The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Mark Haddon, 2003): this is a cute little book with a bittersweet story about an autistic boy who decides to investigate the death of his neighbour’s dog. Haddon writes it in the first person, and his greatest merit, in my view, is how he captures the voice/worldview of autism. There are a few gimmicks here and there that annoyed me a bit, but overall it was an interesting read. A short one, too.
By Nightfall (Michael Cunningham, 2010): I didn’t like this one as much. Cunningham, in my view, has a certain disdain for his female characters and an undue fascination for his dull male protagonist, the owner of an art gallery in Chelsea who lives in a Soho loft (does it get more predictable than this?) and who is (guess what?) going through a mid-life crisis and may or may not have feelings for his brother-in-law. To make matters worse, his prose is unnatural and his lyricism is forced. I hate labelling things as pretentious because it is often mistaken for ambition, I would give By Nightfall this label – a made-for-preppies book.
Leviathan (Paul Auster, 1992): Auster is a good example of ambition than is often mistaken for pretention. Leviathan is a touching tale of a writer’s disillusionment and decent towards radicalism. Despite the book-within-a-book structure, Leviathan has a pretty conventional narrative style (at least for Auster), and its beauty lies in the psychological exploration of the two main characters.
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2009): I expected more of Ishiguro, although this is perhaps not the best place to start. This is a collection of very loosely connected short-stories that have some relation to music (which was the selling point for me). With one or two exceptions, I didn’t find the stories (or characters) to be very interesting, and Ishiguro’s sparse, simple style didn’t do much for me either.
Cosmopolis (Don DeLillo, 2003): Mixed feelings about this one. I absolutely loved DeLillo’s prose in this one – quite beautiful and lyrical, and often impressionistic. At the same time, I wasn’t crazy for the story or most of the characters (except for the wife). I thought DeLillo went a little overboard with his parable of de-humanization in the digital age; I usually prefer my moral lessons to be subtler, if that makes sense. In any case, the writing was good enough to make me want to dig further into his material. White Noise will be next, most likely.