Books - May 2005
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov. The devil comes to town as a stage magician in the atheistic 1930’s Moscow, accompanied by a choirmaster, an assassin and a giant cat.
There are a lot of different threads and viewpoints in the book, but it largely centres around the oppressive lifestyle in Russia at the time. The whole thing is very musically influenced, and a big part of the main storyline is inspired by Gounod’s operatic version of Faust.
The translation I read is apparently from the most complete version of the story available. I can’t compare it against any other version, but it did avoid the problem you often get with translations feeling weirdly stilted. I think it’s one of those books that loses a lot if you don’t know a lot about the history surrounding the period. There are a lot of footnotes, but a lot of the time they just serve to make you aware of how much context you’re missing. Even so, the whole thing’s really enjoyable.
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell. I picked this up as the most likely-looking thing in WH Smith’s while I was rushing to get a train out of London. It turned out to be a decent choice, but probably not for the expected reasons.
The most interesting thing about the book is the structure. It’s essentially six short stories, split up, and laid out in a parabolic, Tower of Hanoi format. Each story is set in a different time and told in a different style, but there are connections through the entire book, and the chronology is a looping, self-referential thing.
The individual stories are often pretty generic, and feel like the author wanted to try our writing in a particular style, rather than for any deeper reason. The over-arching story also feels secondary to the theme of connections running in many directions through time. It’s not too much of a problem though, since the fun part is finding all the connections and skipping back and forth through the book to find some of the things you’d missed the first time.
Conveniently - for me at least - it’s also the exact length of the train journey from King’s Cross to Edinburgh Waverly.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers. I’d avoided this for quite a while, since it was one of those hugely-hyped Bay Area books that people seemed to talk endless twaddle about (using lots of words starting with post- and meta-). I finally admitted that that was a pretty crappy reason for not reading something, and ended up enjoying it quite a lot.
As a sort-of autobiography, it’s essentially a verbose, funny guy, who’s lived through a really tough time unscrewing the top of his head and letting everything out. The second half kind of meanders, but it’s not really a problem, it’s more what lives tend to do, and signals things getting more manageable for him and his family, rather than the more frantic start to the book. Good stuff.
February 15th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
[...] Mitchell’s first novel feels a lot like a warm up to him writing Cloud Atlas. It’s got approximately the same format of a series of globe-spanning short stories, each linked through some connection of the characters involved, but it doesn’t have quite the same impossibly-intricate, Russian-dolls structure of the subsequent book. [...]