G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen ** 1/2

Alif the Unseen starts out as a very different book from the one it ends up being. The first few chapters are in the realist mode, telling us about the Arab-Indian hacker Alif and how he provides security services for clients who want to evade surveillance. The story includes compelling details about life in a Persian Gulf state (cell phone shops with their names in Tamil; marriage certificates printed from the Internet as cover for having sex; why low-class girls who wear a veil are considered "uppity") and reasonable programming details.

However, the book takes a significant turn once Alif comes under suspicion from the State. Before you know it, he's on the run with wise-cracking jinns and building elaborate metaphorical computer programs that make no sense. The realism turns on a dime into cartoonish action, with the kind of "clever" dialog and plotting that I'd expect in a young adult novel or Dean Koontz book.

The author has an ambitious plan in Alif the Unseen. First of all, she is a Westerner trying to write an Eastern book -- something one of the characters suggests has never been done. She also wants to explore how the new online world relates to social change, and how cyberspace is similar to the unseen world of the jinn. In my opinion, though, she fails to meld these ideas into a coherent style. The book-cover comparisons to Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, and Neal Stephenson are overly generous.

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby ** 1/2

The Faraway Nearby is an impressionistic memoir/essay collection about a few difficult years in the author's life. Her mother was fading in an Alzheimer care facility, she was diagnosed with possible breast cancer, and she traveled to Iceland. (The last one is part of her recovery rather than one of her difficulties.) Because of Solnit's discursive style, she covers a lot of ground (apricots, Frankenstein, Che Guevara, lepers, Eskimos), but her primary theme is how we understand our lives through stories.

I typically enjoy writers who can't resist digressions, but most of Solnit's musings are too vague for my taste. Unlike, say, Nicholson Baker, she doesn't ground her abstractions with details, and they drift away.

The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

The best chapters are the ones dealing with her trip to Iceland, because the specific details outweigh the academic New Age fiddle faddle. (The first chapter made me want to go to Iceland immediately!) The weakest chapters are those about her mother, because she implies stereotypical conflicts between mother and daughter but never makes them clear. 

Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs ****

The Woman Upstairs caused a bit of a stir recently among the literary critical community, when author Claire Messud objected to a question about whether her main character was likeable. Is there a double standard when judging books from male and female authors? Or for male and female characters?

Nora, the narrator of The Woman Upstairs, is nowhere near as unlikeable as I expected her to be. She is more open than most people about her (unattractive) neediness and self-involvement, but I think most people feel the same kinds of feelings. I know I do.

Nora is a third-grade schoolteacher who harbors dreams of being an artist. She meets Sirena, the mother of one of her students who is an up-and-coming artist, and her relationship with Sirena awakens her hopes for a more fulfilling life. It's obvious from the beginning that Nora invests more in the relationship than Sirena does. A profound disappointment is inevitable.

These kinds of asymmetrical relationships happen all of the time. Nora's story shows their benefits as well as their drawbacks. Nora does return to her art and has a season where life feels full of promise. The book documents a character struggling against feelings of regret and trying to live more fully; this theme always speaks to me, which probably reveals something unattractive about me.

Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass *** 1/2

Through the Language Glass addresses a question that has interested me since high school: does the language that you speak affect the way you think? The cover promises that the answer is "Yes, it does," making is a different and more satisfying answer than the one I got back in high school from Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. I looked forward to hearing what Deutscher had to say on the subject, and also a bit leery about my reaction since I have fairly strong educated opinions in this area.

I was mostly familiar with the linguistic research that Deutscher reports on. The book focuses primarily on color terms and spatial orientation, with a short speculative foray into gender systems. Deutscher does a lovely job of describing how these topics came to be at the forefront of the study of cognitive variation, especially in the case of color terms.

In the introduction, Deutscher promises to avoid the rhetorical excesses of Whorfians and stick to the data. In one sense, I think he kept his promise too strictly: I wanted more discussion about how the theoretical results relate to the fundamental question. On the other hand, the conclusions he does come to sound somewhat overblown and unjustified to me.

Andres Neuman, Traveler of the Century ***

Traveler of the Century has a lot of elements that should make me love it: a well rendered historical setting (Germany in the mid-nineteenth century), a Tolstoy-esque perspective that shifts between the personal and the sociological, philosophical and cultural conversations, some beautiful writing, and a believable love story. For some reason, though, the book never engaged me. I admire it, but the spark between us is missing.