Notes from Underground

Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground is apparently the world's first "existential novel". Like most of the other books we read, it's an awkward guy - this time to the max: it's the "rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator".

We understand it inspired Taxi Driver and American Psycho (Can we have a nice well-adjusted bloke sometime?)

We're reading it because it made Angus the man he is, and because it's shorter than anything else Dostoevsky wrote.

Discussing it at Craig's on 1 July.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is short and well-written, from a viewpoint we don't often get (though, hey-ho, it's yet another self-absorbed, slightly asocial man).

We liked it, but not as much as the critics. His girlfriend - and her life path - seemed a bit convenient and symbolic (her name is Erica as in am-Erica). The story is left hanging at the end. It's all very allusive, but we're philistines and like events and narrative.

You wouldn't catch Khaled Hosseini doing that in the Kite Runner (but then he was a doctor when he wrote that, not a writer).

The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky was a big hit when it came out, featuring a marriage breaking down in the exotic setting of North Africa after the War.

Very odd, for me something like a cross between - or a missing link between -- Graham Greene and JG Ballard. You start with Americans lost in a post-colonial world, out of their depth. There's a disaster, and a bizarre closing section where the survivor pushes further into the unknown world.

Well worth reading, and resonates more a little while after

John Updike's Villages

The book for March was Villages, by John Updike. What with him recently dying, we thought we should see what all the fuss was about.

Probably, we should have gone for a better and earlier book. This was yet another book about a self-absorbed bloke, with too much flash-back. Even the presence of sex and the development of the computer graphics industry weren't enough to excite.

Still, the last chapter or two, with ageing people sinking into a tetchy church-administered rest, had something of an American Alan Bennett.