American holiday literature

So we just went on a 2 week holiday to Italy, and during this holiday, I read 3 American novels. I won't call them 'the great American novel', because none of them were, but it had been an long time since I'd read so much American literature in one go.
First I had to finish The Luminaries, which is such a wonderful book that it deserves its own blog post. Also, it's written by a New Zealander (New Zealandess?).
After finishing The Luminaries and knitting my head together again as it was blown to pieces on the sheer brilliance of the novel, I started with Big Brother by Lionel Shriver. Which is different, veeeery different. Also, I'm not sure if it really constitutes as 'literature', but that's just technicalities. It reminded me a lot of We Need to Talk about Kevin, which I was forced to read for a class and still have slight nightmarish thoughts about every once in a while; sad, deflated, somewhat depressed woman describing events to the reader (in the case of Kevin in letters, in the case of Big Brother it never really becomes clear how she is conveying her message to us). The book is about a woman whose brother comes to live with her for a while, and it turns out he's become incredibly fat. Which disrupts her whole life, and her family's life. But really it's about expectations in life, about becoming 'someone', and the American Dream falling apart. The sad thing is that this message is repeated time and again, by the main character, her husband, and everyone else, so that you get incredibly sick of it. The ending was also really really horrible, one of the worst deus ex machinas I've read in a long time, which made me so disappointed with the whole thing that I quickly went on to the next.
Which was The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates. Which definitely is literature. I loved Revolutionary Road, so I bought The Easter Parade on a whim, and also took it with me on a whim. I knew nothing about this novel before I started reading, but it turned out to be pretty close to Big Brother, in that it's also about siblings, and it's also about life not turning out the way you planned, and about the American Dream falling apart. Only it was written 50 years earlier, before people got properly obese, so there's none of that. Otherwise, it's great. Typical Yates, with his descriptions of people and atmospheres and feelings. It's hard to describe, I think everyone should just read Revolutionary Road (it has better character development) and experience it for themselves.
Finally, I read Rabbit, Run, which is the first of John Updike's brilliant Rabbit-series. It describes life in the fifties for the average American guy, which is to say; another American Dream bursting asunder. Harry (Rabbit) leaves his pregnant wife to go on the great American road trip, which reads like the start of a great young-guy adventure story, but as Updike says himself in the afterword 'things fall apart when a young man leaves his young family behind', which is exactly what happens in the novel. And the main character is just so self-absorbed, so stupid (at first you believe what he says and you also think his wife is a dull witted bore, but you quickly find out that he's a narrator you shouldn't be trusting) that you have to love reading about him. And about America in the fifties, with it's nice little details (his mother refuses to buy a washing machine because washing by hand does the job just as well). It was written in 1959, just like all the following Rabbit novels were also written in the last year of the decade the represent, which makes it a probably pretty accurate account of the times.
Now apart from the American Dream falling apart, which seems to be a theme in many American novels, there is one other connecting element to these novels: New Holland. The narrator of Big Brother lives there, Emily Grimes stays there for a year with one of her lovers, and Rabbit drives through it on his great American road trip. Most readers probably wouldn't have noticed, but as someone from the 'actual' Holland, these things tend to stick (I realise that there must be thousands of 'New Hollands' in the US, and I can only be sure of the first one, which is properly set in Ohio, but still, it's a nice detail). Apart from the first novel, which was good in writing and characters but bad in plot, it was a nice trio of American literature. I've ordered the rest of the Rabbit novels, so I'm sure to get back to the US in due time, but for now I'm busy reading the rest of Roald Dahl's short stories, which are a whole different thing all together. Particularly because there is no American Dream; life has failed for most of his protagonists before it even started.

A Farewell to Arms

So I finished Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (a few days ago, but it's been crazy busy, especially now that we're winning gold medals left and right at the Olympics and everyone is glued to the TV). It was not the first Hemingway I'd ever read, we had " Hills like White Elephants" and another weird story set in Africa that I can't remember the name of, but it was the first full-length novel. As with all the other 'classics' I've been reading recently, it took me quite a while to get through. Much longer than I would have anticipated from the very small and very thin book.
I already knew how it ends because I'd seen Silver Linings Playbook in which Bradley Cooper throws the book through a window because he is dissatisfied with the ending. I won't give it away, but I can tell you that from the first page you will already have the inkling that this won't be a fairytale happy ending. And it isn't.
Anyway, the novel, or more specifically the plot, reminded me of two things: Roald Dahl's short stories and Ian McEwan's Atonement. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Roald Dahl wrote several short stories based on his experience as an RAF pilot in the Second World War, and Hemingway based his novel on his own experiences in the Italian campaign in the First. You can somehow get from their writing that what they're describing is something they know about, something they've experienced themselves. I'm not saying this makes it more realistic, but there is a rawness to it that can make it less smooth to read. That idea actually makes it interesting to compare it with McEwan's novel, as he (as far as I know) has no experience of active service, but the part in which Hemingway describes the retreat, the long line of stalling vehicles and the enemy planes flying above, was very familiar. Atonement was of course written long after A Farewell to Arms, so if anyone is copying it was McEwan, but as I read Atonement first (and several times) it works the other way around in my head.
Even apart from these literary connections I thought the novel very good, and it is probably a good idea to (re)read such novels now that the First World War is exactly 100 years behind us, and there is tension building on all sides in the world.

After finishing the classic I went on to a contemporary novel, Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid (his first novel of the three he has written so far; I've already mentioned his novel How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, if you still haven't read any of his work you definitely should). The only connection Moth Smoke could have to A Farewell to Arms is that they're both written in the first-person narrator, and that narrator is a man. Otherwise, they're completely different. Which is exactly what I need, after such a classic heavy tome.

Short stories

I haven't read many short stories in my life. To be honest, I only discovered that short stories are a 'thing' in their own right when I had to read some for a literature course (I can remember 'The Story of an Hour' and 'The Lady with the Dog', and something by Kate Mansfield about a garden party). When I was younger, I read a collection of short stories by Anton Quintana, who is a Dutch author and not very famous at that, so I might be quite unique in that area. Other than that, very few short stories were ever read by me.
Until I bought The Complete Short Stories by Roald Dahl. Did you know that he was an air force pilot stationed in Greece during the Second World War? And that he hadn't written anything until someone asked him to give him some notes on stuff that happened during the War? And that Dahl's 'notes' were actually the first story he ever wrote? Neither did I. And that was just from the Introduction.
I've been zooming through the stories at quite a high speed, and I've recognised some, either from the aforementioned literature course, or from other places (I may have read one or two in a Dutch translation when I was younger). I can't really say too much about them, other than that they're gripping, and moving, and slightly disturbing, and all very very different. From milk-drinking snakes to being killed by a frozen leg of lamb, all amazing in their own way.
If you find yourself without a book to read, do try Dahl's stories. It's like reading 10 great novels in one day.