The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise
by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos (Vintage)

Having resolved to exercise your brain and refresh your literary palate you decide to read this newly translated 1968 text by the deceased experimental french writer georges perec who is celebrated for once having written a long novel without using the letter “e” so having forked over your ten quid for this short story or at a stretch novella but a book is not any the better for being cheaper by the word you remind yourself in any case having forked over ten pounds you begin to read and either you find the looping style immediately so rebarbative that you cast the book to the floor and feyly lament your wasted cash or you find the style intriguing and continue reading let us for the sake of dramatic interest assume the latter in which case you soon realise that the story is a prose imitation of a flowchart or decision tree festooned as it is with if-then statements as well as that it lacks punctuation and paragraphing and capital letters too all of which eerily evokes an artificial mind running conditional algorithms to compute a narrative in which you the adventurer having decided to ask your boss for a raise are guided with a kind of monstrous sympathy along the forking paths of bureaucratic possibility Continued →

Carte Blanche
by Jeffery Deaver (Hodder)

What kind of sunglasses would James Bond wear today? Such is one of the important branding questions addressed by this literary reboot, which is “Copyright Ian Fleming Publications Limited”, though composed by a writer of serial-killer thrillers. Bond in 2011 still drives a Bentley, wears a Rolex, and waves a Walther, but his shades are hip and technical: he sports Oakleys.

This new Bond is “a man of serious face”, which probably does not mean that he has a really massive face and needs oversized Oakleys. Bond is in his thirties, a former Navy officer who saw frontline action in Afghanistan and was then recruited — not to MI6, but to a black-ops outfit called the “Overseas Development Group”. Bond is still run by M and furnished with gadgets by “Q Branch”. (Bond’s mobile phone, in an excitingly modern way, has lots of espionage “apps”.) Continued →

The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?
by Padgett Powell (Profile)

Is my review of a novel composed entirely of questions itself going to be composed entirely of questions? What do you think?

What is this novel composed entirely of questions about? Is it “about” anything? How are we to imagine the scenario? Do certain lines and section-breaks in the novel, one coming after the question “Do you have anything you’d like to say?”, imply unheard answers by another character? If we assume the questioner is speaking his questions out loud, what are we to make of the moment when he says he was writing one? Is this interrogation taking place in a military base, or a padded cell, or in Purgatory? Who are the other people present who never speak either but are implied exactly once? Or is this all in the questioner’s head? And if so, how did we get inside his head? How can we get out? Continued →

The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember
by Nicholas Carr (Atlantic)
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives
by John Palfrey & Urs Gasser (Basic Books)

Do you find it hard to concentrate these days? Do you get fidgety after two pages of a book, and look around for something else to do? Is the online abbreviation “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read) your response to basically everything? If so, Nicholas Carr feels your pain, and has diagnosed the cause: using the internet has rewired your brain and turned you into a flibbertigibbet. Continued →

Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
edited by Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, & Irené Wotherspoon (Oxford)

How would a person in the early 1600s call someone an idiot? “Half-wit” is tempting, but it turns out to date from a century-and-a-half later. “Chucklehead” is no good either (1731), but “blockhead” (1549) is fine, as might be the beautiful “obstupefact” (1601). “Dunderwhelp” (1621) is pushing it, but you’ll be fine with “dullard” (1440), “blockhead” (1549), “idiot” itself (1375), or, of course, the classic “fool” (1275). If you are interested in nicer distinctions, decide whether you mean a “person of weak intellect” (“wattle-head”, 1613), a “crazy person” (“nidiot”, 1534-1613, or “moonling”, 1616), or a “confused, muddled person” (“mafflard”, 1450). Should you desire to reach further back into the past, before the advent even of “fool”, choose from Old English “sotman” or “unandgitfull”, among other treasures from the deep word-hoard. Continued →

Shoplifting from American Apparel
by Tao Lin (Melville House)

Writing that looks artless is a difficult trick to pull off. This trancelike and often hilarious novella by a cultish young New York writer is all about that trick, and the unusual pleasures it smuggles in just below its seemingly flat surface. The tone of apparently apathetic hipsterism is set early on:

“You know those people that get up every day, and do things,” said Luis.
“I’m going to eat cereal even though I’m not hungry,” said Sam.
“And are real proactive,” said Luis. “And like are getting things done, and never quit their jobs. Those people suck.”

The conversation is reported with the usual novelistic markers of dialogue (speech marks, “said Luis”, “said Sam”), and yet Luis and Sam are not in the same room; they are not even talking, but conversing on “Gmail chat”. A common literary approach is to transcribe such exchanges in a sans-serif font; in writing them instead as traditional conversations, Lin is arguing that, for his characters, this constitutes talking to someone just as much as standing in front of them and speaking aloud. Continued →

The Idea of Justice
by Amartya Sen (Allen Lane)

Humans are often misled by abstract nouns of their own making, and sometimes the bamboozlement can last centuries or more. Because one can say the word “justice”, one might conclude that a singular thing or essence called “justice” actually exists. And so one could spend a life trying to figure out what this abstract animal called “justice” really is, and fail to pay much attention to problems of justice in the world.

The eminent professor and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has chosen for his deeply interesting synthesis of political philosophy, economics, and “social choice theory” a title that might at first appear rather bland, but it is holding two opposing ideas in a kind of dynamic stasis. Half the implication is indeed that it is possible to spend too much time on justice-as-a-mere-idea. But the other half is an insistence that justice-the-idea could be reengineered to work better as a basis for “practical reasoning”, such that it might improve the world. Continued →

The Good Angel of Death
by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Andrew Bromfield (Harvill Secker)

Kolya Sotnikov is a Russian night-watchman at a Kiev storehouse that contains cans of hallucinogenic drugs labelled as baby-food. The previous owners of his new flat left behind a curious volume hidden in a copy of War and Peace, containing marginalia that fire his imagination. He sets off on a picaresque journey in search of something buried in the sands of Kazakhstan by a much-loved Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko. Crossing the Caspian sea in a floating fish-processing plant, Kolya wanders unprepared into the desert, where he surprisingly acquires a Kazakh wife, and gets caught up with a couple of Ukrainian nationalists and a colonel from the secret police. Continued →

Occupied City
by David Peace (Faber)

In Tokyo on 26 January, 1948, a man walked into a branch of the Teigin Bank, claiming to be a public health official sent to vaccinate the staff against dysentery. What he made them drink was poison. Twelve died. Later, a watercolour artist called Hirasawa Sadamichi was arrested for the crime and confessed, even though witnesses did not identify him as the murderer. Hirasawa later recanted his confession but was sentenced to death anyway, despite the absence of any other evidence as to his guilt. No Japanese justice minister ever authorized his execution, so he died in prison in 1987, having lived on death row for 32 years. The crime has never been definitively solved, and a campaign to clear Hirasawa’s name continues.

Such is the plot basis of Occupied City, and it is all historical fact. The question for the writer of true-crime novelizations, then, is how to arrange the facts aesthetically, and to justify processing them into fiction. Continued →

Emergency: One Man’s Story of a Dangerous World and How to Stay Alive in It
by Neil Strauss (Canongate)

Stunt books — in which the author goes off and does something unusual in order to write about it — can be an excellent source of vicarious pleasure. And Neil Strauss — whose previous stunt book, The Game, saw him initiated into the world of “pick-up artists”, who teach geeks algorithms for attracting women — has picked an ideal follow-up stunt for our uncertain times: becoming a survivalist.

“I’ve begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes,” he declares portentously. What if society breaks down? Could a rock journalist survive in the subsequent atavistic free-for-all? (Strauss’s coinage for this scenario is “a Fliesian world”, as in Lord of the Flies. No, I don’t think it will catch on either.) Continued →

Nobody Move
by Denis Johnson (Picador)

After the 2007 publication of Tree of Smoke, his stupendous 600-page Vietnam-war epic, Denis Johnson might well have wanted to kick back and let off a little steam. He does so in grand style here. Nobody Move is a terse little hardboiled entertainment that originally ran last year as a four-part serial in Playboy magazine. Relatively speaking, the author may be slumming it, but he can’t help slathering the story’s pages in his usual idiosyncratic brilliance. It’s a story of small-time gamblers, crooks and gangsters in the contemporary American west, which opens on a scene of insouciant incongruity. Our hero, Jimmy Luntz, is singing on stage in a barbershop chorus competition. Two pages later he is in a car with a melancholic villain, Gambol, sent by the guy to whom Jimmy owes money. Four pages after that, Jimmy has shot him. Unfortunately, Gambol survives. He and his boss will come after Jimmy hard. Continued →

The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (Harvill Secker)

Number theory — what Gauss called “the queen of mathematics”, devoted to the study of numbers and their arcane interrelationships — does not perhaps sound like the most fruitful basis for a poignant domestic drama. And yet this novel, with its skilful admixture of tender atmospherics and stealthy education, has sold more than four million copies in its native Japan. Its unnamed characters suggest archetype or myth; its rapturous concentration on the details of weather and cooking provide a satisfyingly textured foundation. Continued →