Category Archives: Novel

2013, Book, Fiction, Manic, Novel, Prophetic

The Circle (2013)

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From Wikipedia:

A young college graduate named Mae Holland unexpectedly gets a job at The Circle, a powerful tech company that serves as the novel’s Google analogue. The Circle is an internet and social media company specializing in Internet-related services and products. Mae is impressed by the trappings of corporate life on The Circle’s California campus, and devotes herself wholeheartedly to the company mission. A chance encounter with a mysterious colleague, however, introduces an element of doubt into Mae’s experience, even as her role at the company becomes increasingly high-profile.

Reading this novel caused me to delete my Facebook account.

Remember the novels “1984” and “Brave New World”? You should probably add “The Circle” to this list of books that imagine a not impossible and decidedly unpleasant future.

Do you think privacy is important? Do you have any secrets? Then you would not want to work for the company called “The Circle”. Perhaps I should call it a cult.

You will be guided throughout the entire novel by Mae as she submerges herself deeper and deeper into the company culture and philosophy. Read quickly as you experience all the minutiae of her various positions in the company. But you need to relive those details so that you feel like the smartphone automatons we see all around us in this year 2013. If you think Facebook can consume much of your time, just try and keep up with Mae’s work life.

What would happen to you if your smartphone, pad, and social web sites all disappeared? Would your world collapse?

What present day company is the model for “The Circle”? Is it Google, or Amazon, or the NSA? Does any of this make you feel a bit paranoid? Smile, some camera is watching you.

After you have raced through this nightmare (it is OK to race, this is NOT great literature) and have reached what was for me a wonderfully written ending, please let me know your reactions to Dave Eggers’ viewpoint.

2005, Book Review, Could be boring, Could Be Sad, Grim, Love Story, Novel, Unusual

Never Let Me Go (2005)

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Kazuo Ishiguro and his family moved to England when he was 6 years old. He was educated in schools in England. He writes in English. You may read more about him in Wikipedia. He is probably best know for an earlier novel “Remains of the Day” which was made into a film with Anthony Hopkins.

My copy of “Never Let Me Go” was the paperback Vintage edition. I tell you this because I refer to page 81. If you know nothing about this novel (and I try to avoid spoilers) then you might not appreciate what is happening until you reach page 81 at which point the lightning strikes. After that the novel can seem many things: strange, creepy, grim, or quite possibly boring. Because I always try to give a book a fighting chance I plowed onward determinedly. Because the premise is so threatening I just had to find out what happens to the characters. At least be forewarned this much: do not expect fireworks. Finally for me the overwhelming emotion was sadness.

Book Review, Funny at times, Indian Culture, Novel, Violent

The White Tiger (2008)

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Aravind Adiga has written this novel (276 pages in paperback) in the first person of an Indian servant to a wealthy Indian. It won the Man Booker prize of 2008 (but don’t all published books these days win some prize ?). As such it is a witty or sarcastic criticism of many of the problems in India: poverty, corruption, class divisions, etc. The book pretends to be a succession of letters that “The White Tiger” (the name the protagonist assigns to himself) has written to the Premier of China to explain the unfortunate culture of India. If anything, the theme is that of an individual brain-washed into accepting his “inferiority” who fights to rid himself of that image. At times outrageous, funny, violent, call this merely an entertaining read.

Book Review, Clever Use Of Words, Manic, Novel, ShortStories

Ghostwritten (1999)

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Currently (2010) David Mitchell is the “it” author. There have been many articles about him, especially one in the New York Times Sunday magazine section. He is said to have re-defined the novel. You can read about him in the Wikipedia article.

Mitchell’s novels are as follows:

  • Ghostwritten (1999)
  • number9dream (2001)
  • Cloud Atlas (2004)
  • Black Swan Green (2006)
  • The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)

If you like T.C. Boyle (especially his short stories), you will also enjoy David Mitchell.

Let me tempt you with “Ghostwritten”, his first novel. Each chapter is a somewhat self-contained short story, but not really. The chapters eventually wrap around to where they started. But the fun “trick” is that each chapter after the first contains within some sly reference back to the previous chapter. If you did not read that previous chapter carefully then you might just miss the reference in the succeeding chapter. I’ll give you a hint for chapter one, namely, “telephone call”.

To tempt you a bit more I’ll describe chapter one. All chapters are written in the first person as I recall. In chapter one the speaker is the Japanese cult fanatic who personally released the sarin gas in the Tokyo subway. In the entire chapter while he is fleeing the scene and hiding in some remote guest house he is ruminating about his cult under the leadership of someone always referred to as “His Serendipity”. He interprets each and every event in the unwavering context of someone so completely brain-washed that he is deceived about everything.

Mitchell has a clever and often witty way with words. I do worry that his choice of words may be trendy enough that his book might some day be outdated.

Some chapters are manic (think Thom Jones), but not all. There is a somewhat poignant chapter in which a brilliant woman scientist tries to retire to her beloved small Irish (Celtic) island in order to escape being forceably employed by the CIA. This chapter relates to a following chapter about a nighttime radio talk show in an astoundingly clever way.

1996, Book Review, FamousDetective, Mystery, Novel, Sexual Episodes

The Terracotta Dog (1996)

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Andrea Camilleri is a Sicilian author who in fact writes in an Italian that has a sprinkling of Sicilian phrases and grammar that is sufficient enough to make it a real pain for yours truly to translate. He has created another famous detective Inspector Salvo Montalbano, a fractious Sicilian detective in the police force of Vigàta, an imaginary Sicilan town. Of course, the Mafia play a big role as does Sicilian cooking. You can read more about Andrea Camilleri in Wikipedia.

“The Terracotta Dog” is number 2 in a series of 16 Montalbano novels. The last two have not been translated into English. This is my first Montalbano and again I am hooked and will read more. In this particular novel in addition to a main plot, there are side episodes, discussion of food, sex scenes, and problems with personal relationships.

Book Review, FamousDetective, Mystery, Novel

Before The Frost (2002)

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Kurt Wallander is a fictional police detective created by Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell. “Before The Frost” is the tenth Wallander book to be translated into English. You can read more in Wikipedia. Moreover, Kenneth Branagh has made 3 TV adaptations, one of which is shown regularly on public television.

“Before the Frost” is a bit different in that it features not only the aging Kurt Wallander but also his daughter Linda who is about to enter the police force as a young rookie. Religious fanaticism is the central theme (a flavor somewhat like “The DaVInci Code” but MUCH better written).

I’m hooked, so I will probably read the entire Wallander series.

2000, Book, Drama, Drugs, Independent, Love Story, Novel, Nudity, Redemption, Sexual Episodes, Unusual

Jesus’ Son (2000)

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From NetFlix:

Nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, director Alison MacLean’s reflective drama follows FH (Billy Crudup), a well-meaning drug addict who stumbles backward into redemption. When his longtime love (Samantha Morton) leaves, FH follows her but meets and falls for the older Mira (Holly Hunter) along the way. Amid his life’s wreckage, a near-fatal car crash and a chance to save a child’s life force FH to examine his existence and its meaning.

Believe it or not, this film (which has the feel of an independent film) won some awards. I first read the book because it was recommended in the NY Times as an older book which you might as well get at your local library. I can only guess that the book made a splash in an epoch in which it was a novelty to write about drug-addled losers. The book travels from episode to episode while the druggies do outrageous things. Maybe I am getting too old for such nonsense.

Following the book fairly closely, the film is also like some otherworld travelog. But I was never bored (“OK, now what ?”). Still, think twice before you start this trip.

1978, Autobiographical, Book Review, Medical, Novel, Sexual Episodes

The House of God (1978)

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Direct quote from Alex Beam in the Boston Globe:

Give the doctor his due: The staying power of Stephen Bergman’s 1978 novel, “The House Of God,” is astonishing. (Begman published the book under the pseudonym Samuel Shem.) Largely ignored when it first came out, with its author shunned by his colleagues for telling tales out of medical school, “The House of God” has since sold more than 2 million copies. It appears on med-school syllabuses and has become a cult classic in the shadowy insider world of aspiring doctors.

“The House of God” is a book to which few are indifferent. A dark, satirical bildungsroman set in the hurly-burly of Beth Israel Hospital’s emergency room, where Bergman worked as an intern, it has been dismissed – by a doctor, or course – as “a piece of trash.” John Updike loved the book and in 1995 contributed a near-fulsome introduction, comparing it quite aptly to Joseph Heller’s classic “Catch-22”; Bergman’s work “glows with the celebratory essence of a real novel,” he wrote.

My son and I confessed to each other that we didn’t read much past the iconic sex scenes in the middle of the 400-page novel. That’s OK: Updike loved the gamy parts, too. “The sex is most conspicuous,” he wrote, “an in the orgies with Angel and Molly acquires an epic size and pornographic ideality.”

But the clean parts stay with you too. Who can forget ER epithets like “LOLNAD” (Little Old Lady in No Apparent Distress) or “GOMER” (Get Out of My Emergency Room), taught to the impressionable young interns by the profane, countercultural resident, the Fat Man. Said Fat Man counsels his young charges that “the only good admission is a dead admission” (because they don’t have to be turfed out of the ER to another service) and to avoid touching patients at all costs. Why? Because they are sick!

In addition to lucrative sales, Bergman and his book have something else to boast about: newfound respectability. Writing in the British medical journal The Lancet, Anne Hudson Jones compared “The House of God” to Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.” Bergman contributed a long article about his book to an American College of Physicians Journal last year and guesses that he has addressed more than 50 medical school commencements in the United States and Europe in the past decade.

But none in Boston, where memories are long and fuses short.