Knife, by Salman Rushdie. What a deep, deft book this is. Although we know from news reports that Rushdie survived a knife attack, we learn in the book how he handled his complex emotional, philosophical, physical, and professional response to it. Watching him rise from near death to the writing of this book is inspiring and always interesting.
Bishop William Barber is the only person I know who holds my attention when he tells Bible stories. He makes them entertaining as well as enlightening. Rushdie sits in another niche for me; he draws on a deep well of classical Western and Eastern erudition as effortlessly as a Baryshnikov pirouette. He begins the book quoting Samuel Beckett and ends with a quote from W. E. Henley’s poem Invictus: “Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.” His use of others’ brains to make his own points bathes his most potent and controversial conclusions in humility.
Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov. This book was copyrighted in 1957, but I read it this year. It was the first Nabokov book I’d ever read—a hole in my education. I found it funny right down to my knuckles, my solar plexus, my ear lobes, and the sparkles of his story’s implied commentary have taken up permanent residence in my brain. (Note: I recommended it for one of my book clubs and some of those readers didn’t find it amusing at all and didn’t find nourishment in the underlying point, as I did.) They might have missed the subtle hilarity of the following sentence, for example, Pnin’s words to the woman he longs for: “A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do.”
Recently, I’ve become more sensitive to plot. So many plots start out at a gallop and end in a slow walk in the other direction. This plot goes full speed right to the end.
It’s is a 190-page fast read. Try it.
After delighting in the artistry of Pnin, I read the Nabokov book that I probably should have been required to read before they granted me an M.A. in English, Lolita.
Playing God In the Meadow, by Martha Molnar. Molnar can’t help herself; she is a poet. She is supposedly chronicling how she and her husband took a moldering apple orchard and turned it into a thriving, gorgeous meadow, but there is an underlying plotline. She was born and raised in early childhood in a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family in Romania; the family fled to Israel, then moved to the South Bronx where, while learning English, she was the only White student in her class. As an adult she has had a profession or two, several children, and a 50+ year marriage.
After gliding through her tale, the reader is left with the impression that beauty is always possible; success is always possible, at a cost; and life on earth is ours to conserve or lose.
2024 has brought me two authors whose further work I will now seek out; Salman Rushdie’s, and Fredrik Backman’s. You know why I want to read more of Rushdie; Backman made me laugh in the lining of my stomach and I want more of that feeling. Looking back on my little reviews here, I see that my body parts appreciate humor these days.
I’m so tempted to list the books I liked least in 2024, too, but I hope that even the books I didn’t like sell well. Others may like them, no matter the ennui they inflicted on me as I patiently waded through them.