Bibliobibuli's Best Books of 2008 (Part 1)

I'm a step behind with blogging about my favourite books of 2008 because I've just been so busy the last week or two. Domestic Goddess replaced for a while Book Diva.

There's always the pressure, if you write about books, to be constantly on top of the latest fiction, but in 2008 some of my best reading experiences came about as I filled in gaps with things I should have read long before. Some of these books I've written about before so just follow the links back to fuller reviews.

Ian McEwan's Atonement and Nabokov's Lolita ( a reread this) are were both superb, and I think easily weigh in as my favourites of 2008.

Half of a Yellow Sun was another highlight of the year for me, as was We Need to Talk about Kevin, Lionel Shriver' s 2003 novel which (deservedly) took the Orange Prize in 2005.

The novel is narrated by the mother of a boy who has taken part in a mass killing in a high school killing in a series of letters to her estranged husband. The novel is deeply disturbing - not just because of the horror of the ending (the last fifty pages is a ride of white-knuckled terror worthy of a thriller), but because of what it implies about human nature - that a child can be entirely evil from birth even if he is given every opportunity in life and has completely committed parents who try their best to do everything right.

Shriver says in this interview with the BBC's Woman's Hour that the book caused a great deal of debate especially in the US because it broaches one of the last taboos - that parents must love their children and that children are inherently innocent, corrupted by life. She explains that she was really writing from her own fears about having children. (These were, I must say, fears I could strongly identify with myself.) (There's another excellent interview with Shriver at salon.com.)

Another of my books of the year was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Dias which took the Pulitzer prize for Fiction this year. I love, as I've said before, "voicy" books : here the narrative voice is especially strong, and there's a terrific energy in the writing. This is a tragi-comic tale of an overweight dude called Oscar who writes fantasy fiction and :

... wore his nerdiness like a jedi wore his light sabre or a Lensman her lens. Couldn't have passed for normal if he'd wanted to.

Two questions propel us through the narrative - will Oscar manage to get laid? And will he finally manage to beat the fuku or curse which has destroyed lives down the generations? (The story isn't Oscar's alone but embraces a broad sweep of family history both in the Dominican Republic and in the United States.) I also mighty curious to find out who the narrative voice actually belongs to. (For the most part, it turns out to be Yunior, his sister's boyfriend.)

There are copious footnotes - unusual in a contemporary novel -but it's hard to see how Dias could have avoided using them. They provide much necessary background information for those of us who know next to nothing of the Dominican Republic, and add considerably to the texture of the story.

If you want a much better review than you will find here, A.O.Scott's discussion of the book at the New York Times is a real pleasure to read.

I have more bests of the year to come, so hold on!

Saved from the Fire

My father told me what his most important books were. He named Laura as one of them. One doesn't name a book one intends to destroy.

Wonder (along with The Literary Saloon who wondered first) why Dmitri Nabokov didn't think of this earlier, instead of getting us all hot and bothered about whether he was going to torch his father's last novel or not?

(See also Chris Green's piece in the Independent and an excellent summary of all that's happened at Gawker.com.)

You can also watch an interview with Dmitri from the BBC's Newsnight.

Abduction Fiction

Some of my most recent reads seem to have the theme of abducted children running through them, which seems pretty topical. (Another is Peter Carey's His Illegal Self which I also plan to share my thoughts on anon.)

Our book club chose Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as our month's shared read, and I was very happy to re-encounter this old friend of my own adolescence. But I definitely appreciated it far more several (!) decades on.

I particularly love what Preeta calls "voicy" novels, in which we hear the voice of the main character, especially when he or she is not telling us the truth, and sometimes not even aware of their own self-deception.

Humbert Humbert, we learn right from the first page, is a murderer and the paedophile abductor of twelve-year old Dolores Haze alias :

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

The novel is his confession, written later in prison, and it is a meticulous study of obsession. And right from the start it puts the reader in a very uncomfortable position: while we know that what Humbert is doing is morally repugnant, while we are horrified by the chilling tyranny he exerts over his stepdaughter, we are disarmed by his honesty, seduced by the sensuality of the writing, and drawn into collusion with him in this most perverse of love stories. It's a very strange and unsettling sensation.

It's hard to imagine too that the book was written 50 years ago, because it seems so contemporary ... and thanks to the internet perhaps we are more aware of paedophilia now than we were back then.

I felt terribly sorry for Lolita, for although she is no innocent (having gleefully lost her virginity at a summer camp, and knowingly strung our narrator along), HH finally faces towards the end of the book the extent to which he has damaged his step-daughter. Having escaped HH's clutches, she eventually marries a war-veteran and, little more than a child herself, dies in childbirth. Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of all is where HH recalls Lolita talking to a friend about death, and realising that the nature of their relationship utterly precluded being able to reach her on a deeper level.

Lolita is also an early example of the genre referred to as a road novel, and I loved the way the essence of the whole journey criss-crossing small-town America moving is so skilfully distilled into a series of vignettes.

Is Lolita porn? Well, it was certainly seen that way when Nabokov first approached American publishers, five of whom rejected it, fearing that they'd be prosecuted on obscenity charges. The language of the book though is never sexually explicit, and all the more potent and sensual for that.

This is the climax (pun of course intended) of one of the most shocking scenes :

She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled on in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola, the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock …

What dazzling, what shameless writing!

Stephen Metcalf in Slate magazine (asking the question Is Lolita Still Shocking?) says :

Lolita is a disgusting book. Furthermore, the day will never come when it is not a disgusting book.

and certainly it changes the reader's inner landscape. Not so long ago Woolworth's stores across the UK were forced by furious parents to withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita which had been designed for six-year-old girls.

(And Muntaj in our book club - a more respectable pillar of society you could not hope to find - said that the book had severely messed with her head and even when in the supermarket found herself weighing up which young girls HH might consider "nymphets"!)

If you haven't read Lolita yet (hey, where were you hiding?) but are considering picking it up, I'd recommend the Penguin Classics annotated version which seemed to be very helpful when I glanced at a friend's copy (especially as HH throws in a lot of words and phrases in French).

I really enjoyed the radio programmes about the book on NPR, and you can listen to the lovely Jeremy Irons reading the opening of the novel.

Lo. Lee. Ta.

This Author's Not for Burning

A fascinating moral debate has erupted on the book pages of newspapers and on literary websites and it boils down to this - if an author tells their executor to burn their work after their death, should their word be honoured, even if the work in question is of great importance to their readership?

At the time of his death, Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov (left) had half completed a novel called The Original of Laura. Not wanting to leave unfinished work behind, he insisted that the manuscript was to be destroyed after his death. It has lain for 31 years in a bank vault in Switzerland.

Vladimir's son, Dmitri (right), wrote to Ron Rosenbaum, a literary columnist with the New York Observer some time in 2005, and told him that he intends to honour his promise to his father before he dies. (He's now 73, and in bad health.) Rosenbaum's recent piece in Slate blew the argument out into the open.

More recently he has appeared conflicted on the matter, and feels that Lara:

... would have been Father's most brilliant novel, the most concentrated distillation of his creativity ...

The Times reveals more about the manuscript and has given space to two opposing voices on the issue.

Irish author John Banville says "Save it!":

That Nabokov, before he died, did not destroy what he had written of his final novel is surely an indication that he wanted it to live; likewise, Véra Nabokov, the most vigilant keeper of the flame of her husband’s writings, let the fragment survive, so she too must have thought it worth preserving

British playwright Tom Stoppard says equally strongly "Burn it!" as he believes that the book would in no way represent the novel that Nabokov wanted to write:

It’s perfectly straightforward: Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it. There is no superior imperative. The argument about saving it for the “greater good” of the literary world is null, as far as I’m concerned. There are parallel universes, might-have-been worlds, full of lost works, and no doubt some of them would have been masterpieces. But our desire to possess them all is just a neurosis, a completeness complex, as though we must have everything that’s going and it’s a tragedy if we don’t. It’s nonsense, an impossible desire for absoluteness. At best, it’s natural curiosity – personally, I’d love to read Nabokov’s last work, but since he didn’t want me to read it, I won’t – and it’s hardly modest to make one’s own desire more important than his.

One strong argument against destroying the manuscript is that if the work of other writers has been published posthumously despite their wishes to the contrary.

How much poorer the literary world would be without the work of Kafka, whose plea to destroy his work after his death was ignored by his friend Max Brod. And Emily Dickinson had very little of her poetry published in her lifetime: she ordered her sister to burn the rest, though fortunately for us she didn't.

Another nice example (from the Sticks and Stones blog) is that of Virgil who:

... asked that his masterpiece, the Aeneid, possibly the finest work of extant Latin literature, be destroyed after his death; the Emperor Augustus himself stepped in to ensure that this did not happen - one of the few occasions on which we can be thankful for supreme autocratic power.

Nabokov himself intended to destroy an early draft of the novel that later became Lolita:

Once or twice I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life.

As maybe the ghost of Laura would continue to haunt us?

So what do you think? :



Just as an aside, I wonder why it is so much more emotive to talk about a manuscript being burned than say shredded?

Update (28/2/08) :

With the decision to burn or not burn The Original of Laura still hanging in the air, Dmitri Nabokov has a chat with the ghost of his dad according to a second article by Rosenbaum, published on the Slate website. Thanks to the Grouch for posting the link.

Update (23/4/08)

He's reached a decision, thanks to his father's intervention, Kate Connolly reports on the Guardian blog that he told German magazine :

I'm a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, 'You're stuck in a right old mess - just go ahead and publish!'