Book 5: Death in Venice

Death in Venice
Thomas Mann

Immortalized for many by the few final moments of its famous film adaptation, Death in Venice is an intriguing, slightly inaccessible look at beauty and the intoxicating power of raw emotion over otherwise rational individuals. The inevitable decline of protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach is at once flamboyant and timid, maintaining an uneasy balance marvelously evoked by Mann when his full attentions are on the task at hand. Though frequent philosophical digressions routinely adorn the text and leave little room for ambiguity, they are often detached from the story at hand and seem to operate independently of Aschenbach. The intention behind these detours is pretty clearly to illuminate the depth of complications arising from Aschenbach's solitude and his growing fascination with a pretty young thing, but Mann's extended meditations on the eternal conflicts between the desire for beauty and truth in art, between the intuitive and the rational, or between the unspoken and overt come at the heavy cost of readers' attention and interest. These passages are illuminating but demanding both in their placement surrounding, rather than really integrated into, the narrative and in the richness of their topics. Death in Venice may be a short novella, but it requires far more attention than most novels I have read, and any lapse is likely to send the reader into a vortex of inscrutable confusion. That the book is short should not be surprising, given the small scope of a plot (insofar as plot exists), that feels abbreviated even after its natural concision is taken into account. The result is that the slender volume feels quite inflated with the author's insights and editorializing.

Not quite a character study and not quite a philosophical allegory, the novella flails a bit while attempting to strike a balance between protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach's increasingly obsessive, and not a small bit creepy, infatuation with a young teenager and Mann's observations on the nature of the human psyche. Despite lacking interest for a general audience, the book does display some deft skill. There are the usual clever turns of phrase that decorate most esteemed literary works, but what is best conveyed throughout the novella is a sense of foreboding, at once overt and subtle. Mann is not shy about setting the tone and deploying an array of repetitive cues to signify Aschenbach's most important observations; when these do come, they are not despite their obviousness in any way obtrusive, and indeed it is refreshing to get inside the fictional writer's head rather than his real-life author's.

Mann may be forgiven for hitting the theme heavily in those moments when the story advances, and indeed his consistency is refreshing and grounds the text after so many distractions. His view of plagued Venice is deeply unsettling, but he is able to convey strong, severe images of decay without relying heavily on meaningless exposition. The inevitable sense of deterioration accelerates meaningfully with the plot, though these tandem developments could have been handled with more skill, and the overall effect of the novel is as deeply intellectual as intended. Like the book itself, the month or so that occupies the bulk of the story moves by with a kind of dreamlike quality, each revelation fading into another until an irrevocable decision is reached and a fate duly sealed. Though it is difficult to actually read and enjoy due to a surplus of attention to unwieldy intellectualism, Death in Venice is obviously crafted with skill and offers rewards for readers who will have a chance to probe its surprising density in greater depth.

Grade: B

Book 4: Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen

Because the early nineteenth century is so far behind us, it easy to forget that the world of Jane Austen may in fact bear a striking resemblance to our own, if not in its particulars then certainly in some of the tendencies of human nature. To misread Jane Austen as predominately predisposed to epic period romances is perhaps to do her a slight disservice; though it is primarily concerned with romance and the follies and glories of love, Northanger Abbey is a hilarious, biting satire that should be lumped neither with Jonathan Swift nor with Fabio-adorned Harlequin romances. Set in Bath and then in the English countryside, the book is one of many faces, a richly textured work pleasing through both its social comedy facade and its frequent, finely pointed but never entirely mean-spirited wit. While Austen’s more salient points are offered by and large with little subtlety, her humor is effective and only rarely disrupts the plot. An offhand remark on the tendencies of gentlemen when wooing likely prospects often serves not only to satirize the silliness of enforced formality (and resulting uselessness) in courtship but also to disguise a more insidious, subtle remark about gender relations in the early nineteenth century. Blatancy is employed as a disguise and a diversionary tactic throughout the book, and readers will find themselves rewarded if they seek out meaning between the sharpest barbs.

Those lines themselves, however, offer no shortage of amusement and are reasonably unpredictable, though the ultimate conclusion will not surprise any seasoned readers. Though the novel suffers a bit from its awkward transition between the high society follies of Bath and the superbly gothic expectations of Northanger Abbey, its story is just cohesive enough to hang together. More importantly, nary a plot element passes by without comment, whether overt or subtle, from the author. From the opening introduction of her protagonist, Austen cranks the irony up to eleven, making comments throughout on the suitability of “heroine” as an appropriate descriptor of poor, naïve Catherine Morland. The author is full of snark, but is able to deploy it with enough subtlety that the novel is rarely overwhelming and, when overwhelming, is often at least amusing (a page or so about the merit of novels is entertaining and revelatory but ultimately misplaced in this particular narrative). Its population of characters displays an effective mixture of the expected and the nuanced, with caricatures such as Isabella and John Thorpe playing so effectively to type that they are nothing short of delightful. Indeed, Austen is at her best when openly riffing on the established norms of high society and of gothic novels, subverting each while deploying them effortlessly to create a novel that is, in some sense, at odds with itself. More than a period piece, more than another canned, predictable romance, and more than a bitter satirical jab, the book is enjoyable for its surface features as well as its deeper implications. All told, Northanger Abbey is nothing if not fun, often provoking audible laughter and wearing its age well by providing contemporary criticism of nineteenth century faults we are now quick to point out.

Grade: A

Book 3: A Geography of Time

A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist
Robert Levine

The perfect nonfiction book may be a simply unattainable product: the few with more than passably good writing and fluid arguments are often distinguished by dry subject matter and delivery, while many with blockbuster concepts are undone by a complete inability to string together a decent sentence or two thousand. The latter are all the more tragic because they leave readers with the lingering feeling that an opportunity has been sorely missed, all the more important in nonfiction because, unlike good plots, good theses and interesting ideas often have few experts and the books that espouse particularly intriguing ideas often owe their genesis to the author alone. It is difficult to read A Geography of Time as anything but a painfully missed opportunity, an exhibition not of Robert Levine’s truly interesting take on the human condition but instead on all of the crucial errors he makes in attempting to create a high-impact pop-psychology bestseller out of his own experience as a Very Serious Scientist, Thank You. The result is a muddle of memoir, data, and that particular breed of arrogance showcased best when one is attempting hardest to avoid such accusations. This wouldn’t be so infuriating if Levine was writing a run-of-the-mill clunker, but the unique importance and ubiquity of time, his chosen subject, makes this painful result all the more tragic.

Levine wastes no time in demonstrating many of the ways a well-conceived book can veer dramatically off course, opening his preface with a personal anecdote about the flow of time in Brazil. This technique, of course, is a brilliant way to draw readers into an otherwise heavily fact-oriented narrative, but it becomes immediately apparent that Levine is no storyteller. The observations fueled by his recollections go incredibly wayward as he first attempts to embrace cultural relativity and then suddenly realizes his need to play to his audience, couching his language in ironically indicting, careful non-judgmental terms that play up his ignorance not only of Brazil, but of his audience as well. Levine clumsily dances around real issues throughout his book, absolutely unwilling to take a stand while simultaneously pretending to and offering value judgments where he promises objectivity. It is difficult to say what he is arguing at any given moment, particularly as evidence often contradicts facts due to his mishandling of English. Time and again, arguments are undercut while readers can only sigh and try to construct what Levine meant to say instead. In one particularly hilarious example, Levine reprints a story of a medieval duel left uncontested after one participant failed to show by noon and the other duly declared him a coward. What the author does not seem to realize is that the resulting intensive court inquiry as to the precise time of the challenger’s own departure does not, in fact, illustrate an "indifference" to time; rather, it demonstrates what appears to be his original point, that the understanding of time could be very fluid in a world without reliable, coordinated clocks. An indifferent court would have placated the duelist and needn’t have bothered ascertaining the precise time that the duel was abandoned.

This may appear to be a minor quibble, but this gross misunderstanding of evidence is just about the only consistency of Levine’s book. Despite being ordered into reasonably logical sections, the book bounces back and forth between subjects, repeating stories and observations and wholly unable to knit anything together at all cohesively on any level. Paragraphs are just as often non-sequiturs as enlightening follow-ups to those preceding, and the inconsistent deployment of line breaks and headings renders them almost pointless. The writing itself is often condescending and remarkably ignorant for all of the traveling Levine has done, his observations hollow in their inevitably numerous iterations and his eagerness to please undermining any scientific credibility he may have had.

Simply put, this book is ultimately undone by ambition and good intentions. It is admirable that Levine himself admits some of the flaws of a given data set, but after spending pages describing why, exactly, his data may be untrustworthy readers may be forgiven for failing to give it any credit at all. The author’s decision to include data this unreliable is questionable at best and perfectly illustrates the confusion that rests at the heart of this book. Levine wants so earnestly to write a pop psychology bestseller that his intent bleeds through where any semblance of a consistent thesis or even a reasonably reliable tone cannot. The book is at once organized thematically, chronologically, geographically, and not at all. Most galling, the end result of a globe-spanning exploration of the flexibility of human time perception yields no useful results. Interesting observations, such as the power associated with making people wait for you or the differences between individualistic and community-based societies, are illustrated with the same few bland anecdotes or are basically ignored as Levine remembers something shiny he either forgot to mention when it was relevant or simply cannot wait to divulge.

For all his misdirection and stumbling, Levine has constructed something useful. His enthusiasm for and appreciation of time as an under-recognized but crucial factor of the human experience is unquestionable and should motivate future scholars to follow up on his more interesting ideas. Unfortunately, Levine simply lacks the finesse necessary to make his ideas coherent and the good judgment to edit, well, anything. There is nothing wrong with embracing cultural relativity, and his decision to do so follows naturally from his experiences, but some things are just incomparable: it is beyond appalling that Levine quite seriously equates habitual Brazilian lateness with honor killing of women caught in adultery; this is no exaggeration. With that gem, Levine erodes any credibility he may have had only halfway through the book and readers can only grimace and prepare for the barrage of ill-supported, self righteous assertions that populate the text. A Geography of Time has the basic elements of success with a unique and important subject, combination of personal experience and scientific data, and the author’s unwavering enthusiasm; unfortunately, the last becomes so overwhelming that any useful insight can only be gained through sheer persistence as a reader wades through the muddled mess.

Grade: D

Book 2: Austerlitz

Austerlitz

W. G. Sebald

It is difficult for me to make a kind of assessment of this book. On one hand, it is lyrical, poetic, moving; on the other, plodding, confusing, and pompous. Sebald has a gift for language, deployed wonderfully through translator Anthea Bell, and there are times when this talent is so luminous that it masks a digression or a lack of plot. At others, however, no amount of lyrical beauty can persuade the reader that the text at hand is anything but the author's indulgence, prioritizing a favored technique or Daring Literary Idea over the needs of the story being told which, all things considered, is quite a powerful one. Peppered with thematic and stylist diversions and distractions, the story is at heart a powerful exploration of identity and anonymity, strangely intertwined and the driving forces between both the erratic style and half-dreamed substance of the book. Constructed primarily of the patchwork narrative of Jacques Austerlitz, told to an unknown acquaintance over a period of thirty years, Austerlitz retraces individual and collective disturbances caused by the Holocaust and the ways in which the past can shape how one views oneself as an individual or within the context of a larger community.

The ethereal nature of identity, its fluidity and inescapable insecurity, are captured effectively by many of the same literary methods that often make the book a chore to read. The displacement of the primary narrative, accomplished through ambiguous, unnamed first-person narration and deliberately evoked through self-referential third-hand quotation, makes the act of reading the book in some ways as unstable as its original telling. Constructions that call attention to the story's murky provenance are frequent and, though jarring, create a chord of thematic harmony as the narrator relays information across several channels of communication ("He said, Austerlitz continued…"). Though these reminders highlight how difficult it often is to remember who, exactly, is narrating at a given moment, the ambiguity reflects the questions of certainty that drive the story. Austerlitz is, in many ways, a man without a history, and his gradual uncovering of the past serves both to solidify his identity and to make him feel increasingly out of place in the world. Sebald's exploration of this dual-pronged result of historical inquiry is an extremely perceptive and appropriate method by which to examine the horrors of the Holocaust and the insanity that occupied Europe throughout the early mid-20th century.

Just as Europe could not, and to a certain degree still cannot, reconcile its past with its present identity, so Austerlitz re-traces his own history, both aimlessly and with an inevitable, inextinguishable desire to progress further. The journey, in Sebald's hands, is both painful and strangely beautiful. There is a lyrical sadness to the book and a heavy weight to both its words and images, many of which are reprinted in stark black and white throughout the text; frequent foreshadowing creates an air of constant slight unease paired with a desire to see where, exactly, the story is heading. The novel in its construction echoes brilliantly its theme, yet it is often cumbersome and seems to be intentionally difficult, much to its detriment. One sentence stretches on needlessly over the course of five or six pages until, exhausted under its own weight, it collapses and allows readers to glaze over. Moreover, the story is presented in large chunks of prose, without chapter distinctions and suffering for want of more than about five paragraph breaks. The structure may mirror the course of the conversation and the neverending flow of history and relational thinking, but a constant battering of words and images and ideas will exhaust many readers and will distract from the greater importance and, yes, beauty of the book. Austerlitz is, as is its central theme, in many ways a paradox, a brilliantly conceived, brilliantly constructed, and brilliantly written novel that suffers from the burden of its care and its uncompromising capitulation to form over substance and readability.

Grade: A-

Book 1: The View from the Seventh Layer

The View from the Seventh Layer
Kevin Brockmeier

A week into the new year, I've finished my first book, Kevin Brockmeier's incredible story collection The View from the Seventh Layer. I was first introduced to his work after "The Year of Silence" was published in a Best American Short Stories collection, and the stories that accompany it in this collection showcase a similar emotional sensibility and Brockmeier's immense and unique talents. Though the collection is drips with the overly artistic tradition of MFA programs, Brockmeier saturates his stories with beautiful prose, and his language floats along effortlessly. This is a remarkable achievement especially in his stories that use nontraditionally "literary" genres, and his introduction of fantasy and science fiction elements only does a service to genre work, which Brockmeier shows can be every bit as subtle and well-constructed as mainstream literary darlings. There are moments in each and every one of these stories, even those that tug a bit too hard on the heartstrings, where a turn of phrase stops the reader dead in their tracks due to its sincerity, sorrow, or hope. Language is clay in Brockmeier's hands, and he is able to shape it precisely as he wishes with some of the best talent I've been fortunate to come across.

His stories aren't bad, either. The collection beautifully navigates that emotional space between sorrow and hope, so brilliantly interconnected that a single sentence can make the reader realize that a story is now operating in one realm rather than another. The effect of these already wonderful stories is enriched exponentially when they are allowed to marinade a bit, and their occasional surface simplicity unfolds to expose their true richness and complexity. There is a definite playfulness and humor to most of these stories, but this is balanced nicely with a hint of sorrow and, ultimately, these stories reflect reality with their mixture of the inalterability of the past and, yet, a delicate hope for the future.

In a collection with this much quality, singling out standout stories is akin to reciting the table of contents, but it is worthwhile to note Brockmeier's incredible range. "A Fable Ending in the Sound of a Thousand Parakeets" sets the tone for the collection with its final chord, and with its cousin "A Fable with a Photograph of a Glass Mobile on the Wall" adopts an overtly didactic story form and strips it of its overtness, showing rather than telling and being in the end far more illustrative and effective. "Andrea Is Changing Her Name" is a testament to love and loss that does not rely on the familiar clichés but instead shapes them to better reflect the layered complexity of emotions that unfold over time. Most daring is "The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story," which indeed adopts that structure but which uses it to make a greater point about the human condition, with a delightful science fiction twist ending. This story, like some of the others, is entertaining as it unfolds but it is only after a bit of distance that its true meaning really hits home; this is, I believe, a mark of great literature, and these are stories that will stay with readers if not in their details then in their remarkable insight. Kevin Brockmeier shows that The View from the Seventh Layer is indeed one of loss and longing, but, ultimately, one of love.

Grade: A

2010 Year in Review

What an eventful year for me, 2010, as I completed half of my graduate degree and took a trip to Ireland for, well, the entire summer. This distinctly colored my reading habits as I looked to read both nonfiction books in preparation and native literature of all kinds once I arrived. I was able to get my hands on the last book in the Millennium trilogy before it came out in the States, but I didn't read it until I was back on the shores of Lake Michigan (literally; I read some of it on the beach). Another prominent influence on my reading habits this year was my continued involvement in a science fiction and fantasy reading group, for which I am continually grateful as the selections take me in unanticipated directions and always toward something interesting, for better or worse. I also finished watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, therefore, there are a few selections from related books, as well as a couple of books obviously prompted by the World Cup. I didn't manage as many books from the 1,001 list as I would have liked, but I did knock off a few and, having read 59 books despite a December no-show, have kept apace with my book-a-week goal.

Next year, I want to knock out more 1,001 books and, hopefully, I'll be in a solid, full-time job with a healthy public library nearby to continue my voracious habits. This year, much of my reading took place in the summer when I hadn't much else to do and was limited by a lack of income. The experience was well worth it, and my knowledge and love of libraries continued to grow, especially as these same limited funds effectively prevented me from acquiring many new books (to say nothing of increasingly sparse shelf space). Some of my favorite books of the year were The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, which well-deserved its Pulitzer; Alone in Berlin, a Dublin book club selection from Hans Fallada; The Ball Is Round, a superb history of soccer; and The City & The City, a book made far richer with invigorating discussion. There were some misses along the way, though I didn't read anything truly dreadful, and I believe I kept a good mix of genres, branching into mystery with Agatha Christie's classic And Then There Were None, which I was pleased to find as superlatively good as its reputation indicates. My main goal for the upcoming year is to focus more on reading roughly a book per week rather than reaching the proper number; December 2010 was an epic fail for my reading habits, and I look to do better starting, well, tomorrow.

Book 59: Talk to the Hand

Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door
Lynne Truss

Readers coming to this book from Truss's previous bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves will be at once delighted with and, perhaps, slightly disappointed in this follow-up. Truss brings her trademark uncompromising crankiness to problems with rudeness and public interactions in modern society, with mixed results. Truss is occasionally at her hilarious, cynical best in this book, but there is an overwhelming feeling of desperation throughout the book, as if she is trying so hard to be crotchety that she forgets what she is saying and relies instead on the crankiest possible wording and reaction, to the point where she repeatedly undermines her own arguments. One moment she is celebrating an action and the next deriding it; should we be mindful of people's privacy or indignant that they don't want to interact with us? Truss doesn't come down on one side or the other, and in such an opinionated work as this the waffling quickly becomes annoying. This, coupled with the over-the-top tone and prose, often means the book feels like a gimmick, which is unfortunate because Truss is occasionally very funny. Her continuously offended tone works with the subject matter, but is stretched to the point of breaking the flow and effectiveness of what she is saying; the book becomes at some point a caricature of itself. Talk to the Hand is an occasionally witty look at some societal patterns of rudeness in the modern age, but ultimately the book is too self-conscious to be much more pleasant than grating.

Grade: C

Book 58: At Home

At Home
Bill Bryson

I have read and enjoyed several of Bill Bryson's books, which successfully use humor and, where necessary, solid research to make science and history fun for the average reader or to craft unique topical memoirs. In At Home, he turns his talents from the geological timespan of the entire history of the universe (though much abridged) to a more focused look at the last hundred and sixty years or so. More particularly, he focuses on household objects, the myriad customs and objects that affect us every day and which we may not ever really consider due not to their obscurity (as may be the case with the Yellowstone caldera) but due to their omnipresence. Indeed, it is the absence of these things that startles us and yet, as Bryson points out in his introduction, they hardly seem to merit any special attention. The result in this specificity is a strangely unfocused collection, which blatantly and often violates some of the rules Bryson appears to lay out in his heading. He says, for example, that the book's focus is meant to be on the years from 1851-2009, but the histories he relates often date back far further than that. This is fine as the historical notes add significant depth to his stories, but it is unclear why the first chapter of the book focuses so heavily on 1851 when that focus does not successfully set up the following anecdotes.

This scattershot vision permeates the book, which is brilliant in overall structure but severely lacking in the minutiae. Bryson structures the book's chapters around the various rooms in his English house, which is at once a clever and natural way to organize a book about household objects. Bryson is also able to use these rooms in unforeseen ways: while the kitchen is, obviously, about food and dining, the cellar chapter focuses on building materials, and the bedroom on childbirth and death. These all make sense in retrospect, and though the connections are occasionally tenuous they make enough sense and allow Bryson to explore more facets of domestic history. He does not, however, stick to his stated topics, and many topics pop up throughout many chapters in unexpected and often distracting ways. The book maintains an oddly steadfast fascination with English manor architecture, which is interesting and perhaps deserving of its own chapter, but which feels distinctly like a disjointed subplot as architects pop up sporadically and as readers are expected to recall arcane details from earlier chapters. This is bizarre, as it very precisely undermines the point of the room-by-room structure. English countryside architecture is certainly fascinating, but without meaningful visual aids it is dreadfully misplaced in this book as Bryson seems to simply throw in stories he finds interesting for their own sake, with no eye toward the grander narrative he's attempting to create.

This lack of organization and focus is shameful, as Bryson is often at his funniest. Though he has a tendency to overly romanticize The Wide Arc of History (he is constantly referring to people as "the first/last man/woman/person in history to do x") and to wander far and wide from his own stated path, he has an eye for the interesting and bizarre and a knack for relating these stories with the wit they deserve. Bryson's prose is, when it isn't trying too hard to be, gut-bustingly hilarious and efficient for casual readers. For those of a more academic stripe or for those whose interest is piqued by a particular room, Bryson often mentions his sources and includes a much-appreciated bibliography of recommended reading, along with the research notes available at his website. Despite its missteps in construction and wandering attention span, the book does provide a lighthearted and informative history of those things we hardly take time to consider. It is obvious that Bryson has done proper research and he is usually able to deliver his punchlines without an overbearing sense of his own hilarity. At Home is, despite its flaws, an accessible and enjoyable history of domestic life that can be easily enjoyed by both more serious and more relaxed readers.

Grade: B+

Book 57: The City & The City

The City & The City
China Miéville

All around us, every day, are worlds we choose, whether consciously or not, to "unsee" despite being on some level aware of their existence. Whole undercurrents of society constantly escape our notice and, though there is much psychologically at stake in preserving our comfortable notions of the world and how it is built, imagine adding a nationalist ideology into the mix; imagine, for a moment, that the community you choose to ignore is, instead, a bustling metropolis countering the slow industrial decay of your home country. China Miéville takes this premise literally, places a hardboiled mystery into a dual city occupying the same physical space, and explores the ways in which we build the world around us. That he does all this without the heavy-handed moralizing one would expect from such a heavy starting point is remarkable, and the overall product and its lingering aftertaste greatly overshadow its faults. For all of the book's fantastic pretensions, Miéville's choice to use a hardboiled mystery plot fuses cold, hard reality with the more whimsical elements of the book and, upon reflection, makes the book much more realistic and delivers an aftershock upon reflection that changes one's perception of the book entirely. It is interesting, then, that the main fault of the book lies in its most mystical elements, which seem over-played and far too confusing to be of any real service to the book. The presence of a mystical force is necessary for the book to function, and indeed resonates deeply upon reflection, but the way it is handled makes a first and/or careless read more of a burden than it ought to be with such well-constructed and otherwise well-handled material.

Overall, however, this book is truly amazing. The setting is utterly original, and revealed in just the right doses to keep readers abreast of what is happening but still allowing understanding to develop in an organic way that quite alters perceptions of both readers and characters by the book's conclusion. Miéville delivers a fantasy with a solid footing in reality, one that does not preach but rather seeps into the reader's consciousness at its conclusion or upon reflection. This is a book to be savored after it is finished, a book that requires reflection without actually asking for or requiring the necessary sustained mental effort. The City & The City will reward both readers who come for the fantasy/noir combination and those who want to probe a bit deeper into the world that is truly represented by the two cities, and what their secrets and the secrets of their strange intersections may mean in our own shared reality.

Grade: A

Book 56: The View from Castle Rock

The View from Castle Rock
Alice Munro

Alice Munro is very nearly universally hailed as one of the finest short story writers of this time, and over the course of her career and various collections she has only come to build upon her outstanding reputation. It is clear that Munro has a keen eye for the short and sweet and an even better eye for a clever, deeply revelatory turn of phrase. It is boggling, then, how she manages to take an intimately personal set of linked stories, whose full arc plays out over the course of the book, and make them routinely dull, tedious, and uninteresting, though her use of atmosphere borders on brilliant. Even with that said, there certainly isn't a dearth of interesting, vibrant, and original material within the book; it seems, however, that for every relevant plot point or clever observation there are numerous hurdles that must be jumped to reach the next one. Most of these stories try, unsuccessfully, to balance two or more plots, often strained across generations; while there is nothing inherently wrong in this approach, and while it is an appropriate ambition for an extended family history, Munro seems to deflect attention just when the present story becomes interesting. Suddenly, dramatically, the lens whirls in a desperate attempt to focus as the reader's head is left spinning. It is almost as if Munro, the master of the short story, would have been better off structuring this book as a memoir, as it is done a great disservice in its present, scattered form. There are enough recurring elements and, understandably, enough links and consistent characters between the stories to justify a slight re-working and the construction of a more collected narrative than that brazenly attempted, but ultimately missed, in the book as it is.

The structural problems inherent in the collection mask and occasionally overwhelm its strengths, which come more often and far more consistently at its more intimate levels. Though plots and stories divide and collide at an often furious and frantic pace, Munro is able to construct compelling characters, even allowing her estimation of herself to slip into the tolerably objective. Her depictions of the pleasant familiarity- and accompanying constriction- of closely-bound families and social groups are poignant and effortlessly effective, along with her prose, which flows with ease despite often lacking particularly interesting or relevant subject matter. Among the jumbled storylines of the book are moments of clarity and delightful observation that immediately satisfy, only to remind the reader that so much of the book is bogged down by its weighty ambitions and, yes, its past. Despite a glut of thought and heavy construction, then, the collection is able to provide some satisfaction and enjoyment, though in its component pieces rather than its as a haphazard whole. An admirable singularity of purpose mitigates the ultimate failure to cohere, and the author's ability to see intimately into the private lives of a variety of characters is not always undermined by the stubborn, stale potholes in which they often become stuck. Showing a remarkable range, Munro is successfully able to evoke a number of convincing lives throughout a number of historical periods home and abroad and ties them together to produce a broad and far-ranging family history. Its ambitions are a dreadful mis-fit with its form, but somehow and despite itself, A View from Castle Rock forges an engaging,(if slightly overwrought) whole out of internally disparate material.

Grade: B