Lots of good books this year, with me thoroughly enjoying stuff I’ve read by Pynchon, Ishiguro, Petrushevskaya, Jhumpa Lahiri and Teju Cole, as well as several books from Steven Brust’s Taltos series and several more from Sjowall and Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series. But the best ones are:
И дольше века длится день (The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years, Chinghiz Aitmatov, 1980) This is a wonderful book and I love it, but you have to admit the pitch for it is among the weirdest: do you want to read a social realist sci-fi novel, written by a party functionary who has no idea how space travel works, and that’s basically an orthodox communist writing a paean to conservatism? No? That’d be too bad, because unlike what it sounds like, this book actually has something interesting to say. It locates evil not in too much information, but in deliberate ignorance. The thing that Aitmatov rails against, again and again, is deliberate acts of forgetting or ignoring. He draws a parallel between the mankurt (a slave who’s had his memories destroyed), a government that decides to abandon a chance at alien contact, a son who disrespects his father’s memory, a functionary who persecutes a man for writing down his life story, a pointless desecration of a cemetery. It’s not a book that is against progress, but a book that is against forgetting. And it feels especially poignant that the narrative is interwoven with Kazakh legends. Legends of nomadic steppe people, for whom preserved landmarks are few and far apart, and the act of remembering must be deliberate. So even though the sci-fi part doesn’t make even the slightest amount of sense, this book is still so, so good, and highly recommended.
Я, бабушка, Илико и Илларион (Granny, Iliko, Illarion and I, Nodar Dumbadze, 1960, tr. Zurab Akhvlediani) I normally distrust books told from a child’s or teen’s perspective. It is too easy to cast the child as the straight man, the ingénu around whom the machinations of the adults swirl. But being a kid is not like that, and even to the extent that it can be, it’s not really an interesting thing to read about, or it isn’t for me, anyway. I unexpectedly loved this book from a youth’s perspective, but it’s in part because it’s nothing like that model of a book with kid as chief protagonist. The kid is as conniving and sly as his elder village neighbours Iliko and Illarion, and only plays up his innocence for greater hijinx. The three are really equals, as far as the book is concerned. As a result, less of the story is something that you understand before the narrator does. The humour is more varied and less about being a fish-out-of-water, the poignant moments less telegraphed. Truly a fun, funny, heartwarming book.
Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987) This is the best book I’ve read this year, and, possibly, in years. A story of a black family in Ohio just after the end of slavery that seems to be being haunted by ghosts. A particular kind of lore pervades this book, where each person’s unique, personal pain is also a component of that person’s mythology. So every character is simultaneously viscerally alive and fantastically larger than life. The only book I can think of as a point of comparison for the feeling is “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. If the only book you can think of as a point of comparison for something is “One Hundred Years of Solitude” that already says a lot. Right now, to me, it’s so clearly the best American book I’ve ever read, that I am wondering how I ended up not reading it until this year
Red Plenty (Francis Spufford, 2010) A novel made up of vignettes from various “representative” people from the Soviet Union, some well-known, like Nikita Khruschyov, Leonid Kantorovich and Alexander Galich, some obscure, and some fictional. Concentrating on how cogs of a planned economy come together and on Gosplan itself, Red Plenty gives a sense, I don’t know to what extent illusory, of providing a general picture of how the Soviet economy worked, and how that impacted Soviet life. How appealing that sounds to you probably varies. Communists would likely see it as naked anti-Communist propaganda, and anti-Communists would likely see it as an irrelevant waste of time: it’s not whether or not they applied linear programming correctly that was the main problem with the USSR. For me, though, I really relished that style of a novel that gives a glimpse of the machinery of society, and I would be extremely excited to read such novels for other places and other economic systems.
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (Alice Munro, 1974) Look, it’s a book of short stories written by Alice Munro, so of course it’s brilliant, you don’t need me to tell you that. There is maybe a handful of authors who have the insight to understand and then the courage and skill to put to paper what goes on in people’s minds in daily life, and then make that worth reading. Reading Munro, you feel completely “seen”, in both a good and bad way. But what I’ve been wondering lately is whether there is something in people who write the best realist fiction that stops them from ever being true believers. Whether to be a great author of realist fiction inclines you to a kind of ambivalence and uncertainty that hinders you from forming extreme convictions. More than anything, many of the stories here are written through the lens of such ambivalent characters looking at true believers with a combined admiration, scepticism and annoyance. They realize that some of them are faking it, and that causes indignation, but also a pleasant sense of moral superiority. But then they also realize that some of them are not faking it, and that brings frustration, but with it a sense of personal inadequacy. It forms a motif for this collection, but it’s also everywhere in Didion, in Pynchon, in Bitov, among others. And, perhaps appropriately, I feel ambivalent about it. It’s a great gift, but the inability to be unequivocal about anything is also an enormous limitation.
Рассказ о семи повешенных (The Seven Who Were Hanged, Leonid Andreyev, 1908) In a collected works of Andreyev, this novella about five terrorists who attempt a political assassination, as well as their proposed victim and two other criminals who receive the death penalty stands out by far. In the way that every character is treated differently, and every character is treated with humanity. Just a very strong, very emotionally powerful portrayal of people dealing with extreme stress. If Wikipedia is right, and reading this book inspired the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, then it’s also among the most historically important works of fiction ever written.
Serve the People! (Yan Lianke, 2005, tr. Julia Lovell) It’s a cult of personality satire set during the Cultural Revolution, but it’s not the satire that is the selling point of this book to me. Instead, it’s the prose. The book is bristling with more metaphors and similes per 60 than probably anything I’ve read, and these are always double-decker over-the-top constructions that just invite you to stop and marvel. But it’s not just individual phrases, the descriptions build up into something more, a wonderful picture of comic timing. And for how well it all works in English, Julia Lovell’s wonderfully arch translation must share a lot of the credit.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman, 2013) I somehow thought I had read this book and was recommending it to people, but it turns out I had read something else (maybe Coraline?) and my attempted “rereading” was actually a first-time reading. Lucky that it turns out to be great. There’s a sense of magic here that’s both comforting and old-timey as well as arcane and dangerous. Perfect for people who, like me, really loved the Tom Bombadil chapter in the Lord of the Rings and have been looking to scratch that itch ever since.
Killing Commendatore (Haruki Murakami, 2017, tr. Phillip Gabriel/Ted Goossen) It’s odd that all Murakami is kind of the same, and yet some of it is really good and some of it is really mediocre. If you were to construct a “Murakami bingo” card, Killing Commendatore would definitely tick a lot of boxes: a disembodied concept that takes the guise of a known piece of culture, listening to jazz records on a record player, precise lyrical descriptions of a man living alone cooking simple meals, portals into other worlds. All of it is here, but rather than being annoyed at the repetitiveness, I was borne along by the plot. Lots of things are happening here, and there’s never so much of a lull that you have to look around and wonder whether it’s too similar to something else. The best parts are descriptions of the process of portrait painting, and combining this book with a visit to a portrait exhibition made it even more enjoyable.
My Nine Lives (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 2004) In the introduction, Jhabvala presents the book as an autobiography of sorts. Which is not at all what it is, since the nine stories have very different characters, who are all mutually contradictory in some way. Or maybe it’s unfair to say it’s supposed to be autobiography: what she actually says is that every “I” in the book is her, but the other people are not actual other people. So it’s an exercise of deliberate self-insertion, thinking of ways life could have been, but wasn’t. Because Jhabvala feels at home (but also not quite at home) in the UK, in the US, and in India, there are many different lives that she can situate herself in. At the same time, her “I”s in the story are surprisingly flawed people, ones I, for example, would have difficulty admitting to. The fictional remove, rather than serving to sugarcoat real facts, gives enough distancing for unflinching honesty in terms of self-assessment. Interesting as an exercise, and even more interesting as just nine different very good short stories.
Rated Zed 
My biggest complaint about the Peter Jackson films was the lack of Tom Bombadil.