Why I try to avoid recommending books

I think I have pretty unusual, and at times a bit morbid, taste in books. These two books are good examples of works that I loved, but that I'd be hesitant about recommending to the general populous. Both are really excellent! But maybe not for everyone.

The first was a bit of a surprise for me, because generally I am not a Virginia Woolf fan (bad feminist!). That said, I absolutely loved The Waves. For a one-word descriptor, I'd choose transcendent. It's very unconventional, and accentuates that impressionistic quality of Woolf's. Though that sometimes (usually) bothers me, in this case it worked. The novel follows the inner lives of several friends as they intersect and then cascade away throughout their lives from childhood to adulthood. The characters do not speak in the usual sense; instead, we hear their inner monologues.

Here is a favorite quote: “He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unanswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose meeting – under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait, and he will not come. It is for that that I love him. Oblivious, almost entirely ignorant, he will pass from my life. And I shall pass, incredible as it seems, into other lives; this is only an escapade, perhaps, a prelude only.”

The second one, Time's Arrow, sort of sounds horrifying when you just read the summary. It's about a Nazi doctor who was at Auschwitz as told through the perspective of this alter ego who is in his body but disconnected from his mind/thoughts. The kicker is that the alter ego is experiencing the life of the protagonist backwards, starting with death and working back through his years living in the U.S. undercover as a doctor at a hospital, hurtling of course towards the years at the concentration camp. Doesn't that just sound delightful?

So, it's obviously a difficult read (though a super fast one, too) raising a number of difficult issues, but it's really, really amazing. Holocaust novels are a genre in and of themselves, of course, and it can feel like a cheap shot at making something "meaningful" and "important" (there's a reason there was that Kate Winslet skit about the Oscars). This one, though, doesn't fall in that trap. Through this incredibly strange narrative device, it brings a unique perspective to many of questions. The narrator truly is experiencing everything backwards, so during the years at the hospital he sees the doctor as taking healthy people and breaking them; at the concentration camp, he experiences the crematoriums as taking ash and turning it into people. It's disturbing, yes, but also gets at you in ways that more conventional and trite works certainly do not.

But yes, this is why I shy away from making recommendations.