Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Post Office by Charles Bukowski

People know that I'm into reading, so I tend to receive a lot of books as gifts. The problem is that gifting a book can be surprisingly difficult. Do I go with a new bestseller and risk giving something bland and mundane? Do I buy a classic that the recipient has most likely already read? Most people seem to opt for the former; one Christmas I received two copies of The Da Vinci Code. For my graduation party (a few weeks ago), people had put in their A-game and brought lots of really interesting books, including Post Office by Charles Bukowski. It might have helped that the party was at a book shop.

Apparently, Post Office is something of a classic, but I had never heard of it before and had stumbled upon Bukowski only in passing. Immediately I was reminded of the song "Bukowski" by Modest Mouse, which has the memorable refrain "Who would want to be such an asshole?". Other than that I had very little idea of who Charles Bukowski might be.

Post Office is one of those books that is probably best read without any preconceived ideas of what it is like. I greatly enjoyed it because it seemed short and non-threatening, a run-of-the-mill post-modern novel with aggressive punctuation and capitalization, an unlikeable main character and an existential crisis. But Bukowski turned out to be the real thing. Post Office is both heartbraking and hilarious, uncomplicated and intricate and it comes at you from many different angles in its relatively short 150 pages.

Initially, I was hoping to write a more in-depth analysis of everything that's going on in Post Office, but once again I'm lacking free time. I had a hard time deciphering whether the tone of the novel reveals the writers true thoughts or if even that is just another piece of his tongue-in-cheek humor. What am I to think of the main character: an uncomely drunk who gets lucky with the ladies and wins bets at horse races, but never manages to find decent work or a place in life. Is Henry Chinaski miserable because Bukowski himself was miserable?

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre

I'm a big fan of the relatively new film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It's a great spy movie and for a while I've been looking for an excuse to read the book. The movie is, in its way, chaotic and difficult to pin down in one go. For example, it jumps back and forward in time, mostly without warning, and relies on the wit of the viewer to put together the pieces. A friend of mine said that the best way to know what is going on is to pay attention to the main character's glasses. Apparently they're different in flashbacks. The movie is as much a post-modern study of film-making as it is a spy thriller.

I did not expect the novel to be so similar. John le Carre's style is very much understated and there are passages that remind me more of Charles Dickens than Ian Flemming. If you've just read a Dan Brown, you'll likely find it frustratingly slow and uneventful. That doesn't mean that Tinker Tailor compares unfavorably to today's fiction, quite the contrary. It doesn't try to wrap everything up in a sentimental finale, where the heroes prevail and love triumphs. Those tricks are reserved for Ken Follett and the likes.

But I have to say that I still enjoyed the film more. Not because the novel is inferior, but because the actors are wonderful and the script is just the right combination of not saying enough and implying too much. In a way, it is almost a breakout feature for many of the cast involved. Benedict Cumberbatch was on the up and up but not yet successful, Tom Hardy was perfectly cast as Ricki Tarr. Even the eponymous Tinkers and Tailors were cast so well that even though they remain background characters, you can feel the back story there. A big thank you to le Carre for writing it and Tomas Alfredson for directing it.

Monday, March 14, 2016

The Martian by Andy Weir

I have to admit that my every instinct told me that I would to enjoy The Martian. The recent movie adaptation convinced me to pick up this novel. I haven't seen it yet, mind you, but I saw a trailer and from what I can tell, Matt Damon is involved and there are a lot of nice computer generated mars-scapes. So it must be great. And I heard through the grapevine that the book is neat, especially if you enjoy science, Robinson Crusoe and nit picky details. Turns out that even though I thoroughly enjoy the first two, the unashamed focus on the nuts and bolts of space missions turned me off a little.

If I didn't imply it clearly enough yet, The Martian is quite simply Robinson Crusoe in space. Sometime in the near future, manned space missions to Mars are possible (but not very frequent) and Mark Watney is a member of the latest expedition. Things go south and Mark is left for dead on the red planet. He has to "science the shit out of everything", as he memorably puts it, in both the book and the previously mentioned movie trailer. He grows potatoes on Mars, improvises a communication system to recontact Earth and comes up with all kinds of little details that make life on Mars just that much more difficult.

There is nothing much wrong with The Martian. It's funny, inventive and sincere in the same way that the movie Cast Away is; humans go on living because survival is second nature to us. The format of the novel, however, was a little rough around the edges. The material started out as a blog and was later put into print and this transition is sometimes visible. Problems arise and are solved so often that at the end I didn't feel that Mark's mission was dangerous. It felt like fiction and therefore some of the unforeseen consequences he encounters toward the end of the book seem tacked on.