I actually started this on September 11th, as seemed appropriate, and am liking it very much. Its time-shiftiness, which can sometimes annoy me, works well to emphasize the narrator's own bewilderment.

The brevity of this book is what obligated my borrowings at A's house. Young woman, brought up by her widowed classicist father on a tiny Maine island, moves to New York to work and live with old colleagues of her father's. I thought it was really nicely done, with an individual flavor.

Also at the country house, where there are not many choices and I needed something quick. Generally I detest Christie, but I was surprised to find this tolerable. (I expected to get my entertainment in part by disliking it, if you are wondering why, in that case, I bothered to pick it up.) I was annoyed that I had not remembered the famous twist.

A re-read, found in my friend's country house. Really a good book; didn't wrench as hard as the first time I read it, but still extremely well done.

So, a bitter short novel about favor and disfavor in a dictatorship. There's an architect in it: he ends up mad.

This seems like a pair with the Kertesz I just read, but it may be the coincidence of two strange Eastern European languages and the initials I.K. No, there's more to it than that, they are both short books about what lingers in the wake of dictatorship.

This never quite worked for me; maybe I should have taken it slower. I could see why I ought to like it, with its blind-to-self narrator, but it was too annoying and I guess I didn't feel it delivered on its hints of the profound. It might have been me, though.

Finished it and am a bit blank. I still want to approach it by determining its genre (maybe a fuddy-duddy tactic) and I still don't know what to call it. I should quickly say that I enjoyed it, am glad I read it, and will look for Adrian's other writing, as he's clearly an inventive, stretching, and lively writer.

I couldn't face CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL after a chapter about death and ashes, so I chose instead - a book about the Holocaust! Although as Mendelsohn says it's not a book about "the Holocaust," it is about the experience of particular people: of the author, his parents and siblings, as well as of the dead whom he hopes to -- what? Piece together?

I'm liking it, but with a reservation. He tells us early on that he learned from his beloved grandfather, brother of the lost Shmiel, a looping, recursive, endlessly expansive style of storytelling, which he found again in the Greeks, and he adopts this style. I didn't think I'd mind, generally, but too often he drops hints -- "It wasn't until Sydney that we realized how wrong we were."

Completed and enjoyed. I feel a little ashamed to have preferred the stories that took place in older days.

Two-thirds of the way through, wondering a little how it can be 600 pages -- I'm sort of ready for it to move to its conclusion, and on the other hand it's an epic, it could go on forever. Still, it continues to be engaging and mysterious.

Joining Banville's SHROUD among Books Set In Turin That I Have Read. A difficult German professor and writer, who has run the Institute for Communications Research out of a Turin villa, dies, and his old friend and literary executor arrives to try to find Rudolf's last masterpiece and make sense of his life.

"With Rudolf, the peculiar but common need to be a part of some group (and to observe its inevitable rules) had given way to a rigid individualism that acknowledged only one rule, never to endorse anyone or anything. Nothing was more repugnant to him than a gathering of authors."

A slim book of naturalistic, yet somehow dreamy short stories by Manuel Rivas, writing in Galician (and a very nice edition by Overlook); translation by Jonathan Dunne.

"A man urgently needed money to pay for a ticket to America. This man was a friend of my father's and had a saxophone. My father was a carpenter and made country carts with oak wheels and the axle of alder wood. He'd whistle while he worked. Puff up his cheeks like a robin and make a lovely sound, the sound of a flute and violin, accompanied by the noble percussion of the tools on the wood."

Now with more miracles!

A dense little novella by Hungarian Nobelist Kertesz. An unnamed Commissioner investigates a never-spelled-out past horror, first interrogating the middle-class functionary who gives him dinner, then visiting "the site" and "the factory" out in the central-European countryside. Kertesz' style, as translated by Tim Wilkinson, is thickly interior, anxious, and somehow (to me) unmistakably local.

"He set off straight toward the gate, but he had not even started before he was stopping short. Something he ought to have seen all along but, it seemed had been overlooked as being of minor importance was now, all at once, looming before him like a cast-iron fact, with the stubborn resistance of its materiality: the gate was locked."

It goes on and multiplies its oddness. I found myself wondering about a possible genre assignment for this book. Even though it takes place in a post-apocalyptic, transformed world, I wouldn't intuitively place it in Science Fiction; Fantasy? Maybe, but. It reminded me of the various genres represented in Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Also, it's reflecting, in a twisted mirror, specifically Christian ideas. Do we have to look back to antique genres, allegory, for instance? Is this a contemporary Pilgrim's Progress?

I haven't sorted out what I like vs what makes me uneasy about this book. Of course, uneasiness is part of its strategy. Maybe it's the yoking of apocalyptic fantasy and naturalism; maybe it's that the character of Calvin, the chief character's beloved dead brother, is so terrifying.

finished. It was interesting and lively, drawing out the connections among half a dozen or more interesting nineteenth-century American characters, but it did not -- nor I think did it really try to -- prove that they all came to understand life as unfixed and evanescent, and to take the hummingbird as symbol of that mutability.

Traces connections among Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Heade, among others, with the hummingbird (a New World exclusive) representing "a brave new world of instability and evanescence" that (Benfey argues) they all come to accept. Ties into J C Oates' WILD NIGHTS, which I just read, in which Dickinson and Twain are both characters; and Heade is a favorite painter of mine, though I've always liked his New England and New Jersey landscapes better than his tropic scenes, flowers, and birds.