Between waiting for the baby to come (one week until our due date) and the disgusting heat outside, I have been spending a lot of time sitting inside in the living room, our one room equipped with an a/c unit. On the positive side, this has meant I’ve gotten a lot of reading done over the past couple of weeks (I was especially glad about this when I had a job interview this week and they asked my what I had read recently). So here are some brief recaps of a few things I’ve read recently.
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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
I had been eagerly anticipating this new novel by the author of Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, as I loved each of his previous books. His first three novels did an amazing job of combining emotional, mature storytelling, postmodern structures, and elements of science fiction. Black Swan Green stepped away from the latter two factors to present a relatively straightforward coming-of-age story, but there were still hints of magic and mystery around the edges of the plot. However, Thousand Autumns is 100 percent historical fiction, completely doing away with the more whimsical aspects of Mitchell’s previous work. The story takes place in Japan as the 18th century turns into the 19th century, but many of the characters are Dutch, and the plot centers around the Dutch East India trading company’s outpost in Japan. Although there are (subtle) romance, derring-do and sea battles involved, the central plot isn’t really as important as Mitchell’s work in fleshing out memorable characters and examining the clashing social mores of the two cultures. I have to say I do miss the more adventurous aspects of his writing from his previous books, and sometimes I felt like I needed more historical background to understand what was happening, but I still really enjoyed Thousand Autumns.
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How to Wreck a Nice Beach by Dave Tompkins
How to Wreck a Nice Beach purports to tell the history of the vocoder, a device originally created to encode telephone conversations in wartime but quickly incorporated into music, primarily prog rock, funk, and early hip-hop. Not to be confused with the Autotune effect heard in much modern R&B and hip-hop, the vocoder was the instrument used to create the robotic vocals in songs such as “Mr. Roboto” by Styx. The subject matter is fascinating, but Tompkins (a writer for the avant-garde music magazine The Wire, as well as other publications) uses an impressionistic writing style that can be difficult to parse. This style works better when he’s discussing the out-there music of Sun Ra and Africa Bambaataa than when he’s detailing the use of the vocoder by Winston Churchill. He also digresses into barely-related subject areas, such as when he writes a full chapter of hip-hop eccentric Rammellzee, despite admitting that he rarely used the vocoder in his music. I will say, however, that this is one of the better-designed books I have read recently, with beautiful full-page photographs and illustrations.
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The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
I put The Imperfectionists on hold at the library after reading Christopher Buckley’s laudatory review in The New York Times a couple of months ago. It details the lives of the staffers (and one reader) of an English-language newspaper based in Rome. Rachman is a good writer but I was left a little cold by this novel, which was very much “modern literary fiction.” There’s a lot of divorce and adultery and meaningless sex and dismal lives, etc. etc. It also reminded me very strongly of Prague by Arthur Phillips (who wrote a blurb for the back of this novel), except not as good. Overall, I’d say: eh.
