LitPundit Home of all things literary

Giving an 'A+' doesn't come easy for the people at Complete Reviews. The last book that they gave a 'rating' of A+ was 1292 books ago. That was until they reviewed Lloyd Jones's "Mister Pip".

Mister Pip may appear, at first sight, to be yet another book about the redemptive power of literature and imagination, cleverly drawing parallels between an old classic and contemporary life, but it's far more than that. And, even just taken at its fundamental level as a story, it is, simply, wondrous.

The reason the novel works particularly well lies in the tone

Samanth Subramanian has a nice little review of Alberto Manguel's A Reading Diary in which he "revisits one book from his youth every month, over the course of the year." I first came across the book in a shop in South Africa while I was 'wasting' time in a bookshop and was struck by the large number of authors and books I have not even heard of, let alone read! Samanth feels the same way

On one level, A Reading Diary profoundly depresses me. There are far, far too many authors whom I haven't read, and probably never will. Who has even heard of Adolfo Bioy Casares or Sei Shonagon or Dino Buzzati or Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis? Where can I find them? Yet these authors are so familiar to Manguel that he is revisiting their works!

Richard Crary takes a lengthy look at J. M. Coetzee's first book, "Dusklands" which contains two novellas "The Vietnam Project" and "Dusklands".

Both stories cover familiar Coetzee territory: madness, obsession, colonialism, imperialism. Both stories play with questions of reality and authorship, both purporting to be largely made up of official documents, and in both his own historical role is implicated.

Max Magee reviews Per Petterson's "In the Wake" at Conversational Reading

That boundary between madness and loneliness is plumbed to great effect by Petterson in In the Wake, and is heightened by the Scandanavian backdrop of icy roads and unadorned apartment blocks. The book opens with Petteron's ruminating, somewhat pathetic male protagonist Arvid Jansen regaining lucidity leaning against the door of a bookstore. Arvid is bruised and battered though he knows not why. What follows is Arvid's slow steps toward awareness and a tentative investigation of memory.

Russ Albery whose SF/Fantasy book reviews we at LitPundit often feature in this section, has a nice review on J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Children of Húrin", edited by Christopher Tolkien.

The story in The Children of Húrin is told in more summarized form in The Silmarillion, so those who have read it will recognize this book, but this is a much-expanded version assembled by Christopher Tolkien from various manuscripts written at different times in his father's life.

...
This is not going to be to everyone's taste. Indeed, I'll go a step further and say that The Children of Húrin is not particularly compelling in isolation. The strength of its tragedy is considerably muted by a distant tone full of the stylings of epic: geneologies, extensive place names (the map is helpful but not quite sufficient), many references to other parts of Tolkien's mythology, and a somewhat archaic tone in all the dialogue.

As concluding remark, he says

(...) if you're looking to explore Tolkien's mythology beyond his popular novels, The Silmarillion is a much better starting point. If, however, you already have a copy of that (particularly the nice hardcover with similarly exceptional art) and have the...

Continue reading

Two reviews of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union over at The Guardian. In the first Jenny Diski, describing the novel as "ecstatically smart and sassy" writes

Chabon is a spectacular writer. He does a witty turn reinventing Yiddish for the modern Alaskan Jews - of course the lingua franca of Jews without an Israel - just a little of which I, with only faintly remembered childhood Yiddish, could grasp. (...) Nothing is described as just the way it is. Nothing is let be. He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it.

In the second review, Adam Mars-Jones finds the book "a brilliantly written fantasy with a not-quite-fatal flaw at its heart."

The real problem with the book is the piecemeal way Chabon introduces his alternate reality. It's an unwritten rule of the genre (well, it's written now) that you should be able to define the difference between the parallel world and ours in a single sentence.(...) Readers can't hope to be absorbed into the delicious texture of the writing if they're subconsciously waiting for...

Continue reading

Pankaj Mishra has a lengthy review of 's book "The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future" at The New York Review of Books

In a chapter that forms the core of the book, she examines the ideas and legacies of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Rabindranath Tagore, founding fathers of India's democracy. Her admiration for Tagore and Gandhi is deep. However, she offers only qualified praise for Nehru, India's resolutely rationalist first prime minister. Nussbaum laments that Nehru neglected "the cultivation of liberal religion and the emotional bases of a respectful pluralistic society"—a failure that she thinks left the opportunity wide open for the BJP's "public culture of exclusion and hate."

...
Nussbaum, who has frequently visited India to research how gender relations shape social justice, is particularly concerned about the situation of women in contemporary India. She sensitively explores the colonial-era laws that, upheld by the Indian constitution, discriminate against Muslim women. She describes how Gujarat, which has had economic growth but has made little progress in education and health care, became a hospitable home to Hindu nationalists. She details, too, tensions within the Indian diaspora, many of whom are Gujarati, whose richest members support the...

Continue reading

Edward Marriott reviews Rose Tremain's tale of an economic migrant in "The Road Home"

For a writer more accustomed to the distant past of the historical novel, the story of a modern-day economic migrant is a bold move, but Rose Tremain does not disappoint. The Road Home is thematically rich, dealing with loss and separation, mourning and melancholia, and what might underlie the ostensibly altruistic act of moving to another country to earn money for one's family. As always, her writing has a delicious, crunchy precision: plants sold in a market are 'fledgling food'; winter is described as having a 'deep, purple cold'; new buds on larch trees are 'a pale dust, barely visible to the eye'.

George Perkovich, reviewing "The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor" at Washington Post, finds it similar to "going to a concert and discovering that your favorite rock star is having an off night. "

To the extent that Langewiesche establishes a coda, it is that "terrorist attacks can be thwarted . . . but no amount of maneuvering will keep determined nations from developing nuclear arsenals." Post-colonial nations are fed up with the inequality of the nuclear order that makes it okay for the great powers and Israel to have nuclear weapons, but not for anyone else. So, Langewiesche writes, we must accept "the equalities of a maturing world in which many countries have acquired atomic bombs, and some may use them."

Langewiesche is a gifted reporter and writer, not a policy wonk. Yet, a more careful study would challenge his assumption that proliferation is inevitable in nations such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. Nor would a more intensive study have repeated dubious assertions about the extent of North Korea's uranium enrichment capabilities, and a hollow claim that India and Pakistan verged on a nuclear exchange in 1998.

The Atomic Bazaar suffers from the...

Continue reading

Harvard Magazine reviews a very unusual sounding book "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes" by Tom Cathcart and Daniel Klein

Together they bucked the fashion of Harvard’s philosophy department, which considered existentialism softheaded, and got onto a jag of existential ethics for a time. “We were going around being obnoxious about what was an ‘authentic’ life versus an ‘inauthentic’ life,” says Klein.

..
Nearly half a century later, those epistemological theories, truth tables, and falsifiable propositions have borne fruit in Cathcart and Klein’s new book, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (Abrams). Consider it Philosophy 101 as taught by Jackie Mason. A philosophical fallacy like post hoc ergo propter hoc—assigning a causal role to something simply because it preceded something else...