The bad and the great

With best-of listmania sweeping the land, the inevitable inverse is becoming popular. (See here and here.) So here's my dos pesos on some books that didn't ring my bell over the last year.

• On the Road by Jack Kerouac: Meh. Egomaniacs on drugs. Repeat for 250 pages.
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides: Gorgeously written, yes. But goes way overboard on melodramatic plot twists. And it stops just when it's getting interesting.
• Sunset and Sawdust by Joe R. Lansdale: Terrific opening sequence [heroine shooting her abusive husband as a tornado wrecks their home]. Sloppy patchwork mystery plotting for the remaining time, replete with corny Texas-twang dialogue and oh-so-odious bad guys. Energetic but sadly nothing new.
• The Sea by John Banville: Gonna have to agree with Book World on this. Pretty language does not a compelling tale make.

Not to be too negative... here's my favorite reads from this year:

• Veronica by Mary Gaitskill: Harshly beautiful; prose like a diamond knife. Sad, haunting, and hard to forget.
  
• Beasts of No Nation by Uzodimna Iweala: What a debut. A prose voice like none you've ever read.
  
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Sholokov: What great fun. Gogol on acid; freakishly inventive, fearless.
  
• M31: A Family Romance by Stephen Wright: Incandescent. For my money, Wright's one of the best writers working today.
  
• Out of the Woods by Chris Offutt: Short stories with incredible clarity, precision and control. Not a wasted word, not an unfelt moment.
  
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: The head, the tail, the whole damn thing. It isn't hype; it's everything, and more.
  

Nobody's perfect

• At Salon, George Rafael points out that other Nobel Prize winners haven't been saints, either.

Now that Gunter Grass has outed himself as being a member of the SS, it's time for more dirt on previous Nobel winners from decades past:

Knut Hamsun, Mikhail Sholokhov and Pablo Neruda scraped the lowest depths. A lifelong Germanophile whose pathological antipathy to modern life and much of Western civilization informed his oeuvre, Hamsun (Norway 1920) became a collaborator during the Nazi occupation of Norway. His enthusiasm was such that he gave his Nobel Prize medal to that prime specimen of the master race (and failed novelist), Joseph Goebbels; he also met Hitler. Unlike his infamous friend, Nazi politician Vidkun Quisling, Hamsun escaped the firing squad after the Second World War; he was judged insane.

According to scholars, notably Roy Medvedev, huge chunks of Sholokhov's prize-winning "And Quiet Flows the Don" (USSR 1965) were lifted from the works of Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and anti-Bolshevik writer who died of typhus in 1920. His victory was the crowning glory of a Communist Party toady whose rise in Soviet literary officialdom, as witnessed by dissident writer Vassily Aksyonov, was nothing "other than a supreme farce. Decade after decade his pen failed to create anything worth reading. Meanwhile, his mouth created nothing but propagandistic banalities."

The most shameful (and least known) episode, however, concerns Neruda, a lifelong, unrepentant Stalinist. During his stint at the Chilean Embassy in Paris dealing with asylum applications from Spanish Civil War refugees, Neruda is said to have heavily favored those who shared his hard-line beliefs when it came to issuing visas. One wonders how many of the rejected perished in concentration camps or wound up as slave laborers under Nazi and Vichy rule. There's also the little matter of Neruda's aiding and abetting under diplomatic cover an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, an action he defended his entire life.