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Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. His most famous novel, 100 Years of Solitude, was published in 1967 and has since been translated into 37 languages and sold over 20 million copies. Since then, he has published 23 other works of fiction, with many of them receiving critical acclaim.

Vargas Llosa's novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is one part bildungsroman, one part autobiographical romance. Vargas Llosa drew on his relationship with his first wife for the romance of the novel, which concerns 18-year old Marito, an employee at a Peruvian radio station and an aspiring artist, and 32-year old divorcee Aunt Julia (his "Aunt" as the sister of his uncle's wife).

Set in Lima, the town of Vargas Llosa's youth, the novel chronicles Marito's romance with his aunt amidst the rise and fall of an extremely charismatic scriptwriter at Radio Central, the station at which Marito is employed.

Throughout Vargas Llosa's novel, the streets of Lima in the 1950's come to life in a time when television had yet to dominate the Peruvian entertainment industry and the airwaves reigned supreme.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/books/08nobel.html

Class with Joe Haldeman

In 1974, Joe Haldeman published The Forever War, an anti-war novel essentially Vietnam-in-space at its core. While initially rejected by 14 publishers, Haldeman's novel went on to win the Hugo and Nebula awards, two of the highest honors in science fiction. Since The Forever War, Haldeman has published more than thirty novels, short story collections, and critical essays in his field.

If any author were ever thought of as a highbrow, scholarly type, Joe Haldeman is entirely the opposite. As a veteran of the Vietnam War, his speech is reminiscent of the era in which he matured - the 1960's - and disarming at that.

Some of the questions my fellow students asked Haldeman included parallels between The Forever War and the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, his methods as a writer, and sexuality within the novel.

In The Forever War, the army is a mixed-gender draft force - a concept unheard at the time of its publication. The novel's protagonist, William Mandella (a close anagram of Haldeman), is among the first conscript of marines sent out to the reaches of space to wage war.

As a consequence of traveling at relativistic speeds (traveling near the speed of light), Mandella ages only months at a time, while the Earth he leaves behind leaps ahead by decades, then centuries, ultimately more than a millenia. The alienation he feels when he returns home to a world which has become foreign to him parallels the culture shock Haldeman and other veterans experienced after finishing their tours in Vietnam.

Haldeman elaborated on this condition, openly referring to it as post-traumatic stress disorder.

"It took a good ten years to shake it," he recalled. "I was up in the woods of Maine a few years after I got out and realized I was looking for snipers in the trees before I realized I was in f***in Maine! Of course there aren't any snipers in the trees!"

I was fortunate enough to meet award-winning science fiction author Joe Haldeman earlier today in my Science Fiction Novels class. Joe Haldeman teaches creative writing at MIT in the fall and lives in Gainesville in the spring. He is a close friend of my professor, Dr. Andrew Gordon.

This consumed the bulk of my time over winter break. Over summer break, I'll take on David Foster Wallace's immense Infinite Jest.

Guns and governments

Conspiracies have a strong selling point. They draw on the suspicions every man has towards a non-transparent government and provide a vehicle for explosive action.

David Baldacci's The Camel Club follows in this vein, as the first in a series of novels about the eponymous Camel Club. A group of conspiracy-minded individuals, the club becomes embroiled in a political scandal when their weekly meeting is interrupted by a murder nearby.

As witnesses, the members become hunted by the killers, but as government watchdogs, they dedicate themselves to determine who the murdered man was and what the motives were behind his death.

While the novel doesn't break new ground in its field, it fits well into its niche, with plenty of guns, government agents and double-crossing to keep the plot going strong, and the characters reappear in the subsequent novels The Collectors, Stone Cold, The Divine Justice and Hell's Corner.

http://www.davidbaldacci.com/writing/series/camel-club

The Book of Fate

A writer in the same field as David Baldacci, Brad Meltzer also earns a living writing conspiratorial fiction.

His bestseller, The Book of Fate, dredges up the dubious Freemason group, a common factor in many conspiracy theory novels. While the group never actually appears in the novel, their hand in designing the buildings in the capital city is mentioned prominently, and darkens the atmosphere significantly.

Wes Holloway, aid to disgraced former fictional president Leo Manning, is drawn into a web of conspiracy when he spots the former vice president, who was believed to be assassinated eight years prior, at an event in Malaysia. Wes finds himself hunted by "The Three," a secret organization consisting of members each from the CIA, FBI, and Secret Service.

Washington serves as the primary backdrop for the political thriller, but Wes also travels to Meltzer's hometown of Ft. Lauderdale to investigate a witness protection agency. As a native of Boca Raton, a city ten minutes north of Ft. Lauderdale, I found Meltzer's descriptions of the local area quite nostalgic.

http://www.bradmeltzer.com/novels.aspx

David Foster Wallace sweeps up

David Foster Wallace's acclaimed novel The Broom of the System, published in 1987, stands as a solid example of the postmodern style.

Wallace began part of the novel as his senior thesis while he was studying English and Anthropology at Amherst University, and a portion of the novel occurs at his Alma mater.

The novel has a very disjointed, post-modern structure, with entire passages consisting entirely of dialogue without any "he said" statements ending a sentence.

The plot deals with Lenore Beadsmen, a switchboard operator undergoing an existential crisis. Lenore is uncertain whether, as an individual, she is anything more than the labels other people identify her with, and if she is anything more than what her function is. The question of whether objects can be defined purely by their function features predominately throughout the novel.

Wallace also pokes fun at current literary styles and explores the concept of Self and Other, or the idea of the boundaries which separate individual thoughts and actions from their external counterparts. Wallace elaborates further on these ideas and others in his massive, 1079-page follow-up novel, Infinite Jest.

Wallace committed suicide on September 12, 2008, after a lifetime battle with severe depression. His unfinished novel, The Pale King, will be published on April 15, 2011.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max

What the Night Knows

Dean Koontz is a remarkably talented author.

His skills at describing a menacing hallway, a hard, grizzled detective, or especially, a ghastly thunderstorm, are utterly top-notch.

"Pulses of lightning brightened the windows, and fat beads of rain quivered down the panes, leaving a trace of arteries that throbbed on the glass with each bright palpitation." From this articulate description, the reader is meant to feel the aggressive, testosterone-ridden tensions an intense thunderstorm can provide.

Koontz also possesses a breathtaking command of vocabulary, as I already found myself racing for a dictionary by the third paragraph of the first chapter, "The September light appeared to strop a razor's edge along each skein of rain." In the wide selection of novels by Fitzgerald, Joyce, Forster, Steinbeck, Conrad, Hemingway and Vonnegut (among others) which line my shelves, I've yet to encounter strop or skein, but I was thankfully able to glean their meaning from the given context.

The plot itself concerns a detective, John Calvino, who believes he is being stalked by the vengeful spirit of the serial killer who murdered his family two decades ago, and whom he in turn murdered. It's typical high-suspense, overpaid action, but it sells, as Koontz made $18 million in 2010, making him the sixth highest-paid author in the world.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/19/patterson-meyer-king-business-media-highest-paid-authors.html

A writer should write what he has to say, not speak it

Ernest Hemingway

Borders

As you may or may not be aware, Borders books is finally closing after failing to compete in recent years with Barnes and Noble.

While this is deeply tragic (I enjoyed their free membership and discounts, as opposed to B&N's paid membership), it means extremely discounted books for the consumers. I went yesterday to see what pickings I could make of the purported 20-40 percent discounts on all in-store items.

Unfortunately, despite the Gainesville Borders location far from campus, most of the books I'd had my eye on in recent months were nowhere to be found, including Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder, and Thomas Pynchon's V.

I did, however, manage to get two other Vonnegut novels, Galapagos and Hocus Pocus, both at a 20 percent discount from their original $14.99 and $7.99 values, as well as the bestsellers I'll review in upcoming posts: Dean Koontz's What the Night Knows (cheap murder and thrills), Matt Haig's The Radley's (vampires living next door in a cheap attempt to capitalize on the recent vampire/zombie fads) and Brad Meltzer's The Inner Circle (conspiracy and secret organizations).

I was unable to find a legitimate 40 percent discount sign anywhere within the store, and although the discounts are almost guaranteed to drop to the 60 percent range with the store's impending closure, I doubt anything worth buying will be left by that point.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/business/media/17borders.html

Freedom

The Great American Novel is far from dead.

Jonathan Franzen may have, in fact, published such a work of literature last year with Freedom.

Franzen's fourth novel doesn't deal with the typical bestselling topics of high-wire court cases (John Grisham), guns (Tom Clancy), conspiracy (Dan Brown/David Baldacci/dozens more) or romances targeted at the 18-to-35 demographic (be it overly pure with Nicholas Sparks or overly sexual with Nora Roberts).

It's not just about one person's struggle. It's about the struggles between all of us and the breakdown of the modern family amidst infidelity and an empty nest.

Throughout the novel, Franzen alludes heavily to pop culture, name drops War and Peace by Tolstoy, and gives an overall stunning example of what the modern novel is capable of.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/freedom-by-jonathan-franzen-2081177.html

#jonathan franzen #freedom #bestseller #review #arnst

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