I'm a pushover for unrequited love, so my opinion may be a bit biased, but I no sooner finished Love in the Time of Cholera than it jumped, no, vaulted to the top of my list of the best books I have ever read.

A two-sentence synopsis might read, "As a young man, Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza and is rejected by her. After waiting 51 years for her husband to die, he renews their courtship," and of course this does the book no justice. Nor would a 25-page or even a 100-page summary suffice. Love in the Time of Cholera is one book that cannot possibly be digested without destroying some essential part.

And this is in the spirit of the book. Neither Florentino nor Fernanda can be wholly appreciated, wholly understood except in light of their whole life. Not only does each moment of present in their lives require knowledge of their past before it inspires sympathy, but it requires knowledge of who they will become in order to be presented in its fullest context.

To this end, Marquez presents the intertwined lives of the two characters not chronologically or even as a series of internally chronological segments, but in some conceptual order of his own making that attempts to present each character's entire experience at once, insofar as this is possible. So for example when a character makes a vow to himself, the next scene is a leap into the past to show what memory was going through his mind when he made the vow, why keeping it will be important to him. Then, the narration jumps ten years into the future beyond the vow to show the closest he ever comes to breaking it, to show exactly what circumstances would make him reconsider it and shatter his heart in deciding to keep it, and then, only then, can the story proceed from the point of the vow. Only then can you understand the significance of this vow in the character's life and have your own heart broken every time the vow comes into question. Throughout the book, Marquez constantly bounds through time to show, "What led to this?" and "What will this come to mean?" The presentation does not confuse, except when trying to figure out what age the characters might be in any given scene. It is, quite simply, the order events must be presented in to understand the characters' lives.

The presentation is so masterful, in fact, that you may feel the characters' emotions more strongly than you feel your own. You have only your memories to base your feelings on, but you are slowly acquiring their entire lives. You know not only where they have been, what hopes they had that are being fulfilled or dashed to the ground, but where this moment will take them. In the time of cholera, knowing the future does not spoil it -- it makes the present more real.

"More than real" is also a good description of the characters themselves. Florentino and Fernanda are no fairly-tale distillations of human beings, no archetypical personae with everything save this hopeless love or that haughty grandeur pared from them. They are, quite the opposite, so crammed full of human details and failings that it seems at times no human life could be that full of idiosyncracy. Every sentence displays another facet of personality. Florentino has difficulty as a businessman because he cannot keep his business letters free of love poetry. Fernanda smokes her cigarettes locked in the bathroom with the lit end in her mouth because she first had them as a guilty pleasure that no adult knew about. Florentino spends his time waiting out Fernanda's marriage in 622 "long-term liaisons" and countless one-night stands, and then tells her that for her sake, he has kept himself a virgin. You want to be like them not because their experience is at all pleasant, but because you slowly gain the suspicion that even as collections of words on paper, they are more alive than you.

Perhaps this is one of Cholera's messages. Florentino, whose life is based in a half-century of obsession with a woman who has rejected him, who witnesses his succession of abortive relationships, his mother's increasing senility, and the aging of himself and the one he loves, is nonetheless a happy man who wakes up each morning in the absolute confidence that when Fernanda becomes a widow, he will make her happy. Fernanda, who has resigned herself to whatever life brings her, even though it brings her a mostly good marriage, is slowly hollowed out by time until she requires Florentino's experiences and obsession to rejuvenate her. And in the end, it rejuevantes you as the reader, too -- it gives courage to love beyond reasonable hope and to live more than any human being can.

First, the obligatory comparison to the Mars trilogy. I didn't enjoy Antarctica quite as much as I did Red Mars, but I found it substantially better reading than the rest of the trilogy. That out of the way...

There's some quality in the stories of the Lensmen or Conan the Barbarian that have caused them to persist in print, or at least in the collective memory of genre fiction enthusiasts, long after most of what appeared beside them in the pulps has faded (mercifully) into obscurity. I think it's a sort of authorial passion, a sincere belief on the part of the writer in his or her characters and the story.

Antarctica is redeemed by this sort of passion. The strength of belief with which Robinson tells the story transforms a collection of passages which might otherwise be simply irritating into one of his better novels. It's not so much his own belief in his politics (there _is_ some incredibly bad environmentalist literature out there) as much as something more ineffable, some experience Robinson incurred during his own time on the ice continent that he manages to convey in these pages.

Because really, most of the novel consists of
(1) Retellings of the more notable expeditions (Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton) of the early exploration of the continent. As told by Robinson, though, this isn't extraneous exposition, but a testament to human folly, courage, and willpower, the collected stories of men made of iron and boot-leather.

(2) Almost Michener-esque descriptions of Antarctican landscape and culture. Yes, it's ice, ice, and more ice. In the hand of a skilled writer who's seen it firsthand, though, it becomes a beautiful desolation that first makes you want to go there and then makes you wonder if you should want to go there -- whether your own presence would somehow make the landscape less what you came there to see.

(3) Groups of characters vigorously agreeing with each other about how dysfunctional capitalism is. OK, this gets preachy. But Robinson can preach well, and somewhere the idea that a what a few thousand people do on Antarctica should become a world-changing philosophical event for a globe of billions no longer seems like an absurd case of the tail wagging the dog, but of those few thousand daring to believe they should wag the dog.

Oh yeah, and there's about a hundred pages worth of plot tucked away in there somewhere, regarding an eco-terrorist action that destroys the Antarctican communications infrastructure and the characters having to find their ways back to human settlements before their food and medical situations become critical. But seriously, this is peripheral.

Writers of speculative fiction should take as a charge what Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the frontispiece of Cat's Cradle: "Live by the foma [harmless untruths] that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." Antarctica is about people learning to be brave and kind and healthy and happy, and about the continent that catalyzes this transformation.

As far as its individual parts are concerned, Ravelstein shows Bellow at the top of his form. Bellow is a great thinker, and since most of the novel consists of his autobiographical narrator's reflections or discussions between the narrator and the Allan Bloom alter-ego Abe Ravelstein, the novel contains plenty of great thoughts. At points, Bellow tackles topics as diverse as lost love, the Holocaust, and a man's choice in cigarettes. He treats all of these as worthy of deliberate consideration, elaborating on them with erudite comparisons to Plato or Keynes or with intimate childhood memories.

Sometimes though, it seems that in a life spent honing a talent for deep discussion on any topic imaginable, Bellow may have lost the eye for discerning which topics are worthy of deep discussion. Bellow has a philosopher's eye: he can see meaning in places where most would find only triteness, and he can bring you to see that meaning, too. But sometimes, just sometimes, in Ravelstein Bellow transgresses some indefinite boundary and becomes less a philosopher and more a man who has become quite sentimental in his age.

Given the subject matter, this isn't surprising. Ravelstein is an elegy written for a dearly loved friend. It is filled with what seems like barely fictionalized accounts of Bellow's best times spent with that friend, especially towards the end of his life, and as such it should be sentimental. However, many of these memories simply consist of Ravelstein and the narrator gossiping about mutual acquaintances. Bellow makes a valiant attempt to make these discussions appear to be more than gossip (As one character puts it, "With him it's not gossip -- it's social history."), but really, gossip is all it is, and gossip about people I don't know can be rather uninteresting. As hard as Bellow may try to imbue deeper meaning into one minor character's use of green ink, another's haircut, or the cleaning lady's rough treatment of the crystal, that deep meaning does not adhere well to such shallow substrates.

I spent most of Ravelstein uncertain of whether I was enjoying reading it. Bellow is a master of his art, and he did infect me with his own concern for topics I do not care about and people I do not know. But really, Ravelstein contains too little of what is universal and too much of what is unique to Saul Bellow to capture me in a rapture of bibliovory. The last fifty pages, in which the narrator nearly dies of ciguatoxin eaten in a fish on a tropical vacation and credits his recovery to the love of his wife and his unpaid debt to write Ravelstein's memoirs, convinced me that I had been enjoying myself. It sets the bulk of the book not as something that would make great literature in its own right, but as memories and reflections that had to be expressed to honor a beloved friend. The subject matter might be trite, but Bellow's care for it is anything but.

If you only want to read one or two books by Saul Bellow, read Augie March or Humboldt's Gift instead. But for the devotee of Bellows works, Ravelstein is no disappointment.

Toni Morrison's Jazz is like the very little girl with a very little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When it is good, it is very, very good, and when it is bad, it is horrid.

First, where it is good. Jazz tells about a murderous love triangle in 1920's Harlem involving Joe Trace, a middle-aged cosmetics salesman who takes an 18-year old lover, and then to keep the affair from ending, kills her. His wife Violet then seeks revenge on the girl by mutilating her corpse at the funeral, but finally is reconciled to the girl's family and to her husband. A plot about passions, if there ever was one, and Morrison's language certainly evokes those passions. Hers is prose more to be experienced than read. The passages narrating the characters' childhoods and states of mind leading up to their various acts of love and violence makes you understand exactly what experiences in being a Negro in the turn-of-the century south or Jazz Age New York would lead a person to feel the anger and longing that produces the passionate violence this book is about. Her language does not only explain these dark passions, does not only let the reader share them, but actually makes them seem beautiful, in their own inverted sort of way.

But in her use of this language, Morrison is not so much an author as a presdigitator. Her lyric prose catches the mood of the characters' actions without actually making them make any sense, and so the excellent style of the novel merely serves as a diversionary tactic to distract one from the fact that the plot is quite weak. Read for emotion, the book does let you feel what the characters feel, but read actually paying attention to the text, there are numerous moments where you can't help but ask, "And the character is doing this why?" or "This symbolic motivation is related to the character's actual actions in what way?" I felt almost cheated at the end when Violet reconciles herself to Joe without even a cursory explanation of what led her violent, hateful, destructive emotions to do a complete about-face in the space of the last twenty pages. Certainly, the final description of their renewed commitment to their love is beautiful, but it is marred in that it makes no sense, and its senselessness makes no sense either.

This might be overlooked if Morrison even managed to keep up her lyric conjuring for the entire novel. But it is occasionally interrupted by self-indulgent intrusions wherein a narrative "I" confesses that even the author really doesn't understand the characters. (This does not help the reader in the slightest.) Then there are the extended flashbacks involving minor characters' childhoods in the South that neither advance nor explain the main 1920's Harlem plot, and furthermore destroy the lyric jazz mood of the novel because the jazz style that works so beautfully in the city simply is not appropriate for the rural deep South.

Jazz is a good novel to experience the first 50 pages of, to become wrapped up in Morrison's almost magic prose. But it is not worth finishing -- she should have lent her considerable narrative talents to a more worthy plot.

I found Soul Mountain to be one of those unique works of literature that immediately identifies itself as great for inexplicable reasons. I cannot compare this book to any other, either in terms of narrative sytle or content. Nonetheless, it is one of the most meaningful reflective texts I have read. It is about the author's journey of self-discovery, but along the way, you may have your own.

Given a reprieve from death when his diagnosis of lung cancer is rescinded and forced to leave Beijing due to threats of political imprisonment, the autobiographical narrator I travels throughout interior China documenting traditional folk songs and seeking a state of being in which he can give free rein to his artistic expression. In a series of unconnected episodes, I tells of his encounters with forest rangers, Buddhist and Daoist monastics, government workers, keepers of the traditions of ethnic minorities, and his own childhood memories. As he tells these stories, I decries the destruction of traditional culture for the sake of "progress" under the Communist regime but mourns the weight culture places on individual freedom. I longs to return to a wild, primal state but is rebuffed by the callous indifference of raw nature. I's story is that of trying to reconcile these conflicting ideas of what it is good for the self to become.

Interleaved with I's story is the story of you, who in metaphor with I's own journey, is traveling to the mythical mountain Lingshan (Soul Mountain). Early in his journey, you gains a traveling companion, she. The interaction between you and she becomes frightening portrayal of how men and women can trap each other in a relationship neither wants, and how easy it is to do so. Eventually you frees himself of she and resumes his journey to Lingshan, but his experiences are not again the same.

Experimental fiction always walks a fine line between narrating in an unorthodox way that is nonetheless perfect for telling the particular story being told and narrating in a way that is such a distortion of traditional narrative that the reader cannot follow. It took me a few (short) chapters to acclimate myself to the interplay between pronouns, to Gao's storytelling mode that is half travelogue and half metaphor, but once acquainted with it, I found it unique but very readable. The story is almost its own tutor in how to read it. There's a point about 300 pages in where both I's and you's stories undergo major changes, and the narrative style here changes a bit too, and I was lost again for a few chapters. This is unfortunate because I felt this section of the book was one of the most important and I missed a lot here, but even a re-read didn't help. The vast majority of the book though, is very lucid.

Gao's prose defies adjectives. It is haunting, multilayered, deeply symbolic, almost a mirror of the self. I've placed this book in my stack of things to read again in ten years, books that become reflections of one's own experience and should be re-read to see what new insights appear as that experience changes.

Demon, the conclusion of the Gaean trilogy, is in my opinion the most satisfying of the three. In the first two books, I frequently got the feeling that Varley had bitten off more than he could chew, character-wise, and so filled in the gap with gratuitous sex scenes and fetishistically detailed descriptions of alien genitalia and reproductive modes. In constrast, Demon confines itself to being an epic adventure and does very well in this role.

Demon is more "stylistic" than the others. It is set up as a triple feature from the pre-cineplex days of motion pictures, broken into pieces like "Newsreel," "Short Subjects," "Feature One," etc... This affectation works well given Demon's subject matter. Gaea's godhood has finally driven her completely insane, and she has decided that all the world should be a film of her devising, that she is the arch-villain, and that it can only end with a hero coming to kill her.

In his descriptions of the insane deity, Varley uses all his considerable resources of imagination and humor. She has taken the incarnate form of a fifty-foot tall Marilyn Monroe and constructed an enormous movie studio / theatre / theme park called Pandemonium, where she and her lieutenants, mostly undead reconstructions of humanity's major religious figures (Martin Luther, Buddha, L. Ron Hubbard), await the coming of a hero and commit various atrocities.

Varley spares none of his imagination in constructing Cirocco's allies for this final conflict, either. The best-constructed of these is Snitch, a small reptilian imp surgically extracted from Cirocco's own brain and a direct link to the mind of Gaea. Many of the characters from the first two novels also return, although in a changed form. For example, Gaby has become a ghost in Gaea's brain, Chris is in the process of turning into a Titanide, and Nasu the anaconda has grown to several kilometers in length.

In short, in the long tradition of epic heroism, Demon places an array of unlikely characters against a self-proclaimed Pure Evil, and in the end, they triumph. It stretches a bit long in places, and many of the inter-character interactions are more than a little thin, but that isn't the point. This is a book about being a hero, and a fairly good one at that.

The age of books like Titan is long since gone. The fact that Titan is still in print is telling -- it is among the best this era had to offer.

An enormous investment of imagination and analysis went into creating Gaea, the giant living space-habitat where the story takes place. Many novels of this day were full of strange alien landscapes and creatures that come off as hollow flights of fancy arranged by authorial fiat. Here though, they fit together in symbiosis. Even the parts of the world that seem "not quite right" on the first read through make perfect sense at the end after finding out more about the world's history. In fact, this is a good analogy for the plot of the book as a whole: a series of apparently random adventures with little obvious connection that finally makes perfect sense at the end when you learn what's really been going on.

Titan is also a reasonably good psychological novel. The opening events leave all the human characters mentally "damaged" in various ways, and Varley does a very believable, mature job of developing the plot as each character overcomes or sinks deeper into his or her respective psychosis.

What prevents Titan from being much better than it is is that Varley does not apply this same maturity to his handling of the various sexual issues he tries to address. In his treatment of free love, homosexuality, rape, abortion, and the like, his characters don't act like the liberated personalities he intends them to be, but simply as people who are as dogmatized in one direction as the American society of thirty years ago was dogmatized in the other. As a result, what Varley intended as thought provoking, having in time lost all shock value, comes off somewhere between childish and puerile. Especially in their almost fetishistic attention to alien pudenda, these passages are no longer good for much more than the titillation of 14-year old boys.

In short, Titan is among the best of the "adventure while exploring alien landscape" space operas of yesteryear. It surpasses most of that genre in terms of both coherency and imagination, and only falls down where it tried to run a path many books like it would not even try to tiptoe.

For most of this novella, Bellow tells a story that appears to be going nowhere. The narrator, the child of Jewish immigrants who has become ionospherically wealthy selling memory-enhancement techniques, recalls two friends he last saw thirty years ago.

The narrator begins to tell the tale of Harry Fonstein, a Jew smuggled out of Fascist Italy by an underground organization financed by the Broadway producer Billy Rose. Rose refuses to hear Fonstein's thanks, and so his life is overshadowed by a cloud of gratitude he is not allowed to express. Until his wife Sorella decides to avenge Rose's treatment of her husband...

and then the narrator stops telling his story, because he hadn't seen the Fonsteins since. The final third of the novella raises difficult questions about memory and the duty to remember. Has the narrator's eidetic memory replaced actual relationship with the people he remembers? Is that memory even accurate? Has he in fact, failed to fulfill the whole point of memory, despite near-perfect recall of the actual facts?

This story lulls you in with an almost colloquial style and simple plot, and then ends that plot to force you to confront how easy it is to fail duties to friends and cultural identity. After its unsophisticated beginning, the final revelation is very disconcerting.

In America intends to be an "important" act of "literature." It is not. It is not even a good read. In the whole story of Maryna Zalezowska, a Polish actress who emigrates to America with a horde of friends and admirers, fails to found a commune farm, and returns to success on the stage, the only remotely memorable moments are snapshots of local color that are almost digressions from the story itself.

The account of two of the characters' sea passage across the Atlantic, focusing on the contrast between their first-class accommodations and those in steerage, actually is touching. There are descriptions of 19th century New York, early Anaheim, and Comstock Lode silver mining towns that might make a die-hard jingoist shed a tear, not because they are flattering of America, but just because they portray her painted large in all the false glory of the gilded age. The last chapter, a long, rambling, almost humorous monologue by Edwin Booth as he half-heartedly tries to seduce the protagonist by telling her how pathetic a person he is, is worth reading (or maybe that was only my impression because it was the end of the book).

But these highlights are actually digressions from the story itself. The real story, revolves around Maryna, who is terribly uninteresting. She possesses a self-centeredness that enables her to do whatever she wants and entrain those around her in her wake, but when one looks closer to see what aspects of her character this self-centeredness might stem from, there is nothing. No innate charisma beyond being a beautiful woman, no grand ideas other than those lifted wholesale from 19th century French social theorists, no traits of human mobility, as if a present-day purveyor of postmodern literature could condescend to believe in such a thing. By authorial fiat, Maryna is the center of her world, but she lacks the attributes that might enable her to be the center of the reader's.

Since Maryna must be the focal point of the book, on several times another character's subplot is developed just to the point of becoming interesting, only to be promptly aborted. One couple in the commune, Julian and Wanda, have latent marital problems that America brings into much clearer focus. Wanda makes a suicide attempt, and then the characters are shipped back to Poland and mostly forgotten about. Maryna begins an affair with her persistent admirer Ryszard. It turns stale and ends. We discover Maryna's husband Bogdan is sexually attracted to the Mexican farmhands in Anaheim, but this goes nowhere as it is immaterial to Maryna's career, and by extension the book. Basically, the whole novel revolves around an innately uninteresting person, and all other characters must become even more completely two-dimensional to avoid supplanting her.

In America contains nothing worth caring about. It contains a few digressions that aren't enslaved to Maryna's story, and in these digressions, Sontag shows she is capable of writing a much better book. However, she did not do so.

While I was reading Galatea, I was entranced. The book tells two stories side by side. In one, the protagonist (not coincidentally also named Richard Powers) is a washed-up author enlisted by a computational neuroscientist to train a artifical neural net to parse, understand, and comment on English literature. The others is Powers' fictionalized autobiography, describing his ultimately failed 10-year relationship with the unnamed woman C.

Both stories are beautiful. They warn you in advance they are going to break your heart, but they proceed to do so with such an honest approach to human inadequacy and regret that although the end is filled with sentiment, it has earned the right to that sentiment. There was not a character in the book I did not love.

In the science fiction storyline, Powers uses a highly novel approach to the genre: actually writing about science and scientists. The story of discovery proceeds incrementally through several tweaks and re-implementations of the developing artificial intelligence. It is one of the few novels I have read that adequately captures the feeling of doing research in a highly speculative field, but does so without becoming tedious. Similarly, the scientists Powers works with have fully developed lives outside their research. One gets the feeling that these are real people that you would like to know yourself, people with lives that the book only scratches the surface of.

The autobiography is also well-conducted, being about himself without being self-indulgent. From the beginning of his relationship with C., Powers simply expresses regret over his inability to be the person C. needed him to be at any given time until the assymetry of their relationship hollows it out and kills it. He often dwells on what he would have liked to have done at each step in its decay, and how far short his actual actions fell of those unvoiced desires. This part of the story is simply an honest look at the fear of living up to one's intentions and regret for having not done so.

After I finished, though, I was unsatisfied. Each part of the book raises difficult, important issues: What does it mean to have consciousness? What is meaning, anyway? What role does literature have in the modern world? How can people let the ones they love know that? To what extent can we really know another human being? Is there hope for human civilization? Yet in each instance, Powers not only shies away from trying to answer, but refrains from even giving hope that an answer might exist. All he can say is that he would like to make some moving, profound statement, but is either powerless to act or inhibited from doing so.

Though a pleasure to read, both for its wit and its heartbreaking honesty, in my final analysis, Galatea disappoints. This book is like a nervous suitor who stands on the doorstep of profundity, poises his knuckles to rap on the door, and then, after several long seconds of silence, walks away without having knocked.