Once again, this is not a list of books published in 2009, but rather a list of the best books I read this year.
I continued reading Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003). By Night In Chile (2000; transl. Chris Andrews 2003) is the confession of a priest who sold out to the Pinochet regime. A two-paragraph novella. Original title: Shit Storms (a reference to both the political history of Chile and the Catholic Church’s pigeon problem). In The Savage Detectives (1998; transl. Natasha Wimmer 2007) the leaders of gang of bohemian revolutionary poets flee mid-70s Mexico City on a hunt for an ultra-obscure poet in the Sonora Desert. Bolaño uses the form of the diary and the oral history to tell of the quest for Cesárea Tinajero and its long aftermath in Europe and elsewhere.
There are three short novels by Horacio Castellanos Moya in English translation. This year I read them all: Senselessness (2004; transl. Katherine Silver 2008), The She-Devil in the Mirror (2000; transl. Katherine Silver 2009), and the ridiculous Dance With Snakes (1996 ; transl. Lee Paula Springer 2009). Moya is from El Salvador. He now lives in exile. Senselessness is a funny, bawdy, horrifying novel about war crimes in an unnamed Latin American country. The narrator is a writer hired to polish the prose of a long report commissioned by the Catholic Church on the atrocities of a military dictatorship. Bolaño writes of his friend: “One of the great virtues of [Moya's work]: Nationalists of all stripes can’t stand it. Its sharp humour, not unlike a Buster Keaton film or a time bomb, threatens the fragile stability of imbeciles who, when they read [his books], have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honour for a writer.”
Clive Sinclair is the too-little-known British author of many stories and novels such as Cosmetic Effects and Augustus Rex. The Lady With The Laptop (1996) is a cosmopolitan and bawdy cycle of six interrelated stories that revolve around seduction, contraception, terrorism and death.
I finally got around to reading the novel which donated its title to this blog. Anthony Burgess’s Honey For The Bears (1963) is a farce of black-marketeering based on the Burgesses’ trip to Leningrad. Andrew Biswell’s fine biography illustrates the extent to which Burgess’s 1990 memoir mixes the remembered with this invented account. The rendering of sultry, stinking, polluted, half-Oriental St Petersburg is vastly at odds with the stereotypical Cold War-era USSR. This is a very funny book, and one of many strong candidates to dislodge A Clockwork Orange from its disproportionate status in the Burgess corpus.
Aleksander Hemon’s first story collection The Question of Bruno (2000) was very good but not quite as fine as it promised to be. Hemon is Bosnian, but writes in very fluent American English. The stories are rooted in Eastern Europe’s dark 20th century and Hemon’s peculiar immigrant experience. Not every story works as well as it could; indeed the New Yorker’s abridgement of ‘Blind Jozef Pronek’ transformed the meandering story as published here into a comic masterwork. There is an occasional tendency towards self-pity (eg. “This story was written in Chicago (where I live) on the subway, after a long day of arduous work as a parking assistant, A. D. 1996″). But these are quibbles, and what I have read of Hemon’s latest story collection Love and Obstacles (2009) is impressive. I have a feeling I’m going to like the novel The Lazarus Project (2008).
Other highlights: Flash For Freedom! (1971), the third Flashman adventure by George MacDonald Fraser: Flashy as reluctant slaver and equally reluctant hero of the Underground Railroad. My favourite Flash yet. Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929) (I subsequently took Don Herron’s wonderful Dasheill Hammett walking tour of San Francisco. Thanks, Don). Luis Fernando Verissimo’s macabre novella The Club of Angels (1998; transl. Margaret Jull Costa 2001), about a Brazillian gastronomy club that engages in a kind of culinary Russian roulette. Javier Marias‘ 1986 novel Man of Feeling (transl. M. Jull Costa 2003) and his short story collection When I Was Mortal (1996; transl. M. Jull Costa 1999) [see also his recent New Yorker story 'While the Women Are Sleeping'].
The non-fiction titles that impressed me most were Tony Judt’s immense Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) and Richard J. Evan’s The Coming of the Third Reich (2003).
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