1. Freakonomics
2. Mystic River (audio book)
I chose to read the book before seeing the movie, so that my impression of the characters are not overtaken by the actors' performances. Dennis Lehane has written a number of mysteries, and therefore so is this book classified. Yet it does not really fit into the genre. The solving of the crime, the investigation and police procedures take up a small portion of the book. The bulk of the novel is a psychological study of a group of characters, one of which is the community of Boston where the story is set.
Meet Jimmy Marcus, a born leader, a born crime boss, a fearless and fearsome man, who gave up his criminal career to become a law-abiding bakery owner in town for love -- his love of Katie, his beautiful-beyond-belief 19-year-old daughter whom he raised single-handedly. Katie's stepmother, Annabeth, is another strong and intriguing character who grew up the only little sister to a bunch of wild, mean, half-crazed boys known as the Savage brothers.
The murder of Katie on the eve of her secret plan of elopement with her boyfriend to Vegas broke loose all hell in the community. More secrets from the past are stirred up, people's lives were turned upside down, and more murders followed.
One this side of the law is State Trooper Sean Devine, who was more educated than most in town, went to college, and came from a more middle-class family. Yet somehow he stayed in the community, watching over it from the hills by the prison nearby. He was tired and numb from his knowledge of the human frailty through his years of being on the force -- the pettiness, the crimes, the senselessness of people's existence. This weariness had strained his marriage and his emotional health. Now he was investigating the murder of Katie, the daughter of his childhood friend.
Under suspicion of everyone is Dave Boyle, a loser from childhood, the branded outcast of the town because he was abducted as a boy by 2 child-molesters. Although he escaped, although the culprits had died, nothing could wash off the shame in him, and he remained an untouchable man isolated from others, including his own wife Celeste.
Many have commented on how the novel has a feel of Greek tragedy, because its theme rests on the invisible and unalterable hand of Fate. All the main characters tried to escape from their respective fate at one time or another, but as illustrated in the fate of Katie who dreamed of running away to Vegas and marriage, no one could really get away. A forboding gloom always hung over Dave Boyle, until finally events and people (including his own wife) conspired to kill him dead. It took me a while to realize that however strong and in-control Jimmy Marcus seems, he too is a victim of his Fate, from which he temporarily escaped because of Katie, but slipped right back into once she was gone.
The novel is one of the most pessimistic and fatalistic I've read, too fatalistic even for a fatalist like me. In that sense, it doesn't seem particularly American, which is all about individual's power to control his own destiny.
Several remarkable things about the book's artistic achievement:
The characters are so vivid externally and internally that they almost "leap out of the pages", to borrow a cliche. The psychological depth of each one is impressive as the author juggles from one person's POV to another's. Even 3rd-person narratives usually focus on 1 or 2 perspectives (eg, Kurt Wallander series), but this novel switches from one person to another with careful construction and deliberate strategy. It is worth studying -- For example, when you have a scene between Jimmy and Annabeth, or between Dave and Celeste, it is of vital importance whether the passage is told from the man's POV or the wife's POV. And it is tricky.
The structure is very intricate. A web of people and circumstances conspired to lead to the final tragedy. In a way it reminds me of Garcia Marquez's "Chronicle of a Death Fortold." The complexity of events and the order of things revealed to the reader test the author's skills, and Lehane handled it beautifully.
The author himself said in an interview that the town itself is one of the characters. This is true. The setting, the community, the general atmosphere of this decaying place, are extremely vivid to any reader who has never lived in such a place. It is one of the forces that, with other forces, formed this inescapable Fate for the characters.
I intend to watch the DVD in the next few days. It would be interesting to see how these elements in the book are handled. One thing is already clear: Sean Penn fits perfectly the description of Jimmy in the book. Will report later my impression of the adaptation.
3. Calvino's Italian Folktales
4. Fingersmith (by Sara Waters)
虽然每篇书评都拿这本书跟Dickens的雾都孤儿相比，而且作者自己也毫不讳言(故事里面甚至有一段女主角到剧场看Oliver Twist戏的情节)， 我觉得Wilkie Collins的白衣女人也是来源之一。这就是现代作者的烦恼了，太阳底下无新事，编故事排列组合，似乎跳不出常见的桥段，模仿经典几乎是下意识的，虽然我可以肯定Waters是有意模仿Dickens & Collins的，只不过更上一层楼，把一些情节和技巧发扬光大。
Fingersmith里面的贼头子比狄更斯的费根强多了，简直是个慈母。她手下的贼帮也好象盗亦有道。相比之下，虐待儿童的是住在大房子里有钱的老绅士，变态阴森。作者似乎想说，在贫民窟的泥潭里打滚也好过住在上层社会的精神地狱里，这根本就是颠覆Oliver Twist的命运和他的大团圆结局。当然啦，差别在于，在维多利亚时代里做个上流社会的男人是挺开心的，做个女人可就惨了。
5. The Great Gatsby
I read this book at Helen's urging (OK, strong recommendation). My first impression was Wow, the characters all talk like they were straight out of a black-and-white Hollywood movie from the 30s. Then I realized that Fitzgerald did write scripts for the studios back then. No wonder. The second impression was Hey a lot of passages sound like they were written in a drunken haze. Then I read that FSF was indeed an alcoholic. It reminded me of my thoughts while reading Hammet's The Thin Man, which was an amazement at how heavily and frequently everybody drank throughout the book.
What's cool about the book was its play with time. The legend had it that FSF kept revising and revising it all the way to the moment before the galley proofs went to the printers. Also in some ways it reminded me of the movie script of "Unforgiven." Both have to do with the American myths -- how they are created and told, and their unreliability and fragility. Although FSF was perhaps more earnest, despite the hint of skepticism. Both tell the myths in a second or third hand, placing a distance between the myth and the reader.
Is Gatsby the hero of the book? I don't know. To me he is the least tangible character, the most difficult to believe or get a handle on. All the other characters were so completely true that I could feel their breath. In that sense, I compare it to The Razor's Edge, which has almost exactly the same perspective and the same problem -- the key character is so mythical that he does not quiet seem real. And there is another similarity. Helen thought the narrator in Razor's Edge loves his subject Larry Darrell. I think the narrator in The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, is obviously in love with Gatsby himself. Neither Larry nor Gatsby is particularly convincing as a person (they both practically walked on water), but then perhaps it's just my own deficiency that I am hopelessly unsusceptible to mystics and lofty ideals.
6. Lolita (the first 50 pages)
I tried to read this book for a local book club I attend occasionally. Gave up after the first few chapters. Not that it's not an entertaining book, but it's just so damned academic, even the vulgarity is so high brow. A woman at the book club complained that she was greatly disturbed by the subject matter and the naturalistic tone of the narrative straight from the POV of a pedaphile. How awful!
I wasn't too disturbed myself, however, because it just didn't seem quite realistic, the storytelling. It was so full of inside jokes, puns, parody, post-modern self-consciousness. It's not the dark and filthy and tragic reality that must plague the life of a real pedaphile, but rather an exercise of an ivory-tower literary guru doing an almost clinical dissection of the pathology, all the while mocking both the subject and possibly the (expected) cringes from the audience.
Nabokov is a genius with words, no doubt, but he is not my cup of tea. He is too dispassionate, too detached, too uninvolved, too smart to the degree of being smarmy. Nevertheless, one has to LOL and
at his matery at the language. People often marvel at his command of English especially considering his own complaints that English is grossly gross and inadequate compared with Russion to express his more complex and subtle intentions. I believe the contrary -- that perhaps the self-claimed subtlety and complexity of Russian helped shape his sensibility and manipulation of English. I could not go too much further with the book in 3 weeks, because it is dense and hardly fast reading. To "get" the pun, the word-play, the parody, one had to slow down and comb through the words. All the jokes are of the kind that you had to think for a few seconds before you LOL. It's just too time-consuming. For a bigger bang of my buck I'd rather read Dave Barry.
He's incredibly clever, true, but I couldn't feel enough warmth from him to nurture a bacterial orphan. That's ultimately what prevents me from being fully invested in Nabokov. After all, I'm not the type who would get her pants charmed off by pure intelligence, hard, flawless, and colorless like a diamond. He might be one of the smartest authors in the history, but he is definitely a snob as well, and somehow snobbiness just pushes all the wrong buttons for me.
