Category: Books

By Catherine McClelland

Senior Writer

There has always been literature and pulp: Tolstoy vs. James Patterson, Dante vs. Danielle Steele and perhaps Oprah’s book club balanced precariously somewhere in the middle. Each side of the great literary divide takes a certain pride in disparaging the other. Shakespeare is dismissed as stuffy. The bestseller shelves are slammed for trashiness.

Neither academia nor the pulp authors seem interested in bridging the divide, and in the age of mega-publishing it seems neither are the booksellers. David Mitchell’s 2004 novel “Cloud Atlas” aims to change that.

In the tradition of Shakespeare, “Cloud Atlas” aims to be entertainment as well as art. Mitchell plays in all sorts of genres—the novel’s six stories span a southern-seas drama, a scenic ars poetica,a conspiracy thriller, an absurdist adventure, a sci-fi dystopia and a post-apocalyptic story.

Rather than being boxed in by the conventions he uses, Mitchell always introduces a twist to break the genres’clichés. During an interview with the Paris Review he explained how he experiments with writing genre fiction as literary art: “When something is two-dimensional, here’s how to fix it: Identify an improbable opposite and mix it plausibly [into the story].”

What results is fiction that feels both familiar and strange. Every time the reader anticipates the plot, a surprise is around the corner. The characters are full of individual quirks but also come together into a coherent portrait of humankind. Mitchell’s strongest talent is his flair for writing memorable voices, slipping into a different vocabulary in every novella so that each protagonist stays in the reader’s head days after putting the book down. Every page is a testament to the author’s artistic bravado—and not only that, it’s clever, exciting and genuinely funny.

The novel’s most surprising element is its unorthodox structure. Each of the six novellas is split in half to form a frame around the following story. Mitchell chooses to structure the story like a set of Russian nesting dolls. Each novella is cut off in the middle of the action and the next one begins immediately. After the sixth, unbroken novella, the novel returns to finish the fifth novella, then the fourth, so that the whole novel is structured symmetrically.

To balance this structure, the six stories are interconnected. The musician protagonist of the second novella reads the seafarer’s diary of the first novella. The musician’s letters are then read by the journalist Luisa Rey in the mystery-thriller novella, which becomes a manuscript submitted in the fourth novella to publisher Timothy Cavendish, whose autobiography is turned into a film that the prisoner of the fifth novella requests to watch after her interrogation, with the interrogation’s footage found by the members of the final novella.

Each of the six stories deals with a different constellation of themes, but the novel’s common thread is power and suffering. The novel is full of seemingly disconnected characters—gunslingers, pirates, scientists, assassins, homosexuals, slaves and musicians—who unite to tell us about ourselves, how humankind never changes from generation to generation and how the world can be startlingly beautiful even in its saddest moments.

Rating: 5/5

By Catherine McClelland

Senior Writer

With a growth rate in the double digits and the largest workforce in the world, China is attracting more and more media attention as a world power. News articles and statistics abound, but the everyday lives and cultural values remain largely a mystery to the Western world, separated by barriers of language and geography and a vastly different way of life. American libraries boast translations of literature from all over Europe—everyone from Dostoevsky to Czeslaw Milosz—but Asian works are often absent from the shelves.

Even in modern Chinese writing, the focus seems to be on the country’s energetic new cities. Provincial life is often referred to only fleetingly and disdainfully. Rural characters often sport thick accents and turn up poorly dressed for the occasion, overwhelmed and awkward among Beijing’s sleek businessmen. A whole segment of China’s vibrant regional life is invisible in literature.

Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck offers a detailed commentary on rural China to fill this gap. Born to missionary parents, Buck grew up in the provinces of China, and her 1931 novel “The Good Earth” offers a detailed window into the values and psychology of a nation, represented by a single rural man.

The novel follows the life of northern Chinese peasant Wang Lung, beginning with his wedding day. Buck takes care to underline the hardships of a life of poverty and often surprises the reader at the inaccuracy of Western stereotypes. The Wang family eats cornmeal mush because rice is too expensive, and they drink plain boiled water because “tea leaves are like silver.” On the way to collect his bride, Wang Lung spends almost all his life savings to buy a piece of pork and a few green peaches to feed the guests at his wedding dinner. Pagodas, dragons and other popular hallmarks of Asian culture are nowhere to be seen. In their place, Buck offers a heartbreakingly honest picture of real life in an all but forgotten corner of the world with the People’s Republic and the Great Leap Forward only shadows on the horizon.

Using poverty as a backdrop, Buck reminds her readers humankind is united across cultures in its common needs and desires. Wang Lung rises from humble peasant to rich man over the course of the novel and changes his whole identity many times over, but he never escapes the fundamental questions of life: How can I improve my fortunes? Who will I be tomorrow?

Also central to the novel is the dangerous connection between land and wealth. “The Good Earth” uses land as the driving force of the narrative, the element that both elevates and undoes its characters. Land is the most important commodity and the only respectable way to make a living, the only thing worth having. The novel sets wealth at the other end of the spectrum, the thing that separates people from the land.

Perhaps most poignant is Buck’s treatment of the difficult lives of rural Chinese women. “Woman” and “slave” are interchangeable in the characters’ dialect. “Not a slave too young, and above all not a pretty one!” his father demands when Wang Lung buys a kitchen slave to become his wife. The two women of the novel both contrast and reinforce each other: Wang Lung’s wife is quiet and hardworking and holds the family together; Lotus, a prostitute that Wang Lung buys later in the novel, suffers as a plaything of men because of her beauty just as Wang Lung’s wife suffers because she is plain and suited for hard work.

“The Good Earth” is nearly 80 years old and especially relevant today as China steps into the global spotlight. The northern provinces are no longer driven into famine with every drought that hits, nor are “Fire Wagons” (trains) a rare sight in the countryside, but the novel isn’t about a closed chapter of history. It is about a nation’s complex relationship with its landscape: unapologetic, steady and unflinching in its depiction of characters that we can’t help but see ourselves reflected in.

By William Bonfiglio

Writer

Swedish author Stieg Larssons’ best-selling series “The Millennium Trilogy” features protagonists Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, two names that do not easily lend themselves to an American audience. Despite the cultural barrier, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played with Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest” have sold millions of copies in 40 countries around the world. The books were top sellers on Amazon.com in both paperback and e-book editions. In addition to three Swedish film adaptations, a Hollywood movie featuring big names like Daniel Craig is also in development.

If it wasn’t his characters’ unpronounceable names that won over U.S.  audiences, it must have been Larsson’s superior storytelling. The books revolve around the interactions of an unlikely pair: Blomkvist is a liberal-leaning yet well-balanced protagonist who fights corruption using means that only a skilled and ethical journalist could employ. Then there is Salander, whose name hints at her slippery character.  She and Blomkvist do not adhere to the same code of ethics. A skilled researcher/hacker and troubled social degenerate, Salander exacts her own version of justice: a Hammurabian adaption in which she views punishment as an “eye for an eye.”

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is not indicative of the subject matter of the story.  Random House Publishing, the company that brought “The Millennium Trilogy” to America, would have done the book justice to publish it under Larsson’s favored title: “Men Who Hate Women,” which is a far better indicator of the subject matter than the published title.

The construction of the first book’s story is also misleading. Unlike many bestselling authors, Larsson feels no need to deviate from mechanical formulas, employing the popular whodunnit plot of a locked room, many suspects and one solution. After some listless dragging, despite an enticing prologue, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” picks up near the hundred-page mark. Although it shows little innovation or originality, the writing style itself is enough to keep audiences captivated. Larsson’s superior talent in crafting suspense and darker humor, coupled with a familiar but not outdated setup, is a recipe for a perfect summer read.

The second book, “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” represents a complete departure from this formula. In assuming the readers are familiar with the characters and their relationships, Larsson deviates with reckless abandon, allowing the plot to span from the improbable to the absurd. Just as his style made dated formulas seem fresh in “Dragon Tattoo,” it takes the over-the-top story of “Fire” and makes it plausible, and that in itself is a massive achievement. “The Girl Who Played with Fire” is a book best read at home, clenched between taut fingers, devoured by flashlight at 2:30 a.m.

Any author that can create the same fanaticism in adults that teens have for “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” cannot be written off. He’s not “just that good.” He’s better. Do not be surprised if Larsson tops the list of the most successful authors of this decade, among the ranks of J.K. Rowling and Khaled Hosseini.