There are few more hackneyed ideas than the year-end list. The "best" are the worst: The Best Books. The Best Films. The Best Live Theatre. The Best Political Scandal - Canada wins hands down for the dead heat between the Senate expenses dustup and the Rob Ford Follies. So how about a slightly less threadbare list of the books I have enjoyed reading the most this year, even if all of them have flaws small or large but none that are inexcusable.
In no particular order, they are Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edyugan. It won the Giller Prize in 2011 and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize that year, too. It's a tour de force. The writer has given us a story that is deeply felt and a Black/Baltimore/German-inflected language that dips and soars like the best jazz. Occasionally, even with the best musicians, a note comes out flat - in this case when dialogue switches codes from swerving improvisation to the strictly formal. And making the female jazz singer a native of Montreal seems like a bit of unnecessary CanCon. Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Human Emotions is also on my list. The first part of the book comes from Being and Nothingness, and the rest was written independent of that. It's a defence of his philosophy against criticism, particularly that of Catholics and communists. It's as compelling today as it must have been in the 1950s, and both parts are written in admirably translated English.
Paris also features in the next two books on the list. They are Published in Paris, by Hugh Ford, and Death in the City of Light, by David King. The former is an excellent compendium of who was who among the writers and publishers of the Lost Generation, and the section on Edward Titus (husband of Helena Rubenstein and beneficiary of his wife's uncomprehending largesse) and his Black Manikin Press and "librarie" and bookstore At the Sign of the Black Manikin is very good. The latter is a tale of gore, madness, greed, anti-Semitism, indifference and official incompetence. Like so much about occupied France in WWII, it was a case of "sauve qui peut" - every man for himself. Dr. Marcel Petiot was a serial killer who disposed of his victims - many of them Jewish and desperate to flee the Nazis - with stupefying abandon. Not a book for the faint-hearted.
The other favourites on my list are Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, by Gohar Homayounpour and The Mind in Conflict, by the great Freudian analyst Charles Brenner. After a long time away Dr. Homayounpour, a clinical psychologist who did her undergrad at Queen's University in Kingston, decided to return to Iran to practice there. Well, it's clear she's conflicted about her move and her conflict is reflected in the book. I expected far more about her analysands - patients to you and me - and can only remember one, a cultured, self-important woman. What I got was plenty about the psychologist herself, and I couldn't help but think from what she wrote and how she wrote it that Dr. Homayounpor could use some more time on an analyst's couch. Last but certainly not least is The Mind in Conflict. It's not a book for the lay reader - I think - but for those who ply the psychology trade in private practice or in universities. I highlighted passage after passage. There's plenty in there that I understand, but some I don't and don't think I ever will.
In no particular order, they are Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edyugan. It won the Giller Prize in 2011 and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize that year, too. It's a tour de force. The writer has given us a story that is deeply felt and a Black/Baltimore/German-inflected language that dips and soars like the best jazz. Occasionally, even with the best musicians, a note comes out flat - in this case when dialogue switches codes from swerving improvisation to the strictly formal. And making the female jazz singer a native of Montreal seems like a bit of unnecessary CanCon. Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Human Emotions is also on my list. The first part of the book comes from Being and Nothingness, and the rest was written independent of that. It's a defence of his philosophy against criticism, particularly that of Catholics and communists. It's as compelling today as it must have been in the 1950s, and both parts are written in admirably translated English.
Paris also features in the next two books on the list. They are Published in Paris, by Hugh Ford, and Death in the City of Light, by David King. The former is an excellent compendium of who was who among the writers and publishers of the Lost Generation, and the section on Edward Titus (husband of Helena Rubenstein and beneficiary of his wife's uncomprehending largesse) and his Black Manikin Press and "librarie" and bookstore At the Sign of the Black Manikin is very good. The latter is a tale of gore, madness, greed, anti-Semitism, indifference and official incompetence. Like so much about occupied France in WWII, it was a case of "sauve qui peut" - every man for himself. Dr. Marcel Petiot was a serial killer who disposed of his victims - many of them Jewish and desperate to flee the Nazis - with stupefying abandon. Not a book for the faint-hearted.
The other favourites on my list are Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, by Gohar Homayounpour and The Mind in Conflict, by the great Freudian analyst Charles Brenner. After a long time away Dr. Homayounpour, a clinical psychologist who did her undergrad at Queen's University in Kingston, decided to return to Iran to practice there. Well, it's clear she's conflicted about her move and her conflict is reflected in the book. I expected far more about her analysands - patients to you and me - and can only remember one, a cultured, self-important woman. What I got was plenty about the psychologist herself, and I couldn't help but think from what she wrote and how she wrote it that Dr. Homayounpor could use some more time on an analyst's couch. Last but certainly not least is The Mind in Conflict. It's not a book for the lay reader - I think - but for those who ply the psychology trade in private practice or in universities. I highlighted passage after passage. There's plenty in there that I understand, but some I don't and don't think I ever will.
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