Batch Review: Novels (Calvino, de Saint-Exupéry, Isherwood, García Márquez, Bolaño, Apostol, Kafka, Hesse, Han)

If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino

The first sentence of Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler is: “ You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.” Yes, that’s right. The narrator is talking about you. But the narrator is also not talking about you, but about You, a frustrated reader whose every attempt at actually finishing any of the books he finds in his journey is thwarted by a series of bizarre conspiracies. But it is also talking about the Other Reader, a distant figure linked only to you by your shared reading habits. She is also you. She and the character referred to as you are both you, the actual reader, in a metaphorical sense. Getting confused yet?

Several books within a book, a pastiche, a puzzle, a postmodern game. If on a winter’s night a traveler is a novel I first read in college. It excited me then because of the sheer screwball nature of the techniques used, the way it chained stories into one another into a commentary on the nature of storytelling and reading. As I’ve grown older though and come to appreciate the empathy and raw beauty of certain writing over their technical precision, I find that the shine of the book has dulled. I agree with the novelist David Mitchell wholeheartedly when he says “ [H]owever breathtakingly inventive a book is, it is only breathtakingly inventive once.” A puzzle, solved, does not need to be taken apart again.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“ To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”

Ah. I didn’t think this up, but it’s a great contrast that this book is the one after If on a winter’s night a traveler actually. While that book has become drab over time because of its technical mastery overshadowing any attempt at emotional pull, Le Petit Prince or The Little Prince remains such a striking favorite to me because of its tenderness. Its easy yet philosophical sentences and its simple, episodic plot about a strange child in a desert telling odd parables about his exploits in space. I think of this as the book that taught me how to love people, and that’s nothing to shake your head at.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

I gave my copy of this book away to someone and I often regret that these days, as I find myself looking more and more for queer literature that a pretentious snob like me couldn’t possibly turn my nose at. Luckily, I had actually read the book before giving it away, and am benefited ever after with occasional pauses in the shower thinking about how human beings are like rock pools that empty into the ocean.

This is a book I undervalued after first reading I think. It is a crystalline creation, a vivid detail of a single day in the life of one man, George, an English professor grieving the death of his lover Jim, lost and contemplating what it means for him to be alive after someone who had given his life meaning is gone. You might think by the previous two books in this review that I consider technique and emotion to be separate sides of a see saw, but I don’t, and this is a book I would recommend to anyone looking for elegant, cerebral prose and inventive technique bringing to life quintessential and heartfelt truths about loneliness in its many forms.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

From a novel that lasts a single day to one that lasts a hundred years. Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien Años de Soledad is a world classic that makes me look smart for having read it. I mean, it’s an amazing family epic depicting high contrast paradoxes such as history’s continuous erasure alongside the inescapable aftereffects of history’s curse, the interconnection yet isolation of the members of the family unit and society in general, and the mythic and fantastical nature of violent and ugly reality.

But it’s also just a book you brag about having read because it screams, #I’M BETTER THAN YOU. Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s a good book. Drags a little in the middle, but the end is pretty satisfying, if depressing. More people should strive to be BETTER THAN YOU.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

I wrote an entirely different essay on this, a thousand words, and that still only covered one somewhat minor aspect of one of the five “parts” that construct this epic novel, touching loosely on the four others. That’s my way of saying I have too damn much to say about this book. It is my favorite (again, I don’t want to use that word lightly and I don’t) book of all time. Lifechanging, definitely, yes.

Descriptions on the internet will often mention the Mexican femicides that are depicted in the novel’s longest section (“The Part About the Crimes”) or the elusive novelist Benno von Archimboldi who stars in the final section (“The Part About Archimboldi”). I don’t think talking about either of those will give any kind of indication as to the sheer experience that reading 2666 is.

There is so much anger and fear and terrifying beauty in the book. It consumes you, lets you in on a secret, makes a nest in the center of your dreams.

The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata by Gina Apostol

The dark twin of history is fiction.

A novel masquerading as a series of academic notes on a strange set of texts written by a minor revolutionary, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata is another stamp indicating that I have a tendency towards books with fucked up plot structure and difficult prose. Still, this is the only book on this list from my country and I’m glad to include it. It’s a relentlessly Filipino novel, referencing so many cultural nuances and historical facts that I can’t imagine any non-Filipino who hasn’t hit the history books hard to even begin to understand what this book is and how it mirrors and rewrites the bizarre, difficult history of the archipelago.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

One of “the great, imperfect, torrential works” as Roberto Bolaño would say. A novel so incomplete they actually left in one of the characters switching names midway through the book without any explanation. Despite such mishaps in the prose, maybe because of such oddities, Der Prozess or The Trial by Kafka is an elegant and claustrophobic exploration of one man’s attempts at freeing himself from the prison that is a trial for a crime he doesn’t even know about. It’s like a locked room mystery where the room is bureaucracy.

This was a book I really wasn’t sure about for the first half, the prose isn’t what the modern MFA would call good writing, though it isn’t uncompelling, and the characters are unlikable caricatures. The book transformed for me in a single scene though, where the protagonist Josef K. is consulting a scam artist of a painter for help in becoming a free man. As the painter describes the options that K. has to escape the system in a moment that is both intensely expository and intensely metaphorical, the reader and the protagonist realize at the exact same moment that none of the options are actually the same as being free. The painter reads the weary shock in Josef K.’s character and takes this moment to show him some paintings he’d like to sell, describing each in lush detail while presenting the canvasses, which to Josef K. appear identical, all exactly the same. K. leaves having bought all the paintings, and the reader’s sympathies.

Who could say that they do not know what it feels like to be trapped?

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

Maybe I wouldn’t feel the way I do about this book if I hadn’t read Steppenwolf right after. Because Steppenwolf is one of the worst books I’ve ever read, and it’s tarnished my feelings about Hesse as a writer.

Still though, I kind of view this as being for me what Catcher in the Rye is for a lot of people. A book to love in high school and not much again after. But probably the book has influenced me more than I care to admit. I look at quotes from it now and despite the overdrawn orientalism (cultural appropriation, as the kids would say) that pervades the writing, a lot of the ideas that the book reflect my feelings about life and all the aimless searching for meaning endemic to my millenial existence. Maybe the most meaningful thing the book has to say though is that meaning cannot be taught. Enlightenment cannot be taught. Everyone’s path is their own, and though we might admire others who have come to their realizations, we cannot trace their steps to get to ours.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

This book has not been with me as long as the others have but I was so stunned by it that I named it a favorite almost as soon as I’d finished it. I like to use the word “lush” to describe it, because there’s a lot of floral and arboreal imagery and I’m not above semi-accuracies like that.

But seriously, I hadn’t devoured a novel as hungrily as I had this one since 2666. The novel explores the story of a “completely unremarkable” housewife who one day declares herself a vegetarian, in truth, desiring to transform herself into a tree. The reader sees the protagonist Yeong-Hye through the eyes of her blockheaded husband, her lustful brother-in-law, and her loving but uncomprehending sister in three long chapters; her arboreal desires escalating until she completely refuses to consume anything that was once living.

Yeong-Hye’s madness is written as beautiful and visceral and powerful: a true rejection of all social norms. Yet it is also incomprehensible, devastating, and unreal. Yeong-Hye is engorged with agency as she is starved for sustenance, making those around her cower in uncertainty at the lives they have lived whilst she herself is ever more sure of the choice she has made. Transcendence, if that is what she goes through, is no bodily ascent into the well-lit heavens. Han’s protagonist destroys herself, but that destruction, that refrain from wanton life and its animal qualities, may in fact be everything she’s ever wanted.