Hunger by Knut Hamsun (06/09)

A talented, arrogant young man wanders around the Norwegian capital attempting to write philosophical articles for local periodicals, having absurd run-ins with people on the street, and gradually starving to death. One by one, the young man's ideals are stripped away by means of the hunger - his moralizing fades, his presumptions dwindle down to occasional outbursts. He is a more tolerable person by the end of the novel. The book resembles Crime and Punishment in many ways, but less convoluted and messy and with no didactic moralizing lurking under the prose. An elegant thing, but less stirring for all its being well-crafted.

Zuckerman Bound by Philip Roth (06/09)

Three novels and a novella collected in a single volume documenting minutia in the life of Nathan Zuckerman, infamous Jewish-American novelist, the most narcissistic project I have ever read, but not bad for all that. Roth is upfront about only being inspired to write about slight variations on his own experience. He is a writer, exclusively, of the internal. The outside world only matters as far as it impacts his inner life. The best of the four was Zuckerman Unbound - the best written, the funniest, the most acerbic. The Anatomy Lesson goes on and on about Zuckerman's undiagnosed chronic pain, which he relieves with vodka, pot, painkillers, and passive fucking. The pain would be a cheap metaphor worthy of English Lit 101 if Zuckerman, being the writer he is, didn't constantly mull over its symbolic significances - the pain is his guilt for exposing his family in best-selling novels, it's the wound of an estranged brother or the presence of his mother's ghost, etc. The Ghost Writer was irritating, and Roth's trademark bon mots (so dry as to be dessicated) felt strained.

My Life as a Man by Philip Roth (05/09)

I gave my copy to Liz, and she's taken it to Brooklyn to begin her post-collegiate life. I'm not absorbing one tenth of what's been happening to me these past days, and I realize that's the most narcissistic possible spin I could put on ending college, saying goodbye to Liz, and leaving the country.

Protagonist is a recent Brown grad with writerly ambitions, high moral seriousness, and licentious proclivities. The narrative is how all that is wrung from him in a single, hellish relationship. In short, literary porn.