To Die in Italbar

Roger Zelazny ranked To Die in Italbar as his worst novel, but I strongly disagree; I would give that title to the uninteresting Damnation Alley, which features little of what characterizes his better work -- that is, snappy dialog, an interesting protagonist, exotic locales, and fleshing out of setting and motive. All of that is present here, although this isn't nearly Lord of Light.

Zelazny begins the novel by dropping several different characters in unrelated settings on us, before finally tying them all together. It's a bit of an information dump (and several of the characters, notably our female protagonist) aren't very well fleshed out. Still, he shoves the story along quickly enough that it's hard to get too bogged down in that.

Probably the weakest area of the story is the motivation of the man who's the objective of the main characters; his reasoning is a little too capricious. Of course, it's demanded by the plot, and can be handwaved away with a little deus ex machina, so maybe not. (I do like Zelazny's concept there, although it's hurried, as he notes, and weakly fleshed out). The final conflict occurs offscreen, observed secondhand by the reader, which can work well as a device, and works tolerably here.

A fun, easy read, but not one of Zelazny's better works.

The Lost City of Z

David Grann's The Lost City of Z was widely praised, and I can certainly see why -- Grann keeps the narrative moving, while skipping between his experiences, and those of Colonel Percy Fawcett, one of the final figures of the Age of Exploration, who disappeared somewhere in the Amazonian jungle looking for the remnants of an ancient civilization. (Or not so ancient, a contemporary of the Maya, the Inca, and the Aztecs.)

Probably the best point of the book was how interweaving Fawcett's and Grann's story allowed Fawcett to slowly come into the foreground; in the beginning, he looks like a quietly competent man, the last of the Victorian era explorers. By the end, he seems like a madman on a spiritual, rather than a scientific, quest. The weakest point was that the long winding up was unable to produce a satisfying conclusion -- Grann spends the entire book working up to his Amazon trip, and then nearly immediately comes to a conclusion. While he's able to tie this in with the end of Fawcett's story, it feels rushed, pat, and not fleshed out. (Of course, given that Fawcett disappeared ~80 years before Grann began the project, in a jungle, Grann was unlikely to find anything other than he did, which is old Indian legends).

Overall, this is a fun pop-archaeology/anthropology/history book, with an interesting hook.

Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day

This isn't anything groundbreaking, but it's a quick overview of Roman culture, customs, and mores written in the style of a travel guide. While not for the serious scholar, it's a fair introduction to daily life in the greatest city the world would see for over a thousand years. The author also breaks up each section with short passages from Roman writers like Martial, Horace, Virgil, and Juvenal.

Not something to seek out, but a decent way to kill some time.

Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana wasn't considered by its author as one of his serious novels, instead being "an entertainment". A lighthearted comedy set during the Cold War during the last gasps Fulgencio Batista's regime (Castro disliked the novel because it trivializes the cruelties of Batista), it's the story of a vacuum cleaner salesman who's recruited into Britain's secret service.

A satire of colonialism, the Cold War, spy agencies, and bureaucracy,Our Man in Havana is easy reading, the plot breezily moving forward through the third person limited viewpoint of Wormold, the titular man. Recruited in a men's bathroom by a mysterious and laconic secret agent, Wormold reluctantly goes along, caring only for the money, and protecting his beautiful daughter from the notorious policeman who's attempting to court her.

It's a fun story that careens towards the inevitable conclusion, even if the ending feels a little tacked on.

Ninety-Two in the Shade

I've seen Thomas McGuane's Ninety-Two in the Shade described as "written on drugs", which may be a fair description, but it's a funny, worthwhile novel. A story of going crazy, family issues, lost potential, certain death, fishing, love affairs, dropping acid, rodents eating cake, living in a bomber fuselage, relatives running whorehouses, women with shopping compulsions, bonefish, rubes from the Midwest, told through bursts of literary pyrotechnics.

I don't have much else to add here. The prose can occasionally become overwrought, and the characters maddening. The plot (described in another review as "ephemeral as a cocaine high") moves swiftly and inevitably, and the ending is, if not satisfying, then worth a smirk. I plan to re-read this at some point, just for the fireworks.

Distant Star

Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star is a novel I'd been looking for for some time. It's an expansion of a short chapter at the end of Bolaño's earlier Nazi Literature in the Americas, although the name of the pilot changes between the two stories (for the worse in my opinion).

Like quite a bit of Bolaño's work, Distant Star focuses on poets and poetry. Our narrator is someone like Bolaño, a Chilean exile who has bounced around over the years. (As mentioned by Bolaño in an author's note, this is most likely Bolaño's alter ego, Arturo Belano). Narrator first encounters the poet/pilot in a poetry workshop, which he (Carlos Wieder, the pilot) had been attending under an assumed name.

I've seen Distant Star called a companion piece to Bolaño's By Night in Chile, in other reviews, as they both deal with the post-coup literary scene. Of course, while this is true, they're quite different works. The paranoia and irrationality of O'Ryan (whose obsession with Wieder drives much of the novel) pales before that of our priest in the latter novel. (Not to mention that the pacing is significantly different. A deathbed rant as opposed to a fugue.)

Recommended, as with all of Bolaño's work that I've come across. (Although I'd prefer the chapter in Nazi Literature in the Americas, to this.)

Monster of God

David Quammen’s Monster of God is an ambitious work in which he attempts to link both the fate of several species that prey on man (lion in India, crocodile in India and Australia, the brown bear in Romania, and the tiger in Siberia) as well as the effect they have on humans. While other species will occasionally kill a human, these are a few of the predators that see man as prey. (Others include the great white shark, and the Komodo dragon, and related species of shark, felid, or reptile.) Quammen coins a term for these animals – “alpha predator”, that is one animal that will stalk, kill, and eat a human, rather than kill a human out of territoriality or fear.

Probably the most interesting part of Quammen's work here is what the Amazon.com review calls "[his] peripatetic mind", as he jumps from topic to topic -- the lions of an Indian nature reserve lead him to another nature reserve (for crocodiles) in another part of India, to a lurid work on crocodiles in Africa written during the 1970s (titled Eyelids of Morning, one of many references to God's description of Leviathan in the Book of Job herein*) , back to India, and finally to the saltwater crocodiles of Northern Australia. Quammen is also prone to digression, as he spends time late in the work discussing the Alien franchise, as well as cave paintings in France. This is not a problem, unless one is unable to keep up.

While Quammen does provide a fascinating survey of a variety of subjects, and has clearly done a significant amount of fieldwork (or at least tagging along with biologists while they are doing fieldwork), his overall attempts at tying everything together are a tad weak. Not that this is not a fascinating book -- because it certainly is. Just I feel he fails to live up to the latter part of the subtitle of the book -- the man-eating predator is well covered in the jungles of history, but Quammen's foray into the jungles of the mind falls short. Still recommended.

*One of my favorite of Roger Zelazny's works is "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth", which also takes its title from that part of Job (Chapter 41, verse 14-19, King James 1769).

Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth [are] terrible round about.
[His] scales [are his] pride, shut up together [as with] a close seal.
One is so near to another, that no air can come between them.
They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered.
By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes [are] like the eyelids of the morning.
Out of his mouth go burning lamps, [and] sparks of fire leap out.