Article: A Catalogue of Unfinished Books

Recommended to me in this way; “You’re a writer? You have to read Shoes of the Fisherman.”

I took the recommendation to heart and ordered the paperback on Half.com. When the little gem I waited ten days for arrived, I was put off by its glossy, bumpy cover featuring a string of barb wire poking through an ornate bejeweled ring. Dating equivalent: Your friend sets you up on a blind date and she shows up with a neck tattoo of her ex-boyfriend’s name. But you can’t refuse to read a book because of a crappy cover, so I went on.

Shoes opens with the line, “The Pope is dead.” Admittedly, I was intrigued. The Pope doesn’t die often enough in fiction. But then the next paragraph opens with the same line, as does the next and the next and the next. We haven’t even reached the middle of the first chapter and the Pope’s died four times.

My stopping point was this deft introduction of characters:

There was Carlin the American, and Rahamani the Syrian, and Hsien the Chinese, and Hanna the Irishman from Australia. There was Morand from Paris, and Lavigne from Brussels, and Lambertini from Venice, and Brandon from the City of London. There was a Pole and two Germans, and a Ukranian who nobody knew because his name had been reserved in the breast of the last Pope.

I was already bored by then anyway and reminded way too much of Dan Brown’s prose. The evening quickly turned into a youtube fest.

Hailed as China’s greatest novel, I figured it was a must-read.

The first chapter is cool. It features a rock as the protagonist. It longs to come to Earth to taste our Earthly pleasures. Had it continued like this, an inanimate object with mysterious carvings on it seeking carnal fun, I would have been psyched. The problem is that it decides to follow the lives of countless members of an eighteenth century Chinese household.

The story is told in the same way a six year old describes the events of a day: “First, I did this, then I did that, then I did this other thing, then something else.” There is a severe lack of all things psychological. Just a peek into one character’s mind would be nice. Otherwise you get sleepy-eyed and disinterested not even a third of a way into a masterpiece.

I’m a big fan of both Updike and centaurs. When I was given a book involving both, I was stoked.

It is apparent right away that Updike is going to dress up his imagery like a cheap hooker. Caldwell is struck with an arrow and is in some understandable pain.

The pain scaled the slender core of his shin, whirled in the complexities of his knee, and swollen broader, more thunderous, mounted into his bowels.

Excuse me? Don’t think I’ve ever had that sensation before. Luckily Updike goes on.

The pain extendcd a feeler into his head and unfolded its wet wings along the wall of his thorax, so that he felt, in his sudden scarlet blindness, to be himself a large bird waking from sleep.

Now I’m really confused. Does Caldwell have a thorax or does his pain? His pain is like a scarab then, right? Okay, so the pain is crawling up in him and spreading out.

The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs: as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of a hungry reach.

Talk about some serious pain. It has wings and hairy segments. I was metaphored out by then. It’s an arrow in an ankle. It hurts. I get it. I only read on out of respect for Mr. Updike, hoping he was just stuttering at the beginning. The Centaur goes on like this for what seems like forever, pretending it is poetry and wasting a good centaur story.

I’ll probably come back to this later. I saw potential, I just wasn’t in the mood. It’s too dense, too Russian. The new David Sedaris waited on the desk for me to finish my “serious” book. The Sedaris seduced me like a mistress, licking its lips and crossing its legs again and again, until all I could think about was the immense pleasure I would get

from reading it. So I abandoned the freezing blizzard of Pasternak’s Russia for Sedaris’ hilarity. Sorry, Boris.