February 2008 Archives

There's a fascinating article in the NYTimes about the proper use of a semicolon in a NY subway public service advertisement. I love that a reporter at the paper saw a semicolon in the subway and decided not only to track down the person who crafted the sign, but also interviewed various professors and "grammar pundits" for their opinion on its usage.

My fiancee ordered this book used and then told me to read it along with Death and the Penguin. As you can see in the previous BookTrack entry, I really loved Death and the Penguin. Unfortunately, Penguin Lost is not nearly as good. It's a cleverly written dark comedy, but it's lost the wonderful, slow surrealism that infused the first book. (Note: my fiancee hadn't read this second book yet, so her recommendation was based solely on the first one.) Penguin Lost seems very much like Kurkov was forcing out a novel to bank on the success of the first one, which, frankly, I totally respect. Novelists have so few opportunities to cash in that if you have a big hit I think it's fine if your artistic integrity suffers when you produce something you know if meant to rake in the bucks. The novel isn't bad, it's just so plot driven and arbitrary. Unlike the first novel, where the events seemed secondary to the protagonist's home life and musings, in this novel the events are so overwhelming (and somewhat unbelievable) that it lost some of the subtle charm.

Also, I haven't read any of Milton's Paradise Lost in a long time, but I'm pretty sure there are not many similarities between this book and that one. I expect a book that is called "Something Lost" will at least allude to the original.

I loved this book. Death and the Penguin moves swiftly from charming to dark, from death to penguins. The book is blurred by a level of surreality, but it's the good kind of surreal. The protagonist never quite knows what is going on, and he stumbles forward in the way of many absurd narratives, but the unexplained conspiracy never gets too overwhelming. Zolotaryov takes actions (a character trait unfortunately lacking in many surreal or abusrd novels) and he continues to pursue his own interests even when the conspracy around him is getting stranger and stranger. The book is highly accessible for English readers, but it is infused with Ukranian culture in a way that makes it different and wonderful. Perhaps it's just that Kurkov is a quirky writer and it would be just as different and wonderful if he was an American. But, still, it's nice to read something coming from another country that is both so accessible and so seemingly influenced by voices outside of the norm.

This collection of short stories is fantastic. I love the two about weird explorers. "Ancestral Legacies" are about a Nazi science team looking for the Yeti and "The First South Central Australian Expedition" is about a team of explorers going through the Australian desert. They are both so whimsical and touching. That combination of inventiveness and depth is what makes all of these stories so excellent. I highly recommend this collection and am planning on reading one of his novels soon.

If this book weren't a classic, I don't know if I could have forced myself to read the whole thing. It's not that The Trial isn't well written... It's just that it touches upon one of my great fears: trying to act rational when people around me are acting irrationally. I am terrified of the day I try to explain to my friends that something terrible is going on and no one believes me (or, even worse, no one seems to think that the terrible thing is so terrible).

In a way, I've seen too much of the absurdism contained in The Trial to really enjoy reading it. I recognize that this novel is from where this kind of absurdist terror originates, and I appreciate it for that reason, but that doesn't mean I necessarily like reading it more.