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OK, trying to collect some thoughts on War and War.

The weird thing is, as much as I was blown away by it, there are some things about it that annoy me. For one thing, there's the same issue (if for a slightly different reason) that I had with Pale Fire: that feeling that there's no firm ground to stand on in the novel - it's all related through the eyes of someone who's not entirely reliable even to himself. There are times when I wonder if that's not a cop-out on behalf of the writer - if there's any part that doesn't quite work, you can always claim that he meant for it to not work since Korin's a bit of a nut even when he's at his most relatable and, well, US. This is especially obvious in the coda, where Korin sounds at times like a caricature of a reactionary conspiracy theorist (noble and transcendant and transcendant and noble and...)

Thing is, though, it does work. I'm still not sure the coda is strictly necessary, but it does cast the novel into a starker light, separates the shadows from the open spaces like an old expressionist movie, brings out the themes that were lurking just under the surface. There's the prose, those huge labyrintine sentences that take me days to even get a hang of (once I do, I zoom through the novel in a few marathon sessions); sentences that are cast into the general mess of life like fishing lines with hundreds of hooks, dragging anything they catch up to the surface. Bob Dylan once said that he wrote "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" because he didn't think he'd have time to write all the songs he wanted to, so he just let every idea he had form one line, one line that could be spun off into an entire story, and turned them all into one song; Krasznahorkai does something similar here, though possibly in reverse.

The underlying theme of transcendance is a tricky one; on the one hand, with the coda in mind, you have Korin answering his own question - what's left in the world - not by finding the story (if that were the point, we'd get to read the story ourselves) but by telling it, finding someone who'll listen to him as he tells it to himself and tries to imbue it with himself. Of course, it also means he withdraws from society, and ironically fails to save the person who's become his one and only audience... or himself, of course. Unless that's what he does. I mean, at least I'll never forget him.

...which, of course, accompanies the theme of all the various timeskips; all the great peace efforts built on methods that require war, all the great churches built on power, all the great discoveries leading to oppression... Yeah, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, that's not news, but I've rarely seen it explored this insidiously; that there is, to nod to Pynchon, an inherent vice in all of humanity. (There's a horror novel lurking under the surface here someplace, an almost Lovecraftian one... that'd make Korin the mad Arab, I guess, but I digress.)

And then there's the sheer beauty of it. I keep going back to Part VI, chapter 1, the scene where movers come and empty the flat and then fill it again whie Korin and Maria just watch in confusion. All according to some plan.

..until, about four o'clock, the men departed and suddenly there was silence in the apartment, at which point, seeking an explanation, they began tentatively to open the boxes.

It's not a perfect novel. It'd be a crime to inflict a perfect novel on an imperfect world. It is a great novel, though.

That's all I got right now. And I'm not sure about any of it, but at least I'm sure about that.

I went back to Guodong. He always listened to me when I whined about how sad and lost I felt.

Good for him. So why did you have to inflict it on the rest of us?

The hype tries to sell Beijing Doll as a novel so controversial that it got banned by the Chinese government - exactly what "banned" means in this context isn't mentioned. I picked it up hoping for some insight into what it means to be a teenager in China today, but in the end, all it accomplishes is to demonstrate that self-obsessed 15-year-olds who think quoting Kurt Cobain in their diary makes them deep are alike all over the world.

I know a lot of people hate dark, pessimistic texts like this one, where you write about yourself as if it were someone else. If you can't stand it any longer you can stop reading here, I won't make you continue.

Why, thank you for your permission.

Well, it's essentially a 240-page issue of Mad Magazine with (mostly) tamer jokes. There are bits where the satire is sharper than elsewhere (Explaining human rights: "Say person A owns a slave, and person B wants that slave, we consider it wrong for B to simply take the slave..."), but overall the jokes are a little on the obvious heard-it-a-million-times side. Good for bathroom breaks.

In 1913, exactly 100 years ago, several well-established thinkers agreed that the world had seen the last major war. There was simply nothing to be gained from a war at this point; all countries were so dependent on trading with each other, while at the same time not trusting each other enough to go to war for each others' sakes. The big stars of the age were artists, musicians and philosophers, and we all know that culture inevitably promotes peace and understanding. Sure, there was something brewing in the balkans, and in the colonies, and in the former colonies, but the bits of the world that counted - contintental Western Europe and Great Britain - were far too comfortable, cultured and, well, advanced to ever want to go to war with each other. Eternal peace loomed, and there was only up, up, UP!

If only the damned artists and poets and musicians would just understand this and stop ruining things. What the hell is up with Picasso and Stravinsky and Duchamp and that lot essentially declaring the old art forms dead? Now that Freud has discovered what makes mankind tick, why is he arguing with his followers? Can't they all just be like that nice Austrian fellow and paint simple pictures of things you recognise?

1913 is, if nothing else, a quite entertaining book. Illies tracks the year 1913 (or at least what people saw of it from a mostly German-Austrian horizon) by chronicling the lives of a few dozen then-current and future artists, writers, thinkers, musicians and politicians as they paint, fuck, fight, write, angst (a lot of that), starve, strive, fall out, create, destroy, etc. Kafka, Stravinsky, Hitler, Picasso, Freud, Armstrong, Joyce, Duchamp, Franz Ferdinand, Musil, Stalin, Proust, Rilke, Mann, Brecht, Camus and lots of others who may have just been born or are at the height of their career all pass through on their way to... well, whatever great new thing 1914 will bring. It's all very well researched, and often quite funny (note from a Vienna hospital upon admission of a man who's been bitten in the nether regions by a horse; "Patient referred to emergency ward, horse to Professor Freud")...

...and also, for the most part, a bit superficial. A little too often Illies writes about artists' lives rather than the art itself - it doesn't come close to sharpness of, say, Andrei Codrescu's similar examination of post-war art, The Post-Human Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess. The book silently challenges us to draw parallels to the situation 100 years later but gives us nothing but an impending sense of doom to draw parallels from; the coming disaster is hinted at, but none of the reasons for it. If the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - the world of 2013 being, perhaps, the most peaceful it's ever been, at least in terms of outright war - then Illies appears to add to it rather than offer any way forward; "In 1913 they couldn't conceive of a world war even as they marched into it..." and he lets us fill in the "Therefore we're clearly doing the same thing now." Uh, logic, dude.

It's still a really enjoyable read, and you'll come away with a lot of little tidbits of information you can use to impress people. You'll either cringe or laugh at Kafka's marriage proposals, the rock star-like behaviour of Kokoschka and Rilke, the casual antisemitism that pops up everywhere, chuckle at Brecht's early attempts at patriotic poetry... It's all packed with irony, while never turning itself into a joke. That's quite good enough, if no more than that.

Fun, if slight, over the top gothic pastiche of Doctor Faustus as filtered through every orientalist cliche you can imagine. Of course it's blazingly racist, but then again, so's Lovecraft and that's not the only connection between the two - ol' HP must have worn out the last few pages of his copy. Plus it's interesting to read a Western novel that complains that muslim rulers aren't religious enough...

This was actually really good. And by "good" I mean that it's a messy, fragmented novel that switches protagonists several times, boils over and burns, occasionally gets lost in its own attempts to fuse The Kinks and M.I.A., and nevertheless grips me in a way the polished, planned and ridiculously dull On Beauty never managed. Welcome back, Ms Smith.

Another modern Swedish classic I've meant to read for years and... holy shit (you'll get that later) it's good. A retelling of Eve's story in Genesis - her oldest son has just murdered her other son, and she runs away trying to find some answer for it, find an I Am to balance her husband's Thou Shalt, try to figure out what to do with all this rage and grief and guilt she's supposed to carry silently and why she can't remember anything from before she met Adam. It gradually becomes clear that this isn't a faithful adaptation of the Bible; there are other people there, some who have also started developing language - it's not a story about giving names to things, it's a story about giving them meaning. Come to think of it, this is essentially Auel's Earth's Children done right, and all in just 211 pages.