book review

Another year has passed, and though it has almost slid out of view already, it's still time to hoist the lot of last year's books onto the table in front of me and give them an eye-over. Over the past three years, the habit has become so much of a tradition that I've now formalized it by giving it a tag, helping to recover all previous literary retrospectives.

Twenty eleven was a good year for books, judging by the number of entries in the list. It was also a good year in that I read more books than I bought – and I gave away even more. My Billy has never had it so easy. Unfortunately, that also means I'm writing some of these lines from blurry memory.

• What am I doing here? and Utz by Bruce Chatwin – An unmissable best-of by the reinventor of travel writing and one of his efforts at fiction, which didn't blow me over, though he tells the curious tale of a Meissen china collector in communist Prague that's very close to home for me.
• Handy by Ingo Schulze – From the author who's praised for best describing the mood and mindset of East Germans in the decade after the fall of the Wall comes a new collection of stories. Some are just about average, but others are amazing. I went to a reading of his here in London.
• Der Turm by Uwe Tellkamp – Set in Dresden in the decade leading up to the fall of the Wall, this is another book that should have struck a cord, but the lack of a plot (over nearly 1000 pages) seriously undermined its effectiveness.
• Delikt 220 by Stefan Wachtel – Chronicles of a political prisoner ("public vilification of the state") in East Germany that served the facts at the heart of the second half of Der Turm. In this case, facts that are stronger than fiction.
• Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras – This fictionalized account of a childhood violated by the rise of the military dictatorship in Argentina shows that we had it quite well in East Germany after all.
• Wie der Stahl gehärtet wurde by Nikolai Ostrovsky – Who had it unspeakably worse were those dissenting from the party line during the Russian Civil War and in the years thereafter. I read this book (whose author's name my secondary school carried) expecting something like a communist Atlas Shrugged, and while there's plenty of superhuman heroism, there's no hilarity. Instead, a truly frightening view of people, history and the world: Brainwash, murder, destruction. To think that I grew up with this…
• Cathedral and What we talk about when we talk about love by Raymond Carver – Two collections of bone dry short stories by the reinventor (or at least reinvigorator) of the genre.
• The Looking Glass Club by Gruff Davies – An initially clever and gripping thriller with two narratives, one set at Imperial today and the other in New York City twenty years hence. The end explodes, unfortunately, but it would make a wild movie.
• The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie – A sweeping tale of family, love, art, religion, history, and contemporary India; skillfully and confidently told, but not nearly as strong as Midnight's Children.
• Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski – Synthesis of the author's life with that of the Greek historian Herodotus. A traveling memoir that didn't work for me.
• Les croisades vues par les Arabes by Amin Maalouf – With focused and united Crusaders against eternally bickering and deceitful Muslims and cruelty on one side exacerbated by backstabbing on the other, the Lebanese author has a hard time painting a picture of vice against virtue. Even the great Saladin wasn't that great after all (as a recent BBC documentary agrees).
• The Curtain by Milan Kundera – The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (one of my all-time favorites) philosophizes on the subject of the novel. I can't say that I retained any of his arguments.
• Der Proceß by Franz Kafka – This unfinished novel takes a most astounding first sentence ("Someone must have made a false accusation against Joseph K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.") and runs with it. Non-sequiturs, lapses of logic, and the impossible are told in the rational voice of the K., a bank clerk who is convinced that everything will turn out right though nothing even remotely does. Brilliant.
• The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson – Hyped with a bunch of prizes last year but couldn't convince me. A Jewish writer explores Jewishness through Jewish characters. I couldn't care less whether someone is Jewish or Mormon or Atheist or Satanist or just doing his thing.
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck – Full of soft-spoken words of great wisdom, but when the non-action shifts from the farm to Salinas, things peter out. A good read but much inferior to The Grapes of Wrath.
• The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Marquéz – With 200 pages split into only five paragraphs and sentences habitually running over two pages, this is a pain to read. I valiantly struggled through 50 pages before giving up.
• Blow-up and other stories by Julio Cortázar – Mind-boggling stories like nothing else. There's one told by a frequent visitor to the zoo who slowly transforms into the axolotl in the aquarium watching a visitor to the zoo, and one where a man remembers fragments of a frightening dream only to realize to his horror that he's dreaming.
• My Father's Tears by John Updike – A collection of the master's last stories. Wistful, melancholy and a pleasure to read.
• On the Road to Babadag by Andrzej Stasiuk – Rambling excursions through an Eastern Europe of back roads, Gypsies and an inexorably crumbling past. Renewed my desire to lose myself there one day.
• The GRANTA book of travel – I can't go wrong with collected highlights of travel writing.

So this is 22 items struck off the list of unread books and not that many added. But since I didn't read many works of any heft, there's still much to go. Les Bienveillantes, The Satanic Verses and A House for Mr Biswas come to mind. I'll keep you up to date on the right and provide a summary next year, as is tradition.