Impressive recent reads

The Rest is Noise - Alex Ross

 This book is a history of the twentieth century as seen through its music. It is the kind of book I've longed to read for many years. Modern classical music has lamentably had a veneer of 'difficulty' to it. Many potential listeners of the genre are scared away because it is 'too intellectual.' This is completely annulled by Ross, who writes about the difficult conceptions of these composers in an enthralling, entertaining prose. There is no dichotomy between the 'high' canon or the 'low' canon, either. Composers like Shostakovich and Britten, dismissed as kitsch by some quarters, receive equal treatment as the likes of Stockhausen or Nono. Whilst I would like to have seen more detail on Varese (who is bracketed under the fatuous futurist movement, rather than commended as the singularly great composer he really is), and perhaps less on Britten, one has to take into account that in a book like this a lot has to be left out. This is a page-turning book that brings together music theory, history and politics.

Memories of the Future - Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

This was written in Stalinist Soviet Union and was considered too subversive to even show to a publisher. I guess that the adjective 'Kafkaesque' is totally applicable to this book - it is dark, enigmatic, mysterious and alienating. There is a divide between the higher echelon and powerless nebbish characters who are kept at bay. There is also a Borgesian tinge (the Eiffel Tower runs away from Paris, a man will only join a group as long as it's logical and a man loses his way in a room that keeps expanding into a vast black waste), but it is charged with political commentary. It'd be a little difficult to describe a lot of the pieces as 'stories' since they aren't all that compact and concise; there are a lot of digressions involving haranguing indictments of the Soviet regime. The language can be dense and many ideas are laid really thick. I am glad I picked this up from Daunt Books in London; it turned out to be a real find.

Hijos sin hijos (Sons Without Sons) - Enrique Vila-Matas

This short story collection starts with a small epigraph from Kafka: “Germany has declared war against Russia. In the afternoon, swimming." The stories situate the subjective, personal lives of individuals within the context of broader political realities in 20th century Spain. More importantly, all the protagonists are "loners" who, in their predicament, do not procreate and produce children - they march on as apparitions, the last of a kind. Several biographical elements of Kafka's life are infused into characters, but this is soon overshadowed by the ingenuity and originality of Matas' ideas. Like the Krzhizhanovsky, there are a lot of meta-fictive tropes here which are a pleasure to behold.

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

The beauty of this book is the wonderful images it conjures - barren landscapes, empty saloons, ebbing tides - through beautiful, lyrical language. It is at once cinematic yet profoundly literary. Although I think they would be considered as polar opposites by most, this did remind of J. G. Ballard at his best. The subject matter makes The Road seem tame by comparison! The novel follows a group of American men in the 1860s, who trail out to massacre Native Indians and scalp them. They first do this for profit but eventually give in out of sheer compulsion. The novel is unflinching in the repeated use of disturbing images (such as two babies' skulls being crushed). This is an overpowering, atmospheric read!