In a recent piece in the Guardian, Robert McCrum listed what he considers the ten best openings to novels. Most of the usual, and deserving, suspects were there: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. McCrum went out on a limb, too, going further afield, opting to include Donna Tartt, P.G. Wodehouse and Sylvia Plath (the latter's scorching, tone-setting opening of The Bell Jar is, indeed, a stunner) -- but might not a longer list, going far further past expectations, been the way to go? Readers have been giving their suggestions in the comments on the piece, but these, too -- e.g. Nabokov's Lolita, Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities -- have been predictable, if deserving. Might not McCrum need to expand his own horizons as a reader? I put forth the openings of Sebastian Barry's Annie Dunne, Peter Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, Dickens's Bleak House and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera as more than worthy to sit alongside the Austen, Bronte and Twain.

Barry: "Oh, Kelsha is a distant place, over the mountains from everywhere. You go over the mountains to get there, and eventually, through dreams."

Matthiessen: "In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to lanterns; through the black reaches of the outer night, so it was said, they flew toward the full moon."

Llewellyn: "I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley."

Dickens: "London."

Garcia Marquez: "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

These speak for themselves and are among the dozen or so finest openings to novels I've ever encountered. I'd put the Plath in there, too. Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet. Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. Peter Carey's Illywhacker. The first paragraph of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. The first five or six sentences of Graham Swift's Waterland.

To paraphrase (if I'm not mistaken) the poet William Stafford: the beginning of a poem should feel like stepping onto a moving train. Or into a dream.

Ditto the beginning of a novel.

Last week, Kelly and I saw Wim Wenders's new documentary Pina at our local arthouse cinema. I went in as a relative virgin to dance as an art form, having seen a bizarre production of The Nutcracker at the University of Montana in 2009 (featuring the visiting Moscow Ballet, true, but also featuring, inexplicably, a GIGANTIC dancing unicorn), while Kelly had some dance training as a teen and worked as an intern at Dance Magazine in New York City one summer long before we met. (Apparently, the Bausch piece "Cafe Mueller" -- seen in Pina -- was also showcased in Pedro Almodovar's masterpiece Talk to Her, but the eight-foot-tall vagina has edged "Cafe Mueller" out of my memory of the film.) I went in with faith in Wenders (whose Wings of Desire is among the very best films I've ever seen) and his longing to honor the art of his friend, the late choreographer Pina Bausch.

However, as this was modern dance we'd be seeing, what would I -- whose suspicion of and distaste for modernism (Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, in particular) elsewhere in the arts is quite thoroughgoing, whatever my admiration of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings, H.D.'s Trilogy and George Oppen's poems -- think? Well, from the beginning (i.e. from Stravinsky in the dirt), I was rapt. It was not the dancing alone that was magnificent, but the sense I had of the creative engine behind these visions and their execution. And watching the Wenders film -- struck as I was by the trust between the dancers, by the staggering physical demands of the performances, by the symmetries and spatial relationships -- I found my mind jumping artistic tracks and articulating something of the precise reason behind my definition and love of great writing. In short: rigorous intellect, prose either muscular or pellucid or attentive to poetic device, elaborate architectural exposition, characterization that is honest even when disconcerting and empathetic even when exploring the monstrous, and a writer's faith in his or her readers to extend their reach as readers -- these are the earmarks of great literature that I came to more clearly understand as such while seeing their parallels exhibited in the work of Pina Bausch.

The world would be diminished without Pina -- valentine that it is to these attributes in dance as a medium, and to the confidence issuing from them -- just as it would be diminished without Marilynne Robinson's diamond-edge intellect, without Peter Carey's luxuriant image-making, without the matryoshka sentences of Howard Jacobson, without Sigrid Undset's love for even those characters of hers whom she would have us (in some degree) despise, and without Charles Dickens's faith in our trusting his lead into the rabbit warrens that are his plots.

To name just a few examples...        

I've been M.I.A. for some little time now, having grown disenchanted with the notion of blogging (and pulling the plug on what had been my principal blog) in the face of so manic a life as mine (teaching, grading papers, working retail, church commitments, two book clubs, diligent dieting). (Indeed, I couldn't remember whether I'd pulled the plug on this one too!) So, then, what has happened in the world of the Booker Prize of late -- and what have the thoughts of this commentator been?

As we all know, Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question walked off with the 2010 Booker Prize, a week after Ladbrokes betting had been suspended on winner predictions (thanks to a suspicious rash of wagers on Tom McCarthy's apparently divisive novel C) and a day before we found out that Jacobson's novel edged out Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America with a 3-2 vote in the final judging. This, of course, pained me no end, given my proselytizing admiration of Carey's fiction and that a 3-2 vote in his favor would've made him the one and only three-time winner of the Booker Prize. (Consolation for Carey came in his having been named a 2010 finalist for the National Book Award the day after he lost to Jacobson.) But I felt the need to thank someone -- anyone -- involved in bringing him mere inches from making literary history, and so I tracked down an e-mail address for Andrew Motion (former Poet Laureate of England and chair of the judging panel) and did just that. (His response was brief and gracious -- and glowing with praise for Carey's work.)

As for my own reading: look for a review of Keneally's Schindler's List in the coming week.

Glad to be back.

This year's Booker Prize longlist will be announced on the 28th, but in anticipation of it, I wanted to predict what I feel are four certainties to make the longlist:

Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America
David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
James Robertson's And the Land Lay Still
Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean

Time will tell...

Having finished Wolf Hall a week or so ago, I thought it was high time to post -- lest memories of the book grow dim. Not, of course, that I see there being much chance of that: Mantel's novel reads like a smoking orange brand on one's imagination.

There has been much fuss from the book's admirers and detractors in the British press about British familiarities with the corners of the Tudor histories it relates -- on the one hand, critics argue that Mantel breathes vibrant and re-considered life into a past grown threadbare with yawning overhandling in grammar school lessons (or, as John Mullan has noted, that she has "unstitched" that past), whereas on the other, critics accuse her of copping out in telling a tale so often told, of cheating readers of encounters with the unknown. All of which brings me to what was, perhaps, the greatest thrill for me in reading Wolf Hall: that I know almost nothing of the historical record from which Mantel has written. Growing up in southeastern Wyoming, one's grade school histories are those of the Oregon Trail, trading posts, bison massacres and Wild West shows. I, of course, went into Mantel's splendid imagining of Henry VIII's court knowing a fair bit about Elizabethan England (from the numerous Shakespeare biographies I'd read and documentaries I'd seen), but next to nothing about the the political landscape that preceded, and gave rise to, it. Sure, I knew something about the dubious origins of the Church of England (belonging, as I do, to the Episcopal Church, its American counterpart), but had neither heard nor read the name "Thomas Cromwell" (the main character in Wolf Hall, and architect of the marriage between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, through whose all-seeing vision and intuition Mantel imagines this world -- indeed, her appropriation of his perspective proves to be an act of ventriloquism every bit as convincing and enchanting, in its way, as Peter Carey's assumption of Ned Kelly's voice in his 2001 Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang) before reviews of the novel began appearing in the Spring. I turned page after page, discovering (most of) its cast of characters and their tangles of relationships for the first time and couldn't have been -- as a result -- more transported than I was.

From the outset, the prose is all one would hope it to be in a Booker Prize-winning novel. Whether relating the beating a teenage Cromwell takes from his father in the opening pages -- "Come on, boy, get up. Let's see you get up. By the blood of creeping Christ, stand on your feet." -- or, later, describing "[a] wash of sunlight [...] over [a] river, pale as the flesh of a lemon," Mantel's ear is perfect. (I read one sentence that made me wince with its tinniness, its rattle -- one in a book of 650 pages.) But the moment I knew that Wolf Hall was something rare and overwhelming came during the scene in which Cromwell's daughters succumb to the plague: the prose in those two pages is so gorgeous, and Mantel's empathies so profound, I was reminded of nothing so much as the Gospels and the masterpiece that secured Sigrid Undset the Nobel Prize for Literature (and a candidate for the best novel I've ever read), Kristin Lavransdatter (in, it must be stressed, the Tiina Nunnally translation).

And how unexpected that a British novel -- from an agnostic's pen and published in 2009 -- should consider religion with the gravitas it deserves (modern and postmodern British novelists tending so often to treat religion as a subject for dismissive ridicule and contempt, as the butt of some humanist joke making the rounds among the intelligentsia)? It is cause for celebration. As is this novel -- for all it attempts and all it accomplishes.

Its shortlist competition in 2009 (those I've read in italics): AS Byatt's The Children's Book, JM Coetzee's Summertime, Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger.

Reading: 1st

A deserving winner

Confession time: I've had a singular hiccup in my New Year's resolution to not purchase books for myself. No, I didn't go on some spree, unable to stand it any longer, filling three baskets at Barnes & Noble with titles I have the vaguest interest in. No, it wasn't that at all.

Last week, my wife and I were driving around Missoula when I told her: "You know what book, more than any other book, I'd like to see Folio publish? Oscar and Lucinda." When I returned home later that morning after dropping Kelly at work, I checked my e-mail, and there it was: an e-mail from Folio announcing the publication of four new books, including Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, in celebration of the Booker Prize. I couldn't believe my eyes. And because it was this book (one of two on which I wrote my M.A. thesis) -- and after so wistful a thought, an hour prior, that Folio might one day see fit to recognize it for the masterpiece it is -- we decided I should and could be permitted this one wrinkle in the resolution. And so I ordered it the next day.

Reading that e-mail was one of the most unexpected thrills I've ever felt, and ordering the book perhaps the most satisfying book purchase I've ever made. Indeed, I'm all a-shiver with the prospect of owning so beautiful an edition of so beautiful a book.

And now: back to the business of no books.

I finished William Golding's Rites of Passage late last week and have to admit mild disappointment with it. I'd never read him before -- not even Lord of the Flies (I know, I know) -- but thought: a Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature must bode well, right? And I've always had a keen interest in seafaring tales, so where could it have gone wrong?

The novel is the journal of Edmund Talbot, written as a gift to his godfather (that the latter might live a vicariously youthful life) and meant to be a document of the comings and goings aboard the vessel. Golding, for his part, succeeds in the voice of the novel -- it feels authentic to the literature and correspondences of the Regency period -- but in too little else. One would think that the sea would fan the flames of an author's powers of description, but there was very little prose in Rites of Passage noteworthy for either its observational precision or its striking beauties. One exception would be a passage early on in which the sailors -- on deck, in their oilskins, during a mighty gale -- "resemble nothing so much as rocks with the tide washing over them." I felt, with this passage, that I saw precisely what Golding intended me to see, that he was -- in that moment -- the captain of a narrative ship capable of inspiring envy in other writers and gratitude in careful readers. But the book almost never sees such piercing and lovely descriptions again. Still, though I'm a reader who loves language above even character and the spinning of the yarn, I've learned to recognize, over the years, that a fine novel needn't luxuriate in alliterative language or flights of metaphor to be a fine novel. In short, not every writer has the poetic sensibility of Sebastian Barry or Peter Carey or Iris Murdoch. Two of my very favorite novelists -- Rohinton Mistry and Sarah Waters -- mine their genius (and genius it is) elsewhere: in depth of character, or startling empathies, or byzantine plotting, or sensitivities to period and politics, or experiments in perspective. In their cases, the prose serves ends more foundational than itself -- the brilliance is in the bricks. And while this was nearly the case with Rites of Passage -- Golding's tweaking of perspectives (giving us, in the journal, Talbot's view of Colley and then, in the letter, Colley's view of Talbot's behavior towards Colley) deepens the pathos manyfold and makes characters of caricatures (until we're allowed his voice, Colley seems like a thin unflattering riff on Austen's Reverend Collins in Pride and Prejudice) -- the book has too much going against it (e.g. a too-awkward mishmash of horror and humor, a narrator it seems Golding wants us to like despite his giving us little or no good reason to) for it to sing as a Booker Prize-winner should.

I liked Rites of Passage well enough, but shouldn't the novel that saunters off with the most prestigious literary prize in England be liked better than well enough?

Its shortlist competition in 1980: Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country, Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day, Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid, Julia O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men, Barry Unsworth's Pascali's Island

Reading: 1st
An undeserving winner

In 2005, the people over at the (Man) Booker Prize gave out the first ever Man Booker International Prize -- an award given every two years to a writer for his or her entire body of work. Unlike the Booker Prize proper (which is open to no one but British or Commonwealth writers of novels in English -- not even short fiction collections are eligible -- and is given to an individual book), the Man Booker International Prize is open to writers from around the globe, writing in all languages and genres, and is intended to rival the Nobel Prize for Literature in prestige. As with the Nobel, controversies abound over the writers who make the shortlist, fail to make the shortlist, are chosen as winners, are passed over as winners. (Philip Roth -- whose following couldn't be more devoted and whose tally of prizes across his almost 50-year career is unsurpassed -- was nominated for his work in 2005 and 2007, but lost first to Ismail Kadare and then to Chinua Achebe. I haven't read Achebe -- I know, I know -- but I have read Kadare's novel Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, and it comes nowhere near the brilliance of even Roth's second-tier fiction, let alone a book like American Pastoral. Hence the controversies.)

In recent weeks, 2009's committee, chaired by novelist Jane Smiley, announced its shortlist nominees for the Man International Booker Prize:

Peter Carey
Evan S. Connell
Mahasweta Devi
E.L. Doctorow
James Kelman
Mario Vargas Llosa
Arnost Lustig
Alice Munro
V.S. Naipaul
Joyce Carol Oates
Antonio Tabucchi
Ngugi Wa Thiong'O
Dubravka Ugresic
Ludmila Ulitskaya

Of these, believe it or not, the only two writers I've read are Carey and Doctorow. Carey -- on whose work I wrote my M.A. thesis -- is my favorite living novelist. Doctorow (who has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice, the National Book Award once and the National Book Critics Circle Award three times) is splendid in his own right -- I've only read his City of God, but it blew my fuses, to be sure.

The winner will be announced on 27 May.

My wife, who is in the midst of reading each Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction (and has crossed the midpoint in doing so), inspired me to this similar end in taking the Booker Prize as a challenge. I've followed it for a long time now and have just as long thought it the gold standard, the height to which novels should aspire in the English-speaking world. Granted, as a Commonwealth prize, it excludes American writers (unless, as was the case with Carol Shields, those writers have dual citizenships) -- meaning the National Book Critics Circle Award (open to all works of English-language fiction, American or Commonwealth) is closer to being an objective gold standard. But we all have our preferences, and I'm a Booker Prize man.

I'll make clear up front that while I've read a number of these titles before, all will be read, for this venture, anew. Despite having read Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda seven times in the past, for instance, I'll read it an eighth time for the purpose of commenting on it here. In addition, please note that I'll do my best to keep reviews free of spoilers and ask that readers of this blog do the same in their comments (and I hope there are comments -- I'm just as anxious to hear your thoughts on the Booker Prize-winners I read as I am to offer mine).

Let it begin -- as I begin with Graham Swift's Last Orders.