A Farewell to Arms

I doubt there is single simile in this novel. I can't remember one. For me, a judicious use of similes is one of the best ways a novelist can bring events and personalities into sharp, three-dimensional focus. Hemingway's genius here is to achieve that clarity and depth using the bluntest of tools. But the surface realism is an illusion: A Farewell to Arms is more like a dreamscape. The only time you are conscious of reading a novel is during the (few) instances when characters make philosophical statements. These are like road markers on the trip through the dream.

The Redbreast

This Norwegian crime novel by Jo Nesbo arrived in the mail from a former colleague who shares a fondness for translated fiction. The hero, an Oslo police detective named Harry Hole, is full of the angst and life failures that plague his breed. The novel reaches back into Norway's collaborationist history in World War II and threads it into the present. All the pieces lock into place by page 500 with a satisfying thunk.

Steppenwolf

Words to live by? Hermann Hesse's novel could certainly be called that. Straddling the theoretical and the practical, it is a search for and a journey into the nature of existence. Conceptually we are all a multiplicity of entities, but with both feet on the ground the book argues the importance of dancing and laughter.

Killing Floor

To see what all the Jack Reacher fuss was about, I picked up Killing Floor, the first installment in the series. The text, 407 pages in paperback, contains probably 300 pages of what I would call sawdust: Reacher eating eggs, Reacher buying supplies, Reacher driving somewhere, Reacher eating more eggs. When you actually get to an action scene, it is more likely than not a disappointment, carried off in a deadpan manner. The clipped non-sentences take some getting used to; but after about 100 pages the reader has stopped trying to find merit in the prose and is simply flipping through to get to the next action sequence. There is some suspense here, but there's too much other stuff or, more accurately, stuffing.

Measuring the World

This novel by Daniel Kehlmann can take its place beside historical fictions like The Way to Paradise and The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa. Although lighter in tone than those works, Measuring the World is, like them, packed with ideas and sharply drawn characters. Kehlmann even skillfully carries off the technique that Vargas Llosa has perfected of interweaving plot strands in the same paragraph. The reader will believe he is consulting a colorful historical account of the two scientists involved, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, rather than a novel.

The Case of the General's Thumb

On page 92, the author writes: "He was beginning to tire of the whole thing." What is true for that character will be true for many readers. This social satire/espionage caper, set in Ukraine and Russia and written by Andrey Kurkov, is in perpetual motion, eventually whirling its way up its own arse.

On the Edge

It is too easy to satirize phony gurus (are there any other kind?), so what Edward St. Aubyn does in this novel is better: He blends his characters' often sincere striving for enlightenment with their more earthly goals (the pursuit of a woman, for example), while throwing jabs here and there at New Age nostrums. To the author's credit, the line between charlatan and second coming of Seneca is not always obvious.

The Great Gatsby

Reading Gatsby now, knowing its story and themes, I am able to appreciate more fully Fitzgerald's gorgeous writing. When for example Nick understands, in Chapter 4, Gatsby's aim — in a word, Daisy — there is this: "He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor." I cannot imagine a more perfect sentence. There is imagery, metaphor, alliteration (the p's in "purposeless splendor"), rhythm, elegance, simplicity, and a furtherance of plot. All in fourteen words!

It is interesting that two books published in 1925, this one and Manhattan Transfer, perhaps best capture the New York of the Jazz Age and yet are so different stylistically. Fitzgerald, unlike Dos Passos, does nothing radical here, but what he does is as good as it's ever been done.

The 500

Robert Harris is the among the best writers of thrillers and historical fiction. His recent The Fear Index was, typically for him, smart and exciting. Matthew Quirk enters the field with The 500, which is neither all that smart nor very exciting. The action makes sense only in the most basic ways -- yes, that character could have crawled under that porch and listened to two people talking above him -- but very little of it is believable. This is due to poor writing and a lack of organic development. Given this same plot outline, Harris could have produced, as they say on the flaps, a ripping yarn.

Max and the Cats

I have not read Life of Pi, whose author lifted the idea from this short novel by Moacyr Scliar, but I doubt it could be as effective, and affecting, as the original. Scliar spins fables that, far from seeming outlandish, hum with verisimilitude. The line between truth and illusion has rarely been so brilliantly blurred.