Satisfying sagas

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/04/2020 (2366 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By all accounts, it’s looking like it’s going to be some time before we’ll be able to leave our homes, apartments or condos and begin interacting face to face with other humans — never mind any sense of normalcy returning to our lives.

And while we all have long-avoided, around-the-house tasks to be tackled and all manner of movies and TV series to be watched, there’s only so long most of us can go without some sort of mental stimulus.

Books, of course, offer such stimulus, and with the prospect of weeks (if not months) of social distancing and general isolation to come, there’s plenty of time for curious readers to dive into some epic pieces of fiction. Whether a single-volume opus or a series of novels, our current situation presents the perfect time to get lost in lengthy pieces of literature.

Here are five weighty, wordy options to pass the time on the couch, at the kitchen counter, in the bathtub or in bed before another day in isolation comes to a close…

 

Thomas Cromwell trilogy
(Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light)
By Hilary Mantel (2009/2012/2020)

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While many of the best-selling Tudor tales for sale on grocery store shelves are tawdry, salacious romps through kingdoms and high courts, Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy manages to bring critical acclaim and commercial success — a rare feat for historical fiction.

Mantel’s sprawling trio of books — Wolf Hall is north of 600 pages, Bring Up the Bodies clocks in at 400-plus pages and her newest, The Mirror and the Light finishes things off at over 900 pages — follows the life of Thomas Cromwell: proponent of English Reformation, chief minister (read: right-hand man) to Henry VIII, and general you-know-what disturber.

Among his other duties, Cromwell was instrumental in helping the 16th-century British king navigate all manner of personal problems, including (but not limited to) producing a male heir. If that proved to be a problem with a particular wife, Cromwell helped the king move on to another woman to try and sire a son.

As Cromwell’s stock rose, the fate of Henry VIII’s wives faltered, and Cromwell became a much-maligned thorn in their sides before heads, quite literally, rolled. The latest book of Mantel’s trilogy details Cromwell’s final few years serving Henry VIII, who thanks to Cromwell ended up in an unhappy marriage to Germany’s Anne of Cleves, resulting in Cromwell’s death (by, you guessed it, beheading) in 1540.

If The Mirror and the Light nabs the prestigious Booker Prize, it would land Mantel a literary hat trick for the Cromwell trilogy, making her the first to win the prize more than twice and further cementing her place as one of the preeminent writers of historical fiction in our time.

 

Infinite Jest
By David Foster Wallace (1996)

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Chances are many of your favourite book-smart friends own a copy of the late David Foster Wallace’s epic 1996 novel Infinite Jest. It’s one of those books that, given its massive size and literary reputation, looks rather impressive on book shelves. Far fewer, however, is the number of people who have actually read the thing from front to back.

Before reading Infinite Jest, be warned: you’ll want to have two bookmarks on hand. One will be used for the novel proper, and another for the 350-plus end notes that make up 100 or so of the 1,000-plus pages.

Infinite Jest is set in the near future, one where years are subsidized by corporate entities (the Year of the Whopper, for example) and North American countries have unified as one mega-state, the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.). At the story’s core is the Incandenza family: Hal, a teen tennis prodigy attending the Enfield Tennis Academy; father James, who founded the academy and was a filmmaker before taking his own life; mother Avril, a francophone from Quebec; and James’ brothers Mario and Orin.

Trying to summarize the plot of the dense, sprawling Infinite Jest is an exercise in futility. Suffice to say, all of the following play a role: a community of addicts struggling with recovery at Ennet House in Boston; a group of wheelchair-bound Québécois separatist assassins set on dismantling O.N.A.N.; the plight of James and his tennis academy pals (who, among other activities, created the complex, tennis court-based global catastrophe game, Eschaton); and the Incandenza tumultuous family’s history.

Of particular importance in Infinite Jest is James’ final, titular film, also dubbed “the Entertainment,” which causes anyone who watches to kill themselves. The backstory of the film and its creator’s filmography — along with interview fragments, notes on various drugs and more — is detailed in tiny type in the book’s end notes, for which you’ll be thankful to have that second bookmark.

Many have started Infinite Jest, but far fewer have finished. Grab your bookmarks and get to work.

 

Warhol
By Blake Gopnik (April 2020)

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American art critic Blake Gopnik’s forthcoming opus on iconic Pop Art creator and New York personality Andy Warhol doesn’t drop until April 28, but when it does it will land like a case of Campbell’s soup. At nearly 1,000 pages Gopnik, who worked for a time in Canada as the Globe and Mail’s art critic, has written the definitive book on Warhol that will set the standard for profiles of cultural icons for years to come.

Gopnik, who has a PhD in art history from Oxford, reached out to the artist’s friends, colleagues and followers and scoured the Warhol archives in researching the book. Warhol opens with a graphic passage detailing the artist arriving at New York’s Columbus Hospital in 1968, essentially dead on arrival from a gunshot wound, before being hacked up and stitched back together by doctors to recover from his extensive, gruesome injuries.

From there the book jumps back to the childhood of Warhol, born Andrew Warhola to Slavic immigrants in Pittsburgh in 1928. Despite its physical heft, Gopnik’s engaging, accessible writing style propels the reader through Warhol’s move to New York City and rise through the art world, creating an immersive chronology of the iconic artist through to his second (final) death in 1987.

Along the way are ruminations on Warhol’s most seminal (and more obscure) works, his relationships with other stars, lovers and hangers-on and much, much more.

Don’t let Warhol’s size scare you off; Gopnik’s chronicle of Andy Warhol’s life is essential reading for fans of the artist, but also will be incredibly engaging for those less familiar with his engimatic subject’s life.

 

The Magicians trilogy
(The Magicians, The Magician King, The Magician’s Land)
By Lev Grossman (2009/2011/2014)

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The elevator pitch for this trio of adult fantasy novels — The Magicians, The Magician King and The Magician’s Land — would be “Harry Potter meets Narnia for grown-ups,” but although author Lev Grossman’s admitted debt to both J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis (not to mention Ursula K. Leguin and T.H. White) is very clear, this is no mere homage.

Our hero is Quentin Coldwater, a high school student who is accepted into Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. Quentin has always been obsessed with a series of children’s books called Fillory and Further, dreaming that he could visit the fictional world; it’s not long before he discovers Fillory is real.

Grossman’s world-building skills are unparalleled, as he takes the reader from a school for young magicians to a fantasy land that turns out to contain more malevolence than its idyllic portrayal in the books ever revealed. But he also excels at the practical magic, making it seem entirely plausible that spells would work, if performed just so.

A scene where the students must transform themselves into birds and migrate south to attend their semester in Antarctica is a tour de force of imagination. And while there are quests and peril and instances of derring-do, what’s most compelling is the sense that magic is real, and the comfort that brings the people who practise it. The series is addictive: terrifying and wondrous, funny and salty, and yes, magical.

— Jill Wilson

 

The Goldfinch
By Donna Tartt (2013)

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American author Donna Tartt doesn’t rush her novels to market. Since 1992 she’s published a grand total of three full-length works of fiction. It was her most recent novel, 2013’s The Goldfinch, landed her in the literary spotlight in a way none of her previous works had managed.

At nearly 800 pages in hardcover (and over 900 in paperback), The Goldfinch is a big bird. It’s told in first-person narration by Theo Decker, whose mother dies in an explosion at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art while the two are there visiting an exhibition of Dutch paintings — including one of his mother’s favourites, Carel Fabritius’ The Goldfinch. In the chaos surrounding the aftermath of the bombing, Theo takes The Goldfinch, thinking he is fulfilling the wishes of a dying old man.

Over the course of many subsequent years, the fate of Theo and The Goldfinch, which is stolen and then nearly recovered by Theo’s friend Boris, is chronicled. Theo sells fake antiques to save a friend from bankruptcy, and takes to drinking and drugs to cope with his guilt as well as an unrequited love and the loss of his mother. The fate of the painting, which lands with drug dealers for a time, results in some of the book’s most dramatic passages.

The book was met with mainly positive reviews, although some criticized the book for being somewhat juvenile in nature and riddled with clichés. In the end Tartt laughed last, nabbing the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 as well as short list spots for many other awards. (A 2019 movie version of The Goldfinch, starring Ansel Elgort as Theo and directed by John Crowley, meanwhile, proved to be a commercial flop and was nearly universally panned by critics.)

If none of the above sound compelling, there are always the old standbys to consider: J.R.R. Tolkein’s Middle-earth trilogy, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series or Stephen King’s pandemic book The Stand. We’ve all got a lot more time for reading, after all.

books@freepress.mb.ca