Books' reviews in this week
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-09-17 14:31
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Home
By Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Home is a third-person retelling of many of the events in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, one of the few recent American novels that have found and deserved both critical praise and readerly love. The intentions behind both Home and Gilead do not coexist in a relation of chronological sequence or thematic priority, but instead turn together like enmeshed gears impelling a single narrative machine. Home is a book full of doubleness and paradox, at once serene and volcanic, ruthless and forgiving. It is an anguished pastoral, a tableau of decency and compassion that is also an angry and devastating indictment of moral cowardice and unrepentant, unacknowledged sin. It is a book unsparing in its acknowledgment of sin and unstinting in its belief in the possibility of grace. It is at once hard and forgiving, bitter and joyful, fanatical and serene. It is a wild, eccentric, radical work of literature that grows out of the broadest, most fertile, most familiar native literary tradition.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
By Junot Diaz (Riverhead)
This wondrous first novel won both a National Book Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize. Moving between contemporary New Jersey and the Trujillo-era Dominican Republic and written in a vibrant, street-wise Spanglish, the book unfolds from a comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek into a harrowing meditation on public and private history. Diaz is one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices.
Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal
By Ben Macintyre (Three Rivers)
Eddie Chapman, a professional Soho criminal, was in prison in Jersey when the Germans conquered the island. They sent him to England as a spy, where he immediately signed up with MI5 as a double agent. Chapman's life (he died in 1997) has everything a successful spy story should have and Macintyre gracefully conveys its "sheer fun".
Options. The Secret Life of Steve Jobs: A Parody
By Fake Steve Jobs (Da Capo)
For more than a year, high-tech insiders devoured The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, a running satire by an anonymous blogger. Last year the author was revealed by a New York Times reporter to be Daniel Lyons, who is now a technology columnist. Fake Steve/Lyons ended the blog and wrote this funny novel, which mocks its complicated, narcissistic narrator. "The world needs sociopaths," Fake Steve insists. "Who else ever gets anything done?"
The Bloodstone Papers
By Glen Duncan (Ecco/Harper Perennial)
Duncan's sixth novel explores the complexity of dual identity as an Anglo-Indian teacher in contemporary London. It investigates his parents' past during the time of the partition. He wants to know whether a British con man duped his father out of a precious bloodstone ring and why his father allowed him to. A different but equally complicated Indian community exists among the Roman Catholic, English-speaking residents of Santa Clara, a wealthy suburb of Mumbai.
(China Daily 09/17/2008 page20)
