Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier ** 1/2

Halldór Laxness is Iceland's only Nobel laureate. He won the prize in 1955.

Under the Glacier is a modernist novel with a satirical tone and Beckett-esque dialog. A young unnamed narrator travels to a town at the base of Snæfellsjökull on behalf of the bishop to investigate rumors of odd behavior from the local pastor. He meets a collection of odd and unlikely characters, with whom he speaks at cross purposes about their religious practices. The town practices a faith that is an amalgam of Christianity, paganism, and pretty much every world religion, and they may be preparing for a resurrection.

Many years ago I read and really enjoyed Laxness' early masterpiece Independent People (from 1934). I've tackled other Laxness books since then, but none have come close to Independent People, or even been similar in style or tone. To be fair, the other books are from much later in his career (The Fish Can Sing from 1957, Under the Glacier from 1968), and they seem to have more insider Icelandic references. Maybe I should try Salka Valka from 1932?

John McPhee, The Control of Nature *****

The Control of Nature comprises three accounts of man against nature: constraining the route of the Mississippi River, saving an Icelandic harbor from volcanic lava flows, and catching debris flows from the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Los Angeles. Engineers and scientists deploy a variety of creative and ambitious strategies against the powerful forces of water, lava, and rock.

All three sections feature clear explanations of the natural forces, the attempted solutions, and the escalating complications. They offer dramatic human-sized stories of individuals caught in the crossfire, such as the Genofile family nearly crushed in their home by a huge flow of debris. Fascinating details abound; for example:

As lava moves, under the air, it develops a skin of glass that is broken and rebroken by the motion of the liquid below, so that it clinks and tinkles, and crackles like a campfire...

All of it it told with John McPhee's idiosyncratic sense of organization, jumping between past and present unpredictably and occasionally confusingly.

Awesome all around. I learned a lot and enjoyed the drama.

Renata Adler, Speedboat ***

Speedboat is stylish, elusive, aphoristic, and funny. All it lacks is a narrative. I thoroughly enjoyed the individual incidents and stories, but I lamented the lack of an overarching structure. On the plus side, it'll be a great book to dip into for enjoyable anecdotes. 

Thomas Hurka, The Best Things in Life ***

The Best Things in Life is a short philosophical treatise on making the right choices for the best possible life. I was a bit surprised to find that Hurka means "best" in the ethical sense, for a life with the highest level of virtue rather than the most fulfilling.

The consideration of the possible candidates for highest good – pleasure, knowledge, achievement, moral virtue, love – is clear and practical but fairly familiar to anyone who has thought about the issues before. Hurka's two most interesting arguments are about how pleasure and pain are not equal in value (an "equivalent" amount of pain is worse) and how knowledge and achievement are complementary aspects of a proper connection between ourselves and the world (knowledge is our mind conforming to the world; achievement is the world responding to our will).

Rene Denfield, The Enchanted ** 1/2

The Enchanted is well written, but I feel like there's a fatal mismatch between its form and content. The story takes place in a dilapidated old prison and follows a death row investigator hired to help inmates escape execution. The narrator is an inmate with selective mutism who views the story though the prism of his madness and the books he reads. His perspective imbues everything with wonder and enchantment, making the story sound like a fable. The main characters don't get names; they are just the lady, the fallen priest, the warden.

The author has worked as a death row investigator, and it shows. The best aspect of the book is the details about life in prison. But her goal is to celebrate "the human capacity to transcend even the most nightmarish reality," so the realistic details get overlaid with luminous mumbo-jumbo.

The yard smells when it rains in the summer... and I think about each clod of mud and how it contains the history of the world: shards of mica and stone, glossy ribbons of clay too faint to see, the arm and leg of Eve, the pulsating pull of Adam... With every exhalation, I find a way out of this enchanted place.

I also question Denfield's choice of narrator. She probably had in mind Chief from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but our unnamed narrator has no way to know (or understand) most of what he describes.

P.S. I bought The Enchanted along with Boy, Snow, Bird and The People in the Trees from the "3-for-2" table at Powell's Books. Coincidentally, all three have female authors and sprinkle elements of fantasy over basically realistic premises. The Enchanted was the weakest of the three, so I'll consider it to be the one I got for free.

Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees ****

The People in the Trees is the faux memoir of a Nobel Prize-winning doctor who discovers a possible secret to immortality among the people on a remote Micronesian island, only to fall into disgrace when he is accused on sexually assaulting some of the dozens of children he adopted from the island.

Our unreliable narrator Dr Norton Perina is a wonderfully prickly literary creation: arrogant and disparaging of others, always with solid reasoning. Once he arrives on Ivu'ivu, his physical descriptions are outstanding but offbeat:

...feeling the floor [of the jungle] beneath me gently buckling and heaving with unseen layers of worms and beetles as I placed my feet upon them; it could feel like treading on the wet innards of a large dozing beast.

The story of the Ivu'ivuans and of Perina's discovery are interesting and well-told, and the ultimate consequences for the island nation are unfortunately realistic. I was surprised that the book was more about cross-cultural contact than it was about the lure of immortality.

For all of its strengths, I have two reservations about The People in the Trees, two lost opportunities, I think. First, Perina's colleague Rob Kubodera, who wrote the preface and edited the memoir, sounds too similar to Perina: he doesn't have a distinctive voice. Second, the chapters relating to Perina's children are comparatively sketchy and don't really add to our understanding of the characters or the themes of the book. They could have been much stronger.

Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird ***

The back cover of Boy, Snow, Bird says that it "recasts the 'Snow White' fairy tale," but that's not quite true. The story does have a central character named Snow Whitman whose stepmother sends her away, but it also has allusions to other fairy tales like the Three Blind Mice and Cinderella. The fairy tale elements provide color rather than an organizing principle.

Once every few chapters, all of the pieces come together beautifully: the prose, the themes, and the plot. The first chapter is wonderful, as is the chapter introducing the first major plot twist. Between them, however, I felt like the story drifted aimlessly. And the last plot twist was a twist too far, in my opinion.

Stripped of its fairy tale trappings, Boy, Snow, Bird is a story about the ethics of "passing" -- light-skinned blacks passing as white. The saddest incident came when Boy, the obviously colored daughter who reveals the family's race, dresses as Alice in Wonderland for Halloween but everyone sees her as a housekeeper or washerwoman. This episode clearly relates to the fraught relationship the characters have with mirrors.

I was also intrigued by the characterization of the "evil" stepmother as being evil "not powers of darkness or something you can protect yourself from with crosses and holy water... [but she would] find someone who was unhappy, and once she'd found them she'd use her gift to make it worse." She avoided happy people.

I should also mention that the cover of the paperback edition is beautifully designed.