Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I could not become anything; neither good nor bad; neither a scoundrel nor an honest man; neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, that only a fool can become something.”

Occasionally funny, often disgusting, the novel Notes from Underground is the mournful wail of a man who has given up and is proud of it, a man who thinks you’re foolish for not succumbing to nihilism like he has. This is one of the most bitter, angry novels I’ve ever read. I’d heard the stereotype of Russian literature as depressing, but The Brothers Karamazov, Pushkin, or Tolstoy all seem absolutely joyful in comparison. I thought that almost two centuries later, the barrage of misery the protagonist endures and self-inflicts here might seem tame to a modern reader. Nope. This is still very, very powerful.

The narrator’s pain being almost entirely self-inflicted is a dominant theme. He was a bureaucrat, but an inheritance allowed him to retire. He does nothing but brood on those he perceived as wronging him. The results are both sad and funny, in a way that becomes so obviously self-inflicted that it feels like a farce. It takes the narrator dozens of attempts to bump a man of higher standing’s shoulder on his morning walk to work, for example. He has been plotting this bump as an act of revenge for years. The man’s crime? A long, long time ago he had ignored our protagonist at a pub. Shocking, I know.

The narrator has lived his whole life on a self-destructive path which is narcissistic and cowardly, but, thanks to his eloquent way of writing, understandable. He is a pitiful, self-disgusted man. He has isolated himself from the world, and lives in a cocoon of anger; he derides a society he sees as arrogant and foolish, but acts no better—worse, in fact—than those he considers scum. The only thing he has pride in is his intellect, the importance of which he clings to like a limpet. He only values what is inside his head, and rages at the world around him which he sees as ignoring his genius. The futility of pride in intelligence, which he uses for nothing but selfish brooding, becomes obvious to readers, as it helps no one, not even him.

Notes From Underground is dark, sad and quite moving. If you’re ever in the mood for a book which stomps on your brain and heart, give it a go.

The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel by David Foster Wallace

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

This is an incomplete novel by David Foster Wallace that was released posthumously. It’s sometimes dazzling and other times tedious. I would never, ever recommend it to anyone but a hardcore David Foster Wallace fan. It’s in such a specific style, and tries to make you feel the banality that its characters live and grow in, which makes for an interesting experiment which is occasionally (intentionally) mind-numbing to read. Like with all of DFW’s works, though, the words are put together with tremendous skill, and can crackle in your skull and leave you thinking days after you put the book down.

“To be, in a word, unborable…. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

The Pale King takes place in the IRS (the Internal Revenue Service) and I appreciated that aspects of life which are often ignored — taxes, social malaise, the difficulty of true acceptance — are put under the microscope, as seemingly unrelated events slide in and out of view at random. The fragmented chapters leave you disorientated, as though they’re dozens of short-stories rather than one interconnected narrative. Reading this is like having hurried, interesting conversations with strangers, trying to work past their defences so you can figure out what it is they want to really talk about.

It’s unfinished (there are a number of plot threads which are brought up and never addressed, although potentially by design), but the thesis here is vital: real adulthood can involve tedium, and frustration, and that both these things are intensely important for becoming quote-unquote mature. Without the ability to sit and think in silence, even when doing so is uncomfortable and draining and painful, the world will grind you to dust.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

A strange mixture of cynicism and hopefulness, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is Dave Eggers’ attempt to unpack his own mind and find meaning in his parents’ death.

Anyone who feels lost in their own thoughts will find something uncomfortably relatable here. Eggers bravery while raising with his little brother is accompanied by narcissism, and a refusal to be put on a pedestal with an acknowledgment of his desperation to be seen by millions as a genius. It would have been easy for him to focus on pure tragedy, but this is a funny book. A funny book that hurts deeply at times.

Eggers feels stripped raw and exposed, his flaws in plain view while he stares straight at you and dares you to judge him for them.

An asshole; aggressively intelligent; selfish; loyal. Eggers is not easily explained and neither is this book, a self-conscious meta-memoir where some of the most honest moments are fictional. His prose is triumphant and his story is, yes, heartbreaking, but he feels flawed and honest and funny and alive throughout. This is a novel in which you feel a heart beating angrily through the pages, trying to burst free.

The Stonemason by Cormac McCarthy

Confession: I wouldn’t have picked this up if I wasn’t working through every piece of Cormac McCarthy writing ever. This was the last thing left to read before I finish his oeuvre with the novel Suttree. Screenplays or short works also haven’t been the highlights of this project, as McCarthy is at his best when he gets grandiose and epic, and there’s often just not enough time, so while sub-par McCarthy is still tremendously well-written I went into this with tempered expectations.

The Stonemason is an interesting play about a black family in the States. The Telfairs are about to undergo an unavoidable, unpredictable series of catastrophes (like many of Cormac McCarthy’s main characters do).

In theme, this was similar to many of McCarthy’s works: the degradation of traditional life, the value of physical work, all with death looming over every moment. The perspective of a black family means issues of race and time are at the forefront here: the more abstract, mental pains of the new age are contrasted with the physical oppression old, so societal progress is presented more evenly than in, say, No Country For Old Men.

The Stonemason is above all earnest. The problems here are still enormously difficult to deal with, but they’re things nearly everyone experiences: death, money troubles, the ability to trust. Definitely one of the more heartfelt and the most subdued of McCarthy’s works, and it was an interesting change of pace.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

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“When they were introduced, he made a witicism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.”

I love David Foster Wallace, but he’s a strange one. He’s been described as a human eyeball, which is also a good way to describe how he makes a reader view the world. Everything is laid bare, all small details magnified, even the parts of human life we’d normally avoid or ignore.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is an uncomfortable but insightful book of short stories. Examining self-consciousness, loneliness, misogyny, and other more lurid aspects of modern life, the narratives flash between ridiculous, heartfelt, skull-achingly painful, and very occasionally beautiful.

I get the feeling that very few people could read this and find it mediocre. The reactions would be love it or hate it. I’m in the former camp, but even so some stories just left me bewildered or mentally exhausted (for example, “Tri-Stan”), unsure whether the effort to get through these was even worth it. And then pieces of genius like “Forever Overhead”, “Adult World (I)” and “Brief Interview #20” remind me why I think David Foster Wallace was one of the greatest writers of the 21st century.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

“If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”

A desperate need to make sense of the world occupies a young boy in provincial England, and we watch as his future shifts in ways out of his control while he navigates his third year at secondary school.

If there is one area of writing where David Mitchell excels, it’s voices. In two or three sentences, he can make a character crawl out from the book pages and say, “Hello, I’m several people from across your life unified in one person. Remember me?” It’s almost eerie how fast he can make a character feel complex and interesting.

There’s a fine line when writing about teenagers, as trying to capture the self-centred nature inherent to most can be irritating to older readers, but if you go too far the other way the characters feel almost inhuman, like they’re lifeless cypher a being used by the author to make a point about their own childhood. The main character here has a naivety which is relatable, but never crosses into frustrating. That is just hard to pull off.

Mitchell is great at understanding the unspoken rules of teenage boys, the way word-choices, nicknames, and even the place you sit on the bus can act as a way the rest of the world can use to judge you, place you.

Black Swan Green captures the claustrophobia inherent to adolescence, the constriction many feel every time the uncomfortable realities of adult life creep closer towards them. He understands but never glorifies youth. He accepts that growing up can be extraordinarily painful and boring, but it can change you in ways you would never give up for the world.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

“It was just a stage I was going through.”

For some reason, I’d always thought this was a coming-of-age story in the vein of Black Swan Green or Catcher in the Rye. I don’t know how I got this impression, but it made the first few pages a surprise, let me tell you. There was less navel-gazing and more shamanistic rituals and dead animals than I expected.

Frank is young, Scottish, a bit of a drunk, and likes murders involving children.

Unrepentantly cruel characters are almost exclusively obstacles for Good People to overcome in fiction. Human monsters are such easy sources of conflict, and can create a natural end point for novels: their defeat or death. Very few people will not cheer when Voldemort gets snuffed, after all. The bloke had it coming.

To have someone who does truly disturbing things as your protagonist, to create sympathy for a devil, is risky. Maintaining reader investment while they are horrified by the main character’s actions is a hard tightrope to walk across, and I had worries that Banks hadn’t managed it, fears that he was faltering around two thirds of my way through. I was, happily, wrong.

The setting here is appropriately isolated, and trickles of rain and looming grey clouds keep the mood somber. You aren’t allowed to become desensitised to the savage acts, and the grounded setting might be part of that. This isn’t ultra-violence, it’s plain, unglamorous, human cruelty. While unsettling, you’ll want to keep reading; you’ll want to keep your eyes fixed on these horrible events just to figure out where things are going. This novel is just short enough that the occasionally slow pace never feels frustrating.

There’s a snarky tone to the narration, an acerbic wit that gives the novel a small, needed touch of levity, but it’s black humour which never feels inappropriate. Banks uses not just talent, but grace, to reveal and warn of the inner-workings of a killer.

This book puts cruelty under a microscope, and displays the thought processes and logic of a sane but angry young person.

Despite the brutal nature of many scenes, this isn’t a book about inherent evil. It’s more concerned, in my opinion, with the dangers of confusion. I can’t say more without spoilers, but it all ties together and makes every amount of sense by the end: a cycle of human callousness lead to all this pain.

Shocking but poignant, I was horrified while reading but came away pleasantly surprised at how good a novel this was.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

(XKCD – 799. This comic isn’t relevant to the book review, really, I just wanted an excuse to post it…)

“Today will still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.”

I recently noted that great writers can make the intricacies of life seem simple and help you better understand the world around you with just a genius turn of phrase. Put another way, it takes an incredible mind to make the complex seem manageable. Hawking condenses time itself into two-hundred and forty pages here, and through crisp examples leaves you (for the most part) with a basic understanding of these impossibly large subjects. Metaphors keep this book alive.

Quarks; general relativity; string theory; quantum physics; black holes. These are often thought of as theories far outside a layman’s potential for easy understanding, so some people brush them aside, on the basis that there’s too much to learn and no clear place to start. This book gives you a good foundation for wrestling with huge ideas, and much more. A Brief History of Time isn’t as quick as a Brian Cox documentary, but it’s not too hard. Hawking proves that while some scientific theories can be anything but intuitive, when they’re explained by a great mind they’re bloody fascinating.

My relevant amazing science credentials going into this: GCSE physics and a love of documentaries, especially those which trick me into thinking I’ve understood a bit about space (especially when Carl Sagan’s narrating). It’s therefore a testament to this book’s readability that I finished it, let alone came away with the (possibly delusional) impression that I’d understood a good chunk. I’d recommend this to anyone who’s curious about the history of everything.

Annihilaton by Jeff VanderMeer

“That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.”

Annihilation is a horror/sci-fi which takes place in “Area X”, a strange ecosystem that’s been cut off from the rest of the world by a border which stretches the minds of those who try to cross it.

Tension is the emotion at the heart of this story. How far can you be pushed and changed before your own self crumbles? There was a lot going on under the surface of this novel, and a Lovecraft-esque atmosphere helps push the question as to what humans can and cannot understand.

The prose is strong (for the most part) and I got through it quickly because of the excellent pacing, so I’m looking forward to the sequels. I’ll be hoping for more actual horror and less inner dialogue about how terrifying everything is.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

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“A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals–that they can’t help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.”

This is a novel about identity, a lengthy examination of a simple idea: the impossibility of escaping your family’s past.

The idea that we are islands — people who can live apart from the histories that brought us to the piece of rock we stake our claims on — is batted about in this book like a mouse by an angry cat. Characters, particularly the second-generation children, slip in and out of different cultural identities like they’re trying on new suits.

Sometimes these characters want to abide by the cultures they’ve been taught to value; sometimes they are making desperate attempts at individuality, at casting aside the expectations of not just their families but the society they are trying to make their way in. They have mixed success, but it’s consistently entertaining to read about.

The omniscient narrator feels like a calm voice in the middle of a hurricane, a dispassionate yet wise woman who is guiding you through a complicated maze of her own making.

It sometimes feels like this novel doesn’t know where it’s going, like the main plot-line has taken a back-seat to whatever random musings have appeared in different characters’ minds, sometimes for fifty-pages at a time, but maybe that’s appropriate. Things rarely occur in real life, after all, in simple, straight forwards ways, or the way we expect, so why should they here?

White Teeth is an entertaining look at Britain’s identity crisis, and a great snapshot of the different forces which help make the UK the complicated, diverse, interesting place it is.