My three most recent reads.
Coetzee's follow-up to
Waiting for the Barbarians,
Foe is every bit the masterpiece, in my mind, despite its comparatively lukewarm critical reception. Fascinating, dense, deeply problematized little novel, and thoroughly worth reading.
I'm not a big fan of Diaz—I've read a few of his more recent stories in the
New Yorker over the past several years (such as the laughably execrable "Miss Lora"), as well as excerpts from
Oscar Wao—but I had purchased
Drown a few years ago, based on some positive reviews and before I'd read any of his work, and decided to finally read it. I think this earlier work (published 1996) is, somewhat surprisingly, much stronger than his later work—simpler in voice and clearer in vision—but the final story, "Negocios", was the only one I really could say I enjoyed (and it was indeed quite good).
End Zone has been a revelation. I'd never read any of DeLillo's writing before, but this early work of his is intense, darkly ribald, and wonderfully concerned with a specially post-modern semiotics of death and destruction—a kind of jargon-riddled effusion that ultimately aggregates to blank space—while at the same time being an intriguing little season-length sports narrative.
