Takashi Hiraide, The Guest Cat *** 1/2

I picked up this short, meditative story based on a short review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The Guest Cat comprises anecdotes about a cat that visits a Japanese couple in their quiet rental cottage, and about the couple's efforts to find a place they can live more permanently. Not too different, really, from the kinds of stories any cat lover would tell, but written in lovely poetical prose (from an actual poet) that conveys a very Japanese sense of the beautiful tentative transience of life, and of the permanent effects of that transient beauty. The vivid descriptions of houses and gardens and cats induce a contemplative state and suggest deep meaning behind the mundane events.

Thomas Bernhard, The Loser **

I've been meaning to read Thomas Bernhard for quite a while. His reputation as a difficult, formal, and unpleasant writer made me expect deliciously corrosive misanthropy along the lines of Schopenhauer or his fellow Austrian (film director) Michael Haneke. The cover of The Loser refers to its "obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator" –– catnip to my ears!

Alas, I didn't find the narrative voice witty, compulsive or "outrageously cantankerous." And since the narrative voice is pretty much all there is to the book, I never engaged with it. Everything I'd heard about Bernhard made me expect to love his work, or to be challenged by it; instead I was bored by it.

Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night ** 1/2

Norwegian by Night is a misleading novel. From the cover and the prize it won, it appears to be a Scandinavian crime novel of the sort written by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, or Jo Nesbø. In fact, it's a character study of an aging American Jew and an exploration of how our cultural pasts influence our behavior. The simple crime plot is merely a slight frame to hang the story on.

Sheldon Horowitz is an 82-year-old American Jew struggling with guilt over the death of his son Saul in Vietnam. (He believes Saul went to war at Sheldon's prompting.) He lives in Oslo with his granddaughter and her Norwegian husband. He witnesses a domestic dispute that ends in murder, and goes on the lam with the murdered woman's son. The killing turns out to have been a legacy of the Serbia - Kosovo war.

I found Sheldon to be a stereotypical Jewish character. Sheldon's family believes him to be suffering from dementia. This plot device annoyed me, because Sheldon's showed no symptoms of it. His fantasies were clearly his means of coping with his son's death. I was also annoyed when the author introduces a standard thriller character -- the mysterious fixer who lives undetected as a model citizen until his violent skills are called for -- in Chapter 20 of 23. 

Patrick O'Brian, Treason's Harbour *** 1/2

We recently watched the classic HBO series Deadwood. When I started this ninth book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, it occurred to me that the two series offer similar pleasures. They are both immersive historical dramas featuring a large cast of fictional and real-life characters, and their characters speak in entertainingly theatrical ways. Indeed, distinctive language is the chief delight in both cases.

The other chief delight of O'Brian's books is sailing adventure; the individual episodes wax and wane based on how much time Aubrey spends at sea. (A well-established trait of Jack Aubrey is his supreme competence at sea and his bumbling ineptitude ashore.) Treason's Harbour spends a bit too much time in Malta, but the sea voyages to Suez and the Adriatic are more exotic than some of Aubrey's previous assignments. Sandstorms, a diving bell, and Turks! The treacherous French reappear for a quick engagement in the closing pages.

As far as I can recall, Treason's Harbour is the first time that O'Brian gives us readers important information that neither of our heroes has (the identity of a traitor in the Royal Navy). It enhances the suspense of the spy business even if it does feel like cheating.

Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today *** 1/2

Two factors motivated me to read this short book, based on a series of lectures. First, it's a contemporary response to William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is a favorite book of mine (and also based on a lecture series). Second, it's written by Charles Taylor, a philosopher whose magnum opus A Secular Age has tempted me many times. Varieties of Religion Today provides an accessible introduction to his ideas and writing style.

I enjoyed the first two sections, which analyze James' approach and situate it within Taylor's more expansive view of "religious experience." Taylor points out that James focuses entirely on the psychological aspects of religious experience at the expense of the social aspects of religious experience, and furthermore on its emotional components rather than its intellectual components. Taylor identifies the benefits that James gains from this approach -- drawing attention to the moment when a person decides what to believe -- but he (Taylor) is more interested in looking at the social aspects of religious experience.

In the third section of the book, Taylor looks at the evolution of modern belief as it relates to the link between religion and the community as a whole. In medieval times, the church was the community, and the legitimacy of the government flowed from the same source. In modern times, people choose the denomination to which they belong, but most still think of their larger community (such as their country) as having a special relationship to God's purposes. I found Taylor's ideas suggestive, but this section felt sketchier than the earlier ones. Maybe I need to plunge into the massive A Secular Age to learn the details.

Tanis Rideout, Above All Things ***

Mountaineering adventure for ladies. This fictional account of George Mallory's 1924 attempt on Mount Everest injects a love story into the adventure by alternating chapters between Mallory on Everest and his wife Ruth back home in Cambridge. Rideout privileges the characters' feelings over their climbing: in their tents and on the mountain, the climbers' thoughts inevitably drift homeward. Only Ruth's chapters are written in the first person, revealing where the author's sentiments lay.

Most of the mountaineering action takes place during evenings in camp, with the Mallory and Sandy Irvine dealing with the various discomforts of high-altitude climbing (freezing cold, difficulty breathing, nausea, hallucinations). Above All Things vividly captures the physical and mental toll of living in the "death zone." It is less successful with the mountaineering details, which Rideout is clearly less interested in.

Ultimately Above All Things is a tragic love story, with a foregone conclusion for those who know the fate of George Mallory.

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.