2007 books

102) Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006
A nameless father and his son head south on the roads of America after a nuclear war, hungry, wary and often on the run. The Road proves that it's still possible to conjure gripping stories from the thinnest of plots, and the frequent negotiations between the man and his boy read like an unspoken transaction: the father has to remind the boy of the need for courage, and equally often the terrified boy, who has never known any other kind of world, must remind his father of his humanity. It's the absence of any back-story, which one might expect from a fully realised bona fide SF novel, which made me think no, this isn't science fiction – any specifics as to what brought about a nuclear war would be irrelevant to the emotional heart of McCarthy's story. His pared-down prose echoes their spare existence, making this a grim and bleak read, and I wonder if T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' may have formed part of McCarthy's inspiration ("I will show you fear in a handful of dust"). It's just a shame that The Road doesn't quite live up to some of the adulatory excesses of the 32 pull-quotes used on the cover of the UK edition; nevertheless, still an excellent and necessary book.

no subject

I had a near miss with surliminal in Bangkok airport last night... hope your flight home was as good as mine, and Happy Birthday!

2007 books

103) Gabriel García Márquez, Leaf Storm, 1954
There's hardly a trace of any magical realism to Leaf Storm, which is set in Macondo, the famous town Márquez was to return to later for One Hundred Years of Solitude. But he does use multiple viewpoints from three generations of a family, whose grandfather is the only person who wishes to provide a dignified funeral for a doctor that the rest of the town would prefer to see rot in hell. Márquez prefers to slowly reveal the mysterious doctor from behind a veil of obscurity in a way that doesn't allow other characters to resolve their own individual kinds of spiritual limbo in relation to him; another issue for me was that all three very different narrators seem to relate their versions of events in the same written style, a tactic which I found problematic though was probably entirely deliberate. Hence a puzzling story, and one which for me conceals its intent a little too well.

Lives of Photographs, 14.1

The recent addition of individual Photo Stats on Flickr has helped me track this photo further: it's now up at the Spanish Wikipedia's entry on Jimi Hendrix aswell.