This has been a year of magpie reading. So the list’s partial, personal, shaped as much by what I missed as by the higgledy-piggledy selection I did read. For a start I tried to avoid all those disheartening novels that begin with a murder, the discovered corpse or cadaver, human or canine. They’ve become overkill.
Then all the trauma-autobiographies. After James Frey’s Oprah Winfrey-selected A Million Little Pieces (Random House) they’ve become suspect. He’s admitted his rehab-bio is fabricated, yet it’s still a bestseller. There’s some kind of emotional, illusionary process going on here that has more to do with what readers want to believe than with reality.
This publishing thread has reached an extreme in arrogant cynicism with the promised memoir by OJ Simpson about how he would have killed his wife and her lover had he actually done it. This has to be a mega-seller. There are two corpses; it’s a trauma-autobiography as well as pure fiction.
What’s left? Corpses weren’t entirely avoidable. The Norwegian writer Jan Kjaerstad’s massive The Seducer (Arcadia Books), the first in a trilogy, and now in paperback, begins with a famous TV documentary producer, Jonas Wergeland, discovering his wife’s body when he arrives home after a trip.
The novel is a multi-layered examination of Norway, modern and post-modern, written with the time-consuming spaciousness of a Victorian novel. The unidentified narrator suggests Ibsen got it wrong: writing isn’t a matter of peeling away onion skins to find a kernel. There’s no kernel in an onion, just skins as Kjaerstad shows through his complex, multi-dimensional accumulation of incidents, storylines, adventure, hyperbole and philosophical reflections.
The nature of art, ideology, fantasy and realism is imaginatively examined in Olga Grushin’s brilliant first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Viking), about Anatoly Sukhanov, the editor of a Soviet arts magazine. After toeing the political line, he has to adjust to changes in Russia. Her novel is both substantial and a stylistic tour de force.
Two other novels — read but not published this year — are worth mentioning.
Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (Miramax), translated from French, is a startling, disturbingly convincing recreation of what it must have been like to be at the top of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Blair Mastbaum’s raw, passionate, gay-coming-of-age novel, Clay’s Way (Turnaround Publisher Services), set among surfers in Hawaii, makes most current United States gay writing seem ditsy. The book was chosen as teen novel of 2005 by the New York public library.
Movie books and serious magazines flourish, although we still seem to end up with rehash star biographies and Heat on our shelves. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s and Adrian Martin’s Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (British Film Institute) compellingly discusses a growing trend towards world cinema in the face of Hollywood hegemony. For a reassessment of Hollywood there’s Jake Horsley’s enthralling, argumentative battering-ram of a book, Dogville vs Hollywood: The War Between Independent Film and the Hollywood Mainstream (Marion Boyars).
South African writing abounds, especially in Cape Town, where I’m told tourists don’t want coffee-table books anymore, but the nitty gritty of novels, non-fiction. It needs its own yearly list, but I’ll stick to two: Ivan Vladislavic’s evocative Portrait with Keys: Jo’burg & What-What (Umuzi), a symbolic and personal history of street-level Johannesburg, and Michael Cope’s delicately written Intricacy: A Meditation on Memory (Double Storey), about his family. I’m also about to buy Michiel Heyns’s The Typewriter’s Tale (Jonathan Ball), a book on my list I haven’t got around to.
Last year we were flooded with Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: the Biography. The better book is James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Perennial) that didn’t make our bookshelves as hardcover but it’s now in paperback. By examining a year in the playwright’s life, Shapiro places him in perspective: he worked hard, didn’t carouse much, conscientiously revised his work and was affected by current political happenings that he used in his plays — like any good writer. Marcel Proust, too, is the subject of two worthwhile biographies, William C Carter’s Proust in Love (Yale University Press) and Richard Davenport-Hines’s Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris (Faber and Faber), both about the writer as a (homo)sexual being.
Finally, John Carey’s provocative, argue-back What Good Are the Arts? (Faber and Faber) It was both debunked and praised. He tries to demolish everyone’s favourite theory about what art is. Art is what you want it to be, he concludes. Fair enough.
However, if you’re really worried about literary art get the handiest, carry-around, work-your-way-through-it reference book of the year: Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Cassell). James Frey and Oprah Winfrey aren’t in it, so you’re safe. The companion piece is John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel: A User’s Guide (Profile Books). In a period in which books are being strangled by their own excess, triviality and the multi-media — all equal art forms if you wish — these last two books are a welcome return of the repressed: the book as book in itself, an object with a history and its own integrity, instead of marketing fad.