Pierre Arthens, a French food critic who regards himself as “the greatest food critic in the world,” has just discovered that he is dying, with only forty-eight hours to live. A resident of the Rue de Grenelle apartment building which is the center of Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Arthens looks back on his life, trying, in his last hours, to remember the most special flavor of his lifetime, an effort to give his life meaning. As a critic, he has made and destroyed reputations with his pronouncements, but now, on his deathbed, he is vulnerable, forced against his will to confront what he has regarded as his life and to understand where he really fits into life’s grand scheme. Alternating Pierre’s comments about his life with comments by family members and others who have strong feeling about Arthens and his attitudes, author Muriel Barbery recreates in lush and elaborate prose the life of this difficult and unlikable man.
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Naguib Mahfouz is a never-ending source of literary surprises. In this unusual and often charming novel from 1948, newly translated and republished by the American University of Cairo, Mahfouz writes his only Freudian, psychological study, an analysis of Kamil Ru’ba Laz, a young Egyptian man so dominated by his mother that he is unable to make a single decision or form a single successful relationship with the outside world. When the novel opens, his mother has just died, and Kamil, in his mid-twenties, is devastated. The first person novel which results is Kamil’s attempt to put his life into some sort of perspective and, perhaps, to find some hope for the future, some understanding of “life’s true wisdom,” a journey which will take him outside himself for the first time in his life.
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In this rich, iconoclastic novel about poetry and the writing life. Paul Chowder, the speaker, has achieved modest success by writing “plums…That’s what I call a poem that doesn’t rhyme…We who write and publish our non-rhyming plums aren’t poets, we’re plummets.” Chowder has just compiled an anthology of poetry which he hopes will, one day, be used as the comprehensive anthology for college students and as a source of pleasure by all those who savor the music of language. Choosing the poems for the anthology was, for him, “like [being] that blond bitch-goddess on Project Runway,” and he must now write the forty-page introduction. His publisher is desperate for it, and Chowder has writer’s block. In a voice so “human” he sounds like an alterego for author Nicholson Baker, Chowder demystifies poetry—and plums—making often hilarious comments about the structure of language, the history of poetry, the lives of famous poets, and about his own struggles. Chock full of “a-ha” moments, the novel is a treasure trove of information and observation about poetry and poets, told with robust humor. (On my Favorites list for 2009)
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To Siberia, the latest of Petterson’s novels to be translated into English, continues these themes. Nominated upon its publication in 1996 for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize (which Petterson won in 2009 for I Curse the River of Time, not yet available in English), it is set in Skagen, in Denmark, at the tip of Jutland. The unnamed speaker, who is aged five when the novel opens, is a worrier—a little girl worried about the fierce-looking lions who guard the gate to a nearby house and about her father’s ears freezing and falling off when he does not wear a hat. Almost anonymous, the little girl comes closest to having a name when her devoted brother Jesper refers to her as “Sistermine.” The two are extremely close, though Jesper is three years older, and they spend much time together, sharing their dreams. Jesper plans to become a Socialist and go to Morocco, while Sistermine intends to travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Dark and often bleak, To Siberia uses its title as a symbol of the yearnings of the main character, and the reader recognizes almost from the outset that she is already in Siberia, emotionally.
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Author and rock journalist Peter Murphy certainly doesn’t do anything by halves, and this novel and the author’s own promotion of it are about as over-the-top as it is possible to get. Murphy has produced a publicity video based on the book (see Notes below), using a gargoyle, the sound of crows (a motif in the book), and the powerful, raspy voice of Blind Willie Johnson, singing “John the Revelator,” a song the R & B singer recorded in 1930. Murphy calls his blog “The Blog of Revelations,” and his MySpace page is “John the Revelator,” filled with information about the book and its reviews. He has been actively campaigning to have his book win the “Not-the-Booker” Prize from the Guardian UK, where it is #6 on the longlist of forty-six books, and he is doing book-signings and interviews everywhere. He is obviously having a ball! The book, an “Irish gothic” novel with dark, religious overtones, is set in rural southeast Ireland, where the author himself grew up.
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