Friday Column: Five Discoveries

Here are five authors that I've been delighted to discover this year. These are personal discoveries, so no crying foul if I happen to mention someone that you consider obvious or an otherwise well-known author.

Also, before I get started I have to put in a general plug for two authors I've already feted grandly round these parts this year. They are Roberto Bolaño and Matthew Sharpe, and readers interested in knowing more about why I've come to like them so much should have no problem finding evidence in my archives.

Now, on to the discoveries. In no particular order:

1. Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital. This was a book that wasn't much on my radar. It sounded vaguely religious, a theme I'm generally not piqued by in a novel. Perhaps worse, it was a McSweeney's book with the word children in the title. (Noting against McSweeney's, but I don't consider the "childlike" aspects of the McSweeneyites among their best.)

But after reading a few very positive reviews I decided this was a book I might be able to get down with. It was. Adrian has the rare ability to write books that seem both realist and fantastic at the same time. He uses it well here to make me believe in characters that are fundamentally in an absurd premise: there's a second Flood and all that survives is a floating children's hospital.

It's a pretty ballsy move, writing a 600-page novel about that, but Adrian more than pulls it off. By the end, not only was I totally hooked by the fates of the people who were living in this hospital; I was also invested in seeing how Adrian's premise concludes. I don't know where Adrian's planning on take his readers next, but I'm interested in finding out.

2. Enrique Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady. There are certain authors that are triggers for me: Borges, Calvino, Kafla, Sebald. When I read an interview with Vila-Matas earlier this year, he hit on all of these and more, and I instantly knew this was an author I had to seek out.

Fortunately, Montano's Malady had just been published in translation. It's hard to capture the feel of this book, so let's just say that I find it hard to believe that a more unreliable narrator is possible. I don't say this because the narrator is such a dissimulator but because the narrator's reality exists somewhere between the real world and the world of literature and the narrator seems to be constantly changing his mind about exactly where. Or, to quote Vila-Matas, this book is "a kind of writing aimed exclusively . . . at the elaboration of a personal myth."

The titular malady is something I think many will be able to relate to; it's a sort of reflexive viewing of everything in one's life through books and literature, a question of where you find yourself once literature takes over the creation of your personal biography.

3. Raymond Queneau, Witch Grass. Absurdity can be very dark, as in Kafka, but Queneau seems to laugh at it, at least if Witch Grass is any indication. In this book, he makes a plot out of looking behind the inexplicable coincidences that hack authors generally employ to move the plot along. Nothing really happens, and yet Queneau gives us an engaging plot, presents several different belief systems, and seems to laugh at all of it.

Knowing that this was Queneau's first novel makes me wonder what kind of malarkey he gets up to in his more mature works.

4. Cesar Aira, Como me hice monja / How I Became a Nun. The first two chapters of this book are so good that I feel bad about discussing them, lest I ruin the pleasure of discovering them yourself. You've been warned.

The book opens with a pleasant afternoon as a father tries to share an ice cream with his 6-year-old son. Inexplicably, the son hates the taste of ice cream. What's so brilliant is that this is told from the son's perspective, so we only really know that he doesn't like the ice cream, but, like the father, we can't understand why. Aira plays this beautifully, evoking both the tragedy of the poor, frustrated father who is deprived of the joy of sharing ice cream with his son and the comedy of the inherent absurdity of the situation and the father's mounting anger.

This scene ends very badly, and then Aira gives us a perfectly reasonable but nonetheless incredibly absurd reason for the whole sorry mess. We're only at roughly page 30 of this 100-page book, and then Aira goes in an entirely different direction.

What can I say? This is one of the most original stories I've read this year. I can't wait for my next dose of Aira.

5. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, The Road. Why did it take me so long to read McCarthy? Perhaps I was put off my all the things I heard about his penchant for violence and the impenetrability of his characters.

Well, it's true--these books are rather violent and McCarthy never really goes into his characters' heads. Maybe this would become dull in other books, but in these two I barely notice because of McCarthy's beautiful baroque sentences and the imagination he brings to bear in evoking his worlds. I'm happy just to sit in fascination and never bother with the question of developing characters.

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Comments

[Daniel]

I had the same aversion to Children's Hospital and was equally & pleasantly surprised by the book.

[fausto]

Great list. "Montano's malady" is a great book, but I think "Dr Pasavento", his latest, is even better. Maybe it will be translated next? If I'm not mistaken, Pasavento is a name that comes up in one of Sebald books ("The emigrants"?) and there was a time when the book should have been called "Dr Pynchon". There are also many references to Walser. There is a continuity between "Montano's malady" and "Dr Pasavento", but both books are quite different.
The main character is a writer who wants to disappear and stop writing but cannot help feeling frustrated that nobody notices his disappearance. It's of course very funny - Vila-Matas is always funny- and full of literary references. It's also his most Sebaldian work, I would say. A great, digressive, paranoid novel.

[J. D. Daniels]

Vila-Matas's "Bartleby & Co." is worth investigating.

[Lisa Kenney]

I bought Children's Hospital based on your review and I'm reading it now and really enjoying it. Thank you.

[Lisa Kenney]

I bought Children's Hospital based on your review and I'm reading it now and really enjoying it. Thank you.

[Lisa Kenney]

I bought Children's Hospital based on your review and I'm reading it now and really enjoying it. Thank you.

[Lisa Kenney]

I bought Children's Hospital based on your review and I'm reading it now and really enjoying it. Thank you.