Y/N by Esther Yi

Sometimes I read a book, and I think, “Really?”  This is one of those books.  This is not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it’s way down there.  I don’t even know how to classify this book, because it’s so nonsensical.  Borderline fantasy, maybe.  The unnamed first-person narrator is a twenty-something woman living in Berlin. She becomes obsessed with Moon (“mooning” over him), a member of a Korean boy band called the pack of boys.  She writes a fictional story about him, using the placeholder Y/N, so that the reader can insert “Your Name” for the person in a relationship with Moon. When Moon decides to step back from the band in real life, the narrator travels to Seoul on a quest to find him.  She eventually tracks him to a convalescent home called the Sanctuary where she sees a boy who looks like Moon.  Here’s her thought process, from page 154:

“In fact, his resemblance possibly proved he wasn’t Moon.  Similarity precluded equivalence:  If the boy were Moon, I’d never say he looked like Moon, just like I’d never say that I looked like myself.”

This odd deductive logic is my favorite passage in the book, but it’s a good example of how weird the whole thing is.  On the plus side, the cover art is stunning, but you know what they say:  You can’t judge a book by . . . .

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

X is a fictional artist and author with a mysterious past and more pseudonyms than you can count on both hands.  Her biographer is C.M. Lucca, a journalist and X’s widow.  The backdrop is alternative history, like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.  In 1945, as imagined here, the U.S. was divided into the Southern, Northern, and Western Territories.  The Southern Territory, as you might guess, was extremely right-wing, and X was a rare escapee whose multiple identities helped her evade authorities.  Fact and fiction overlap in odd ways here, as X became friends with David Bowie, Connie Converse, and Susan Sontag, to name a few real-life notables.  Some fictional elements seem to be intentionally outrageous, with real people in different roles with different ideologies, such as the naming of Ronald Reagan as a Green Party presidential candidate.  These humorous asides don’t quite redeem this novel, though, in which Lucca seems to be so much in X’s thrall, even eight years after X’s death, as to be a bit pathetic.  She completely subjugates herself to X, even abandoning her career, which she may be resurrecting by setting the record straight about X’s history.  X is a woman beloved by many, but I didn’t find her the least bit lovable.  She’s definitely enigmatic, disappearing for weeks without explanation, expecting Lucca to carry on in her absence. Most of the remarks that Lucca quotes X as saying are completely incomprehensible and borderline nonsensical.  The photos scattered throughout are a treat, though, and this could be one of those books where it’s more fun to look at the pictures than to read it.

TREMOR by Teju Cole

My idea of a novel includes characters and a plot, but this novel really has only one character and no plot.  Tunde is a Nigerian-American professor and photographer who travels to Mali for a speaking engagement.  Chapter Five contains the entire text of the speech, and perhaps the audio version of this book gives it justice.  In written form, it is meandering and not exactly dazzling, just like the rest of this book.  Chapter Six is a series of first-person vignettes narrated by denizens of Lagos, Nigeria.  (One review suggested that these are Tunde’s interviewees.)  All that aside, I have two major complaints about this book.  First of all, there is a huge amount of discourse on African art and music, most of which was meaningless to me as a non-connoisseur.  Secondly, the narrative changes unexpectedly from third-person to first-person, with a few second-person references in which the “you” is never identified, at least as far as I could tell.  The change to first-person confused me to the point that I wasn’t really sure if the narrator was Tunde, but I assumed that it was.  Then on page 235, four pages from the end, in the middle of all of this first-person prose, we have a sentence that starts with “Tunde is making aviation cocktails with Sean’s help.”  Never mind that I have no idea what an aviation cocktail is.  My real question is whether or not Tunde is now referring to himself in third person, and if Tunde is not talking about himself, who is?  Needlessly frustrating.

THE MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

I had to put my thinking cap on to read this book.  It centers around the life of John von Neumann, a brilliant physicist and mathematician who worked on the Manhatttan Project and who also co-wrote a book with major implications for the field of economics.  Each chapter in this novel features a different von Neumann acquaintance who sheds light on the man’s personality and intellectual gifts.    The title of the book could be a sort of double entendre, given that von Neumann could be very obsessive about his theories, but he also developed a computer whose acronym was MANIAC.  This book is not as enjoyable as When We Cease to Understand the World, but the last few chapters rescue the rest of the book, although they have little to do with von Neumann.  The last section, entitled “LEE or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence,” focuses on computer programs written to play chess, and, more importantly, the Chinese game of Go.  The chapters in which an AI program called AlphaGo challenges the best Go player in the world, Lee Sedol, to a 5-game match are fascinating, even to someone like myself who knows nothing about Go.  We get a glimpse into the emotional psyche of Lee Sedol in this last section to about the same degree as we witnessed von Neumann’s reaction to his own successes and frustrations, even though the latter’s story occupies the majority of the book.

BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL by Jonathan Lethem

Novels like this, especially with “Novel” in the title, should come with a disclaimer stating that its format is atypical.  Like Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, this book has no plot per se but is a series of vignettes.  It does have a bunch of characters, none of whom have proper names, and keeping them organized in my brain was impossible, since all the stories are shaken up and dealt piecemeal throughout the book.  On the plus side, this book takes a nostalgic look at a Brooklyn childhood in the midst of gentrification, despite everyday muggings.  Surprisingly, the muggers described here are mostly not adults, and weapons may be fictitious.  Mothers send their children out into the world with money hidden in their socks and “mugging money” in their pockets to appease the muggers. The problem is that snippets of narrative jump back and forth in time so that characters appear and then don’t appear again until much later.  The ambience that the author generates is vivid, and there’s a whole section on funny muggings, which morph into non-muggings in which the intended victim ingeniously thwarts the muggers.  On the flip side, we have a violent rape and a fake rape, but both the rapist and his non-raping ally have to face consequences.  Life is definitely not fair in this setting, but the author implies that Giuliani’s subsequent “stop and frisk” policy was not necessarily an improvement.

RETURN TO VALETTO by Dominic Smith

Hugh Fisher, a bereaved historian, returns to the Italian village of Valetto where his mother, Hazel Serafino, grew up, but the town now boasts only ten inhabitants.  Four of those are his three aunts and his grandmother, whose one hundredth birthday is approaching.  The family property includes a small cottage, which Hugh inherited from his mother but has now been claimed by Elisa, a chef from Milan. Elisa’s family apparently sheltered Hugh’s grandfather, who deserted his wife and four daughters to join the Resistance during WWII.  Elisa’s arrival on the scene solves at least one mystery—that of the whereabouts of Hugh’s grandfather after he disappeared.  Another mystery crops up when Hugh discovers that Elisa is the daughter of a woman who lived for a time as a refugee with the Serafino family.  Elisa’s mother and Hugh’s mother became great friends as children, but Hugh was never aware that refugee children lived with the Serafinos and has trouble coming to terms with why his mother never mentioned this fact.  Hugh soon finds that there is a lot more about his mother that he does not know, including an event whose details have been suppressed for decades and that only Elisa’s mother can shed light on.  All of the mysteries make for a good solid foundation, but the middle of the book drags, and the pace is almost as lethargic as the town of Valetto.  Ultimately, this is a family story about abandonment and regret, but it is not depressing.  I laughed at what Hugh’s grandmother says on page 37:  “I don’t recommend living a day over eighty-five.  Everything after that is like reading a novel you never liked for the second time.”  Oh my goodness, I hope not, but first, I have to get to eighty-five.

VENGEANCE IS MINE by Marie NDiaye

The translator of this novel tells us that Maitre is the title given to French lawyers, and Maitre Susane is the main character here.  She agrees to take as a client a woman, Marlyne, who drowned her three children, but that crime does not seem to bother her as much as the fact that she may have met the woman’s husband as a child, and that encounter may not have been totally innocent.  Remembrances of this encounter causes a rift between Maitre Susane and her parents—her father in particular—the reason for which I never grasped.  Another case she is pursuing is that of her housekeeper, Sharon, who is seeking legal residency status.  Sharon is an enigma in more ways than one but stubbornly refuses to provide her marriage certificate to Maitre Susane, who requires that document for Sharon’s case.  These two puzzles are never resolved, nor is the title, as far as I am concerned.  Vengeance is whose and for what?  I have to say that I was intrigued by Marlyne the most, especially the two radically different reasons she gives for murdering her children.  Both motives are equally unhinged, and in one description of her motivation, she describes her crime as premediated, but in her other explanation, she claims that she had no plans to kill them until the moment that she decided to do it.  She is a monster but still a more fascinating character than Maitre Susane.