The NYTimes asked a bunch of people to name the top 10 books of the 21st century and I thought hmm what are my top 10 and there it was in my head. FroThe NYTimes asked a bunch of people to name the top 10 books of the 21st century and I thought hmm what are my top 10 and there it was in my head. Frontier. One of the most glorious confusing joyful reads of my entire life. Thank you Karen Gernant for translating these amazing words and making this novel available to me in my native language.
It’s taken me seven years of reading, and about a thousand books, to be able to say once again: “This is the best book I’ve ever read.”
Here are some It’s taken me seven years of reading, and about a thousand books, to be able to say once again: “This is the best book I’ve ever read.”
Here are some reasons why I feel this way.
Luisa Hall has written what is by far the best depiction of childbirth I've ever seen in print.
Elsewhere in her book she has perfectly captured the hollow void of grief a woman feels after the miscarriage of a wanted child, and in other pages she reminds me of the sometime-strangeness of living inside a woman's body when it refuses to get pregnant when you want it to, or gets pregnant when you don't want it to.
And yet this book holds so much more than these particulars about living inside a woman's body. I've also had the privilege of spending time with a deeply feeling, deeply observant narrator. She has gifted me with a wise and revelatory view of these times. I feel as if I can see this right-now world that we're living through so much more clearly than I did before, because of this book. The plague. The weird climate events and what they might portend. The way new technologies keep upending our lives at an ever more frantic pace. The hysterical politics.
When I read this book again in ten years I'll surely be saying to myself: "yes, that is exactly how it was."
Some people have asked in the comments to this review or in DM's which book made me feel this exhilarating feeling of "this is the best book I've ever read" last time. It was Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin....more
Tyll is so entertaining that I struggled at first to understand just how deep it is. I'm not sure what it says about contemporary literature, or aboutTyll is so entertaining that I struggled at first to understand just how deep it is. I'm not sure what it says about contemporary literature, or about me, that I needed to consciously banish my cynical mistrust of any book that is so delightful to read.
As I read the novel I thought of Falstaff, Shakespeare's comic-yet-deep repeating character. The character who most reminded me of Falstaff is played by a donkey, a character who appears in many scenes, sometimes for comic value and sometimes for something else entirely.
And now that I've brought it up, I realize that I could write several paragraphs just about the donkey in this novel--how funny the donkey is in a given scene, and then how horrifically the donkey's fate plays out in another scene. Sometimes this donkey has a name, and its name is Origenes. And like so much in Tyll, Kehlmann invites me to think of the donkey's name as just a name, and to read on, or alternatively, to ponder what shimmering potentials are added to my reading if I take time to realize "Origenes" is also the name of an itinerant third-century Christian ascetic whose life and fate were caught up in religious disputes not unlike those raging in this novel.
The donkey's story is threaded throughout this broken, nonlinear novel, and always brings with it some new wonder or terror or sadness or revelation, even though it's a minor character, like Falstaff. And the thing is, it's not just the donkey. Every character in the novel is a kind of itinerant bit player, and every one of them--the miller Claus, the Winter King, the expert in dragonology, the little girl named Martha, Tyll himself--has a marvelous and mysterious story to tell, when it's their time on stage. Kehlmann made them all real for me, sometimes in just a few sentences.
References to Shakespeare plays appear throughout this novel with both historical and thematic resonances. A recurring side-theme is how literature was changing in this period of history that we now call "early-modern." The play Macbeth makes its way into a scene as a way to reference James I's rise to power, and Macbeth's last soliloquy is a good description of how this novel unfurls as you read it:
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
So here we are. Apparently my second stab at coming to grips with Tyll here on Goodreads is going to consist of a little bit of Shakespeare, a little bit of donkey.
Okay. I should also add that I found a lot of Lutheran-like philosophy playing out in profound ways--over and over again the character Tyll projects a belief that suffering and uncertainty is worth enduring for the hope of living through it, and that evil is worth fighting, for the hope of the good to come. This philosophy is most starkly portrayed in the late chapter "In the Shaft."
Well, I'm just gob-smacked by this novel. Read it....more
This novel gets to the heart of the human condition. I feel scoured out by it. I feel like my head was held tight until I was forced to look at the saThis novel gets to the heart of the human condition. I feel scoured out by it. I feel like my head was held tight until I was forced to look at the sadness of being alive. The meanings in this novel are not entirely rational and yet the bedrock truth of the story felt so familiar. It was like reading about some tragic, true event.
The characters are worthy of love, and yet they are each so alone and so unloved, and so confused in their isolation, and so unknowable even to themselves. They pity each other but they don't stop to pity themselves. They think the best of one another and yet they never manage to be entirely real to one another, or to make their inner selves known to those they love.
The writing is surprising-- it's flat and straightforward, and yet full of mystery. The novel entraps you in the most unlikely of stories, just when you're expecting the most typical of stories. It carries you along into unexpected journeys where it seems poised to unwind into nonsense at any moment, and then just at that moment it becomes deeply disciplined, anchored in repeating symbol and theme, on a path toward an inevitable, tragic conclusion. This combination of unexpectedness with discipline made the novel a very satisfying and a very unique read.
It's a terribly sad story. It upended my defenses....more
When I got to the end of Laurus I thought: "this is the best book I've ever read." I've had that feeling before with other novels and I hope I will haWhen I got to the end of Laurus I thought: "this is the best book I've ever read." I've had that feeling before with other novels and I hope I will have it again in the future but even so Laurus will remain one of the most perfect and memorable experiences of my reading life.
It probably changed my experience to have read "The Confession of St. Patrick" before reading Laurus. Unlike Augustine's Roman intellectualism, St. Patrick's Confession describes a chaotic reality where the spiritual and the physical worlds are so intertwined that they sometimes interact in brutish ways--as when Patrick writes:
"The very same night while I was sleeping Satan attacked me violently, as I will remember as long as I shall be in this body; and there fell on top of me as it were, a huge rock,and not one of my members had any force."
St. Patrick describes the Devil as a force that can reach through from the spiritual world and manifest itself physically in this world, and the same sort of Christianity is at work in Laurus. In both Ireland and Russia Christianity developed without the mitigating rationality of Rome. This faith is visceral and unforgiving and absolute. Demons and angels are corporate. Faith healers are real. Holy fools are venerated. Future and past events can appear in dreams, and the consequences of sin and virtue are made manifest in this life: in the health of the body, in good or bad events, in the weather and the seasons.
The world view described with such tender care in this novel is very foreign to mine, and yet the writing is so grounded in physical detail, and so consistent throughout the novel, that I bought into it completely and was immersed in it entirely as I read.
I cried a lot. Even for the donkey. It's an amazing novel. It got to the absolute heart of me....more
A novel about New York from the point of view of the most disenfranchised. A book that is never sentimental, never condescending. One of the best bookA novel about New York from the point of view of the most disenfranchised. A book that is never sentimental, never condescending. One of the best books I've ever read....more
With wrenchingly beautiful prose Malouf offers readers another way inside the beauty of Homer's story of Achilles and Priam, these two tired men, thesWith wrenchingly beautiful prose Malouf offers readers another way inside the beauty of Homer's story of Achilles and Priam, these two tired men, these enemies, who discover together how close their grief has brought them to one another. The book is careful, vivid, perfect, not Homer, something else, something fine....more
Some books are such gifts. This novel is one. It's not for everyone. Most of my book club didn't enjoy reading it. You need to be very patient with itSome books are such gifts. This novel is one. It's not for everyone. Most of my book club didn't enjoy reading it. You need to be very patient with it because it's written in the form of one seeming digression after another. The digressions are incredible though. Many of them have to do with the way history reveals itself in ways that range far beyond books--in buildings, in monuments, in personal memories we share with one another in conversation. I could say this novel changed the way I think about history....more
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