I'm currently reading Daniel Handler's Adverbs, which, a quarter of the way through it, is a collection of briefly episodic love stories conceptualized by specific adverbs--Immediately, Obviously, Soundly and so on. David Eggers on the back writes that Handler's an American Nabokov, which makes me wince. Handler writes maybe the best teenager I've ever read, with sparkling wit and earnestness and inanity; it's a lot of fun even though it feels somewhat samey after his other two books, and even if his teenagers turn out to be adults and parents, too. But as much as I'm enjoying it, I feel cheated by the quotes on the back--Michael Chabon, who is (almost certainly) a far more insightful reader than I am, seems to enjoy this far more than I know how.
Before that was P.D. James' The Children of Men, on which the recent film was very loosely based. The novel's so different from the film that I'm curious about the production process, to see if they started with a completely independent script and either had long-since-acquired film rights or copyright issues that forced the patchy adaptation. I'm not sure how much I liked the book, although I like the film much less for it: James' novel is a depiction of dystopia writ very small, illustrating the pettiness of autocracy and rebellion in a world stripped of posterity.
Prior to that (this will get a bit listy, I'm afraid), Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. The intricacies of the plotting and the sparse beauty of the language are enough to overcome the fact that Greene seems to enjoy seeing even his lesser characters hurt and isolated (the most vivid example of this is, I think, in The Quiet American when the American journalist learns of his son's polio, and only has Fowler, who hates him, to confide in and to console him). But I'd have liked this a lot better if it were forty pages shorter; the ending as an answer to Bendrix's and Smythe's rationalism felt hollow and a bit silly.
Also in the mix were Milan Kundera's Immortality and Slowness. Written consecutively, they feel the most similar of Kundera's books, and both feature Kundera the narrator interacting with his characters. Slowness is a light work, the story of two seductions taking place in parallel at a chateau in Prague two centuries apart, comparing the slowness and indulgence of the eighteenth century with what Kundera depicts as the haste and desire for forgetfulness in the modern age. |
