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A hilarious take on the autobiography; she doesn't write about the life she's actually had, but the life she might have had... if she'd been kidnapped by her dad at a young age and adopted by Wayne Gretzky's family. She writes it like a dry (and very German) critical study in third person of how these life experiences may have shaped her writing, throwing in (fake?) quotes from (fake?) critics about (fake?) books lambasting her for pointless exercises in nonsense literature, gets her story mixed up with The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Pippi Longstocking, Captain Grant's Children, Tom Sawyer etc, runs it all through a blender, and has Glenn Gould play it. Bizarre, not necessarily accessible, but lots of fun.

Just wow. A huge, sprawling, aimless and yet deadeye story of identity, resistance, success and failure, all that jazz (as in free, as in Rahsaan Roland Kirk's twin saxes blowing different melodies at the same time, as in Miles' electric phase fusing white-boy funk with black panther politics, as in Thomas P), ancient folk tales and pragmatic political actions, Mao vs Reagan, all scattered out over 600 pages, 10 years, the echo of billions and centuries in a few dozen people over 10 years, spoken in scores of voices and a new genre for every chapter. Written in every perspective and yet somehow ending in a clenched-fist first-person-plural. I'll try to write something more coherent about it, but I'm not sure I can.

When The Doves Disappeared continues the themes from (the rather magnificent) Purge; wartime and post-war Estonia, a small country caught between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. And like Purge, it does so in two parallel timelines, with the story set first in the early 40s as nationalist Estonians welcome the German forces who "liberate" the newly incorporated Estonian SSR, and picking up again in the early 60s as an entire generation has grown up under Soviet rule.

And yet the focus character remains the same: Edgar Parts (or Eggart Fürst, as he prefers to go by for a few years), master of that most hallowed of human traits, the ability to adapt to his environment. From failed nationalist soldier to Nazi collaborator to KGB propagandist, he's perfected the art of fitting in, of telling his superiors what they want to hear and changing his face to fit the current political situation - in other words, he lies, he spins stories, and now he sits there in his grey Soviet apartment writing the definitive history of Nazi collaborators during the Hitler years. He should know, after all, he was one of the leading... uh, anti-Nazi collaborators. Yup, that's the ticket. (In the foreword, Oksanen says she was inspired by the story of a man who made everyone around him believe he was famous pioneer pilot without ever having set foot in a plane, and wondered what that life must have been like for his wife.)

So then there's his wife who hated her sexless marriage and fell in love with a German soldier, and his cousin who still believes in neither Nazi nor Soviet supremacy, and all the other people he's run into, and whose stories he gets to tell on their behalf, except when they get to take over for a chapter or two and tell their own side of the story... which doesn't matter, since in the end they're not the ones writing an Official Soviet History, and their superior officers never praised them for their initiative, so there.

When The Doves Disappeared is a very confident novel, with vivid characters; the parallel timelines and conflicting narrative voices complement each other beautifully, and the themes of self-deception and survival mechanisms mean that Oksanen has to be subtle in putting across what the characters don't allow themselves to think or feel; like the Estonian flag they quickly run up the pole in the short days between the Nazis evacuating and the Red Army coming back, things show through the cracks. Occupation (in whatever meaning you want to take the word) permeates everything, and not everyone manages to cope - in fact, the novel seems to say, the only way of fully coping is to give up and play along. It's an indictment of tyranny - political, sexual, social - told through someone whose entire life is spent justifying it even as it affects himself.

The only thing that bugs me is that as much as I like unreliable narrators, Parts just doesn't grab me as a main character. His actions are fascinating, and the more we learn about him the more we understand who he is and why he is like that, but he himself remains... kind of an annoying coward, whose identity has been so thoroughly scrubbed that he barely exists. Which may be the point; we want our villains to be audacious, like he describes them in his book, we want a Hitler and a Stalin and a Bin Laden, not an army of faceless yes men who quietly adapt to anything and help put pressure on the ones who won't.

It's a very good novel, one I sped through in a couple of days, unable to get out of my head; just not quite as brilliant and as immediate as Purge was. But then, that's a very high standard to hold someone to.

Picks up right where vol 4 left off, and it’s college time. Young Karl Ove enrolls in a creative writing class, thinking he’s going to become a literary wunderkind, being a writer is all he wants… and he can’t. He writes and reads and reads and writes and gets drunk and gets a girlfriend and writes and gets drunk and fucks around and writes and splits up and writes and drinks and throws up in Björk’s bathroom and writes and gets married and writes and nothing happens. He’s a fraud, he’s useless, he has nothing to say, and he can’t even say it in an original way, he reads Dante and Ellis and Cortázar and all his writer friends who go on to get published and he’s left behind struggling to write more than a single page before his stories die. The only thing that makes him a writer is the way he fetichizes his own self-important suffering and his own depravity.

Vol 5 is a deceptive beast; Knausgård is comfortable in his public literary suicide by now, and continues to put everything about himself into the story of his life – essentially transferring himself (or his image and his memories of himself) to book form; picture that scene in Tron where Jeff Bridges gets scanned and disappears only to reappear inside the computer. For the most part, the story remains mundane, and while it’s all good, it’s rarely as utterly entrancing as some passages in the first two volumes were… until you realise that this is all setup, that he’s working himself up to not only Knausgård the novelist, but also Knausgård the son; the book ends up where the first one did, with the death of his father and the immediate aftermath, this time taking the long way around and hitting even harder for it; after page upon page of wanting to smack the conceited little asshole, I find myself almost crying in the middle of Schiphool Airport reading about his father’s funeral. You could write a book about how he does it (and people have – Knausgårdkoden by Eivind Tjønneland is interesting) but fact remains, this is a remarkable… project, for lack of a better word. Cleaning house. The sixth volume is 1000 pages, supposedly including every idea for a novel he’s ever had. I wonder what will be left of him by then. I hope there’s something, because Knausgård is one of the great writers.

Cory Doctorow has Opinions. (We knew that already, right?) He has Opinions on issues such as copyright, lawyers, entrepreneurship, digitization not only of information but of life itself, the role of technology in transforming our view of the world, etc etc etc. And that's all well and good; while I don't always agree with his conclusions, his opinions on the issues are always intriguing and well-informed.

The trouble is that when he puts it all into novel form - using the same idea as Stephenson's Diamond Age, the changes in society that happen when material abundance is available to everyone while information is restricted - then as much as I'm fascinated by the ideas, the what-ifs and the probably-wills, I never get rid of the feeling that he's preaching at me. The story moves in fits and starts, the world is for the most part limited to what the lead characters get up to (it doesn't help that they're all Fantastic at what they do except when it's a plot point that they're not), the villains (because you gotta have villains in a story about entrepreneurship) are one-dimensional... And the probably most intriguing storyline, that of a collective building a coherent story out of apparent chaos, is alluded to several times only to be unceremoniously dropped before Doctorow tries to explain what that story is.

Makers makes me want to read Doctorow the non-fiction writer. That's a compliment to the writer, but not to the novelist.

Speaking of great Scandinavian writers, this finely sculpted piece of modernism convinces me even further that Kyrklund is as good as they get. A short story told through three voices; Master Ma, the Chinese philosopher who uses his life as inspiration for his musings on the Human Condition and the great struggle forward (this was written in the 50s and ends with a moon rocket) which is far more interesting than actual humanity. His aphorisms and koans are then footnoted and undercut by his servant girl Yao. Her footnotes are then in turn footnoted and undercut by a later expert, who dismisses her as a foolish emotional woman wanting to make the old man look good and changing the story. Not completely dissimilar to Pale Fire in both form and scope, but cooked down to under 100 pages, letting the actual story just show up in glimpses that are immediately questioned by the people living it… Not a casual browsing read, but coming right after the huge meal of Knausgård’s frustrated attempts to get writing, Kyrklund’s deconstruction of the whole idea of storytelling sobers me up like a triple espresso.

In the end, I think it's the good kind of disappointment. The kind that comes from a writer having a good idea and overreaching rather than underachieving. Because Starobinets has a great idea here; a post-singularity novel, set in a world where the entire world population ("The Living") is tied together with Facebook a social network that's implanted directly in their brains. Few people even visit the "First layer" (what 20 years ago would have been called "reality") anymore, instead they spend their lives watching serials, speaking in memes and having cybersex. Well, the ones who aren't "robots" at least. And since everyone's profile is always saved to the cloud, everytime someone dies they're instantly reborn and assigned their old profile, memories and all. Until one day, when Zero is born - who doesn't have a previous profile, which should be impossible, and who therefore cannot possibly be let into the network... Dun-dun-DUUUUN!

Trouble is, Starobinets doesn't know when to quit. She keeps on adding complexities to her story (immortality secret councils body surfing hidden histories Dark City newspeak death camps christ metaphors Inception web wars post-soviet power struggles Matrix reincarnation angst dissident groups dogs trolls bug drugs bozhe moi) that sometimes work really well (and sometimes very underdeveloped and obviously satirical) but when taken all together just turn into... white noise. Information overload. At no point do I feel like I understand this world (ETA: Or the characters - there's probably a good reason I didn't even remember to mention them); it starts out weird in medias res, which is fine, but being told from the perspective of people living in it for centuries, it never really pauses and lets us catch up. I spend too much of the novel just watching people do stuff I have no idea why they're doing or even what it's supposed to signify. And for a novel about a world tied together by a social network, it's remarkable how little we see of the world outside our handful of main characters... of course, that may be the point.

It's too bad, because there are things in here that really are quite clever; it's a cyberpunk novel in its purest form, where "humanity" is literally reduced to input and output of information, and it's very timely as well. "He +Liked Big Brother." But there's a fine line between "complex" and "confusing", and Starobinets has way too many underdeveloped threads going in this novel to see it.