Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Some books get by on wit, some on suspense. Gone Girl seems to do both. A book that kept me from sleep one night too many, does indeed seem like a fresh take on a traditional thriller formula. A fifth anniversary for Amy and Nick, but the wife soon goes missing and the husband gradually turns into a true creeper. What really did happen?

For the first three hundred pages, I was swearing that I already had everything figured out. I'm not going to indulge in details, but I was one hundred percent for a certain type of resolution to the story. And then, out of the blue, a huge turn of the tables, some very unreliable narrating and a jarring twist in plot.

It's true, I could not put it down. Despite one unnecessary lull in the action, Gone Girl is one of those rare books that keeps you hooked without making it feel like it's fooling you. There are twists, sure, but they are not the type that make you feel stupid, or cast previous plot elements in unflattering light (yes, I'm looking at you Inferno).

Overall, there are some wonderful details to the storytelling and characters. Unlike last time (in J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus), Gone Girl is a completely contemporary work that is happily rooted in the events and culture of post-2008 America. The loss of jobs, the downward spiral of both the economy and a couple, all have an impact, but so does the media. Gillian Flynn, an ex-journalist for Entertainment Weekly, is an expert at conjuring media frenzies and public outrage at a suspicous husband (and later on at something else).

The film rights for the novel have already been bought and I found names such as David Fincher, Ben Affleck and Rosamunda Pike being mentioned in connection. Let's just hope they are able to portray the tantalizing sense of foreboding that held me throughout.

The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee

Some stories are bigger than their origins. Sometimes it seems that instead of telling a tale of a specific boy and a specific father (or merely father figure) we are drawn into the basic realities of life; work, family and ambition. The last time I felt a primal, simple connection to a work of fiction was Cormac McCarthy's The Road. With Zen-like calmness it told of a desolate post-apocalyptic America from the point of view of a father and son. The Childhood of Jesus is from the same mold in many ways, including the Pulitzer prizes that both authors carry, and also concerns itself with a near future scenario, where a man and a boy travel from uncertain beginnings to an uncertain end.

The tone of the novel, however, is notably brighter than in The Road. It is almost a serene piece, with an easily distinguishable pace that walks instead of runs and promenades instead of races. Coetzee is almost as concerned with watching the scenery and letting his characters get their say as he is with advancing the plot. At times this is confusing, since there is no clear direction for the action, both a curse and a blessing. I had trouble anticipating the turns and their pacing and once I did feel the tempo to be too Andante. Who knows, this might be only me. I did spend most of my time this summer reading action packed thrillers like World War Z and Inferno.

The name is both a clever marketing ploy aimed at turning gazes in bookstores and a central concept to Coetzee's character development. No one here is actually Jesus, thankfully, but there are certain connections that can be made and some clever quips and turns of phrase that allude to the title. It gives the novel a ghostly second meaning that seems to ask more questions than it answers. I won't go into plot details, you'll know enough by reading the back cover.

Off the top of my head, I had two main thoughts while reading The Childhood of Jesus. First of all, I was caught off guard by the old-times vibe and simple aspirations of the characters and scenes. In a world of super-high-speed everything, it is easy to forget the simple pleasures of physical labor, boredom and, alas, ordinary conversation. The world described does not exist anymore, at least for a vast majority of city-dwellers living in western countries. Machinery and robots operate everything, we are only puppet masters removed from the actual context of the work.

On the other hand, I'm wondering how traditional literature will survive in a world of clicking on electronic screens and thumbing text-messages on touch pads. Somehow it seems we lack the language and capabilities to describe the modern world in a meaningfully accurate way. How to describe a world of smartphones without resorting to visualizations? Is there any joy in describing people interacting with machines? I have no answers. Perhaps this is the reason for Coetzee's nostalgic ride into a non-modern society.