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.

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Mario Vargas Llosa's novel shifts between the disintegrating Peru of the 1980s and a period 25 years before to tell the story of failed revolutionary Alejandro Mayta. It is not a secret that Mayta's quixotic campaign to light a socialist spark failed; that much is clear from the first pages. But Vargas Llosa is able to create suspense to such an extent that as the book approaches its climax the reader is actually willing the revolt in the remote mountain town of Juaja to succeed. Mayta's story is told by a novelist who interviews the surviving principals a quarter-century after the events. Memories are unreliable, but the novelist is not necessarily after the truth. He wants to tell a story. Along the way are astute commentaries on the revolutionary mindset and a devastating portrait of the depths to which Peru had sunk by the mid-1980s, when this novel was published. This is my second go-round with The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. I suspect it will be just as spellbinding when I read it for the third time five years from now.

Fast Company

Jon Bradshaw's Fast Company profiles "six master gamblers" -- as the cover puts it -- in poker, pool, golf and backgammon. But "gambling," meaning playing a game of chance, isn't the best description of what they do. What they do is find an edge and press it. And money is not the objective; it is simply a way of keeping score. The objective is action and defeating an opponent. Bradshaw's style is sharp but completely transparent, allowing the philosophies and personal histories of his subjects to come through at full strength. His account of the Bobby Riggs-Margaret Court match in 1973 is a textbook piece of reportage, from Riggs's strategizing through the nearly shot-by-shot account of the event itself. Everyone remembers Riggs losing to Billie Jean King later that year; Bradshaw lifts this match out of its undeserved obscurity.