Aaron's Picks

Dark, muddy, and desperate images pervade this incredible volume from Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. The characters that inhabit the novel's unnamed village have lost hope in everything save for the charismatic wanderer Irimias. The villagers rally around their prodigal savior, allowing him to take full advantage of their vulnerable and credulous position. My favorite part of Satantango is the way that Krasznahorkai's deliberately slow, meandering sentences seem to become aware of their existence and ultimately mimic the characters' tortuous journey. One beautiful instance of this occurs who Krasznahorkai writes, "and so the words tumble over each other and begin sparring round as in a whirlpool, having formed the occasional frail, if painfully useless sentence," masterfully referencing the characters' dialogue, the author’s own command of language, and the novel's ruminations on meaning.

In her debut novel Kjersti Skomsvold is writing against the notion that aging can be a beautiful, life-affirming experience. For Skomsvold's protagonist, Mathea, growing old presents nothing but anxiety. Leaving her apartment where she lives alone, socializing with other elderly members of her community (who seem to be coping with their advanced age much better than she), asking the young supermarket attendant to help her open a jar of jam - all of these instances create a foreboding dread in Mathea that is equally as palpable in the reader. Though Mathea's crises appear hopeless, Skomsvold employs a dark sense of humor that fills out what would be an otherwise all-too-pathetic main character. As Norwegian author Stig Saeterbakken says, this is a “gloomy, feel-good book about the irreperable loneliness of being human.”

The incredibly dramatic back-story to Edouard Levé's Suicide threatens to completely overwhelm the novel itself: Levé took his own life just 10 days after handing over the manuscript to his publisher. His final actions, however, are much more explicit than anything in the novel; this novel is subtle and never gives itself to the overwhelming, emotional response that is typically associated with such a morose subject. The narrator examines the suicide of a friend without any over-the-top breakdown or psychic collapse, and instead conducts a thorough dissection of the melancholy that both precedes and follows suicide. This analysis vacillates between a near clinical precision and heartbreaking observation: “You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad.” A depressing read, to be sure, but one that affects without pretension.

This little piece of genre-defying literature began as an experiment designed by computer programmers, and ended up becoming one of the most clever novels I've ever read. Here’s a brief summary of its creation: computer nerds make an algorithm, the algorithm makes a flowchart detailing the steps necessary to ask your boss for a raise, the nerds give the chart to well-renowned French author. Perec’s interpretation of this flowchart adorns the end pages of the book, and provides the reader with a blueprint of everywhere the story could and will go. The breathless narration— told without any punctuation in order to mimic a computer—manages to examine each possible loop dozens of times without coming across as repetitive. Though Perec planned to write like a computer, he can’t help but kindle a sense of humanity— drawing readers into his protagonist’s tortuous, ill-fated endeavor.