One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I am not quite ready to hail Marquez’s masterpiece as the finest piece of literature since Genesis. Yet his splendid Latin American tale is so awfully good that the moment of hailage is not too far away.

So lyrical, so dreamlike, One Hundred Years reads even better accompanied by Counting Crows’ “Dreaming Tree.” Appropriately enough there is so much from the sprawling story that stays etched in the memory, so many characters, so much tragedy and joy, so many modest yet profound life lessons.

What I found wanting—the plot device that cannot quite hide the fact that the novel is merely a series of short stories; that sexuality assumes too large a crutch to the novel’s plot—is easily brushed aside in the wonderment through which I shared the Buendi family’s fate.
Excellent

Seize the Day, Saul Bellows

When Bellows won his Nobel in 1976, the judges, like so many others before and since, singled out Seize the Day as a modern day masterpiece.

I suppose they are all right.

“Right” because the story evokes the peril of personal ambition and the pain of existential loneliness like nothing I’ve read since the incomparable Death of a Salesman. Yet also only “suppose” because flaws somewhere within the plot or the writing style prevent Bellow’s short story from fully conveying the depth of feeling this reader expects from what is essentially a statement on the isolation, failure and despair of modern man.
Memorable

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

There are books that move me to write my own novel. Count this as one of them, but for all the wrong reasons.

First the good: Mistry’s six-hundred page epic about Indians living through Indira Gandhi’s disastrous Emergency regime is an endearing mix of pain, humor and familial love, and save for a few simplistically evil figures, the characters spring to life, rough edges intact.

As to the bad and ugly, you can start with any number of stereotypes that are agonizingly overplayed: the young male characters’ sexual obsession is one of many examples. Yet what damns this novel is that it is so relentlessly grim, so wedded to a hopeless perspective on the challenge of life, that at some point the reader wants to throw the book aside and ask why anyone would devote so much space to say little more than life- or at least India in the late seventies- is endlessly awful.

Any number of admirable reads posses a fairly bleak outlook on life. But when A Fine Balance spins a story for six hundred pages with nary a redeeming message in sight, the bitter taste at the end does not reflect empathy for the characters’ wretched fates as much as frustration for trusting in an ultimately soulless novel.

Mama Huhu or Horses and Tigers

The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

More a fable than a story, three things kept the book from really earning my admiration, all of which reflect the fact that I simply read this book too late in life. A decade earlier, and we might have had something special together. So much for the past.

My first problem with Coelho’s bestseller is that much of the grist is taken from Genesis, which would only be to the tale’s credit except that when even the ending turns on what is an all too familiar Hasidic yarn (though whether eastern European Jewry can really claim ownership over the tale, I’m not quite sure), the use of so much that is familiar leaves me desperate for signs of authentic creativity.

The second problem goes deeper, as much of the story’s admirable ideas about life’s purpose are ones I had already internalized from elsewhere by the time I got together with The Alchemist. The result was page after page of admirable messages that this time around, resonated only at the level of a study guide.

The third problem goes deeper still, but as it is largely personal, reflecting why and when I read The Alchemist and my immediate reaction to that context, let’s leave it aside for personal conversation and agree for the moment that this is a story to share, just at the right place and time.
Memorable

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Almost necessitated the creation of an even more atrocious rating. The unique perspective utilized by the novel saves some respect. Otherwise this is a total bomb.

The plot goes nowhere for way too long, and then becomes obvious midway through. With nothing to look forward to, the reader is shamelessly dragged along for a while, hoping that the characters will at least began to have some personality.

Doesn’t happen and by the end everyone- you included- is the worse for the experience.
Avoid

A Canticle For Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.

High expectations are par for the course with the books on this list. So the heady proclamations that crowd Canticle’s backside, “enduring masterpiece,” “on every sensible list of the half-dozen great novels of the last half of the 20^th century,” do not excuse a book that fails to package an appealing plot or any character studies into thirty chapters otherwise consumed by a pessimistically told moralizing tale against nuclear weapons and human hubris.

This book is worth a skip unless you want to tap at the Strangelovian era fear of nuclear hubris. Or if you’re a secret fan of imaginary monastic life and mumbled Latin prayers.
Mama Huhu or Horses and Tigers

A Voyage to Arcturus, David Lindsay

Wikipedia calls Arcturus the “major underground novel of the 20^th century” and no less an authority than Yale literary critic Harold Bloom lauds it as one of the finest literary works of any century (a more apt commentary from a less renowned critic notes that the story reads “like the description of a very powerful acid trip”). Such was my inspiration to step into the strange metaphysical mind of Lindsay and through a heavily metaphorical and exceedingly bizarre realm of make-believe, contemplate good and evil and their relationship with existence.

It should make for heady reading but chances are that the laconic writing, nonsensical plot and the endless unexplained mysteries will leave you disappointed, frustrated at a journey that fails to provide the resources even the most patient reader expects from a two-hundred plus page text.

Mama Huhu or Horses and Tigers