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Part III of Hrabal's autobiography/biography of his mother, that started with Cutting It Short (I've yet to find Part II in translation) is more of the same: at times hilarious in the way it trips, slapstick-like over itself to find the time to tell all the stories it wants to tell, and at times filled with grief for that which has gone and will never come again.

She is old now, and together with Francin and his senile brother Pepin they've checked into a retirement home; it used to be a castle belonging to a nobleman, but of course this is the CSSR and there are no noblemen anymore. (They'd wanted to spend their autumn years travelling the world and even saved up the money for it, but of course they don't get to do that now.) With Hrabal's amazing gift for imagery, the old castle becomes both a mirror of the big world outside (the old people guard the gates themselves, unable to recognize friend from foe as long as they're on duty) and the setting for the stories that the three oldest inhabitants of the home tell to her: everyone that lived in the little town down there, everything they did, stories going back 50, 100, 200, 400 years. And in Hrabal's prose, all of these times and themes mingle and mirror each other. For instance, there's a breathtaking scene in which the narrator describes dinner time at the home, with 400 decrepit and toothless old people reflecting a huge painting of Alexander the Great defeating the Persians, that the old Count had put on the ceiling of the dining room. Knives clash against plates as the new world sweeps away the old, the huge but outdated Persian army being bested by the streamlined and modernised Greeks, while outside the walls of the castle (Masque of the Red Death, anyone?) new thoughts and styles are not only replacing the old ones but even, as is often the case, even the memories of the old ones.

The teeth she was tricked into replacing with false teeth she couldn't wear; the gravestones that the caterpillars like giant dentists rip up at the local cemetary to turn it into a park, carting away all the old stones - the only witnesses remaining that these people ever existed. The stories that the three oldest men tell her of times gone by that often get told twice - always a little fancier the second time around; this is both an exercise in and an indictment of nostalgia. The only way to keep memories alive is to keep telling stories of them, but the stories tend to get idealised over time and turn into fiction. A lot of times, things were better in the old days because we tell ourselves they were.

The shops that used to have first and last names had transformed into Meat and the department store Unity, Restaurant and Bread and pastries, Café and Motors. I smiled and was happy that I'd gotten to see with my own eyes how times had changed, how almost all of the old people had passed away and been replaced by young women and young men, everything was different from before.

And of course, the subtitle to the whole book is "A Fairytale." Because we cannot really trust anything we remember; man (and, I suppose in this case, woman) likes to mythologise, likes to fill in the blanks and make sense of what we remember, improve on it.

In every room in the retirement home, where the old people live bunched together, 8 to a bedroom, there's a loudspeaker playing the Harlequinade (that's the book's title); that sentimental ballet music you hear over a thousand silent movies, as if to keep the old people stuck in their nostalgia and not look at the world around them. The narrator and her three companions find a way out by telling stories of what they've seen: keeping themselves alive by keeping the past alive, by not forgetting the good and the bad, not buying into the mandatory conformity. Not all of the memories are happy, not all of them are even all that fascinating; but hey, that's Life - and in the hands of Hrabal, even the dullest stories take on all five senses, right up until the ending knocks us all flat on our backs.

It's a plot not unlike many a science fiction movie; a bunch of people wake up one morning, each in an identical hotel room with a bed, a door, and a computer. They don't know how they got there. The door of each room leads to a labyrinth - each person seems to have a different labyrinth, though of course they might simply be at different starting points of the same one. The only thing on the computer screen is a chat room where they can interact with each other, though some unseen moderator keeps censoring any messages that might help them figure out who and where the others are. Each person has been given a nickname (an avatar) which they cannot change. And the only thread in the chat room was started by the member named Ariadne, asking about the labyrinth and Theseus and the Minotaur.

This is the fourth volume in Canongate's Myth series that I've read (after Armstrong, Winterson and Östergren) and of the fictional ones, it's by far the most interesting. Where the others seemed content to simply retell a story, Pelevin gets right down to business and tries to come to grips with what a myth IS, why it can matter, why it can continue to be relevant for thousands of years - in short, how we use it to understand the world and ourselves. You may know the basics of the Theseus myth; the hero enters the labyrinth (using a roll of thread given to him by the King's daughter, Ariadne, so he doesn't lose his way) and kills the monster. Simple enough, it would seem; all our intrepid Internet heroes need to do is figure out how the labyrinth(s) work(s), where the minotaur is, how to kill it, how to get out, and which one of them is Theseus.

But as Pelevin notes in the foreword, every myth takes on a different meaning depending on its context - and since every single one of the protagonists represent a different school of thought (the existentialist, the Christian, the rational scientist, etc etc etc) every attempt they make to make sense of their situation turns into a long discussion of just what the labyrinth, and the minotaur, and they themselves symbolize... and of course, since they can't see each other, they can't be sure that the others (and their viewpoints) even exist or are worthy of consideration. Yet their only way out seems to be co-operation.

When I hear the word ‘discourse’ I reach for my simulacrum.

As you might gather, it's not exactly a fast-paced thriller (though it is both thrilling and a quick read...) and if the book has one great flaw, it is that it tends to forget that it's supposed to be a novel (at least I think it's supposed to be a novel) and settles for an Eco-like lecturing rather than try to advance the plot (such as it is). Since the entire novel is presented in the form of a chat room thread, you have to be interested in stuff like how we construct reality (virtual and "real"), the nature of memories, free will, perception of time etc. If you're into that sort of thing, The Helmet of Horror is a fascinating if deceptively tricky novel, flipping subject and object back and forth, a myth writing itself, how we create future from the past. It's all in your mind; including your mind. So post it ends up pre. Or something. I might still be stuck in that labyrinth - hell, we might all be. But I think I want to read more by Pelevin before I find my way out.

Depressing but masterfully told story of a man trying to follow his conscience in the midst of the Korean war. Apparently, "Han" is not only a common surname, but also an abbreviation for Korea itself and a word meaning "a collective feeling of oppression and isolation in the face of overwhelming odds... lament and unavenged injustice". Makes perfect sense to me.

Watch young Frank Wheeler, husband of April and father-of-two in his late 20s, work in the garden of the Wheeler's home in suburban Connecticut. He's breaking out stones in the backyard, dragging them to the front and using them to build a brand new path from his house down to the driveway. It's tough, sweaty work, the kids keep getting in the way and it's doubtful if he's ever going to finish it, but that's what it means to be a Man; you do the job, you support your family.

Watch young April Wheeler, wife of Frank and mother-of-two in her late 20s, acting in the local community theatre's production of The Petrified Forest. Despite having given up her naive ideas of becoming a model or actress when she married, we're told she's the only good thing about the play; she knows her lines, she understands her part, she's the last one to fall apart when everything starts going wrong and the play ends in disaster. Not that she doesn't eventually fall apart; everyone's an amateur here, after all.

She must have spent the morning in an agony of thought, pacing up and down the rooms of a dead-silent, dead-clean house and twisting her fingers at her waist until they ached; she must have spent the afternoon in a frenzy of action at the shopping center, lurching her car imperiously through mazes of NO LEFT TURN signs...

There's been a ton of films and novels about American suburbian angst in the past 15 years or so, so it stands to reason that Revolutionary Road (set in 1953, published in 1960) has had a revival. But in a weird way, though Revolutionary Road predates all the other stories, it also anticipates them: Frank and April are very well aware of their situation. They're not the ones to blithely settle down and wait for promotions, grandkids and death while the rose bushes grow; they're self-described intellectuals, goddamnit, they know what their parents got wrong, they have plans and aspirations, they know that there's so much more to life than being good neighbours and following the flock. They're the post-war generation, they're the perfect family on the cusp of a brand new world, they're the ones who are going to build a new road out of old stones.

And it's all going to go to hell.

Revolutionary Road is easily one of the best reads of the year for me. I don't know what it is that does it; the stark realism; the beautiful prose that stays down to earth without ever becoming dull, descriptive without being flowery, with just enough sneaky irony to underline the earnestness, show-don't-tell like very few can do it; the multi-faceted, well-drawn characters and the way he sets them up against each other without using any far-fetched plot elements - just lets it play out and coldly takes them where they need to go, not for the sake of making a heavy-handed point but just because that's what happens to these people. One of the blurbs has Kurt Vonnegut declaring it the Great Gatsby of his generation, which is a perfectly valid comparison, though personally I can't help thinking of Rabbit, Run - with the added twist that Yates gives the story a more interesting (and by extension horriffic) spin than Updike; where it's hard not to think that Rabbit Angstrom is an asshole who deserves what he gets, and the people who suffer from his shenanigans are victims, there aren't really any bad guys in Revolutionary Road. Sure, they have their less admirable sides - Frank especially - but there's no conscious malice here, at least not to start with. The road isn't paved only with good intentions but also with a certain set of deeply set ideals, ideas, power structures and personal backgrounds that slowly but surely bring everything crashing down. And what makes it all the more chilling is that these are the sort of people who are supposed to know better, who think they have the intellect, education and fresh ideas to do things in a new way - and given everything they've come from, everything they still don't see, can't not end up where they're headed.

We tend to forget that "revolution" means "full circle"; the very word itself belies the notion of forging a brand-new path. And even the best intentions for how to make the world better tend to end in a reign of terror. Revolutionary Road is so deliciously detailed, so subtle, and yet hits me like a ton of bricks.

Two young men show up at a bed & breakfast in the Polish countryside. They've come there to get away from the hustle and bustle of the big city and have some peace and quiet, but it turns out to be anything but; not only do they find a macabre and mystifying corpse nearby, but the family they get to live with seems to have a lot of unresolved issues, which the two youngsters soon find themselves caught up in... and as always in these types of stories, somebody's going to die before it's all over.

Cosmos, like all detective novels, is all about finding the clues. Clues being that which deviates from what we perceive to be the norm; the "C'est un cauchemar!" spoken in the wrong language, the mysterious blue key on the table, the rake moved to point at the servant's window. So our hero and narrator Witold and his friend start to gather evidence. But how, in a world they don't know, surrounded by people they don't know, are they supposed to know what are actual clues and what is normal? In trying to find out what things mean, at what point do they go from observing to concluding to ascribing?

The defining ability of mankind is not our sense of humour, or our love, or our hate, or our ability to use tools; animals can do all of that, in one way or another. What we can do, what only we can do, is to try and figure out meaning, to make sense. We (supposedly) understand intricate chains of cause-and-effect, we (supposedly) understand symbolism, we (supposedly) understand how context matters... and even when we get it wrong, even when there is no sense, we can make it. We look at a bunch of stars that are hundreds of light years apart and call them a constellation; we look at an abstract painting and call it a portrait; we look at a bunch of possibly related lives and call them a plot. Where there is no causal relationship, we'll invent one – thereby becoming both cause and effect ourselves.

...As you may gather, Cosmos is not your typical detective story. The obsession with the tiniest details is similar to another novel I read recently, Le Clezio's Terra Amata, but the difference couldn't be more drastic; where Le Clezio's protagonist sees only beauty and harmony in the great jumble of existence, Gombrowicz's sees perversion, deviance and taboo in everything that doesn't fit his picture of what's normal; and being a good catholic, he's both repulsed and attracted, ashamed and excited by it. It's not an easy read; it's confusing, with a narrator who at times is verging on either stream-of-consciousness or full-on paranoia, another main character who speaks complete nonsense half the time, and those looking for a straight A to Z plot are advised to stay away. As darkly humorous as Gombrowicz always is, the narrator gets on my nerves a bit after a while. Not a lot, but a little bit.

And yet somehow, Cosmos is a detective story. A surreal, nightmarish, perverted detective story, but a detective story nonetheless in both plot and form. (Then again, so is Crime And Punishment.) And like all great detective stories (and opposed to the vast majority of them) it goes much further than that; in trying to ferret out the cause and effect of what's going on, it's a perfect analogy for modern man trying to find his way in an ever more confusing world. Find the killer, save the damsel, save the world, figure out how everything works, live happily ever after. And so, the one place where Cosmos deviates (heh) from the norm is in its perception of whether that is at all possible. The traditional detective story tries to create order from chaos; take a number of seemingly unrelated clues, and then use your little grey cells to piece them all together into a watertight cause-and-effect narration of what happened; the killer is caught, the deviant object is removed and order is restored. The story has a clear beginning and a clear end. Except Gombrowicz won't play that game; he can't see one clear meaning, one clear plot rising from chaos - you can't return to normalcy since there was never any normalcy to begin with. In trying to solve one mystery, bring order to one seemingly chaotic chain of events, the detective has just created new mysteries, uncovered new deviations. At some point, the deviation becomes the norm; as Frank Zappa once said, "anything played wrong twice in a row is a new arrangement".

It's a hell of a novel. It gives me a headache, and I'm actually not sure I enjoyed it all that much, but it's certainly a thinker. Much like Witold, your experience of it will probably depend on what you bring into it and how much you're willing to work. It's a novel that makes you doubt your own reading of it, and that can only be a good thing.

Dostoevsky fan living in wartime Kabul kills nasty old woman, becomes convinced that he's Raskolnikov and spends the book trying to work through his guilt and get arrested - but who'll arrest someone for doing something as inconsequential as murder, and of an unwed woman at that? Are you sure we shouldn't give him a medal instead, or at least declare him a martyr? How does the old Karamazov nonsense of "if God doesn't exist, everything is permitted" hold up in a society where everything is permitted and God is everywhere condoning it? Crosses Dostoevsky with Kafka's Vor dem Gesetz and Hedayat's fever visions - perhaps a bit too willfully intertextual at times, but quite effecive.

You know, a book this short, with a setting this fascinating, by an author I actually thought I liked... has no business, none whatsoever, being this boring.

Chabon sets out to write a classic swashbuckling adventure set in the only Jewish kingdom to exist between the fall of Jerusalem and the rise of modern Israel; this is a world of constant movement, trade routes, invasions and religious wars, scattering people of all creeds and nations (ridiculously so - there's hardly a single nationality here that seems to come in pairs; it's always one Bulgar, one Sorb, one Frank, etc.) And in the middle of this he sticks two Jewish adventurers, a Frank and an African, just looking to make a quick dinar and finding themselves caught up in big politics between Arabs, Vikings, Khazars and everyone else. (The original title was Jews With Swords.)

Sounds interesting? It should be. Making it boring is a hell of a feat, but Chabon pulls it off. I'm not sure exactly what happened; I mean, I loved Kavalier and Clay and I've heard very good things about Wonder Boys and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and then the next Chabon I pick up is this - which might pass for one of those "young adult" adventure books if it weren't for the fact that Chabon seems to want to deliberately complicate things by writing in the most annoying and roundabout manner he possibly can. I realise this is probably an attempt to make it sound like a classic boys' adventure novel (whether that is really a style worthy of imitating faithfully is another question), but seriously; why is a 21st century American, writing an adventure set in 10th century Azerbaijan, trying to write in 19th century English?

Then there's the plot, which could have been interesting if it had been developed into something more than just a series of fight scenes, but as it is doesn't even work properly as an adventure. You've got such an interesting idea here, man, use it! There are fascinating bits of history - both political and philosophical - woven into this, but it just makes it all the more frustrating when he skips past it to repeat yet again how his lead characters look, what weapons they carry, etc, without making us care what happens to them or the plot they're involved in; are we supposed to cheer for the insufferably brattish princess, or the tough ruler, or... what? Between that and the stilted language, Chabon too often comes across as a 15-year-old with a brand new thesaurus for big words and access to Wikipedia for the historical bits.

Still, I'll give it a weak two stars. Because truth is, Gentlemen of the Road makes me want to read more. It makes me want to read Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars. It makes me want to re-read Eco's Baudolino. It makes me want to read any number of central Asian authors I haven't yet heard of. It makes me want to read up on history. But it also makes me want to push the other Chabons I have to the back of the TBR pile. It's not that he's not talented, because he is, and there are brief moments when you can spot it here. No, the big problem is that he seems to be deliberately writing below his capacity, as if he's decided that the genre he's chosen cannot be more than shallow, formulaic adventurism (I happen to think he's wrong, and I'll smack anyone who disagrees with 512 pages of Baudolino) and then letting that dictate what he does with it. As if he knows it's a lesser work, ruined by its own lack of ambition, and is still happy with that. Well, I'm not.

Leo Africanus is, in a lot of ways, a good old-fashioned picaresque; Hasan is born in Granada in 1489, and when the muslims are kicked out of al-Andaluz he winds up stateless, homeless, and needing to survive (and help his family survive) by his wits. Does he travel all over the civilised world (the Mediterranean)? Of course he does. Does he meet most of the powerful people of his age, from kings to sultans to popes? Of course he does. Does he play a small but crucial part in historical events? You know he does.

At the same time, the novel shares a lot with some of my favourite 20th century examples of the genre - say, Eco's Baudolino or Bengtsson's The Long Ships, in that it's very consciously written for contemporary readers. He sneaks in discussion of current topics without ever making it too obvious, has the narrator not see the prejudices of his time while still making them stand out for the reader, while at the same time showing some things starting that still influence us today but have become so much a part of culture that we don't see them. Hasan (later Leo) lives through the end of one era and the beginning of a new one, sees the fall of Granada and the rise of the Ottoman empire, the departure of Columbus and the rise of the Habsburgs, the end of small-scale mediaeval culture and the beginning of a view of society, power and religion, that claim to want to return to something old while at the same time building something entirely new - both for bad and good. Maalouf creates a fully alive, entertaining character very much of his time, to show us things about how our own time came about.