Read and Appreciated in 2003
A Year’s Best List
Fiction
I read fewer complete books in 2003 than in previous years, but I read a lot of short stories in numerous anthologies by various writers, notably tales by Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard and Ray Bradbury. I was pleased to discover the cunning potboilers of Arturo Pérez-Reverte, in particular The Fencing Master. Other renowned authors I read for the first time include Arundhati Roy, Oscar Hijuelos and Orhan Pamuk, all of them excellent. I also did quite a bit of re-reading, mostly of Italo Calvino.
One of my most significant new discoveries was the work of Zoran Živković. The man himself gave me copies of his books, including The Fourth Circle, Time-Gifts, The Writer, Impossible Encounters, Seven Touches of Music, The Library, Steps Through the Mist and The Book. I am currently working on an article about Živković which I hope to see published in the literary journal Wormwood in early 2004. For the meantime I’ll just content myself by saying that Živković is an amazing contemporary writer and that I recommend everything he has ever published.
Talking about Slavic fantasy (if such a thing exists) I would also like to put in a good word for Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and their utopian fantasy Hard to Be a God, which combines challenging ideas with colourful action in a typical Strugatsky Brothers manner.
My novella of the year is Su Tong’s “Nineteen Thirty Four Escapes,” one of the strangest and most evocative pieces of writing from this amazing writer. Without a single decorative flourish, Tong writes about the China of the 1930s and a disarming and troubling place it always turns out to be.
The best anthology of the year was surely The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases edited by the amazing Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts.
As for novels, I feel no guilt about plugging yet again The Non-Existent Knight by the incomparable Calvino. This time I even managed to get hold of a Portuguese version, courtesy of Luís Rodrigues. I therefore can justifiably claim that my favourite book of 2003 was O Cavaleiro Inexistente even though I can’t actually read it in this form. I assume the Portuguese translation is closer to the Italian original than the English translation. Most fictional characters don’t exist, but the hero of this book doesn’t exist even in his own fiction. In this way he is closer to the majority of the human race, who also don’t exist in fiction, than most fictional characters are, however representational of ‘real’ people they seem to be.
Apart from the Calvino, my favourite novels of the year were as follows:
The Malacia Tapestry, Brian Aldiss
A fabulously rich and scented feast of style and farce set in a world which has historical and histrionic parallels with our own. Perian de Chirolo is a poor actor who employs his talent to both rescue his flagging stage career and survive in an increasingly unstable society where change and innovation are regarded with fear and loathing. One of the strengths of Aldiss is his brilliant wit, which he frequently employs throughout this novel to deflate the pomposity of some of the characters and also to enhance the earthy humour of the created civilisation itself, which is a curious compound of Elizabethan England, Byzantium and the Venetian Empire. In terms of ethics and aesthetics, this fantasy resembles the books of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series and it is no less sceptical and suspicious of escapism, but Aldiss, although frequently melancholy, is less deliberately dour than Harrison, his colours less muted and the swish of his capes less rotten.
