Americanah and Pericles

I finished off two excellent books this week, one fiction and one nonfiction.  Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  is a sprawling, big novel that moves across continents and time to tell a story about two people who lose each other and themselves in the quest for opportunities in England and the US, only to find themselves again back home in Nigeria--one by choice, and another by force.  I am still not sure how I feel about the ending, but Adichie is a marvelous storyteller and a brilliant prose stylist.  I was seething with frustration with her main character who stubbornly refused to grow in any way--Ifemelu is a watcher and a judger of other people, and she uses her brain to critique rather than to build--until she is by herself in the United States. She is a character who changes fast, by leaps, even as she possesses a writer's detachment.


Mike Peed gives a terrific overview in his NYT review. 

I also finished Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy.  My edition appearse to be the 1990 edition, as I picked it up at a used bookstore.  In this book, Donald Kagan, of whom I am an unabashed fangirl, writes about Pericles in his various roles: Strategist, Statesment, Hero, Democrat, Imperialist, Peacemaker, etc. It is a study of leadership. Kagan is a historian, and he doesn't have that much to work from for Pericles: Plutach and Thucydides  are his main sources.  This books feels a little self-indulgent, and that's ok: Kagan is a fan of Pericles (there are worse leaders to admire), and Kagan allows himself to praise what he finds admirable. He can't escape the obvious problems of Pericles as a military strategist, and Kagan's assessment is sad and fair.   There are some bumps in the book, which are quite dated: Kagan doesn't have a terribly deep read of Marx or Plato, and he drubs both of them for their anti-democratic visions.  Still, his writing on democracy and the Periclean vision is breath-taking.

I'm traveling this week so there will be lots of time for reading.

The Dupin Novellas by Edgar Allen Poe

I have a weakness for books about books, and I just picked up Books to Die For, a collection of writing by contemporary fiction writers about the most important or best mystery novel of roughly each year from 1841  to 2008. The early years skip because the mystery novel had not yet become a genre; there is nearly a ten-year gap between the first entry, Edgar Allen Poe's Murder in the Rue Morgue and the second entry, Charles Dickens' Bleak House.

Because, of course, I don't have enough reading to do, I am going to try to read them all in order, except for the ones I've already read, and perhaps revisiting some of those.

That means I started out with Poe, who is IMO unreadable except for poetry. I have large bits of The Raven memorized because as a poem it is awesome-gnarly and I love it.  His prose leaves me cold, and much as I wanted to like the Auguste Dupin stories, I didn't. They were tedious and turgid, and I am glad to be done with them and scratch that particular book off the list. I doubt I will have such trouble with Dickens, whom I've always liked.