Category: underappreciated books
“Maybe it’s not fair to call Martin Amis underappreciated,” Waldman says. “After all, he’s the writer whose teeth much of Britain’s literary community was obsessed with for quite some time. Still, there is one of his books that I find to be generally loathed, despite the fact that it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In fact, I only ever met one other person who liked Time’s Arrow. But this is the book I’m recommending. In my (very humble and probably incorrect) estimation, it’s a fabulous novel, probably one of Amis’s best, maybe even the best. It tells the story of a man who lives his life backwards, from his death through to his birth. He does everything backwards. Everything. Moving his bowels is an exercise that involves sucking feces from the toilet into his butt (gross, I know, but somehow wildly entertaining), eating is similarly backwards; bite by bite he vomits up his meal. Lest you think that I’m consumed by the scatological and the regurgitory (I know that’s not a word, but it should be), there are many other things I love about this book. It uses a narrative conceit to shine a light on the Holocaust and thus avoids so much of what it facile and trite about most novels having to do with atrocity and despair.”
Ayelet Waldman is the author of Daughter’s Keeper and of the Mommy-Track mysteries: Death Gets a Time Out, Playdate with Death, The Big Nap, Murder Plays House and Nursery Crimes. She now has a blog called Bad Mother.
“An under-appreciated book this past year that I absolutely loved is a slim book of interrelated essays called Wolves and Honey, by Susan Brind Morrow,” writes Anthony Doerr. “On the surface it’s a regional history of the Finger Lakes area of New York, but it’s also a personal narrative about the deaths of two friends. Sort of. But everything in this memoir ranges: ultimately, it is impossible to categorize other than to say it’s a riveting compendium of observations from a very curious, very interesting mind. From beavers to coyotes, to a history of grafting, to an absolutely beautiful chapter on the lives of bees, Morrow’s memoir/collection consistently subverts the confessional in favor of tracing the infinite connections between the modern self and the larger world beyond. What I enjoyed more than anything was her extreme care with words, and her classicist’s sensitivity to etymology. Language, she continually reminds us, is a ”great mirror that contains the reflections of everything that ever lived.'”
Anthony Doerr is the author of The Shell Collector and About Grace. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope: All Story, among many other publications. He currently lives in Rome, Italy.
“I finally read something I love,” Adichie writes in an email in between transcontinental flights. “The writing in Saadawi’s memoir Walking Through Fire is beautifully lucid and clear (so much so that I wished I could read the original Arabic) with occasional flourishes, much like the story itself. We follow Saadawi’s recollections from exile back to her life in Egypt: her family, her medical school education, her writing, her activism, the men she loves.
“I regularly give away copies of Weeds by Edith Summers Kelley,” Harfenist says. “It’s an old book (first published in 1923) about the daughter of a tobacco tenant farmer in 1920s Kentucky and it’s the unblinking, outspoken story of a superior young woman trapped by her body and her culture. With the emotional accuracy of Sister Carrie‘and without a sniff of sentimentality or self-pity’ it triggers something so strong that readers either love it or hate it. And that’s the sign of a book worth reading.”
Jean Harfenist’s novel-in-stories, A Brief History of the Flood, received wide critical acclaim when it appeared in 2002. Michiko Kakutani called it “wonderfully wry-melancholy,” and declared it “an auspicious and stirring debut.” Harfenist is a native of Minnesota, a graduate of New York University, and now lives in Santa Barbara with her husband.
“I just finished reading Josip Novakovich’s wonderful novel April Fool’s Day,” Mandelbaum says. “It chronicles the life of one Ivan Dolinar, a Croatian whose knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time makes him a useful guide to that hauntingly perverse pocket of the world, the Balkans. Spanning fifty-plus recent years, the book naturally devotes some of its attention to war and its horrors (in a particularly chilling scene, Ivan comes across the crucified body of a Muslim friend from medical school), but the novel’s main focus is Ivan’s struggle for survival and a meaningful existence. Novakovich’s vision encompasses the broadly philosophical and the minutely sensory; his voice is inviting and compelling, morally alert without being moralistic, and he never loses sight of what makes for a good story.”
Paul Mandelbaum is the author of Garrett in Wedlock, part of which appears in the Winter issue of Glimmer Train Stories. He also edited the anthology First Words: Early Writings From Favorite Contemporary Authors, including juvenilia by Margaret Atwood, Rita Dove, Stephen King, Maxine Hong Kingston, John Updike and others.
Sherman Alexie suggests Ann Patchett’s Truth And Beauty, a memoir of her passionate friendship with Lucy Grealy. “I read it on an airplane from DC to Seattle,” Alexie says, “and sat weeping in my seat. I’m sure that in this age of terrorism an ambiguously ethnic guy weeping in a plane was terrifying to nearby passengers. It’s an amazing book about friendship – love through fragility and craziness.”
Sherman Alexie is the author of the novels Reservation Blues and Indian Killer, and of the short story collections The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The Toughest Indian in the World, and most recently, Ten Little Indians.