Top 10 Books of 2010: #1

The Corrections

#1: THE CORRECTIONS, Jonathan Franzen

For the past few weeks, I went wandering back through the 10 best books I read in 2010. I conclude the year’s review with these fragmented thoughts on my favorite book of the year, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.

It’s been a year of dysfunctional family epics: Ada, The Man Who Loved Children, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and now this: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I guess I have a thing for this genre.

I know this is not the Franzen novel that everyone’s been talking about this year, but I hadn’t previously read any of his work and so I wanted to get started before Freedom came out. My reservations about “modern” literature have already been briefly expressed, but I felt like they all dissolved after I had read The Corrections.

Franzen’s ability to inhabit the dreary, seemingly hopeless Lambert family is astonishing to me. At first glance, this sounds like a supremely boring book: This middle-class family is falling apart and the mild-mannered matriarch is obsessed with getting her whole disjointed family together for Christmas one last time. Why would anyone want to read a nearly 600-page tome about that?

Well, for one thing, because Franzen is a bit of a genius. I don’t know how he does it; I really don’t. Some critics called him a “prophet.”  The Corrections came out a few weeks before 9/11. After we recovered from the shock, we began to realize that this novel was already proclaiming the domestic malaise that we would face in the post-9/11 world; it was a quiet and almost eerie warning.

To my mind, Franzen’s most impressive ability is his skill in replicating voices. Many authors do not write convincing characters of their opposite sex (Dickens and Per Petterson come to mind). Franzen does not seem troubled by this at all. In fact, I think the most believable character is the mother, Enid Lambert. Her gestures and fears are so perfectly expressed that you feel like you might have spent a lot of time with her at a long, fluorescent family reunion.

One of the most moving exchanges for me was a passage I have already written about here. Franzen most likely did not intend for this to be read religiously at all, but I read the exchange between the Lambert siblings, Denise and Chip, as the perfect description of the Gospel. We cannot stand to be forgiven. And yet over and over again, a beneficent Franzen offers his characters forgiveness. They are unwilling to extend or accept forgiveness, but they crave it, just like we do. The Corrections is a beautiful novel about the complex web of emotions that families create, but it is also a map through the labyrinth of familial tension; it’s letting you into the secret of the way out.

In short, it is one of the most full novels I have ever read. At the conclusion of David Gates’s review of The Corrections, he writes:

No one book, of course, can provide everything we want in a novel. But a book as strong as ”The Corrections” seems ruled only by its own self-generated aesthetic: it creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world, and while we’re under its enchantment it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read.

The Corrections is lovely and sad and true. What more can you ask from a genuine work of art?

With that, I’ve spoken my peace about the 10 best books I read in 2010. Thanks for reading along. Now, onward to 2011! There is much to be conquered.

Top 10 Books of 2010: #2

The Museum of Innocence

#2: THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE, by Orhan Pamuk

The Turkish Proust! This is how I keep describing Pamuk to myself and to other people when they ask who he is. Proust and Pamuk don’t really have that much in common, really. One is a long-dead Frenchman, the other, a very alive Turk; one writes monolithic odes to childhood, the other, properly modern novels on a variety of themes. So, why do I keep calling him the Turkish Proust? I don’t know. It’s just this… pervasive sense that I get from reading Pamuk’s novels; I believe that he and Proust share deep sensibilities.

I mean, how can they not? Read this paragraph from Pamuk on the pain of true love, from the perspective of his melancholy narrator, Kemal, and just try to tell me it doesn’t sound like Proust:

The pains of true love reside at the heart of our existence; they catch hold of our most vulnerable point, rooting themselves deeper than the root of any other pain, and branching to every part of our bodies and our lives. For the hopelessly in love, the pain can be triggered by anything, whether as profound as the death of a father or as mundane as a piece of bad luck, like losing a key; such elemental pain can be flamed by any sort of spark. People whose lives have, like mine, been turned upside down by love can become convinced that all other problems will be resolved once the pain of love is gone, but in ignoring these problems they only allow them to fester.

I mean, don’t you see it, too? So Marcel.

The English translation of The Museum of Innocence came out in 2009 and people started talking about it. I had heard Pamuk’s name before (he won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for Istanbul) but didn’t know much about him. I picked this 600-page tome up from the library when it was still relatively new and had no idea what to expect.

I like coming to novels with this perspective of blankness, of utter ignorance. I refuse to read dust jackets and forewords and simply jump right in. The Museum of Innocence lends itself well to this type of approach. I think if I had known what it was going to be about, I might not have attempted it. But to prevent you from that same reaction, this is what I will say about it: It is a massive book, but a very beautiful one. (I did, after all, think it was the second-best book I read in 2010.)

The story follows one unlucky lover, Kemal, for many years as he more or less unsuccessfully woos his distant cousin, Füsun. Nothing is accomplished. Kemal begins to obsessively collect trinkets and love paraphernalia from his few, precious moments with his beloved and starts to file them away in an empty apartment, which, naturally, becomes the Museum of Innocence. Years pass. Füsun gets engaged, but not to Kemal. Kemal starts hanging around her family, hoping for some chance to win her back. Upon closing the final page, you may get the sense the novel is just 600 pages of emotional turmoil with a few mild climaxes and little resolution.

So, why read it? Here are two reasons:

1.) Pamuk writes with more skill than you or I could ever hope to have. Therefore, when you read The Museum of Innocence, you may simply enjoy the pleasures of a masterful novel. I don’t know a word of Turkish, but if Pamuk is even half as good in Turkish as he is in English, we have a brilliant author on our hands.

2.) But even more than that, it is always beneficial to read about Real Life. Woolf said that good fiction must be attached to reality at the corners, like the edges of a spider web. Not many novels accomplish this today. Most are difficult to believe, with characters–like Oskar Schell–who seem like nothing more than pure fantasy. We cannot recognize anything of the world we actually know in them.

This is why I stand behind The Museum of Innocence. Pamuk refuses to give us a fairytale. Because that’s how life is. The prince doesn’t always win the princess. And maybe the princess isn’t trying to be won after all. We don’t live in some rosy-edged bubble that obeys the predictable laws of the romantic comedy universe. Thankfully, Pamuk realizes this, too, and refuses to stoop to Nicholas Sparks’s level.

And beneath the simple futility of it all, the story holds together with the thin beat of hope. Because even though life rarely pans out the way we want it to, we still believe in our coming triumph. This is the motivating force for our downtrodden, love-weary narrator. After he remarks that an afternoon spent with Füsun was the “happiest moment of [his] life,” he qualifies that statement with this observation, which captures the spirit of this novel so well:

In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant “now,” even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.

Pamuk will tease you–and Kemal–with hope throughout The Museum of Innocence. He immerses you in Kemal’s universe as you begin to realize that it is all very real and very beautiful.

Top 10 Books of 2010: #4

Pale Fire

#4: PALE FIRE, by Vladimir Nabokov

For the next few weeks, I’ll be thinking back through the books I read in 2010 and ranking my favorites in a top 10 list. Today, I’ll be talking about #4, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

It should be rather evident by now that I am a Nabokov fan. (His Ada was, after all, my 10th favorite book I read all year). I picked up Pale Fire a few months after I had read Lolita and was dazzled… and confused. This is one of the most ambitious and strange novels I’ve read and yet I do not think Nabokov would want me to call it a novel.

So what is it exactly? Pale Fire is many things. It is the title of a 1,000 line poem by the fictional poet John Shade. It is a murder mystery. It is the long-form annotated guide to the aforementioned poem. And it is quite elaborate and beautiful and confusing.

After a foreword, the book begins with “Pale Fire,” the long poem by John Shade (which, of course, Nabokov wrote himself). I don’t know very much about poetry, despite being married to one who makes it, but I think it’s a pretty decent and interesting poem. Particularly considering that English was the third language of its author. The New York Times book review from 1962–when Pale Fire was published–puts the issue of Shade’s poem quite well:

["Pale Fire," the poem] is about on a level with the work of Alfred Austin, Tennyson’s successor as Poet Laureate, who also had a bent for conversational verse: not bad, but also not good, not, in the strict sense, a poem at all. The reader, having plowed through it with mild interest, is likely to be afflicted by the disproportion between its merit and the apparatus that surrounds it. For the author has to keep up a pretense that Shade was a great man, and the poem a great poem. Yet it is also part of the joke that he does not believe this for a moment. He is carefully building a farce, assuming the mask of pedantry in order to point a grimace at his readers.

Behind this farce we meet the person of Charles Kinbote, an obsessive literature professor from the imaginary country of Zembla (Nabokov has a thing for fictional nations). Kinbote is the author of the annotated guide to the poem, which we are now reading and which consumes the rest of the novel. It is fair to say that Kinbote worships Shade. He regards “Pale Fire” as the greatest poem ever written and managed to get the rights to the poem and to publishing this annotated guide after Shade’s mysterious death.

In the hands of the witty and sly Nabokov, Kinbote’s fanaticism is a wonderful and frightening thing to behold. His love of Shade borders on pathological, once he moves in next door to Shade so he can watch him all day long. He is deeply envious of the poet’s purported talent, for as Kinbote says of himself:

I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation*, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.

Kinbote’s warping of the web–the fabulous series of artifices that Nabokov has created–captivates utterly. Pale Fire was certainly the most interesting and thought-provoking book I read in 2010. I do not know if it was the best, but it was deliciously strange. As Kinbote–or is it just Nabokov himself?–says in the end:

I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.

(*Side note: Just in time for this review: The New York Times reveals that Nabokov’s theory on butterfly evolution has been proven. Lovely!)

Top 10 Books of 2010: #5

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

#5: EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE, Jonathan Safran Foer

For the next few weeks, I’ll be thinking back through the books I read in 2010 and ranking my favorites in a top 10 list. Today, I’ll be sharing some brief thoughts about Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

I am not very well-versed in contemporary literature and so, as a proper literary snob, I always approach modern novels with trepidation. This novel was no different. It’s not exactly fresh or new to be into Jonathan Safran Foer and rave about him on your Tumblr, but I’d never read anything he’d written, so I decided back in February to figure out what the hype was all about.

The hype is about a novelist who keeps one finger on the pulse of the 21st-century reader and the other on the voice of his swift and witty self.

The story of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is clearly designed to pluck your postmodern heartstrings. Oskar Schell is 9 years old. His beloved father, Thomas, was killed when the World Trade Towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. Oskar goes on a personal quest to discover the details of his father’s last moments on Earth. He scours New York City, following a trail of obscure clues and joining with a team of randomly encountered strangers. Oskar is probably the most precocious child you’ve ever met in a novel (perhaps excepting Charles Wallace) and it’s often a bit difficult to swallow the fact that this kid is supposed to be only 9 years old. However, we enjoy his adventures and his emotional odyssey through New York and through this powerful, collective memory of the tragedy of 9/11. In the end, we are not exactly sure if Oskar has found what he has been looking for, but he is content. And so we are as well.

Much of what makes Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close interesting is the book layout itself. Foer is not shy with graphic gimmicks–the book contains a number of full-page photographs, typographical absurdities (in one section, the words begin to run into each other until they completely overlap, creating an almost entirely black page of unreadable text), even several sections with red-lined edits included. Essentially, the book is a publishing designer’s nightmare–or greatest challenge. At first, I wasn’t sure what I thought about this. It seemed on par with an amateur magician’s tricks to keep a waning audience interested. But the more I read, the more Foer convinced me that he knew what he was doing.

Even though I was quite affected by Anis Shivani’s scathing critique of Foer (“Rode the 9/11-novel gravy train with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, giving us a nine-year-old with the brain of a-twenty-eight-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer”), it’s been a long time since I read a book that made me cry. Somehow, it was good to find one that could accomplish that. Foer probably is guilty of “gimmick after gimmick,” as Shivani says he is. But, Shivani, I’m giving him #5 on my list because he made tears fall from my eyes and because it was pretty beautiful. Whether that makes him a circus-like panderer to the masses, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll let you decide.

Top 10 Books of 2010: #6

Wives and Daughters

#6: WIVES AND DAUGHTERS, Elizabeth Gaskell

For the next few weeks, I’ll be thinking back through the books I read in 2010 and ranking my favorites in a top 10 list. Today, I’d like to introduce #6, Elizabeth Gaskell’s beautiful novel Wives and Daughters.

Rachel and Emily Hylton are responsible for simultaneously introducing me to two great loves: BBC period miniseries and Elizabeth Gaskell. During a luxurious winter weekend in Asheville a few years ago, we watched the brilliant, 301-minute epic film of “Wives and Daughters.” It was perfect, light, and funny; just about everything one could hope from a rendition of a great novel. The only thing was that I hadn’t actually read Wives and Daughters at the time.

I had heard of Gaskell before, but frankly, by the time I watched “Wives and Daughters” with the Hylton sisters, I had long since read all of Austen, all of George Eliot, and all of the elder Brontës to convince myself that I had exhausted my appetite for 19th-century English women novelists. I had no plans to start reading Gaskell’s novels (even though I did subsequently devour the other BBC reproductions of her novels Cranford and North and South, which are really excellent, particularly during exam week).

My mind was changed after I’d been assigned to read Wives and Daughters in a class on the British novel at UNC. I had bought the thick paperback copy for the class, but our professor ended up dropping the book from the reading list, saying it was too long and we wouldn’t have enough time to finish it before finals. While announcing this, however, she noted that Wives and Daughters was, in her opinion, “one of the most beautiful and masterful novels in the British tradition.” I raised my eyebrows, somewhat surprised, and decided to save my copy and return to it some day.

“Some day” turned out to be two years later, once I had graduated university, married, and moved to a new town. I read Wives and Daughters this past summer and quickly became enthralled with the little universe Gaskell had created. The novel follows the life of young Molly Gibson, who is raised by her doctor father after her mother’s premature death. Molly is intelligent and sweet and possesses an unwavering devotion to her father. She develops a friendship with the Hamley family–particularly with Mrs. Hamley, the invalid matriarch–and the Hamley’s sons, Osborne and Roger. Life seems to be happening at a pleasant clip for Molly, until her father brings home a new wife.

Dr. Gibson abruptly marries an attractive but unbearably vain and garrulous widow, Hyacinth Clare. Molly feels hurt and betrayed and, naturally, strongly dislikes her stepmother. Hyacinth might have fallen neatly into the evil-stepmother archetype were it not for the complicating influence of her daughter, Cynthia.

Molly is an interesting heroine, but her stepsister, Cynthia Kirkpatrick, is perhaps an even more interesting one. The professor who wrote the introduction to my edition of the novel noted that Cynthia Kirkpatrick was perhaps “the most complex female character” he’d ever met in a 19th-century novel. A tall order, perhaps, but she seems to fit the description. Cynthia is very beautiful and very aware of the power that her beauty gives her. She arrives to the Gibson household fresh from a French boarding school and filled with pretentions and secrets. Molly and Cynthia take a bit of time to warm up to one another, but after a few chapters, they have come to care for one another as true sisters. Cynthia, however, does not operate in a way we would expect. We expect her to be silly and flirtatious–which she sometimes is–but she surprises us with her ability to transcend her stereotype of the glamorous, desirable single girl. While mired in a romantic trap that she has created for herself, Cynthia exhibits both great lapses of judgment and bouts of the deepest insight and self-awareness. Gaskell never fully lets us make up our minds about her–and that is, perhaps, the true genius behind the character of Cynthia Kirkpatrick.

Wives and Daughters was not the most beautiful and lyrical book I read all year, but it was certainly one of the most enjoyable. Gaskell writes with brilliant humor and keen eye for the intricacies of middle-class life. Once you enter her universe, you will be quick to laugh and loath to leave. She holds a firm grasp on her readers and manages to keep them–to keep us, rather–grounded solidly in the reality she has created for us. And that’s why it’s worth reading another 19th-century English woman novelist.

Top 10 Books of 2010: #7

Ulysses

#7: ULYSSES, James Joyce

For the next few weeks, I’ll be thinking back through the books I read in 2010 and ranking my favorites in a top 10 list. Today… (cue Jaws music) meet number 7: The Greatest Novel of All Time, Apparently, James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I know, I know. Of all the books I read this year Ulysses only got ranked number 7. Number 7!? This is mainly because I’m not nearly smart enough to understand it. And because I’m not Irish or Catholic and have perilously little memory of The Odyssey and all the Latin I learned in middle school. But I did read it. I think the better verb phrase there is “labor through it,” but it was remarkable, as everyone says it is.

I am not going to presume to give you an intelligent review of this behemoth of literature. Rather, I am going to give you a list: a brief collection of thoughts on the least “brief” novel probably ever written. So, here we go.

EDITION I READ: A beautiful hardback Modern Library edition, which I just happened to find for a mere $10 at The Bookstore on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Naturally, I haven’t read Ulysses in another edition, but I loved this one. The margins are wide and the references are complete and easy to find. Recommended.

ESSENTIAL COMPANION: Unless you happen to be a modernist scholar, or a true Catholic Dubliner fluent in Latin and Greek mythology, I’m going to presume to say that you might need a little help with the allusions. I certainly did. Which is why I absolutely relied on this marvelous book, Allusions in Ulysses (which, I’d like to note, was published by UNC Press, where I enjoyed a year as an intern). It is a perfect and clear line-by-line guide to the entire novel and it saved me lots of frustration along the way. I feel that Joyce, like his difficult modernist counterparts, is more deeply and fully enjoyed if you actually understand what he’s saying. Weldon Thornton’s Allusions in Ulysses will help you do just that.

FAVORITE CHAPTER: Part II, episode 4, Calypso. We first meet Leopold Bloom as he makes breakfast for his wife, Molly, while she languishes in bed. It’s a funny, domestic chapter, and yet very sexy, too.

READING ALOUD: I highly recommend reading difficult portions of the novel out loud. If you can find a place where this will not cause you undue awkwardness, by all means, read this book to yourself. I can guarantee that your comprehension will be aided tremendously. I know mine was. I recall reading it aloud to myself and Guion as we drove to Southern Pines for a party, and I can still remember what I read because it was that much easier to understand.

MOLLY’S SOLILOQUY. Insulted that I keep talking about strategies for comprehension? OK. Fine. Just take a gander at the famous, oft-quoted Molly’s Soliloquy from the novel, written in its entirety here. Got all that? Good.

WORKSHOPPING ULYSSES. I think I used this in a Snax post, but I’m going to use it again because it’s hilarious: A McSweeney’s writer imagines the comments that James Joyce would have received from his imagined MFA workshop. Especially hilarious once you’ve actually read it, but still, worth it.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT, AND WHY I’LL READ IT AGAIN: I think reading Ulysses extends beyond the “shoulds” that are tossed out by the literary elite and our diligent English professors. I think we read it because Joyce changed the landscape of the novel forever with this book. He started a conversation that is still happening today: What is a novel? Why do novels matter? And do they still matter? For those reasons, I’m looking forward to returning to Ulysses in a few years.

Top 10 Books of 2010: #8

The Man Who Loved Children

#8: THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN, Christina Stead

For the next few weeks, I’ll be thinking back through the books I read in 2010 and ranking my favorites in a top 10 list. Today, meet number 8: Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children.

OK, so I realize that the other two books I’ve ranked so far (Ada and One Hundred Years of Solitude) have also been about big, totally crazy families. What can I say? I have a niche.

I picked up The Man Who Loved Children because I’m reading through Francine Prose’s book list, Books to Be Read Immediately. The list appears in her fabulous book, Reading Like a Writer. I’ve been reading through this list for two years now and I think I’m maybe halfway through. I don’t always love the books Prose picks (see William Trevor’s The Children of Dynmouth and stuff by Philip Roth, for example), but this one really got to me.

The Man Who Loved Children is a large, complicated novel that eludes simple categorization. It was the first novel I’ve ever read by an Australian and one of the first I’ve read from 1940. I don’t think a great deal of quality literature was produced in the 1940s, for good reason, and so my knowledge of the period is quite slim. The Man Who Loved Children was also one of the first novels I’d read all year that was completely riveting and yet thoroughly baffling. Even now, looking back on the novel, I can’t say exactly what it is about Stead’s style that is so strange and yet so perfect. Something about the mood she creates in The Man Who Loved Children is eerily enchanting. Her characters are not fantastical, but they are mysterious, even when they appear to be revealing their deepest desires and ambitions.

The novel doesn’t tell the story of a pedophile—which you might unfortunately expect, given my great admiration for Nabokov. Rather, it’s the winding tale of a savagely dysfunctional family, the Pollits. Samuel Pollit is an idealistic, scheming bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. He lives in a squalid home in the Georgetown suburb with his wife and nemesis, Henny. They have six children. Sam and Henny hate each other with such fervor that they haven’t exchanged words in over two years, and instead use their children as messengers to deliver handwritten notes to the other parent. Sam and Henny are so deep in their own worries and domestic agendas that they are consistently unaware of the damage they inflict on their children. The undercurrent of emotional violence is deeply disturbing, made doubly so by the fact that this novel is often hilarious. Sam has crafted a family language through which he communicates with his children, using his own invented jargon to both awe and control them. The children are believably sweet and funny and yet seem precociously capable of seeing through their father’s ruses.

Louisa, or Louie, the eldest child in the Pollit household, is particularly able at calling her father’s bluff. She was Sam’s daughter from his first marriage and Henny despises her with the passion of the archetypal evil stepmother. Sam seems to favor Louie at first, but as Louie grows up and approaches adolescence, it becomes clear that she will not turn out pretty or graceful or sweetly domestic, as her father wishes. Heartbreakingly, Louie recognizes her father’s gradual dissipation of love. But it is Louie’s story that becomes the triumph of this comically ruthless novel.

Reflecting on the central conflict between Louie and her father, Jonathan Franzen writes in his wonderful review of the novel:

In a lesser work, this might all read like a grim, abstract feminist parable, but Stead has already devoted most of the book to making the Pollits specific and real and funny, and to establishing them as capable of saying and doing just about anything, and she has particularly established what a problem love is for Louie (how much, in spite of everything, she yearns for her father’s adoration), and so the abstraction becomes inescapably concrete, the warring archetypes are given sympathetic flesh: you can’t help being dragged along through Louisa’s bloody soul-struggle to become her own person, and you can’t help cheering for her triumph. As the narrator remarks, matter-of-factly, “That was family life.” And telling the story of this inner life is what novels, and only novels, are for.

Toward the end of his review, Franzen remarks on how Stead’s masterpiece is largely unknown in the Western canon. (I had never even heard of it until I saw the title in Prose’s list.) He relates a brief anecdote in which his wife found the book at the library and declared to him that it was the best book she had ever read. I don’t know if I would call it that, but it is definitely a book that will stick in my side for many years. Writing out of her own family sorrows—Stead apparently based Sam Pollit directly on her own father, and Louie on herself—the author has plumbed the darkest recesses of the nuclear family and yet emerged with a victory; a victory in the shape of a daughter’s escape and the tragicomedy that accompanies it.

Top 10 Books of 2010: #9

One Hundred Years of Solitude

#9: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Gabriel García Márquez

For the next few weeks, I’ll be thinking back through the books I read in 2010 and ranking my favorites in a top 10 list. Today, we reach number 9: Gabriel García Márquez’s expansive family chronicle, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I feel like I had this book on my “to read” list for one hundred years. It’s been staring me in the face forever and I never had the wherewithal to pick it up. Quite frankly, I’ve never enjoyed much of the South American fiction I’ve read, but this could be because I’ve read comparatively little of it. Fair or not, I never had much enthusiasm to read García Márquez. This could also be because I once watched The Worst Movie Ever Made, which was an adaptation of his novel Love in the Time of Cholera. So. Bad. Don’t watch it. You will regret your life if you do.

All that to say: I finally picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude from the library in July and I was glad I did. I’m a sucker for family epics (much like Ada, actually, or Anna Karenina) and this is one helluva family epic. The novel tells the long, fabled story of the Buendia family through seven—yes, seven—generations. It’s difficult to keep track of what generation you’re in, because everyone in the story shares the same pool of names, sometimes slightly rearranged in order. For example, we have the patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia, who names his sons Jose Arcadio and Aureliano. Aureliano goes on to name one kid Jose Aureliano and then has seventeen more named… Aureliano. It gets very confusing; just take a look at this family tree that some crazy person made. But maybe that’s what García Márquez intended. This family is supposed to swallow you whole.

I have a distinct memory of reading and really falling into the novel while waiting through a wedding rehearsal. Guion was playing in the ceremony and I had the forethought to bring the book while he was practicing for an hour. I remember trying to stop myself from laughing or gasping too audibly, lest I disturb the militant wedding director. It’s funny and crazy and often totally unbelievable. I liked the impossibilities of the story. García Márquez demands the constant suspension of belief. You must believe than an entire village did not sleep for a decade and that the ghost of the matriarch’s husband really is living in the yard, tied to a tree. These are not fairy tales; all of this really happened and these people are not crazy. I think of it like what Toni Morrison did with Beloved: At no point in the narrative are you led to believe that anyone has lost his or her mind. All of these seemingly supernatural things have indeed happened. You just have to have the faith to believe it.

García Márquez goes back to what feels like the beginning of time to tell the Buendia family’s story. The people who orbit in the world he’s created seem so primal that, at first, they appear barely relatable. But that’s the magic of García Márquez’s skill: Suddenly, you realize that this manic, superstitious, unethical, ambitious family is not all that different from your own. (I mean, hopefully, they’re a little different. I hope your family doesn’t routinely kill each other off or become hermit alchemists or speak to other dead relatives at the dinner table.) But you catch my drift. Maybe you do. What I’m trying to say is that García Márquez can really write about the human condition with characters that barely seem human at all. They’re magicians or temptresses or liars or warriors, but they all carry the same hopes, ambitions, and wishes that we do, we who are so far removed from the earth.

Top 10 Books of 2010: #10

For the next few weeks, I’ll be thinking back through the books I read in 2010 and ranking my favorites in a top 10 list. Today, I start with number 10: Vladimir Nabokov’s epic, Ada, or Ardor.

Ada, or Ardor

#10: ADA, OR ARDOR: A FAMILY CHRONICLE, Vladimir Nabokov

One of the best things my mother did when I was young was set me free in the library. Unlike most of the homeschooling parents in our community, my parents never censored my reading; they never told me, “You have to read these types of novels; you can’t read these types.” When confronted by other parents about this liberated policy, my mother’s response was always, “She reads way faster than I do. It would be impossible for me to read everything she’s reading and screen it first. If I had to do that, she would never get to read anything at all.” And so I read everything. By early middle school, I had positively devoured the entire young adult section of the local library, to the point that the librarians were on a first-name basis with me and I was responsible for writing 75 percent of the YA book reviews on the library website. This literary freedom allowed me to discover good and bad authors and a large range of genres. My independence also introduced me to messages and themes—e.g., sex, crime, obscene language— that I’m sure my parents would have objected to if they had known what I was reading. But they didn’t. So I kept reading, good and bad.

I relate this episode to try to explain why this novel by Vladimir Nabokov is on my top 10 list for 2010. Because, frankly, if I told a stranger on the street the plot of this novel—a fantasy-tinged family epic about a brother and sister from a fake planet who are involved with each other in a passionate love affair—I’d get more than just a few raised eyebrows. I’d probably get a strong, “You LIKED it? What is WRONG with you?”

Probably a few things, but yes, I did like it. Here’s why. This book thwarts expectations of the novel and does so in a sprawling, complicated, thoroughly messy way—and yet it’s beautifully done. Ever since reading Lolita (which, coincidentally, made my Top 10 list for 2009), I have been fixed on reading as much Nabokov as possible. I am mesmerized by Nabokov as a person—for his genius, for his disturbing and repetitive themes, for his ability to make all of his twisted characters somehow transparent and compassionate.

I ended up taking Ada, or Ardor on our honeymoon. It was certainly not a thematically appropriate book for the occasion: this 900-page monolith of a novel is about, more or less, a brother and sister who fall in love with each other and continue their all-consuming, destructive love affair even after the discovery that they are blood siblings. It is Nabokov, after all. From what little I know about his body of work, I know that you are going to find incest and pedophilia featured. Ada, or Ardor features the life story of Van Veen, a young man who grows up in the imaginary Russo-American world of Antiterra, and his romance with his sister, Ada. The novel takes the form of Van’s memoirs, which he is supposedly writing when he is about 90. His love for Ada has not dimmed, even though their lives have now grown apart. But the plot is not what matters about this book. And the characters’ actions are not the primary vehicles for the movement of the novel. It’s why you can read this book without endorsing pedophilic/incestual relationships—in the same vein of why you can read Harry Potter without becoming Wiccan or why you can read The Bell Jar without descending into madness yourself. Ada is about a love affair between siblings, but it is less about them and more about the pattern of their lives, the way daily events intersect to form a fabric of memory. As a whole, therefore, this book carries a distinct whiff of Proust; something perhaps Nabokov was aware of; I really don’t know.

Joining the theme of complicated memory and the retelling of the past, accurate or not, Nabokov’s diction is compelling. His language is so complex that it’s almost unbelievable. His sentences are rigged with Anglo-Russian neologisms, various puns, and allusions so dense that almost every line requires annotation (as demonstrated by this now-abandoned website). The language itself is part of the journey of Ada and one of the main reasons why I enjoyed myself throughout it. If you approach it with an open mind—as Nabokov flatly demands of all of his readers, of this book or any other—I think you would have a similar experience.