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Short little tale about two supposed bourgois degenerate (since their parents had actual educations) teenagers who get sent to a small Chinese mountain village during Mao's cultural revolution. There, they labour in misery and near-starvation (physical and intellectual) until they discover two things: a friend with a secret cache of Western literature (Balzac, Dumas, Dostoevsky, Flaubert) and a pretty but uneducated girl in the next village...

Quite enjoyed it, even though it doesn't really have the emotional or narrative weight that the story might have warranted; you rarely get the feeling of being sucked into the story, since Sijie for the most time is comfortably lodged in first-person way-past-tense mode - for a book about the lure of forbidden fiction and love, it reads a little too much like a long-ago memory told from a safe distance. Enjoyable, but not great (though I might have caught on more if I myself had been familiar with most of the works referenced).

Suffice to say that while it's not quite the bulls-eye that Too Loud A Solitude is, it still kept me absolutely riveted. Like with the other Hrabals I've read, it's a microperspective of something much larger, telling the story of life in Czechoslovakia from the 1930s to the communist era from the horizon of a small and rather clueless restaurant worker; he starts as a bus boy and works his way up to manager before everything comes crashing down, and yes, the double meaning of "serve" is very deliberate.

Hrabal's comedy is anything but refined, at least on the surface; the first half is almost slapstick as he gleefully sends up the pre-war society that is still trying to pretend the old days of the Empire are still alive and well while still marvelling at new technology, and our narrator is young and selfish and learns to serve others by paying close attention to what they want and who they are; one look and he can tell exactly what they need. Then the war comes, in the middle of a sentence as if it doesn't have anything to do with him at first, and the comedy becomes increasingly dark; being a selfish sort, he picks the wrong side, falls in love with a German girl, has a tailormade Aryan baby (who turns out to be an imbecile) and sooner or later can't help but turn that sharpened sense of character perception towards himself.

I Served The King Of England ends up both as sharp social criticism (it was banned in Czechoslovakia) and as a journey of self-discovery to rival (at least my memory of) Hesse's Siddharta. Except a lot funnier.

And I said to myself that during the day I would look for the road to the village, but in the evening I would write, looking for the road back, and then walk back along it and shovel away the snow that had covered my past, and so try, by writing, to ask myself about myself.

Merkoski was in on the ground floor of the ebook development; one of the first to write hyperlinked novels on the web, one of the chief architects of the Kindle, and now apparently all-round Book Future guru. Burning The Page is about all of that - how we (or well, Amazon in particular and the US market in general) got to where they are today, what it means for the publishing business, and where it'll go from here. It's interesting stuff, and anyone interested in the digital transformation of the book business and society at large should find some interesting points here. Merkoski isn't a bad writer, even though (and this is a pretty general problem with these kinds of books) his exaggeratedly conversational musings repeat some points endlessly and make the book seem more like his personal memoir at times, which gets a little tiring in the long run. It also highlights one of the central problems of the book: it's very much Merkoski's view of how things work from his horizon and where he thinks the future will take the book. And as much as he likes to talk about his own love of reading (which I don't doubt) and refer to other books, his view of reading is very much technology-focussed. He can conceive of a world in which reading turns into a multimedia bonanza of moving images and portable miniprojectors, but not one where e-books are DRM-free. He's open about the shortcomings of digital, but can't imagine that paper books won't be completely gone in just a few years. He can stare for ages at the technical possibilities of what you can do with a text, but says very little about how the market will actually work. And so on.

As one of the first proper histories of the digitization of the book industry, written by someone who was right there, it's a good read. But it needs a few pinches of salt and a few extra spices.

A teenager, a little too caught up in himself as teenagers tend to be, runs away from home. A confused old man commits a murder (maybe). An aging woman writes down her memoirs in a library where time seems to stand still.

Kafka on the Shore is a fascinating book that's difficult to pin down; like the cats that keep appearing throughout, it doesn't seem to have a fixed structure (ever try to hold on to a cat that doesn't want to be held?) and doesn't give up all its secrets. This is the sort of story I keep hoping for and so far have never gotten out of Canongate's myth project; while it's heavily intertextual, referencing and building on both ancient myths (Theseus, Orpheus, Oedipus), newer literature (Kafka, Conrad, Eliot, Salinger), music, corporate logos... it's often so overtly metaphorical that it even has the characters point out that life is just a metaphor. It mixes in ingredients from fantasy and science fiction (UFOs, gateways to alternate realities, interspecies communication) and, come to think of it, pretty much follow's Campbell's The Hero's Journey almost perfectly. It's built on myths, on things that have come before, on things that have been proven to have universal relevance.

And yet at the same time, it's such a unique and beautifully told story. It takes a handful of outsider characters and makes them come alive when they run into each other. Kafka, the 15-year-old runaway; Oshima, the hermaphrodite forever trapped in between; Nakata, the old and slightly backwards man who cannot read or even remember his own past; Hoshino, the young lorry driver with no fixed point in life; and Saeki, the middle-age woman who might just be the central character here. Their stories slowly weave together while at the same time unravelling... not their pasts as much as what MAKES a past, the experiences and memories that make us human and make us relate to others. Having only read one of Murakami's fictional works before - Norwegian Wood - I get the feeling that this is sort of a central pillar of his storytelling; we are the result of what we experience, but also of what we make of those experiences.

There's one conversation in the book where one of the characters talks about a piece of music by Schubert, saying that the problem with it is that the piece as it's written is flawed - or rather, quite simply boring. And being a finished composition, the structure is already there and can't be ignored if you want to play it. The challenge to the musician playing it, therefore, is to put his or her own spin on it and MAKE it interesting. Somehow I don't think he's just talking about music.

It's lyrical, enigmatic, and still somehow strikingly straight-forward at times. This is only the third Murakami I've read, but the first two have remained with me for years and I've no doubt this one will as well.

Taking both its title and its central storyline from Bret Easton Ellis' insert-adjective-of-your-choice-here American Psycho (well, I liked it), Alain Mabanckou's African Psycho is a succinct, disturbing but also frustrating read. Succinct in that it gets in, throws its punches in merely 145 pages, and gets out again before it overstays its welcome. Disturbing in both its subject matter and the hinted-at society it takes place in. And frustrating in the way it's presented.

If Ellis' serial killer (or was he?) Patrick Bateman was supposed to be the symbol of everything wrong with the shallowness of 80s America, rich, beautiful and seemingly powerful, then Mabanckou's Gregoire Nakobomayo could well be a symbol of sub-Saharan post-colonial Africa; orphaned at birth and brought up by a series of supposedly well-meaning but oppressive foster parents, he's a would-be serial killer whose shaven head is filled with bits and pieces of both African lore and European culture but who has no real use for either of them. He lives in a poor, stinking and perpetually alcohol-soaked district he calls He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, near One-Hundred-Francs-Only Street where girls from the countryside come to earn money the only way they can. And despite the fact that Gregoire himself is reasonably well off, he hates it. The only myth he has any use for is that of the legendary bandit and murderer Angoualima, and his one ambition in life is to become as famous a serial killer as his idol. If only he weren't such a complete failure at it... but now he's got a girlfriend, and he's going to start his career as a legendary murderer by killing her in the most inventive way he can figure out. Maybe.

Mabanckou's got talent, there's no denying that, both when it comes to style and content. As a narrator, Gregoire is a foul-mouthed, boisterous and rather pathetic figure. It's hard not to end up laughing at his impotent attempts to prove a villain (and the way he completely misses that he might have proved a lover); he tries to kill, rape and rob, but keeps failing and imagining his idol Angoualima laughing at him. He has no power over even his own actions, let alone the society he lives in. And there are passages where Mabanckou has him unwittingly offer both scathing criticism and sharp satire of a corrupt society, all of it set to the forbidden music of the band The Same People Always Get To Eat In This Shitty Country; somewhere underneath all of his rants, Gregoire really just wants to make something of himself. Be somebody. Have control over his own destiny.

The problem, however, is that everything we learn about him seem to suggest that giving Gregoire control over his own destiny would be a Very Bad Idea. Unlike some other despicable first-person psychos (Bateman, Humbert, Bickle, et al) there really is very little about Gregoire that allows us to empathize - let alone sympathize - with him. Over the course of the novel he never really changes much, and if his circumstances do, it's not because of anything he himself does; he's just swept along. In the end, a serial killer who isn't actually much of a serial killer is... well, just a really annoying guy. And spending time inside his head soon becomes more embarrassing than shocking or thrilling.

That's not to say that I disliked the book. African Psycho has moments of brilliance, both silly humour and harsh social critique, viewed through the eyes of a character who is more part of the problem than part of the solution, no matter what he himself may think. The psycho of the title is too harmless to be a threat in himself; he's a symptom of a greater disease, and the sobering and visceral glimpses we get of that make this well worth a read. Just as long as you don't mind laughing at rather than with the narrator.

Right, so, Pale Fire it is then. The story of an escaped king, a murdered poet, or possibly neither.

Man's life as commentary to obstruse
Unfinished poem. Note for further use.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

1. I put off reading this book for well over a year simply because I don't, as a rule, read poetry. Don't get me wrong: it's not a matter of principal... sorry, principle, but rather that I knew enough about what it was (an unreliable interpretation of a poem) to doubt my own ability to catch Kinbote in the act. I could catch Humbert because I knew the novel conventions he hid behind, the references he used to defend himself. Not being a fan of poetry, I thought I wouldn't be able to do the same here. I'm not sure whether or not I was right.

2. From that perspective, I can't help but be somewhat underwhelmed by John Shade, if he exists. "Pale Fire" strikes me as a rather prosaic poem, the odd glimmer of beauty (that first stanza!) and/or meaning notwithstanding. This may or may not be the point.

3. Kinbote, if he exists, is a despicable but fun character. Part overzealous critic (scoffing at critics who draw far-reaching conclusions even as he maintains that another man's autobiography is his own in code), part psycho stalker, part complete mythomaniac.

4. Zembla, if it exists, is an impossibility; like a never-russified Novgorod ("new town"), the language an occasionally hilarious mixture of Scandinavian, German and Slavic. As Nabokov has Kinbote (or has Shade or Botkin have Kinbote) point out, the name indicates both "land" and "mirror"; it is, or it just resembles that which is. It's explicitly said to not be Novaya Zemlya; does that make it the not-new, the old world? There's that "Lolita as metaphor for the old world falling for the shininess of America" theory again. Which, of course, Nabokov scoffed at.

5. This, of course, runs through everything. Pale Fire is full of shadow images (is that Plato's blasted cave again?), fairground mirrors, opposites, dark halves, colours, flowers - obviously metaphorical and symbolical language that comes together in a way that emphasizes its own artifice. In other words, there are things that are too obvious, too deliberate, to be true.

6. Kinbote cannot be telling the truth; his story is too absurd, he knows too much about everyone. This much is true, at least within the novel (which of course in turn is a lie by Nabokov, the wealthy Russian who emigrated to the US and whose father was murdered by accident.) What's more, it's doubtful whether Kinbote knows he's not telling the truth - because he might not even exist. There are points in the text (starting on page one, that "very loud amusement park") which seem designed to call his authenticity into question; who would actually write that? How could someone as intelligent (if deranged) as he clearly is be as blind as the story requires him to be in order to not notice his own fictional status? Not only is his narration unreliable - the very existence of a narration is itself unreliable.

7. Likewise, Shade himself - for all the biographical information both Kinbote and Shade himself give us - is, in name and deed, a shadow (or Shadow). He only speaks in poetry and in sarcastic putdowns. His last poem starts, continues, and ends with his own death, following shortly after the poem is (un)finished. Does that seem right to you?

8. So Shade writes a poem, Kinbote writes the footnotes. Or Shade writes a poem and invents Kinbote to tell a different story in the footnotes. Or Nabokov invents Shade and Kinbote. Or... etc. The text is an interpretation of itself that itself demands to be interpreted while mocking those who would interpret it. There's endless permutations, not one of them is completely improbable, and the word is indeed "mindfuck".

9. And yet. And yet. I'd even go so far as to ask what significance the story itself has to anything if there's not one fixed point, not one opening where we can say "OK, THIS really happened, if perhaps not quite in this way; now, let's see what that implies for everything else he says." For all we know, everything here is Kinbote's invention. For all we know, none of it is. Without any "real" (within the fiction) basis, we haven't got a leg to stand on. We're just turning in ever-narrower circles around a novel that may or may not have a centre, chasing our own tale.

10. That's not a huge complaint, and perhaps it's even the point, but it does lead me to admire the book more than I love it. Pale Fire is an astounding work; it's so full of tricks, trompe l'œils, hidden passages, masks and question marks that I could re-read it right now and probably come to a completely different conclusion about everything in it. It's funny as hell. It constantly undercuts itself and forces the reader to re-evaluate his/her opinion of what's going on. And somewhere underneath, there's serious issues to address. But unlike Lolita, it never captivates me - at least not this time around. I can't give it less than five stars, though.