Patrick O'Brian, The Truelove ** 1/2

A placeholder episode in the Aubrey-Maturin saga. The entire book concerns an uneventful cruise in which the Surprise suffers from internecine tension due to the presence of a woman on board. (The original English title, Clarissa Oakes, is far more suitable.) The strain creates a hitch in the usual smooth cooperation of the crew, and a concomitant hitch in the usual smooth flow of O'Brian's prose. They - both the crew and the prose - still get the job done, but it's not as pleasant as it should be.

Stephen knew that he had said all this before, off the many, many islands and remote uninhabited shores they had passed, irretrievably passed; he knew that he might be being a bore; yet the tolerant smile on Martin's face, though very slight indeed, vexed him extremely.  

Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs *** 1/2

Despite its explosive title and the dramatic adjectives on its cover ("unpredictable," "breathtaking," "devastating"), The Association of Small Bombs impressed me most with its portrayal of everyday middle-class Indian life. Mahajan doesn't go out of his way to describe the characters and locations where his story plays out, but they felt very real.

The plot kicks off with a terrorist bombing in a small Delhi market. Two young brothers are among the dead, and their Muslim friend survives with injuries. The story follows the boy's parents, their surviving friend Mansoor, and the terrorists who planted the bomb. The bomb changes them all.

On this particular day, [the boys] had gone with a friend in an auto-rickshaw to pick up the Khurana's old Onida color TV, consigned to the electrician for perhaps the tenth time. But when Mr. Khurana was asked by friends what the children were doing there...he said, "They'd gone to pick up my watch from the watch man." ... Why lie, why now? Well, because to admit to their high-flying friends that their children had not only died among the poor, but had been sent out on an errand that smacked of poverty... would have, in those tragic weeks following the bombing, undone the tightly laced nerves that held them together.

I found the mundane details more compelling than the major events, and was similarly impressed by the way that ordinary trains of thought led some characters to terrorism. (This aspect reminded me of Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist.)

 

Robert Harris, Pompeii *** 1/2

In advance of our summer trip to Italy, I read this fictional thriller that takes place around the Bay of Naples over four days in late August A.D. 79. The new aquarius deduces that there is a rupture in the mighty Aqua Augusta aqueduct, somewhere between Pompeii and Nola. He hurries out to repair it, but gets embroiled in power struggles between the city fathers of Pompeii. He solves the mystery of his predecessor's disappearance and fixes the water flow, but you know what happens next.

The disrupted water flow provides the plot with a clear narrative motor. The story is well designed to introduce details about the impressive Roman aqueduct system and the harbingers of the Vesuvius eruption naturally, without undue exposition. Plenty of historical color, too, such as a feast that features Roman delicacies like "mice rolled in honey and poppy seeds." When the climax comes, Harris does a great job of showing what the eruption looked, felt, and sounded like from various perspectives.

Knowing how the story ends made the middle section a bit less compelling: why wonder about the motivations of a character when you know that character is doomed?

Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned *** 1/2

The very nice cover of We, the Drowned advertises it as an "epic tale of the sea." Its 675-page heft marks it as epic, and it does include several seafaring adventures, but the book is really the (fictional) story of a (real-life) town: Marstal, Denmark. The men of Marstal are sailors, which influences all aspects of town life. In the first half of the twentieth century, they had to adjust to the coming of steamers and engine-powered ships -- and one widow attempts to move the townspeople away from the dangerous sea entirely.

Although We, the Drowned is a multigenerational saga written partly in the second-person plural, Jensen keeps the focus on individual stories. I enjoyed the adventure and was intrigued by the widow's quest to re-orient a traditional town toward safer pursuits. However, her quest just kind of fades away in the final section of the book, and the final scene (at the end of World War II) reminded me far too much of the Ewok dance party at the end of Return of the Jedi.

Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful ***

This slim book contains Dyer's impressionistic meditations about jazz. Each chapter is an imagined scene from the life of a jazz master like Duke Ellington, Lester Young, or Chet Baker, described in a manner intended to capture the feeling of the man's music. It's beautifully written and contains passages of insightful music criticism. The cumulative effect is a bit too monochromatic though: every one of the musicians is closed off and dealing with an addiction or mental issue.

My favorite chapters were the first two, about Lester Young and Thelonious Monk. The Young chapter best describes the artist's life in musical terms, and the Monk chapter has the best description of his music.

Sometimes the song seemed to have turned inside out or to have been constructed entirely from mistakes. ... But a logic was operating, a logic unique to Monk: if you always played the least expected note a form would emerge, a negative imprint of what was initially anticipated.

Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries ***

This winner of the 2013 Mann Booker Prize takes place in New Zealand, 1866. A cross-section of society in the gold-rush town of Hokitika tries to explain several events that took place on 14 January: a hermit was found dead with a fortune hidden in his house; a popular local whore apparently tried to kill herself with an opium overdose; the richest man in town vanished without a trace. How do these events relate to the politician who arrived in town the same day? Or to the ominous sea captain who may or may not be related to the hermit?

The Luminaries is an amalgam of a hard-boiled detective novel (its twisty plot recalls something like Farewell, My Lovely) and a nineteenth-century "loose baggy monster" (for its locale and loquacious prose style), with a dash of modernism (characters and chapter titles based on signs of the zodiac). It is entertaining, although I'm not sure it justifies all of its 830 pages. I was disappointed that Catton resolves the final mysteries of the plot through flashbacks instead of the detective work of Hokitika's citizens.

Ruth Anna Putnam (editor), The Cambridge Companion to William James *** 1/2

William James is my favorite philosopher. There is almost no view he holds that I agree with. ... Why do I love him? ... Simply put, the attraction of James the philosopher is that he is the best example I know of a person doing philosophy; there is no hiding the person behind the work, no way of discussing the work without the person, no way to make believe that there is a way to do philosophy that is not personal. ... He wanted and worked at a picture of the whole thing. - Owen Flanagan

Most of the time, The Cambridge Companion to a philosopher offers articles that clarify the work of a great philosopher whose own prose is daunting (Kant, Hegel, Nietzche). William James is different because James' own writing is so inviting and seemingly clear. This companion shows how James' modern professional peers view his less rigorous approach.

The one word that best summarizes James' philosophy is pluralistic. He wants to account for the richness of human experience and emphasizes the many different ways we make sense of the world. In all of his philosophy, he focuses on the effects of ideas rather than on their origins.

If reality is not that economical and systematic universe that our logic likes to represent, if it is not sustained within an intellectual framework, truth of an intellectual order is a human invention the function of which is to utilize reality rather than introduce us to it. ... Reality does not form an ensemble, if it is multiple and mobile, composed of criss-crossing currents...  - Henri Bergson

James' unflagging devotion to the ideals of plurality and tolerance is as relevant and inspiring as it was a century ago.  - Ruth Anna Putnam

For many philosophers, it can be best to start with the secondary literature before attempting the original works. Not so for James. His own writing is the best introduction.