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On the one hand, the world-building part of it is excellent and even believable (at least in an "i buy it as fiction" way). Computers happen to be invented 100 years earlier so that the industrial revolution and the information revolution coincide; now you have Victorians in 1850s London trying to make sense of a world where hackers (or rather "clackers", given that nobody's invented plastic, magnetic tape or transistors yet) control the information...

"But that's theft!"
" 'Borrowing,' according to him. Says he'll give me back my cards, as soon as he's had 'em copied. That way I don't lose nothin', you see?"
Sybil felt dazed. Was he teasing her? "But isn't that stealing, somehow?"
"Try arguing that with Samuel bloody Houston! He stole a whole damn country once, stole it clean and picked it to the bone!"

...where the United States quickly fell apart into several warring nations thanks to the UK's automated intelligence service, where rationalism has taken over completely (Lord Babbage, Lord Darwin, etc - Disraeli is just a hack writer) and the Luddites have become not only enemies of the state but outright terrorists - thoughtcrime, du-du-du-dudu-du. And they write it all like a saucier Englisher Jule Verne novel, complete with mustache-twirling villains and upright gentleman "heroes" saying things like

"Some folk pass their very lives in the mud of the Thames."
"Who's that then?" asked Tom.
"Mudlarks," Fraser told him, picking his way. "Winter and summer, they slog up to their middles, in the mud o' low tide. Hunting lumps o' coal, rusty nails, any river-rubbish that will fetch a penny."
"Are you joking?" Tom asked.
"Children mostly," Fraser persisted calmly, "and a deal of feeble old women."
"I don't believe you," Brian said. "If you told me Bombay or Calcutta, I might grant it. But not London!"
"I didn't say the wretches were British," Fraser said. "Your mudlarks are foreigners, mostly. Poor refugees."
"Well, then," Tom said, relieved.

...so that you have to keep your eyes open to notice that it's actually women doing most of the heavy lifting in the novel, with Ada Lovelace the original clacker, despite still being thought of as lesser creatures. It's two paradigm shifts at once. Or probably more than that.

Unfortunately, the plot is convoluted to say the least (or possibly just badly thought out). It's told in several interlocking storylines that don't really interlock, that don't really feel like they get resolved. Plus, with most of the characters being rather stuck-up unlikable fools in a lot of ways, it's difficult to find one to latch on to - especially since they tend to get written out for a few hundred pages. It's entertaining as hell up to a point, but when everything just drags on, I start to lose interest.

Fascinating effort though, and I'll never not like the idea of steampunk. I might have to go back to this one at some point.

When Darwin sat down to write his autobiography - more for his children's sakes than because he thought anyone outside his immediate family would be interested - he was 67 years old. He had travelled around the world, he had met the elite of 19th century English thinkers, he had published a number of books including at least two which would still be widely read 150 years later, and revolutionised the field of science in general and biology in particular.

After all this, he managed 120 pages of autobiography, almost half of which describes his childhood and teen years.

In other words, Autobiography neither is nor tries to be the ultimate word on the life of Charles Darwin. For most of the book, he simply relates the facts of his life, his friends and family and his work, without doing much to try and put it in context, draw conclusions or reveal secrets - or even discern between harmless anecdotes and important events; he spends almost as much on stealing apples as a child as he does on his 5-year trip around the world on the Beagle. (Though to be honest, the latter is because he'd already published an account of that and didn't want to repeat himself.)

Darwin comes across as a genuinely humble guy, who acknowledges that he's done something huge but isn't out to defend his conclusions or parade his knowledge; he's already done that in his other books, and now he just briefly tells us why he came to be interested in biology, how he started questioning prevailing attitudes, and how he drew his conclusions and wrote his books (and he says very little about the 20-year wait before he dared publish Origin of Species). He's as calmly objective about himself as he is about his findings; it's all in a day's work.

Whenever I have found out that I have blundered, or that my work has been imperfect, and when I have been contemptuously criticised, and even when I have been overpraised, so that I have felt mortified, it has been my greatest comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that "I have worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do more than this." I remember when in Good Success Bay, in Tierra del Fuego, thinking (and, I believe, that I wrote home to the effect) that I could not employ my life better than in adding a little to Natural Science. This I have done to the best of my abilities, and critics may say what they like, but they cannot destroy this conviction.

The result is a well-written, if not terribly fascinating book; the kind of autobiography that tells you more about its subject by what it leaves out than by what it includes. I'm sure there are better accounts of his life and the importance of his work; hearing ol' Chuck himself tell it, you'd almost think he did no more than invent a better mousetrap. But hey, if you're interested in a look inside the mind of the man who basically came up with the idea that mice could be caught at all, you could do a lot worse.

I'm ever upper-class high society
God's gift to ballroom notoriety
And I always fill my ballroom, the event is never small
The social pages say I've got the biggest balls of all!
- AC/DC, "Big Balls"

Yes, if you didn't get your fill of jokes during teabagging week, fear not; Seth Grahame-Smith is here to save both you and Jane Austen with numerous double entendres about just what excites upper-middle class girls in 19th century England.

"Balls are always a subject which makes a lady energetic."
"It depends on who's throwing them, Mr. Darcy."

Of course, that's not the most obvious change that Pride And Prejudice has gone through here. While the basic plot, setting, characters and even most of Austen's original text remain the same, Seth Grahame-Smith has tweaked everything a little bit; London now is a walled-off fortress where few people get in or out, violence is part of everyday life, and the Bennet sisters have trained with Shaolin monks to become some of the fiercest warriors in Hertfordshire. Which doesn't exactly help their marriage chances in a country which, despite everything, still expects a wife to submit to her husband and stay at home.

My sisters and I cannot spend any substantial time searching for Wickham, as we are each commanded by His Majesty to defend Hertfordshire from all enemies until such time as we are dead, rendered lame, or married.

The reason for all of this, obviously, are the titular zombies who have been terrorizing England for the past 50-odd years, and which offer plenty of excuses for inserting action scenes into the story - both from fights against the undead, and from the generally much more violent society that their presence has created. See! Hordes of zombies attack the ball where Elizabeth and Darcy meet for the first time! See! One of Elizabeth's closest friends slowly turn into a zombie! See! Elizabeth Bennet fight off three ninjas blindfolded and eat the last one's still-beating heart before him! See! Certain characters get exactly what's coming to them!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.

It's completely insane, of course. But the really insane thing is, it works. Obviously, most of it is played for laughs (though there's enough respect for the source material to keep it from turning into outright parody), but Grahame-Smith actually uses the zombie plot to underline and comment on Austen's themes. In classic horror fashion, the monsters work as an embodiment of the less tangible problems in life, the everyday struggle becomes an actual life-or-death fight. I'll give you three guesses as to how the confrontation between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine plays out. Hint: it involves katanas. Elizabeth fights society's norms and she fights zombies.

Elizabeth lifted her skirt, disregarding modesty, and delivered a swift kick to the creature's head, which exploded in a cloud of brittle skull and bone.

But mostly, it's just a lot of gory fun. So Grahame-Smith can't match Austen's dialogue (who can?), so it all gets a bit predictable (especially if you're read P&P before), but who cares? It's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, people. And they've got the biggest balls of them all.

True story, I swear: I'm sitting on the metro, reading 2666 when a man walks up to me and says:

"You shouldn't read that."

"...Pardon me?"

"That." He points at the book, whose cover is a Bosch-like scene of what looks like angels and demons shrouded in red and black and 666 in large red numbers. "It's not good for you. Do you know what that means? The end of the world. Jesus loves you, do you know that?"

And I get what he's about and try to explain that it's a misunderstanding. Not only don't I believe in any of that, but the title of the book is 2666 and might be catholic but not in any way supernatural or religious, and it's a... um... post-postmodern deconstruction of... er... the violence inherent in the structures of... The man isn't impressed by my explanation and keeps trying to convince me to get rid of the book and turn to Christ, for we live in the end of days and he's only telling me this because he's my brother and he loves me, etc. That's an awful lot of fuss over a book, I think as I step off the train and note that I'm on page 166 out of 898.

So we've established what 2666 is not; not about the Antichrist, the apocalypse, check. And now, long after my Christian brother has left, I'm here trying to explain what it is about, what all the fuss is about, and why I spent every free moment of a couple of weeks with my nose buried in a huge Chilean novel I both loved and hated.

Let's see, there's a secretive German writer who barely sells any books. There's a group of literature critics who claim he's the greatest writer of the 20th century (well, except for Kafka) and are prepared to beat up anyone who disagrees. There's an industrial city in northern Mexico which is probably home to at least one serial killer, since women keep turning up dead - much to the annoyance of the local police force. You've got a black journalist who happens to investigate the murders when all he really wants to do is interview the forgotten heroes of the civil rights movement. Plus hundreds of other characters who walk in and out of the story - or are carried in and out, since many of them only show up after their death.

So what is 2666? I can namedrop until the cows come home to the slaughterhouse; a The Name Of The Rose in the way it not only references Borges and Calvino but also uses a murder mystery to illuminate the century-old structures of our culture; a far more ambitious The Secret History in its tackling of society's pressure and misguided idealism; a The Pledge in the way it picks apart the crime novel and refuses to put it back together since it doesn't work; A Hundred Years of Solitude, American Psycho, A Void, Gravity's Rainbow, Moby-Dick... I could keep this up all day and not come any closer. It's at once a fascinating hodgepodge of influences and one of the most unique, coherent novels I've read recently, which is all the more remarkable since on a surface level the damn thing doesn't fit together at all. It's five separate books covering five (mostly) different sets of characters in five (mostly) different timelines, each one slowly and methodically drawing me in only to leave me hanging just when I start loving it. And then the fifth book ties all the themes together in such a magnificent way that it's several days before I realise that it doesn't actually resolve the plot at all.

Because obviously, nothing gets resolved in the 20th century, which might be the main protagonist of the story. Especially in that Mexican city that acts like the main focus point of the story (not that the story is focused), where the poor come either to move on to the US or to earn money off their body, either as workers or as the women servicing the workers, and the rich come to live well off that. Especially off the women, who all seem to end up on the coroner's table and the police's "unsolved" folder. They blame a serial killer, and there probably is one, but even the busiest serial killer of the world couldn't account for a fraction of the deaths. The flashy, extravagant ones, sure; but then there's the regular, boring, everyday murders that pile on top of them; we stare ourselves blind at the unusual violence while the "normal" stuff just goes by unseen, a part of the world we accept. For 200 pages Bolaño goes on and on, listing death death death and all the detail around it, while the cops who try to solve the problem spend their free time in the pub telling jokes like "Why do kitchens have windows? So women can see the world."

And around that, using it as a springboard, Bolaño draws up the story of where we are, the 20th century and how it got here, the lie and how we told it; society, arts, wars, and that which came after the wars when everyone agreed that it's a lot easier by applying the same ideas within society rather than against it. It's not a rollercoaster of a novel; it's a hall of carnival mirrors, where you meet yourself everywhere, both as a victim and as a perp, whether it's set at the Eastern Front in the 1940s or at a literature seminar in 1990s Italy. Everywhere, Bolaño finds new structures to play off, new angles, new corners we don't want to look around, and there I stand in a labyrinth of darkness and humour and storytelling and bitter medicine and can't find my way out again. And mankind keeps its eye on the flashing lights and impressive but abnormal carnival acts, while we keep marching in the same footsteps towards an unheard-of but all too familiar fate.

Do you know what that means?

You should read this.

Music, as Sacks points out in this book, is a peculiar thing. It's the only human art form that is (almost) completely abstract and yet resounds emotionally with most people; sure you can set words to it, you can specifically use it for something, but the musical notes, melodies, harmonies and rhythms themselves don't have any logical meaning. We are perfectly aware of this (Sacks quotes Arthur C Clarke's Overlords from Childhood's End, saying humanity is the only species they've ever come across to invent something as useless as music). And yet it's everywhere; in our oldest archeological findings, in every single culture, in maternity wards and in old folk's homes, in wars and in love scenes... And it seems to work on us on a much deeper level than simple enjoyment, deeper than memory, deeper than language.

Sacks (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat) is a neurologist and psychiatrist first and foremost, but also an amateur musician and very knowledgeable (classical) music fan. In Musicophilia he collects a number of case histories of people who have been mentally damaged, either from birth, illness or accidents, some more severely than others, and their relationship to music; those who suddenly find themselves unable to even hear music as anything but random noise, those who suddenly find an almost pathological passion for music take over their entire life, musicians who suddenly find their brains going out of tune... but also musical idiots savants, people suffering from severe memory loss or brain damage who are still able to communicate with their loved ones and live through music, people who have been locked inside themselves for decades but who can be woken by a familiar song. He can tackle both the rather mundane problem of tunelessness and the very serious cases, like the man whose short-term memory has been reduced to mere seconds but can still conduct an orchestral piece that's much, much longer.

Musicophilia is consistently fascinating and occasionally both heartbreaking and -warming in the stories it tells; but personally, I think I came at it from the wrong direction. Sacks, as a doctor, gives plenty of examples of how music works in relationship to various cases, how it can be used to help people or how he's seen people's relationship to it change with their illnesses, and the specific workings in our brains that help (or hinder) us process information; but never really gets to the heart of what music means to us in a larger sense. He's a good writer and the book is an easy read, but to a layman like me, the book could have used more of a frame story, a cohesive theory... relevance to make it more than just a collection of interesting case studies. Still, at the end of it, you'll know a lot more both about how we work and how music works with and on us; but if the Overlords ever come asking, you may not have an easier time explaining it to them.

"Life, I do not understand you."
- Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas

"Life is the crummiest book I ever read. There isn't a hook, just a lot of cheap shots."
- Bad Religion, Stranger Than Fiction

"What have you done to deserve this punishment? What sins have you committed? What dark thoughts have you harboured that condemn you to wander through the universe without hope?"
- Gaius Baltar, Battlestar Galactica

"Like a dog."
- Franz Kafka, The Trial

So we know the story; Josef K awakes one day to find that he's been arrested. For what, he doesn't know. Neither do the people sent to arrest him (but not take him into custody). Neither does anyone else, nor do they seem to ask; and so the case against him proceeds, getting more and more complicated as he tries to solve his situation with the questionable help of others.

He was always inclined to take life as lightly as he could, to cross bridges when he came to them, pay no heed for the future, even when everything seemed under threat. But here that did not seem the right thing to do.

The original title, Der Prozess, ostensibly refers to the judicial process - the case against K - but also the process of learning, of discovery (or lack thereof) that he goes through. The English title, on the other hand, has a subtly different double meaning; it makes the reader (and K) expect an actual formal trial with an accused, two lawyers, a judge and a jury which of course we never get. The trial - or trials - of K begin on the first page, the entire book is both the prosecutor's and the defense attourney's legal documents.

K isn't used to the legal proceedings, he has no knowledge of the language or the customs or indeed the law itself; and so he seeks (or rather expects) help from everyone from his landlady to lawyers, priests and other accused. But none of their answers really help him. The judges and lawyers - the ones who are supposed to serve the law - are all, time and again, described as "vain." A lot of people claim to have seen others go through similar trials (processes) to K's, and they are quite happy to say that they know a lot about it, but they keep the details on them secret, stored away in drawers. And ultimately, their knowledge is useless since they're all just low-level servants and none of them know of an actual way out. As the painter points out, the hope of an accused can be put in either an acquittal, an apparent acquittal or a deferment; but the first is purely mythical, everyone's heard of it but nobody's actually seen it happen, and none of the others offer anything but a temporary reprieve, at the price of hard work and patience - and ultimately, yourself.

So these were the lawyer's methods, which K. fortunately had not been exposed to for long, to let the client forget about the whole world and leave him with nothing but the hope of reaching the end of his trial by this deluded means. He was no longer a client, he was the lawyer's dog.

I read it in German this time around, and it's interesting to note how often Kafka uses the (often difficult to translate) passive form - as in, it's not that people do things to him, but that things happen to him; the verbs don't have an agent. I don't read nearly enough fiction in German to know if this is something Kafka uses more than anyone else, but it seems to fit the feel of the story and adds yet another dimension of "the world is out to mess with you."

It's also very very funny. It's a joyless sense of humour which probably owes a lot to what's often referred to as "Jewish humour" - whatever its roots, it's the humour of the eternally shat-upon, the ones who cannot hope to win but can just stave off defeat by laughing in the face of the whole sorry deal. The laughter is the narrator's and the readers', though; there are no jokes for Josef K, our sorry protagonist (if he can even be called that), since he only realises at the very end that the joke is on him. The more absurd the situation gets, the more serious it gets. Kafka's prose is bone-dry, which just adds to the frustration and confusion of everyone claiming to know what's going on without ever telling us in so many words - you'd almost think they are all just as clueless, that the ones claiming to hold the answers are just deferring their own trials.

So what's the moral of this story? What crime is etched into Josef K's back? What, at the end, do we know about him?

- He's busy. He's 30, he's in the middle of his career (which falls apart as soon as he starts spending more time on his process). He works 12-hour days and doesn't have time for the big questions of guilt, innocence, meaning; the modern world isn't designed for people to spend their days philosophizing.

he did not know what the charge was or even what consequences it might bring, so that he had to remember every tiny action and event from the whole of his life, looking at them from all sides and checking and reconsidering them. It was also a very disheartening job. It would have been more suitable as a way of passing the long days after he had retired and become senile.

- He's arrogant. He's not really a bad guy, he's probably pretty nice in the right context (we're told he regularly hangs out with friends at a pub, but they never show up in the story). But he's just a little too convinced of his own importance, his own ability to handle everything that he comes across. He's critical of others, but he never turns that critical eye towards himself; he keeps claiming he's innocent without ever defining what he's innocent of.

- He's clueless about the law, about how the world works. And he doesn't seek to enlighten himself - it's doubtful if he can, since everyone who claims to know something ultimately has nothing to tell him that's of any use to him.

It's tempting, of course, to incorporate Kafka's own story and background into the interpretation of the story. Much has been made of the question who gets to "claim" Kafka as their own (which would probably be a very strange question to him). Born and raised in the Austro-Hungarian empire (Kakania, as Robert Musil called it in a very deliberate pun), later to live in the republic of Czechoslovakia, a secular Jew with German as his first language (and had he lived another 15 years he would have seen just how dark an irony that turned out to be). Where does he belong? What's his fate? What's anyone's?

There's nothing you can do as a group where the court's concerned. Each case is examined separately, the court is very painstaking. So there's nothing to be achieved by forming into a group, only sometimes an individual will achieve something in secret; and it's only when that's been done the others learn about it; nobody knows how it was done. So there's no sense of togetherness, you meet people now and then in the waiting rooms, but we don't talk much there. The superstitious beliefs were established a long time ago and they spread all by themselves.

(You might compare it to Vonnegut's concept of a granfalloon; a group of people who think or seem to have something crucial in common and act based on that, but the obvious traits that they share and base their togetherness on are actually completely irrelevant.)

On the other hand, one interpretation I've seen is that The Trial was written while Kafka was engaged to a much more socially active woman than he, and that it represents the trials of a socially inept person trying to relate to others without knowing the rules - which is an interesting idea about the inspiration for it, though I don't think that's all it is by a long shot.

Of course, it's also easy to say - just as it is for Metamorphosis - that The Trial is just a metaphored-up story of a young guy who's under a lot of pressure, who doesn't know what this thing called life is supposed to be, is prone to clinical depression, and eventually cracks and kills himself? K's breakdown in the attic is pretty much a description of a full-blown panic attack, after all. Or you can go to the other extreme and point out that this is Europe after the "long 19th century" (1789-1914) that started in progress and enlightenment and ended in war, depression, and the death of pretty much every old truth. The phrase "existentialism" hadn't been invented yet, but Kafka seems to have the concept down: the search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. After all the old world has failed, all of humanity finds itself accused of a crime it doesn't understand in a world where it doesn't know the rules.

Perhaps, and again this is just one idea, the entire novel is summed up in the parable told by the preacher towards the end: each door to the Law - each way to understanding the world - is individual. Everyone has to seek it themselves. Then again...

"Don't get me wrong," said the priest, "I'm just pointing out the different opinions about it. You shouldn't pay too much attention to people's opinions. The text cannot be altered, and the various opinions are often no more than an expression of despair over it."

And obviously, there's despair. The Trial is a frustrating work because it doesn't seem to offer any outs, it just gets worse and worse (in a good way) with no end in sight. Then again, a great novel isn't supposed to give clear answers. A great novel is supposed to ask difficult questions and force the reader to think about them. The Trial is one hell of a great novel, and oddly enough it asks its question all the more effectively by never asking it outright.

What did K do to deserve this? What is he accused of?

Nothing. Everything.

England, 1860s. It's a simple plan (famous last words, there): smart con man finds wealthy but very sheltered and naive young lady in the country, with an inheritence that will only pay out when she marries. So he hires a young female pickpocket from London to pose as the lady's chambermaid and convince her to marry him. Once he's consummated the marriage, he intends to ship her off to an insane asylum and live happily ever after off her money. Except of course that this is a Sarah Waters novel, and so something happens that none of them had anticipated: the two girls fall for each other instead. And things aren't as simple anymore. And that's just the beginning of it...

I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed Fingersmith more or less if I'd read more of the English classics; it certainly likes to play with all of the classic tropes - moustache-twirling villains, mixed-up identities, grand houses and filthy dens of thieves, madhouses and libraries and of course the eternal dance between rich and poor, men and women (and women) and their fixed Victorian (and modern) roles. The latter, especially, Waters is happy to deconstruct.

The overexposure of women to literature breeds unnatural fancies.

As it is, though, I enjoyed it a lot. Yes, it's a bit long as Waters' Victoriana pastiching gets a bit too overdone at times, but it manages to balance character drama - the kind where almost everyone does things that are completely wrong, but make a lot of sense given their situation - with a smart plot that twists and turns quite nicely. And it's even quite heartwarming (and -breaking) at times. Does that make me a sap? Maybe it does. But hey, I can live with that. It's one of those books you just gobble up and, despite 500+ pages, don't feel bloated afterwards but just nicely full, warm and still caught up in it after it's over.

On the same day that he arrives in the holy land after never before even setting foot outside his own village, a middle-aged pilgrim comes down with a fever that proves to be fatal. Dying, he asks his companions to carry him into Jerusalem so he can at least see God's city first-hand. As they carry him through a noisy, stinky, crowded city full of people of three different faiths going about their regular business, they point out the landmarks to him: this is where the last supper was held, this is where Jesus was tortured, this is where he carried the cross, this is the holy grave. And he looks at all this mundanity and begs them to stop joking. This can't be it, show me the real Jerusalem. Where's the gold? Where's the glory? Where's the peace and serenity? Where's God? Did he really come all this way, did he give up everything, did he die just to see a... city?

There's a long tradition in Scandinavian literature, especially 19th century literature, of the "simple" bygdedrama - village drama, the story of a small village and the farmers who live there, the big man on top of the hill, the old pastor, the simple but virtuous tenant farmer's daughter, etc. Selma Lagerlöf's Jerusalem, loosely based on real events and often cited as one of the major reasons why she became the first female Nobel Prize winner, takes that and runs with it, turning it into a great early-modern novel in the process.

Focusing on the inhabitants of a small village deep in the forests of Sweden, it follows the wave of religious awakening that swept across the Swedish countryside in the late 1800s and led some to abandon everything and everyone they'd ever known to make the pilgrimage halfway across the world to settle in Palestine. She takes her time setting things up; of the two volumes, the first is set entirely in the small parish they all come from, setting up who they are, the life they've led for generations, and the conflicts that arise when the modern world starts getting closer - both material and ideological/religious rules suddenly start changing, and all of a sudden it's not a given that the richest farmer, the schoolteacher and the preacher are unquestionable authorities. The second volume details what happened to the ones who, eventually, sell their farms and give up everything to emigrate to a country about which they know very little apart from what they've read in the Bible.

Lagerlöf tells it all like a fairly simple story, limiting herself to what her uneducated characters can feasibly know and think about; at the same time, though, she manages to weave in discussions on faith (both religious and personal), community and family that never tries to give any easy answers or pick sides; even when she introduces mystical elements and themes (both Christian, Muslim and pagan; fairytales were still very much alive in these areas a 100 years ago) she leaves it up to the reader to decide whether they're real or just in the characters' heads - and indeed, if it matters one way or the other. But what really makes the book is the way she handles the characters, gradually letting the main characters in this, at heart, fairly simple story become more fully drawn, giving them a history that goes back generations and then occasionally raising the drama to heart-wrenching levels without having to resort to any far-fetched plots.

Beautiful.

It's hard to be a man, Elvis Oké's father tells him. The measure of a man used to be his good name, and he has to be prepared to defend that name - his honour - against anything, from outside or inside.

Names play a part in this, yes. Elvis father is named Sunday, his best friend is named Redemption, and Elvis himself is of course named Elvis. That's about all they have left, it seems; they live in a shanty town in Lagos, Nigeria, and if there's any meaning to the fact that Sunday is a drunk to whom every day is a day of rest, Redemption is a small-time bandit, and Elvis himself a failed dancer, it's nothing they try to think about: names, today, are just words. Sure, Elvis tries to make a living as an Elvis impersonator, dance and smile for the rich white tourists, but nobody wants a 16-year-old black (and tonedeaf) king of rock'n'roll. And so instead, having to make a living somehow, he gets pulled into both criminal and political conflicts - which, in a military dictatorship (the book is set in 1983, with flashbacks to Elvis' childhood) is often the same thing.

In a lot of ways, Graceland is an impressive novel, both playful and harshly realistic in its depiction of life at the (not quite but almost) bottom. Abani has his characters reference both Nigerian (Achebe, Soyinka) and Western (Ellison, Dostoevsky, Marley) writers to create a picture of a world that's become an interconnected web long before modern communications made it obvious; the characters rarely set foot outside their own city, yet thanks to the cultural, commercial and political revolutions of the past centuries they very much live in the Big World Outside. Starting from a, to be honest, fairly cliched story - a young man trying to find his place in a world that doesn't want him - Abani weaves a character piece where the details get to show how it all hangs together, from kingdoms to dictatorship, from Las Vegas to Lagos, where everything you're promised by your name or your background turns to bitter (though often laugh-out-loud funny) irony. A land of grace, as in spending your life at the mercy of someone else's good graces. Abani tackles politics without bashing us over the head with it; things are as they are, men and women do what they do to survive until they leave the building. At best, they get to choose their own encore.

Some people name their children after saints or forefathers in the hope that they will be, well, graced with their good sides. Others are named after rock stars, which may be the modern equivalent. According to some doctors, Elvis - the original one, Presley, that is - died of poverty. Not in 1977, obese and trapped in the Graceland that was to be his palace but got turned into his mausoleum, but when he was young. After growing up poor and undernourished, his body couldn't handle the comfort food and the drugs he could suddenly afford (after growing rich off cover versions of black artists, heh). He was pretty much screwed from the beginning, if poverty didn't kill him, success would; an irony as bitter as the situation in what could have been one of the richest countries in Africa. But great music was always born from the blues. Graceland isn't quite up there, it's a little too self-conscious and meandering for that, but it's a very good read nonetheless.

...That is, I assume that it is if you read it in the original English. Because unfortunately, I read a poor Swedish translation of it. And when you take characters who speak English like Nigerian street kids (it's part of the theme, too) and translate it into Swedish, it ends up sounding like an old 50s comedy half the time.