Short(ish) life (and other assorted thoughts)

Even though Yann Martel's new book, Beatrice and Virgil, is but a slim volume, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through it, I've decided to stop reading it. I read Martel's Life of Pi a few years back, and loved it. And while I do consider myself a patient reader, and willingly to give complex works the benefit of the doubt, this book is leaving me cold. There's still a lot to like about Martel's writing - he's a wonderful prose stylist, and he makes the craft of writing seem easy and effortless - but there's much to hate about Beatrice and Virgil. It's almost as if Martel set out to write something that would be contemptuous toward his readers. Or maybe fables about the Holocaust just don't turn my crank. In the end, life is too short to waste on something that's really doing nothing for me, even if I was almost finished. (I flipped through the final 40 or so pages and got the gist of it. That seems good enough.)

This is the second book in a row that has left me disappointed. Priorly, I read Ian MacEwen's latest, Solar, which was also a disappointment. (Actually that's not entirely true: Roberto Bolano's Monsieur Pain was sandwiched in between. It's tier B Bolano, but it's still great fun, and takes some joyously surreal turns for good measure.) Again, MacEwen is one of those writers who I admire (but don't necessarily "love"), and I'm also one of the few who thought his last work, On Chesil Beach, was a small masterpiece. But Solar was, overall, a fairly weak effort. The writing is, as always with MacEwen, sharp, but I found the story flabby and, at times, downright silly. Moreover, the main character felt a little too much like Philip Roth's Mickey Sabbath. In the hands of Roth, despicable characters are three dimensional and (almost) likeable; MacEwen, however, doesn't seem to have the immoral balls to pull it off.

So as you can see, I'm in something of a reading slump. A bit of a mirror on my life, actually, since I feel like I'm in a personal slump as well. Nothing to be concerned about: just your regular garden variety melancholy that strikes me every few weeks or so. (I was also battling a nasty head cold for a week, which wasn't fun.) I'm struggling to write, which is frustrating. I get into these periodic, existential "what the hell are you doing with your life" moods, but then I find some degree of purpose and snap out of it. First world problems, of course. I'll get beyond this. And hopefully I'll soon be taken with a great novel.