Captain Alatriste/Purity of Blood

Since I was a kid watching reruns of "The Mark of Zorro" with Tyrone Power, I've been a sucker for a swashbuckler.  I was a big fan of Rafael Sabatini's novels when I was ten years old - Captain Blood, Scaramouche, The Sea Hawk.  For the most part, it's a dead genre in literature, with one glorious exception: The Captain Alatriste novels of Arturo Perez-Reverte.  One of Spain's best mystery novelists, Perez-Reverte has written four novels about his enigmatic swordsman, a soldier, sword-for-hire, and man of honor in 17th-century Madrid.  Quick to take offense, loyal to a fault, and skeptical of corrupt authority (including the Church and the deadly Inquisition), Alatriste is the kind of man who is a valuable friend and a frightening enemy.  

Okay, it sounds corny. It's not.  Alatriste and his closest friends come to vivid life on the page because Perez-Reverte takes the time to reveal their histories, and describe the political and cultural turmoil of this specific time in Spain's history.  The stories are told by Inigo Balboa, the son of Alatriste's dead comrade-in-arms, as he looks back from old age at his violent and tumultuous youth.  This enables Perez-Reverte, through his narrator, to put the actions of Alatriste, with his friends and enemies, into a deeper historical - and emotional - perspective.  Think of To Kill a Mockingbird, and how Scout looks back from maturity at the events of her childhood, and how that adds to the depth of her - and our - appreciation for her father's heroism.  The same dynamic holds here (I grant, in a wildly different context).

I don't mean to makes these novels sound too serious.  They are truly literature, but that doesn't mean they aren't a lot of fun.  Swordfights, duels, massive battles, daring rescues, evil seductresses, witty comrades and one great villain - these books are packed with the kind of action that brings out the 10-year-old in guys of all ages.  Yes, I think these are guys' books.  Alatriste is what used to be called a "man's man," and I don't know many women who would be interested.  But no matter what your gender, if you stay up late because TCM is running an Errol Flynn swashbuckler that you have to see just one more time - the Captain is for you.  I've read the first two novels - can't wait to start the third.

The Road

There are many post-apocalyptic novels, but few are love stories.  Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road presents a world of unequivocal hopelessness, where nothing remains but ash, desolation, hunger and (yes) cannibalism, and the knowledge that mankind's future is a certain descent into extinction.  And yet, and yet - what remains with you is its protagonist's love for his son, and his battle to leave the boy with some sense of what humanity meant before humans committed suicide.

The narrative is simple - a man and his small son walk down the road, scavenging what they can after a nuclear war that has destroyed civilization and poisoned the planet.  Nothing grows. Nothing is safe to eat or drink that doesn't come from a can.  There is no fuel, no comfort, no safety and no hope.  Mankind is in its last days.  As they move, pushing a fragile shopping cart with their worldly possessions, they encounter horrors beyond the imagination of most writers -- although not, of course, McCarthy's, the creator of Anton Chigurh.  The father fights beyond the limits of endurance, not only to keep his son safe, but to keep his young soul intact amid the savagery.

That struggle is what raises The Road to a level of almost Old Testament revelation: If all was to end, if we do the worst and destroy everything, what will be left, if only in the best of us? What is the best of us?  Why are we worth caring about, even with all the evil we inflict on each other?  The Road is one of the few novels in my recent memory to struggle with the biggest questions of all.

Throughout the novel, the boy and his father reassure each other with these words: "We're the good guys."  Defining what that means is the true purpose of The Road.  Mission accomplished, with terrible beauty.

We Were The Mulvaneys

The first book I ever recommended to a book club was We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates.  It was our group's first book, and I don't think the club ever forgave me.  We Were the Mulvaneys is a devastating experience, as tragic and painful to read as King Lear is to see.  The next five books we read were all comic novels, as if we had to purge Mulvaneys from our systems.  So, how can I recommend it?

Because as brutal as it is, Oates' novel is also ultimately redemptive - well, that may be too strong a word.  Maybe the word is forgiving, for the members of the cursed Mulvaney family - those who survive their long ordeal - are able to forgive, and go on as a family.

The plot is simple: An American family - imperfect, but happy - suffers an horrific event; the rape of their teenage daughter.  The rape is the catalyst of a series of actions that rips the family apart, tearing it along the fault lines that always existed, but that remained stable until the incalculable stress of the tragedy.

I'm not a fan of much of Oates' novels: Too often, her characters seem constructs, created to represent a moral position or philosophical concept.  But in the Mulvaneys, Oates creates some of the most vivid, real personalities in modern fiction.  Corinne and Mike are a living, breathing couple, and the disintegration of their marriage - of their love - is like watching a beautiful estate slide slowly over a cliff.

Anyone who has ever survived a family tragedy knows that things are never the same afterward; that the innocence of the years before the tragedy haunt you forever; and that somehow families, fractured and fragile, live on.  There is grace in this, although not an easy grace to accept.  Endurance is never rewarded with a return to paradise; at best, there is a return to some sort of peace, with the world and within the tribe.  We Were the Mulvaneys captures all the horror and grace of tragedy.  You'll never forget the Mulvaneys.

The Long Goodbye

"I stared.  She caught me staring. She lifted her glance half an inch and I wasn't there anymore. But wherever I was, I was holding my breath."  You know as soon as you read it that Raymond Chandler wrote that sentence, or maybe someone aping Chandler who got the rhythm right.  The concise declaratives, the baroque similes, the dangerous blonds and the heavy air of corruption - Chandler's style has become a cliche, except when it's Chandler writing it.  Chandler took pulp style and transformed it into something much more sophisticated, but without removing the tension of impending violence and barely veiled perversity.  A half-century later, you still can't put his books down, no matter how late it's getting.

The Long Goodbye is not the best of Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels to read first, but it's my favorite.  Its flaw is also its greatest strength - it rambles.  It goes down one path, hits a dead end, and then takes the long way round bringing you back to its central plot, so it doesn't have the narrative drive of earlier Chandler novels.  But I love it because its meandering takes you down some pretty fascinating roads, where you'll meet the long cast of memorable characters - thugs, cops, dishes, quacks, drunks, and rich phonies (the worst in Marlowe's book) - that populate Chandler's amoral cesspool, Los Angeles.  And in contrast to them all stands Terry Lennox, a weak and despairing drunk who Marlowe meets accidentally and helps tragically.  In Marlowe's mind, Lennox comes to represent the pale light of honor in a dark, rotting world.  

When Lennox is killed, his reputation stained with a particularly brutal murder, Marlowe can't give up on proving his friend's innocence.  Learning what drives Marlowe to clear Lennox - even if it's only to himself - is what raises the novel above its predecessors.  Marlowe reminds me of Kurosawa's samurai - men of honor in a world where honor has lost its value, except to these few who remain committed to the code.  Lennox, like Marlowe, is one of this dying breed, and Marlowe needs to believe - to know - that he remained true to the last.  Every encounter he has in the novel, with characters increasingly perverse and corrupt, pushes Marlowe closer to despair than he has ever reached before.  Yet he endures - no Chandler hero ever really triumphs - and receives some reinforcement that his code is worth his commitment.

In a time when corruption and dishonor have driven our country to near ruin, Chandler feels more relevant than he might have a decade ago.  But don't read this for political enlightenment: Read The Long Goodbye - and read it slowly - to revel in the mastery of style and character that make Chandler the best genre writer of the past century.

Cloud Atlas

I'm not a big fan of what I call "stunt writing" - the kind of writing that calls attention to the author's cleverness with minimal concern about the reader's pleasure or enlightenment.  (For that reason, I'm in the tiny minority who find Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections unreadable.)  But there is no greater joy than finding a writer who is a breathtaking stylist, who can do remarkable, unprecedented things with a sentence, and who can simultaneously move you deeply. 

David Mitchell began his career as an unrestrained stylist - his novel number9dream (note the lowercase title - always a bad sign) overflows with run-on sentences and ideas that drown any opportunity to uncover an actual novel.  But Cloud Atlas is a miracle of a novel - a stunt novel that qualifies as great literature on every level.

The stunt is unprecedented in my experience: The novel is actually six stories, arranged like a set of nesting dolls - the first half of the first story is followed by the first half of the second, then the first half of the third, fourth and fifth.  In the center is a complete story, followed by the second half of the fifth story, the second half of the fourth, then the third, the second, and finally, the completion of the first.  In addition, each story is told in a completely different style - the first, a 19th century journal of an ocean voyage, a la Conrad; the second, a romantic epistolary tale of doomed love in pre-WWII Bruges; next, a Grisham-style thriller with a perky heroine, secret documents and a cliffhanger; fourth, a farcical tale of a contemporary cad trapped in an old-folks home a la Kingsley Amis; and fifth, a horrifying, hard sci-fi tale about cyborgs in a corrupt, totalitarian, and decaying future.  The tale at the center is a stylistic tour-de-force - an adventure fantasy set in a world of savagery and mystery, featuring a shocking secret and told in an invented dialect Anthony Burgess would admire.

What makes Cloud Atlas a novel - a great novel - is that ultimately, every story connects with the whole in a real way; all are part of one ultimate tale.  The resonances are astonishing, and hit with surprising force because they are so unexpected.  Every story wrestles with an aspect of the question, "what does it mean to be human?" and Mitchell drives you to feel and think deeply about the implications of that question and its possible answers.  

This is not just an exercise in complexity and style; Mitchell's characters are not types, nor ideological constructs.  Their humanity is palpable.  (In fact, the most human of all is probably the least human - a cyborg of achingly real sweetness.)  Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable reading experience - entertaining, challenging, and filled with a passion not just for words, but for humanity, too.

Nine Stories

"See more fish."  If that sentence doesn't bring tears to your eyes, you haven't read J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, a collection of short stories published in 1948.  It's unfortunate that many people who have read Catcher in the Rye don't read Salinger's other work.  In a way, his relatively small collection of works - Catcher in the Rye, four novelettes (Franny, Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters, and Seymour), and these short stories - can be seen as one larger, integrated work, and not just because of the focus on the Glass family as primary characters.  Thematically, almost all of these works share the same concerns about the loss of innocence and the hypocrisy of modern life (or, as Holden put it, "phonies").

The strongest of these stories contrast the beauty of children not yet spoiled by adult influences - greed, jealousy, and most powerfully, war - with the fragile state of young men trying to endure their initiation to those influences.  In the two most powerful stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esme, With Love and Squalor," that initiation was profound - the horrors of World War II.  The protagonists of both stories meet young children who give them a glimpse of the beauty hidden by all the horror they've seen.  For one, that glimpse is enough to keep enduring; for the other, it's a fatal reminder of all he has lost.

Other strong stories: "The Laughing Man," about a young man's fall into adulthood as seen through the eyes of a boy he coaches; "Down at the Dinghy," a seemingly simple story of a mother and son with a heart wrenching twist; and "Teddy," the tale of a 10-year-old wise beyond his years.

If you decide to read all of Salinger, at least read "Bananafish" first.  It is the author's thematic keystone, and perhaps the saddest story in American literature.

Things Fall Apart

Like most Americans, I am sadly ignorant about African literature.  According to a recent New Yorker profile of Chinua Achebe, who wrote Things Fall Apart in 1959, Americans have limited access to African literature of the past 50 years because of a dearth of English translations.  I don't buy it.  More likely, the dearth of translations is due to a dearth of interest and demand by American readers. Since I count myself among the transgressors, the New Yorker profile struck a chord, and I picked up Things Fall Apart, a cornerstone in 20th century African lit and originally written in English (a choice for which Achebe, born in Nigeria, has taken critical heat ever since).

Achebe's novel is the story of how one man, his family, his village, and his culture are crushed by the arrival of white Europeans in the early 20th century.  Okonkwo is a leader in his village - a brave warrior with a large family and a successful farm, respected for his courage, and feared for his quick temper.  His story is told in the third-person, but from the limited perspective of one who shares the same culture and background as Okwonko, so that we experience Okonkwo's internal struggles with change as he does.  The story is told in the manner of folk tales; many such tales are told within the novel, as they are passed on from Okonkwo's wives to their children.

The most ingenious aspect of Things Fall Apart is that it gives us the time and exposure we need to see and feel life in Okonkwo's village.  Incidents reveal the details of domestic life, the village's system of justice, and its hierarchy, religion, economics and art.  At first, the society seemed foreign and primitive to me; halfway through the book, my growing respect for the sophistication of their culture made me ashamed of my initial response.

Of course, this appreciation and respect (and shame) is what makes the destruction of Okonkwo's society so devastating in the latter chapters of the novel.  The Christian, European conquerors are equally blind to the value of this culture, and don't bother to take the time to learn and appreciate its value.  Their invasion demolishes Okonkwo's life at every level - his family, his village, his culture, and ultimately his own soul.  Fifty years after his novel first appeared, Achebe's voice is still powerful, and his message, sadly, still relevant.

The Aubrey/Maturin Novels (Master & Commander)

It's fascinating that the best adventure novels in the English language are formally untitled.  The novels - Patrick O'Brian's stories of British naval captain "Lucky Jack" Aubrey and his friend, ship's doctor and secret agent Stephen Maturin - have no umbrella name, unlike say, Lord of the Rings.  Most people who know anything about them call them the "Master and Commander" novels, probably because of the excellent film with Russell Crowe as Lucky Jack.  But for those of us who have read them and love them, it doesn't matter.  

In truth, the series of 20 novels is really one novel - an epic saga of the Napoleonic Age that begins with Jack's first command, and first of the spectacular successes that lead to his nickname, and ends decades later with his rise to admiral.  But that simple description doesn't begin to summarize the complex narrative of the rise, fall, and resurrection of one of English literature's most captivating heroes, or the story of a fascinating lifelong friendship between two very different and fascinating individuals.  

The books are brilliant in their portrayal of action at sea, and of the political intrigues of the time.  They are also compelling romances, especially the long, tragic story of Stephen and the Lady Diana, his alluring, self-destructive wife.

But O'Brian's genius is most evident in two achievements: His incredibly compelling descriptions of life at sea in the first years of the 19th century, and the creation of an unforgettable friendship between two entirely different types of hero.

As good a storyteller as O'Brian is on land, his novels really take off when the mooring lines are thrown off and his heroes take to the sea.  Life in the British Navy is brutal and harsh, a constant struggle against weather, hunger, drunkenness, and the extraordinary danger of every ordinary day at sea.  Mistakes are frequently mortal.  And yet the adventures experienced by even the most common sailor - the thrill of finding new cultures, the excitement of battle, the bonds formed between men who depend on each other for their safety and sanity - make you wonder if 20th century life can offer anything remotely as inspiring.

O'Brian's adventures are unabashedly old-fashioned - they could have been written 200 years ago - and Jack Aubrey is the perfect hero for them.  Reading these novels and getting to know Jack over a 20-year span, you realize how rare a bird is the traditional hero in modern literature.  In our age of irony and cynicism, Jack Aubrey should seem too good to be true - but he's not.  Aubrey may be one of the most sophisticated characters in 20th century fiction.  Jack is flawed - boastful, spoiled, headstrong and naive - but his flaws make his courage and audacity more believable, and more admirable.

Stephen Maturin is in many ways Jack's opposite - intellectual where Jack is instinctive, repressed, angry and suspicious where Jack is sensual and trusting.  Stephen is more of a 20th-century heroic ideal - the anti-hero, scornful of authority and traditional institutions.  A secret agent for the British government - which, as an Irish national, he loathes with a passion - he thrives in darkness, while Jack is a creature of noise and light.

And yet their friendship is what truly brings these novels to life, and the evolution of their relationship is what ties the books together into one satisfying whole.  In the first novel, Stephen first sees Jack as conservative and shallow, a happy tool of imperial power, while Jack finds his doctor to be argumentative and irritating.  By the end of the series, after numerous battles, personal failures, shared deprivation and triumph, the two men have built the kind of friendship rarely found and greatly envied.

I say "men" because I have a bias - I think these are books that few women will enjoy as much as most men.  Their emphasis on friendship and their lack of compelling women characters (Lady Diana strongly excluded) will - I think - lessen their attraction.

O'Brian's greatest asset is patience.  Knowing from the outset that he was going to tell his story over the course of 20 novels, he takes his time and goes into great detail with each.  Don't think "Moby Dick" and its lengthy discourses on whaling techniques; a better comparison is Dickens.  Both share the ability to describe situations concisely and convincingly while keeping the narrative moving like a war frigate at full sail in a howling gale.

My favorites in the series: HMS Surprise, in which Jack takes command of the ship he will love most his entire career; The Reverse of the Medal, in which Jack falls victim to poor judgment and political intrigue; and The Far Side of the World.  But the truth is, I love them all, and read them all in order, one right after the other - and when I finished, I felt empty for a week with the loss.

Midnight's Children

Appropriately, I'm writing this just past midnight, having just finished Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the night after Slumdog Millionaire won the Best Picture Oscar.  If "Slumdog" was your introduction to today's India - I'm just guessing, but I'd bet that's true for a lot of Americans - and you want to learn more about its people, history, culture and identity, Midnight's Children might be just the place to start.  You probably know Rushdie's name from the controversy caused by The Satanic Verses, the satiric novel that caused the Ayatollah Khomeni to issue a "fatwa" calling for the author's assassination.  (By the way, it's a brilliant, funny and moving book.)  Midnight's Children is the novel that made Rushdie a literary celebrity, winning the Booker Prize as the best novel in English in 1980, and subsequently the "Booker of Booker" Prize as the best novel in English since the Bookers were established.

Any description of the plot is a futile exercise, because Midnight's Children is one of those magnificent works of art that is totally unclassifiable - it's a sweeping epic, sharp satire, tragic romance; it's the story of one man, and of an entire country; it's funny, horrifying, fantastical and palpably real.  Rushdie reminds me of Robin William's stand-up style - the limitless scope of his references; the talent for identifying the precise, telling detail; the love of humanity in its infinite variety.  What Rushdie adds is passion, both for his country and its people in all their flawed beauty, and for the breathtaking ride that's the gift of the greatest storytellers.

Midnight's Children is the story of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight as India achieved its independence, his life and destiny to be shared with India's own.  Saleem grows up as a wealthy Muslim in a Hindu nation, his life driven by a mystery regarding his birthright and the magical abilities of those children who share his birthday.  But Saleem is only the central figure in a story that begins decades before his birth.  The story of his family, beginning with his physician grandfather meeting his bride-to-be through a hole in a sheet, is intertwined with the history of independent India, including the end of the Raj, the birth of Pakistan, the rise and fall and rise of democracy, bloody wars and bloody peace.  

In fact, like Slumdog Millionaire, the real star of Midnight's Children is India itself, in all its contradictions, color, magnificence and blundering.