Eyrie

Tim Winton
Eyrie

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014/ Picador UK, 2014

Perth, Australia, our days. Tom Keely lives alone in an apartment building in a poor neighborhood. He's almost 50, he is divorced, childless, he is out of work. Keely was once known environmental activist, he even appeared on TV screens, the newspapers and magazines wrote about him. But after a conflict with officials, he lost his job because he refused to cover the illegal actions of the authorities. Keely issued dirty linen in public, and now no private company wants to hire him, not to mention the state.

Keely lives on some savings and money from the sale of the house. All that he can afford is a small apartment in the seedy neighborhood. Keely worsens his problems with alcohol and regular antidepressants. Most of the novel we will be see Keely either drunk, or on pills, or hang-over.

Keely rarely comes from the apartment, speaks to no one, occasionally swims in the ocean. His mother Doris, a successful lawyer, and sister Faith, working in the financial sector, worries about Keely. He assures them that he's all right.

Everything changes in Keely’s life when he unexpectedly meets a woman, which resembles someone, in the building,. She is Gemma, a girl from the past. Now Gemma is in her forties, and she raises her grandson - a strange boy with no less strange name Kai. Keely is surprised by this meeting, he did not even know that Gemma lived in the same house with him just down the hall.

Despite its length, Eyrie reads in one breath. That’s not surprising considering that Winton has written 25 books already. The secret of success here is that the book equally attracts with its plot intrigue and an ability to write about everyday life.

Winton pushes his characters to an almost impossible situation, making the novel very dark and kind of depressing. Heroes fall into a trap, and all their actions and attempts are doomed. It is important not to lose the human face, not be on the same level with animals, those who prey on the main characters of the novel.

Despair largely even comes not from an external source, i.e. criminal elements, but from life itself. Keely after his fall from the top steps on the lowest rung of society, at his age left with nothing - except the conscience and moral attitudes. He largely looks up to his father, who was a priest and really saved people. Keely is also trying, but realizes that he lacks hardness. And his moral values are his own ruin. Because of them, he does not fit into society, can not keep in touch with other people.

Actually everyday life stifles Keely and Gemma and the like. They are honest, strong-willed people who simply can not cope with the system. Everything is against them. Toward the end of the novel Keely pawns his computer equipment to the shop to get a little cash. Clerk gives Keely a hundred dollars less than usual just because Keely looks, due to stress and alcohol, as if he were a junkie.
Crime story takes a turn in the second half of the book, and in the first Winton depicts Australian life of bottom. The novel is written in the third person, but such that it is similar to the first. And the voice of Keely is simultaneously resentful and angry at society (and himself), but also from bitter at his own impotence and unwillingness to change something. Such bitterness in his voice helps make the novel drive, when seemingly nothing happens, other than sitting in a stuffy room, swimming in the ocean, a short phone talk with the sister. Descriptions of hangover here are gorgeous, extremely realistic and somewhat painful. It is a rare thing.

“He peeled back the lids with a gospel gasp and levered himself upright and bipedal if not immediately ambulatory. Teetered a moment in the bad weather and shapeless mortification of something like waking consciousness. Which was heinous. Though in the scheme of things today’s discomfort was the least of his troubles. He should be glad of the distraction. This little malaise was only fleeting. Well, temporary. Just a bloody hangover. But for all that a pearler anyway, a real swine-choker. Even his feet hurt. And one leg was still intoxicated.”

In the novel there is no quotation marks at the dialogues, they are part of the main text, but the dialogues are actually Winton’s strong point. It’s difficult to write a believable dialogue between child and adult, and Winton makes it believable.

Eyrie’s action takes place in Australia, though the novel is rather a hybrid of literature of the three countries. From Australia there is destroying heat and large spaces, from English literature dialogues and britanisms and from the American prose the story itself.

Winton is a brilliant stylist, a good storyteller, and his novel is a great success.

Boy, Snow, Bird

Helen Oyeyemi
Boy, Snow, Bird

Picador UK, 2014

The story begins in the postwar years on Manhattan. Girl with a strange name Boy Novak lives with her father in a small house. Boy does not know anything about her mother, and her father works as a rat catcher. The basement floor of Novak’s house is laden with cages with rats that Boy’s father uses for his work.

Boy has a passion for words, has a strange attraction to mirrors, has average grades in school, all due to the fact that she grew up in a family of lone rat catcher. Boy’s father often beat her, sometimes scares her with rats.

«I did fine at school. I'm talking about the way boys reacted to me, actually, since some form of perversity caused me to spend most lessons pretending to absorb much less information than I actually did. Every now and then a teacher got suspicious about a paper I'd turned in and would keep me after school for questioning. "Has someone been. . . helping you? "I just shook my head and shuffled my chair sideways, avoiding the glare of the desk lamp the teacher invariably tried to shine into my eyes. Something about a girl like me writing an A-grade paper turns teachers into cops.»

Boy meets a young man named Charlie, but their relationships don’t work out. Unable to withstand the regular beating of her father, Boy one day gathers a few of her belongings, steals $12 from her father and runs to the bus depot, buying a ticket to a small town Flax Hill.

Helen Oyeyemi has the ability to write vigorously. The book begins as a modern fairy tale that one girl can tell another. Dates are blurred, but there are a rat catcher, abusive father, running away from home and a small town of shadow nature. The beginning already makes guess what is in front of us, realism or magic realism?

Every sentence in this book radiates energy, and sometimes sentences themselves bump into each other, the idea might pause for a paragraph, but reappear in another paragraph. Prose here really is alive, not stereotype for the words, 70 percent of modern American literature uses. It makes me happy, you’re feeling originality, otherness.

But the first half of the book has a problem not with the style, but with the narrative, with the writer’s ability to clearly tell the story. There is just not enough clarity. Narrative wobbles and it is not clear whether the author knows where she is going, or just writes in the hope that the story itself will lead somewhere. The key point of the first chapter emerges as an ax from the pond - that is, all of a sudden, without any hints from the text. One expects from the writer who writes unique prose a certain subtlety.

But the second part is written more smoothly, without wiggle of the first, and the second part offers very thinly scattered clues, trivia, internal techniques that later get together and make the overall picture. Particularly impressive is the fact that the first and second parts of the novel are completely different, as it should be when there is a narrator change. Despite the existence of racial themes, it has no effect on the style: the entire novel is written in literary English, without its "black" version. The characters discuss the color of the skin here, but it's just one of the themes of the novel. Racial theme here is one of the components of the theme of the family.

The finale of Boy, Snow, Bird is immaculate, shocking, amazing, as however you think for something unexpected, you still will be surprised. Despite the flawed beginning for such a finale you can forgive this book a lot. Overall imperfection of this book says only that great books are rarely smooth and perfect.

The Deaths

Mark Lawson
The Deaths

Picador, 2013

Four families live in the fictional Middlebury in homes in the suburbs, which were built for the aristocracy. They call themselves The Eight, mainly communicate only among themselves and goes to London only to the airport and commute on train to work.

Men of the family all work, and among their wives work only two. Max is a tycoon, always doing business. Johnny is a prosperous lawyer, Tom is a security expert, and Simon is a PR manager of a bank. His wife Tasha runs a catering company, and Tom's wife Emily is a doctor, a specialist in chronic diseases. Max's second wife (he is 56, she is much younger) Jenno sometimes teaches courses and gives advice to families on reducing costs, and Johnny's wife Libby mostly is busy shopping and discussing of au pairs.

The novel, in fact, opens with the deaths from the title. Courier of coffee in containers delivers coffee to one of the houses where he sees a family shot to death, wife and children, as well as dogs. Victims of mass killings are from one of the above families, but Lawson before the end will keep in secret, who were killed and who killed them.

And if the main plot line will explain in a meticulous manner the life of The Eight, the secondary storyline will focus on the police investigation. There is very little to investigate, and the detectives just wander around the murder scene, discussing the murdered family.

Four families are seen in their daily lives, and with each chapter husbands and their wives become more disgusting and repulsive. The main storyline begins with the description of men on the train London. They all are late for work when the train suddenly stops and an announcement explains that someome threw himself under the trainand the train can’t go any further, and the four men are even not surprised with this: suicides like that happen on English railroads every week. The men are only annoyed, but they do not feel any sympathy to a suicide victim: they think they will never fall that low.

Lawson, like a real surgeon, dissects the top layer of British society: he stabs and cuts, sews and cuts up, exposing the insides – people’s vices. He is amazing surgeon, but he just gives too much anesthesia. He forgot to check if the reader feels anything.

The problem with this novel lies not in the fact that the characters are all unsympathetic, as we have seen even more vile, but that Lawson is not particularly empathetic to his own creations. And if the author doesn’t care, what to expect from the reader?

If we discard the murders, which is not only bait for the story, but also a way to show that there is a punishment for sins, the plot of the novel is compressed into a parade of little connected scenes of everyday life of the wealthy. Lawson spins his characters, exposing all their imperfections. Work, leisure, sex, church, holiday, day-to-day life - Lawson just can not stop. He throws out the details, going from one family to another. He tells hurriedly, as if afraid to stop. It is not surprising that the novel has grown to such a volume.

No doubt, the author is witty, has a keen eye, can make you laugh. He seemed to doubt his own abilities: making their characters vile, Lawson can not stop, as if considering that we did not see enough how disgusting all the characters were.

If you do not belong to their circle and their social status, you are nobody. But why, then, even to the 400th page you hardly recall who is who in this book, and who married to whom? Where is the humanity to his own creations? He is interested to look at them under a microscope, but the characters from the book after closer look remain types.

Those readers who expect from The Deaths complicated police investigation will be disappointed. Murder plot line is only auxiliary, giving no surprises.

Lawson is sure talented, but in this book even those characters that remained alive turned out lifeless.

Nazi Literature in the Americas

Roberto Bolano
Nazi Literature in the Americas

Picador, 2010

This novel finally confirmed that Bolano is a great fabulist. Imagine a directory of encyclopedia articles, written by a sensitive and well-educated scholar who has never read the encyclopedia, but read a lot of science fiction (and not only by South American writers) and watched European films. The book has through characters, but each article-chapter is a separate article and is devoted to a fictional writer. Among them are poets, novelists, but most often it is the writers - those who write: from plays to the letters. There are those who write all his life until death, there are those that released in a lifetime only two books of poetry.

Nazi literature from the title of the novel is something that unites all very different writers in this book. Though there are not Nazi literature by and large in the book, but in the fate of every writer there is a vital episode associated with the Third Reich. For Bolano the use of "Nazi Literature" in any case is no way outrageous, but the formalities necessary to give the seemingly banal encyclopedic compilation in novel form some mystique.

To understand the humor of Bolano - and appreciate it - you have to be bookworms and bibliophiles. Humor begins with the title of the novel. And anyone who tries to take the book seriously will be disappointed.

The merit of Bolano is not only his boundless imagination and a subtle humor, but also a sense of proportion. He knows when to get bored, and chooses the correct volume for the book. No matter how different writers’ stories are, sooner or later the author begins to repeat himself- and ends the book. Bolano himself appears in the final chapter, thus placing himself in a number of imaginitive writers. I made you up, and I, too, am made up by someone else, Bolano implies.

Well, probably so.

The Skating Rink

Roberto Bolano
The Skating Rink
Translated by Chris Andrews

Picador, 2010

Roberto Bolano wrap around this short novel according to its title. The story is on behalf of three male heroes who change each other in short chapters. Thus, the reader moves in circles, like on a skating rink.

In the center of the story the girl Nuria Marti, figure skating champion, which unexpectedly due to reorganization of the national team has been expelled from the team and lost the grant. Nuria, famous after his victories, is deprived of the most important thing in her life. Local official Enric Rosquelles, overweight, unattractive, not very popular among women, is charmed by Nuria. The only possibility of being closer to beautiful Nuria, even though in purely platonic way, is to help her again to do skating, to continue training. Had not committed any crimes before Rosquelles makes a risky move that could cost him everything: an official on the public money behind the Mayor’s back built in the old stadium the new rink specifically for Nuria. On evenings they come to the rink together, and while Nuria trains, Rosquelles just sits and stares at her.

Two other heroes of the book, a Mexican drifter and poet, who turned out in the tourist town of Z, Gaspar Heredia and businessman and friend of Gaspar for the old days in South America Remo Moran are also drawn into the story around the rink.
Everything ends with, of course, murder, and the novel has even formal features of mystery: an investigation, unclear motives, several suspects, the double ending. But do not think that Bolano was writing this novel, keeping in mind only the detective.
Bolano is generally a big dreamer. Invent the idea of a skating rink to win a girl – onlu this already says a lot. By and large «The Skating Rink» is a novel about love, and a skating rink is a metaphor for love. It hides, becomes a secret, but when the senses go out, it is often too late, only blood on the ice remains.

Bolano is not only a visionary but also a big humorist. There are no jokes as such in the book, but then, that, as a writer collects different cliches and features from the romances, detective stories, black humor prose and then just lays out these cliches, gives a clue to the reader that all this is certainly an ingenious invention, despite the fact that book is very sad.

This Bolano’s book, but like his other books, of course what is commonly called the poet's novel. This is indicated in style of the novel, sliding, but full of Spanish (even though most Latin American) heat, and the novel's characters are poets. Moran and Heredia, they are that kind of character that all the time in dreams, nostalgic for the old days - and the old places - man, broken, but without strain, in search of the senses, but not letting his own feelings goes free.

Whether it's a bad novel, it would be finish this review with Bolanesque joke, quote from a radio – «We are all united by a stadium». But this is a good novel, but the same joke comes to mind. I think Bolano would appreciate the humor: we are all united by a rink.