In one of the most exciting and intellectually stimulating novels of the year, author Julian Barnes tells a two-part story that reconstructs the lives of four young British secondary school students in the 1960s as they study literature and history and argue about philosophy in an effort to solve the riddles of their universe. Through narrator Tony Webster, one of these boys, the author describes their lives up to their early twenties, then leaves them to their fates until Part II begins, forty years later. Webster, now in his sixties, twice divorced and retired, suddenly receives a bequest which suggests hitherto unsuspected revelations about one of his school friends who died young. For forty years, his memories of these school friends and the experiences they shared have informed and affected his life and his philosophy, but now he discovers that the memories may all have been constructed on lies based on incomplete information. Ultimately, the novel resolves all the complex mysteries of the plot in unexpected ways, and the author’s philosophical musings on life, sex (eros), death (thanatos), and time, their ineradicable connections to our lives, and their more transient connections to our memories are given full play as Barnes also introduces questions of individual responsibility and one’s personal history. A brilliant, challenging, and ultimately important novel of time, order, and chaos and how we survive.
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Gerard Woodward has been one of England’s most iconoclastic literary authors, rejecting all the polite expectations of writing and society by creating novels that seem, on the surface, to be about real families experiencing real life but having a darker agenda. A poet with a fine eye, ear, and sense of pacing, Woodward uses these talents in unique ways to create dozens of scenes which surprise and shock and even repulse, all the while causing the reader to laugh uproariously, not from shock or embarrassment but from surprise and delight in his daring. The opening pages of this novel, which are alternately wickedly funny and darkly ironic, graphically illustrate these points. Mrs. Head, a proper London widow is preparing dinner for her daughter Tory who is living with her and working for the war effort in a gelatine factory. When a German bomb hits the butcher shop nearby, Mrs. Head explores. As she looks over the wreckage, she finds an absolutely perfect leg of pork. Quietly picking it up and wrapping it, for fear that someone will think she is looting the wreckage, she brings it home and roasts it for their first real dinner in ages, admiring the cracklings and the scent as it roasts. It is not until Tory returns home from work and asks, “Where’s Mr. Dando?” that the horror of what they are eating hits home.
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Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy, of which this novel is the second in the series, incorporates four novels set in four different time periods, illustrating Mishima’s extremely conservative attitudes toward the changes in Japan from the 1912 to 1970. Born in 1925, Mishima had, throughout his life, mourned the loss of samurai ideals, including reverence for the Emperor. As the novel opens, Shigekuni Honda, a main character in Spring Snow, the first novel in the series, is now a judge in the Osaka Court of Appeals. He has reached the age of thirty-eight, a man leading a quiet life of reason who believes that his youth ended with the death of his friend Kiyoaki Matsugae, eighteen years ago. When he is asked to substitute for his Chief Justice at a kendo exhibition in Nara, some distance away, he accepts. The star of the exhibition is young Isao Iinuma, the nineteen-year-old son of Kiyoaki’s tutor during their childhood. Honda, who has always grounded his life in reason, soon has reason to believe that Isao is the confident samurai reincarnation of Kiyoaki, who was a sensitive man of passion and emotion a generation ago. As he follows Isao’s life, he gives an ironic blueprint for his own life in 1970.
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Pulitzer Prize winning author Jeffrey Eugenides creates a story, set in the 1980s, in which the entire novel incorporates and illustrates the marriage plot, with three main characters all pursuing the goal of marriage. These young students at Brown University are all conscientious, and all have real academic interests, but they also follow their libidos into sometimes new directions with the goal of experiencing a “full” and “satisfying” life. Madeleine Hanna, the English major of the quotation above has just discovered semiotics and the excitement of this esoteric academic subject; Mitchell Grammaticus, who has loved and fantasized about Madeleine since he first met her, is fascinated by religion and philosophy; and Leonard Bankhead, with whom Madeleine is passionately in love, wants most to “become an adjective,” like Joycean, Shakespearean, Faulknerian, Chekhovian or Tolstoyan. Eugenides creates a novel which is fully successful in developing these characters and their interactions, and when, at the end of this year, they separately arrive in New York City and find themselves at the same party, they are quite different from who they were just a year ago. As the party progresses, the reader, too, having had the opportunity to get to know them, their family backgrounds, and their goals from their earlier lives, comes to new appreciation of who they all are. Firmly grounded in the reality of the individual lives of students in the 1980s, the novel concerns itself with the self-absorbed and individual lives of the characters, often at the expense of universal insights.
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With a breezy, irreverent point of view and a fine eye for the kinds of details which make characters and scenes memorable, Aravind Adiga tells an often humorous morality tale about life in an area of Mumbai undergoing residential redevelopment. And just as his Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger, was celebrated because “it shocked and entertained in equal measure,” this novel, too, both shocks and entertains. Here Adiga also explores the theme of moral compromise, which India seems to require of its citizens if they are to become financially “successful.” The extreme poverty and the masses of other enterprising residents with whom everyone except the very rich must compete make absolute morality impossible, Adiga seems to suggest, a luxury which few can afford, and Adiga draws from these conflicts in his novels. The fifteen apartments of Vishram Society Tower A in Vakola, “the toenail of Santa Cruz,” near Mumbai’s airport, are home to a group of relatively middle-class residents – a social worker, a hardware specialist, a retired accountant, a teacher, and a journalist, for example. When Darmen Shah, who works for the Confidence Group, makes an offer to buy out the residents to build a super-luxury apartment building, most of them are ecstatic. He is offering a windfall of the equivalent of $330,000 per apartment if they will vacate so he can tear down their building and build his new development. The only catch is that all of the residents must agree to sell.
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