Reader Stille came up with a brilliant idea: let’s have a regular feature on the blog where people can offer and exchange reading suggestions.
I think this is something that should definitely be done, so here is my first suggestion:
Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs.
I picked up this book at the end of April because it’s a huge best-seller and I needed some mindless entertainment to get me through the end of the semester. The novel, however, turned out to lie pretty close to actual literature. I spent most of the book praying that the author wouldn’t kill the whole thing by offering “explanations” of what is going on to attract more readers of the facile kind but Messud didn’t succumb to the temptation.
The Woman Upstairs is a very powerful female Bildungsroman that fits into the category of female novels of development I studied in my own book. The novel’s protagonist is precisely one of those heroines who chooses to stunt her own growth and dedicates her entire life to the project of self-infantilization. The novel is very well-written, engrossing, and really spot-on in terms of human psychology. Forget about all the Franzens and Eugenideses and read Messud instead!
Clarissa's Blog 
I recommend The Shadow Speaker and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor. The first is marketed as YA. The second is not, I think. Both are brilliant, to the point that I predict that Nnedi will be the first SF/Fantasy writer to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.
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My apologies. The Shadow Speaker was published under the hyphenated name Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu. She no longer uses this name, but her first two novels are still listed under it.
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Has anybody heard of “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt ? Is it good?
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
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I’m interested, too.
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It is definitely a page-turner, but I’d say that ultimately it disappoints. Superficial, little substance. The characters (and their behavior) are totally loathsome, and yet they’re flat and uninteresting at the same time.
I still enjoyed it more than The Goldfinch, though. In The Secret History you’re in this very shut-off little world that’s claustrophobic, and there are parts that are breathless, all of which makes it compelling. If you read or have read either one, please share your thoughts 🙂
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I love the Secret History! Very fun.
I hated the goldfinch though.
I really liked Five Days at Memorial for a harrowing experience of medicine gone awry, and the failings of our justice system.
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“Engrossing” is a good description for The Woman Upstairs. I pretty much inhaled it in two hours and will probably have to read it again to understand better how the self-infantilization psychological mechanisms worked.
You’ve previously recommended Mohsin Hamid’s “How to get filthy rich in rising Asia” (and, I think, “The reluctant fundamentalist”) so I ended up reading “Moth smoke” as well. It’s a weaker novel than his latter two, but people who have read them and liked them should definitely try this one too.
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On the Edge of Reason (Revived Modern Classic) by Miroslav Krleza –> sounds interesting
“As far as I could gather until I was fifty-two, no one ever heard a disparaging or malicious statement about me. I was, in fact, quite nameless and invisible, so discreet that nobody ever took any notice of my existence.” The narrator of Croatian novelist Krleza’s 1938 novel is a prime example of a successful homo cylindriacus or “top-hatted man” until, overwhelmed by the self-assured inanity of his peers, he mutters a truth about a prominent industrialist at a dinner party. That truth becomes the “fatal experience” that overturns his comfortable existence but also breaks the strictures binding him. As the report of the narrator’s attack spreads through the town, he is called lascivious by a thrice-divorced profligate, insane by the aged representative of a long line of madmen. Refusing to withdraw his “slander,” the narrator undergoes a trial, imprisonment, self-imposed exile and finally a whole new slew of lawsuits. Krleza (1893-1981) was a convinced communist, and his disdain for the robber-baron capitalism of Croatia between the wars is pervasive, sometimes a little deadening. But Krleza (The Return of Philip Latinovicz) is a shrewd observer of man as social animal, and his wry, sardonic style fits cleanly into the Eastern European tradition of bureaucratic satire by the likes of Kafka, Karel Capek and Jaroslav Hasek.
From reviews:
In the hands of a lesser writer, the story would be a two-dimensional struggle between a heroic and morally attractive individual versus the insidious corrosion of society. Krleza’s character is far more nuanced. Convinced of the soundness of his own views, he argues logic and moral righteousness, arguing most stridently when his position is least logical. As his monologue unfolds we more and more doubt his sanity and the reliability of his judgment. The protagonist is not a nice fellow, he has ready excuses for every one of his own reprehensible acts, including a fistfight in the Sistine Chapel, yet he harshly condemns all of the “top-hatted men” who disagree with him.
The oppressive and conspiratorial nature of the legal proceedings brings to mind Kafka’s “The Trial”, except that Krleza’s character is fully aware of the runaway nature of events, yet he obstinately chooses to let his own life fall to ruin. The character recalls the nameless protagonist in Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground”, except that Dostoevsky’s man was wickedly self-aware, as when he opens that book, “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts.” Krleza’s character could never see himself in such an unflatteringly honest light. He thinks himself well-liked and reasonable, so that when he learns others despise him and his wife has had a lover for years, he is convinced that this is just a sudden bout of hypocrisy by his neighbors, rather than confronting the truth of his own lifelong disagreeableness. He is paranoid, delusional, self-important, and hypercritical of others. And for all that, he hits on some fundamental truths about the cynicism and the dark heart of a civil society that jails him for slander while Domacinski is lionized for multiple murders.
This is an excellent book. A disturbing look not only into the heart of a corrupt society, but into the mind of a diseased iconoclast.
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Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood –> read excerpts and liked it
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann –> Have you read him?
Joseph and His Brothers was Thomas Mann’s “Humane Comedy” of the 1930’s and 1940’s. As his European world was collapsing in ideological extremism and descending into chaos, Mann turned his imagination to the Semitic and Egyptian worlds of 1600 BCE and invested the prodigious gifts of his ironic imagination in the all-too-human desires and deities of that world. Though it is enormously long–over 1400 pages of smallish print–the Joseph Saga unfolds its treasures of humane perception to the patient reader who savors Mann’s delicious comedy. Read it slowly for full effect.
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