Kis delivers a wrenching indictment of the lengths to which ideology, in this case communism, can deform the human animal. The oblique form of the stories, in which a narrator grasps at incomplete and inconclusive biographical documentation, serves to deepen their meaning by highlighting the ambiguous motivations of the doomed and the randomness of their demise. Kis's tales are not without a wry humor, which makes them even more realistic and therefore more terrifying.

Paris Trance

Geoff Dyer's novel achieves the improbable by enticing the reader into caring about a callow, shallow character named Luke Barnes. Could Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their ilk have been as repellent in the Paris of the 1920s as Barnes and his pleasure- and love-seeking cohort are in the Paris of the 1990s? Possibly, but the earlier group was more colorful, literate, and creative. Dyer's crew is gray. He carries off, nonetheless, several striking scenes, including the death of a deer and a gang beating. And there is the sex. In Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Dyer achieved the near-impossible by writing sex scenes that were neither pornographic nor laughable. Here his scenes are similarly intense and graphically descriptive but in no way gratuitous or titillating -- just meaningful.

Fatuous Jonathan Franzen

On a video clip, the author says he wants to talk, through one of the characters in his novel Freedom, about "the elephant in the room" -- overpopulation. See, people naturally want to procreate, but overpopulation is either the cause or an aggravating factor of all of our problems. Someone should point out to him that the most jam-packed place on Earth, Singapore, is also just about the richest. Poverty is caused by many things, but the Malthusian view that overpopulation is at its root has not been seriously believed for decades. A writer who declares he wants to address "the elephant in the room" is pompous enough, but when the elephant is a dusty, stuffed relic, he makes himself ludicrous.

Horrible Jonathan Franzen

The New York types are falling over themselves to praise Jonathan Franzen and his new novel (cover of Time, rave by Sam Tanenhaus), but if an excerpt I read online is anything to go by, I'll let this parade pass me by. I actually couldn't finish the excerpt; it was that suffocatingly bad. A sample:

"In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture ...

"There were also more contemporary questions, like, what about those cloth diapers? Worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary?"

All of this seems expressly designed by Franzen to appeal to the very people who can logroll his product. It reeks of falsity.

I'll stick with my Honore de Balzac. At 15o years' distance, he knew more about people in the 21st century than Franzen ever will.