Eka Kurniawan - Vengeance Is Mine All Others Pay Cash

This was a thoroughly enjoyable book full of interesting juxtapositions, images and ideas. On the one hand, it is a careering journey through a world of mobsters, whores, truck stops, extortion, hitmen, vengeance killings, fights and gangs. The atmosphere created is similar to a very violent cartoon or the sinister stylisations of a Tarantino movie. The prose and structure are simple and staccato. The story is told in snatches; sometimes a couple of lines of conversation, other times a more extended retelling of a series of events. The cast of characters is limited and the overwhelming focus is on the impotent hero Ajo Kawir. The disconnected paragraphs jump around geographically and chronologically and while this is never confusing sometimes it was a bit disjointed.


The book also had a funny, absurd side with Ajo constantly pulling down his trousers to consult his penis in front of other people, angry exchanges between posturing protagonists and pulse raising games of chicken in trucks at the dead of night. However, the book was far from superficial and also dealt with some weighty themes without ever becoming self conscious or explicit in examining them. I thought this was a significant achievement and the best aspect of the book.


Amongst other things, it was a commentary on corruption and authority in Indonesia and portrayed evocative scenes from this lush, lawless land. The roles sex and violence play in growing up and shaping definitions of masculinity were also integral to its story. The mercurial natures of sexual desire, love, fidelity and anger also played an important part in the story. At times, the relentless, gory violence was overbearing but it found a counterpoint in Kawir’s transformation and ability to philosophise and reconcile himself to his life. I found myself impressed by his cool simplicity and dedication to his chosen path. He’s in some senses stoic but also allows his emotions room to evolve and change. He is dispassionate but not, ultimately, to a sociopathic and destructive extent degree that he is at the beginning of the book. These attempts at extreme dispassion only end up in angry demonstrations of a different kind of passion, as the story shows. I felt I could sympathise with the raw, uncontrollable desires that many of the characters portray but was far more impressed and interested in Ajo’s ability to overcome them. This may be a matter time and experience, exemplified by the relationship between Ajo and Mono and the differences between them. While Mono is taking his first steps in his career as a tough guy, Ajo is retiring from his. It could also be more to do with the interplay between chance, circumstance and disposition which is expressed in the different actions Ajo and his wife take at the end of the book. One settles down to raise a child that isn’t his while the other goes out to seek revenge that isn’t hers. The chance appearance of Jelita in Ajo’s truck and the role she plays in his recovery of his erection also seem to point to the fact that large portions of what happen to us may be outside of out control. This kind of determinism also has a physical expression through Ajo’s penis, his consultations with it and his eventual acceptance of his powerlessness.


In the end, I found the book reassuring and reflective. In a world full of dark, traumatic experiences and savage abuses it is still possible to navigate, however circuitously, towards peace and acceptance. The book makes this point in an unromanticized, unsentimental way. Even though many of the scenes and people featured fall firmly in the category of caricature it ended up feeling far more profound and meaningful than I could have imagined when I began.

Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian - Tiger Woods

The overwhelming impression I got from this book is that Tiger Woods is a nasty guy. From dumping his high school girlfriend while at college by letter without explanation and refusing to speak to her - to abruptly severing long standing relationships and ‘friendships’ - to his self-centred and dismissive treatment of people he deems less important than him (everyone). Everything revolves Tiger and must take place on his terms or not at all. He seems socially disconnected, pathological and sometimes sociopathic. This is before you even consider his adultery, which is the most gratuitous example of this kind of behaviour. His attitude seems to have been, ‘I’m so good at golf and such an important person I should be allowed to do whatever I want’.


But beyond acknowledging how atrocious his behaviour was, why did he behave like this? And why did, and do, the public love him so much in spite of the highly unattractive side of his personality? Obviously, his exploits on the golf course and dominance of his sport are the most likely explanations. Here, the two questions - why was he so good at golf? why did his life become such a mess? - may share some common ground. Tiger Woods seems to have been raised as a golf machine and not a human. Both mother and father dedicated themselves to him to a startling degree and there seem to have been very few, if any, distractions from the all encompassing pursuit of golfing excellence. While other children learned how to play with each other and socialise, Tiger’s parents were concerned with creating a ruthless, competitive killer. The book reports that his father used to try and distract him while he played to help prepare him for this eventuality in tournaments. In extreme circumstances he would shout racist insults at his son in a tactic designed to build psychological strength. Meanwhile, his tiger mom would tell him to ‘kill’ opponents and ‘take their heart’. All told, this sounds like pretty good preparation for becoming an amazing golfer but also a good recipe for creating a sociopath. Tiger was almost unbelievably mollycoddled growing up but had to submit himself to an equally inconceivable and all encompassing schedule of training. Both parents and Tiger talk extensively throughout his life about how golf was his choice but it rings utterly hollow in light of the facts of his junior golfing career. As such, a young Tiger Woods would have grown up in an environment that valued golf, mental toughness, compliance with a schedule and, above all, performance as measured by a very limited set of narrow factors. Caring for other people was definitely not one of those factors. It is chilling to imagine that Woods played some of best golf while cheating on his wife and young family with multiple other women. This cold hearted lack of emotion might have served him well on tour but in a family context it has a more sinister and unsettling character.

Added to this already considerable burden to perform were the ideas and opinions of his father. Earl Woods regularly told people that Tiger would have a huge socio-political impact because of his status as a black player in the overwhelming white world of golf. When Tiger started playing their were courses that hosted the US Open that would not admit black members. While Tiger actively tried to defuse racial questions, his father seems to have wanted to turn his son into a living ‘fuck you’ to the white sporting establishment that may have curtailed his own baseball career. So, on top of the pressure to be the best golfer and to always win Tiger was also expected to be a symbol of black success in the face of white domination and to change the world. The weirdest expression of his father’s desire for their to be a racial significance to Tiger’s career comes in the form of a story he told about how Tiger was tied to a tree and stoned by his classmates while at school, which the book debunks fairly convincingly. So, Tiger grew up in a maniacally focused, aggressive, hyper virile, super competitive environment, which bore striking resemblance to the military world of the marines his father came from. However, his father quit his job to focus fully on managing his infant son’s career. At one stage, Tiger recalls how his father told him he had a choice of being a marine or being a golfer. Tiger’s obsession with the marines pays testimony to how deeply he had absorbed his father’s philosophy. The pressure to perform, to not let his parents down, to be a symbol of racial change and to change the world must have been unbelievably difficult to deal with.


The book is strong on Tiger’s amazing achievements on the golf course, albeit with a few too many misty eyed descriptions of clutch putts and famous tournament victories. His capacity for practice, his mental and physical toughness and his extreme competitiveness are truly breathtaking. Perhaps what stands out the most is the fact that he won the 2008 US Open only three weeks after being unable to walk and with no cartilage left in his knee. Less spectacular, but equally fascinating, was Tiger’s decision to remodel his swing after winning his first major in 1997. When most people would have been basking in the glory of victory, Tiger had his eyes on far bigger, longer term goals.


Tiger is a personification of modern, competitive, professional sports. Trained since early infancy for a sole purpose, he dispensed with fairplay, sportsmanship and etiquette in favour of a warlike, win at all costs mentality that made everything subservient to his golfing success. However, rather than gaping in awe at the achievements this strategy had yielded, as I would have done before reading this book, I finished the book feeling sad. What kind of life had this created for Tiger? What kind of person had emerged from this regime? Had the extreme micro management of his life ultimately helped or hindered him? Indubitably, he dominated golf in a way that’s never been seen before and made huge amounts of money. Nonetheless, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Tiger grew up in a cold, loveless world focussed on what he could do rather than who he was. This seems to have created an equally cold, loveless man with little capacity for empathy or warmth. The fact that Tiger is still so popular and such a huge star says something about society. It made me think that Tiger is the quintessential example of the corrupt and questionable SportsWorld that Robert Lipsyte describes in his eponymous book. In this world, sports are not played for the development and enjoyment of the athlete as a person located in the context of broader society. Rather he plays for the benefit, more specifically the financial profit, of his parents, his school, his agent and his sponsors. Jack Scott’s 'The Athletic Revolution', which I am currently reading and hope to write about soon, is excellent on this topic. Modern sports, far from encapsulating and teaching the best principles essential for broader life, as is often claimed, teaches the philosophy of unshackled aggression akin to the mindset that predominates in war. In the same way that America, and much of the rest of world, glorify the fundamentally tragic character of war and combat; so too in commercialised sports. Dubious actions and morals are embraced in the pursuit of all-important victory while concepts of fairness, justice and wellbeing are thrown out and laughed at as soft and outdated.


Perhaps the most poignant part of the book is the story of Tiger’s record breaking third straight victory at the US Amatuer championships at the age of 20 in 1996. On the final round, Tiger and Steve Scott are neck in neck. Scott has a putt with Tiger’s ball in the way, Tiger marks it and moves the marker out of his opponent’s line. When he replaces his ball, he forgets to move it back to its original position. Scott points it out to Tiger and saves him from forfeiting the title. Tiger doesn’t even thank him.


Reflecting back on the event and his life afterwards, Scott said, ‘I think I am walking proof that you can win in life without winning’. Scott went on to have an underwhelming tour career and became a club pro. Of course, I can’t judge what a successful life constitutes and even if I could it would vary wildly depending on the individual. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would much rather be Scott, with his kids and his marriage of 18 years, than Tiger, with the chaos of pressure and media attention swirling around him. In spite of the 14 majors and a billion dollars, Tiger’s life as represented in this book reads like a tragedy. I don’t know if Tiger’s upbringing created his problems later in life or if his success lead him astray or if everything is pre-determined genetically; surely the question is too complex to have an easy answer. However, Tiger’s reckless adultery and possible sex and drug addictions do not strike me as the actions of a happy and healthy man.


This was an interesting and well researched book. It was a bit sentimental in places and undoubtedly glorifies his sporting exploits. While it doesn’t question the values and ethics of professional sport explicitly, I feel like it contains all the raw material required to start asking these questions and presents a fascinating case study of a true modern sporting icon. I really feel I got more out of this book because of reading 'SportsWorld' and 'The Athletic Revolution' at around the same time.

Andrew Sean Greer - Less

I was quite taken with the first 50 pages of this book. Our hero, Less, is a graphic character and the sketch of his years as the lover of an older, famous poet are well drawn. Equally, the narrator’s voice and the writer’s eye for detail are pleasing. I particularly enjoyed a reference to, ‘the quilted sides’ of food carts in NY. Less’s impending world tour seems like an good way of setting up the plot structure and, without further ado, we are off on an adventure with the engaging Less; our interest piqued by the narrator’s anonymity.


Sadly, it was largely downhill from there. I did think the author was good at doing scenes from the literary world like writing retreats, academic departments, publishers, book awards, drinks parties and receptions. However, he also had a Franzen-esque penchant for tossing long, pretentious words into his prose for no obvious reason other than to show how erudite he is. Some of these words defied even the definitive power of Google so he really must be extraordinarily clever! For example, I couldn’t work out what the phrase ‘groupe en biscuit’ meant in either English or French. And ‘sesh’? Not an abbreviation for session judging from the context. Alongside this tendency towards elaborate vocabulary there are some really sloppy mistakes in the prose. For example, Less puts his shoes on before his trousers at the beginning of the book, there is a poorly researched poker game and the contradiction, ‘Roman generals hire slaves’; a oversight that really annoyed me! I’d have preferred clearer vocabulary and closer proofreading.

The book seems to have been written, at least partially, as a work of comedy but it isn’t very funny. From the Mexican tour guide who says everything is closed to the lame jokes about Less’s grandmother’s vagina, the attempts at humour are hackneyed and puerile. The problem is compounded by repetition. Some of the travel writing is too cliched with caricatured bell boys, taxi drivers and tour guides. However, the worst aspect of the prose was definitely the dialogue. It wasn’t universally poor but some of the central sections are very clunky. For example, Less’s first meeting with his lover-to-be the poet and his wife. The reader is in the dark about who this mysterious straight couple on the beach, recollected from Less’s 20s, are. But when the foolhardy man wants to take a dip in the stormy ocean, his wife implores young Less to go with him saying, to a background noise of narrative sections being dropped noisily into place, ‘please look after him, he’s a wonderful poet but a lousy swimmer’! Oh, the cruel irony of her inviting this seductive homosexual predator into their marital bliss! Oh, the tragedy of prose so bad that it reads like a plot summary transposed into the mouths of the characters. The whole thing felt awkward and unrefined. Less’s big chat with Carlos at the luxury resort in India is almost as clunky and equally facile. Here too, Less inexplicably doesn’t want to hear more about Freddy’s wedding even though he is allegedly mourning the love of his life. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the novel where Less pines for his lost lover. Additionally, I couldn’t quite work out the root of Carlos and Less’s animosity, which continues throughout the book but is never really explained.


There were several minor aspects of how foreign languages are presented in the book that I didn’t like either. Some of the German in this book is written in German. None of the other languages are attempted for more than a sentence. The German that is contained in the book is not translated. This is a pet hate of mine, translate it in the footnotes for goodness sake! Alongside this, there are conversations that take place in German for the purposes of the story but appear in the text as broken English literally translated from the supposed German conversation. This wasn’t attempted in any other languages. It wasn’t particularly funny and was another example of an insipid reworking of an already overworn theme - ‘the things non-native speakers say’!! It was especially unsuccessful as to really get the jokes one would have to know the German words that are being mistranslated. The fact that this was only done for German was explained by Less only being able to speak this language but, taken as a whole, the book had a weird and unpleasant mishmash of presentations. As it progressed, the structure of the world tour itinerary started to get a bit stale as Less repeated his routine of turning up somewhere, blundering about a bit, learning something very precursory about the culture, having a romantic encounter or recalling one from his past and then stumbling on!


Less, who is initially drawn as hopelessly unknown as an author, surprisingly meets lots of fans of his work during his travels. Besides these minor massages to Less’s ego, he also wins an award and has several sexual encounters that no doubt help boost his confidence in the aftermath of his breakup with Freddy. However, like the acerbic woman who’s birthday party Less attends in the desert who comments on Less’s latest protagonist, I found myself asking, ‘who cares?’ The character of Less, who had started out with such promise, had turned out to be a bit boring and shallow. The prose and the narrative, that I had initially liked, turned out to be repetitive, cliched and full of empty humour. The more interesting aspects of Less, like his feelings about his past loves and the meaning of his life, are drowned out by clunky dialogue, bad jokes and superficial travel details.


To round off the disappointing experience of finishing this book, which ended up feeling like another episode of a middling sitcom - this week on ‘Less Flounders In Foreign Lands….’ MOROCCO! - the mystery narrator was revealed as Freddy. ‘REFEREE!’, I felt like shouting, ‘surely that’s not allowed’. Freddy the narrator had described himself in the third person earlier on in the book, which excludes him from being the narrator in my mind! The narrator’s voice also felt much older than Freddy’s mid-thirties when I was reading it. It was a sloppy, half-baked end to a sloppy, half-baked book and I felt cheated! The ending was also very neat and tidy with Less returning from his travels to be reunited with his lost lover leaving me wondering what the upshot of Less’s trip was ultimately. Is the moral of the story - if you are deeply in love but your lover marries someone else then don’t say anything and go away for a bit and then he’ll realise how much he loves you? Everything seems to fall effortlessly into place for Less in the end and I found this mawkish and twee.

Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games

There were lots of parts of this book that reminded me of other books, films or cultural reference points. It hung together well enough but I was a bit unsure about the overall effect. The most obvious parallel, for me, was to a film called ‘Battle Royale’ (2000), which in turn is based on an earlier book. The film is about a group of students who are taken to an island and forced to fight to the death by the Japanese government. There were also parallels to be drawn with the Roman Empire, Stoic philosophy, Romeo and Juliet, 1984, My Girl and many others, I’m sure. This pastiche approach reminded me of ‘Ready Player One’ (2011) although that book approaches cultural referencing far more explicitly, which I prefer. The two have other similarities - dystopia, a rise to fame, an exciting, dangerous adventure, a love story, both became films. I think I enjoyed ‘Ready Player One’ more because its content is aimed at middle aged geeks while ‘The Hunger Games’ is aimed at adolescent women. The PG rated love, looking beautiful in pretty dresses and worrying about popularity exemplify the young adult level this is pitched at. On the other hand, it’s violent, dystopian goriness would also appeal to adolescent boys so perhaps I have more of an issue with it because I am the wrong age rather than because I’m a man.


The love story is a bit cringe-worthy but it was saved by the intrigue over whether her relationship with Peeta is genuine and if she prefers him to Gale, her hunting partner back in the Seam. The fact that all the girls at school love Gale, and it’s heavily implied that he’s in love with Katniss, but Katniss has no idea is a bit sentimental and corny. As I mentioned earlier, all romance is very tame and Katniss has never kissed anyone in spite of leading such a deeply adult life and seemingly having many admirers. Similarly, the interviews before the games where Katniss apparently struggles because of her unlikeable personality are a hard to believe. In the end everyone loves her and Peeta declares his love for her in front of everyone; it is a bit vomit inducing. On the whole, I felt the strength of the central plot and the excellent pacing of the narrative saved the book from becoming too twee. I had read in the PLR, where this book was recommended and reviewed, that the pacing was outstanding and this proved to be the case.


It’s just as well because the plot was too facil and, in places, downright hackneyed. The character of Katniss was a slightly unhappy mixture of hardened hunter and ditzy school girl. Her almost inconceivable level of ability and suitability to the games are coupled with some equally inconceivable moments of stupidity. For example, she forgets to loot the bow and arrow from the girl who dies in possession of it even though she has been coveting it since the start of the games and it his her best chance of survival. Equally, it takes her a minute to work out what the sedatives she is gifted should be used for when she needs to subdue Peeta to go to the feast. I was also surprised that ‘the Careers’ didn’t train using more survival skills like Katniss’s given they work so well in the arena! The sponsorship meted out to the players seemed a bit unfair as well. While Katniss got a couple of meals and some burn cream, one of the other player’s got an impenetrable suit of armor! It’s mentioned in the book that gifts are very expensive but it’s also mentioned that the residents of the Capitol bet heavily on the event so I was expecting the gifts to play a much bigger role. The treatment of whether there was going to be one or two victors was a bit clunky but did set up the mutual poisoning scene at the end, which was good, and allows the is-it-real-is-it-not-real? storyline of Peeta and Katniss’s love to continue into the next book.


The themes of this book also saved it from becoming too saccharine or sentimental. Inequality, exploitation, subjugation of a population using the media, humanity’s bloodthirstiness, the morality of murder and the cruelty of consumerism and entertainment culture. These are all weighty topics for young adult fiction and they’re, for the most part, sensitively and subtly handled. In truth, the issue of murder isn’t nearly gory enough for my liking. Contestants help each other and behave in a remarkably civilised manner during the Games whereas I’d have thought they’d be ripping each other limb from limb and screwing each other over at the earliest opportunity. To me, this would’ve been a more faithful representation of human nature although perhaps I’m overly pessimistic!

The strong points of this book were the pacing and the subject matter of the Games. I didn’t really enjoy the way the story was framed or how things developed in the arena. The love story was corny but had interesting angles and some good twists. Overall, it was enjoyable but facile and I probably wouldn’t recommend it.