Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife (2006)

Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage has been variously described as an allegory, satire, parable, tale, memoir of a Boston borough and a humanist magic realist text. And I would add to that list, a bildungsroman.

Firmin himself, both narrator and protagonist, is a self-professed “trespasser, vagabond, bum, pedant,voyeur, gnawer of books, ridiculous dreamer, liar, windbag, and pervert.” He is also a rat!

This short (148 pages), tightly written book follows the life of a runt-rat (thirteenth offpsring to a mother with twelve teats) who grows up in a neighbourhood bounded by the Rialto theatre (which shows Hollywood fare by day and pornographic films after midnight) and the Pembroke Bookshop (which stocks a universe of “Big Ones” like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake as well as contraband books from Olympia and Obelisk presses, judiciously stored in a safe at the back of the store). It's all there: philosophy, psychogeography, literary theory, Freud and Ginger Rogers.

Firmin is a rat but in every other way he's like you and me: he wants for love and friendship, he's hurt by betrayal, he wants to be warm and dry and well-fed and he wants his life to have meaning. Sam Savage charmingly draws these parallels to deliver a blunt message, if Firmin the rat can find his humanity surely we can too.

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The Clothes on their Backs by Linda Grant (2008)

Linda Grant has been writing the same tragi-comic novel over and over since 1995. The narrator is an assimilated English-Jewish woman, there is some trans-continental travel, a love affair or two (sometimes) gone wrong, post-holocaust characters trying to live a normal life, and a surprise or mystery at the core of the narrator's family. I love them all.

In The Clothes on their Backs, the narrator, Vivien Kovaks (Kovacs Klein), is in her mid 50s and looking back to 1977 where the bulk of the action takes place, the year that the National Front became dangerously active in the UK. She organizes an encounter with her newly-located Uncle Sandor (a character based loosely on real-life slumlord Peter Rachman) and agrees to transcribe his bleak life story. The result is an extraordinary clash of ideas and personalities, rich with Yiddish constructions and immigrant trials, shadowed by the delightfully elusive questions: does he know who she is? Does he know that she knows who he is?
This enterprise culminates in a fiasco of a birthday party, a failed family reunion and a violent, race-related altercation.

The book parallels different and ultimately flawed ways of responding to the world: Uncle Sandor is brave but incapable of nuanced morality, Viven's father is afraid of the consequences of his actions and runs away. Vivien has the monumental task of understanding the suspicious, paralyzing world she grows up in, freeing herself from its constraints and finally forgiving herself for failing from time to time.

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Invisible by Paul Auster (2009)

Clancy Martin writes in The New York Times that unlike Auster's last few books where "ïrony vacuums out the content" Invisible is a "crisp, elegant, brisk(ly)" written bildungsroman based on an incestuous love affair which is the key to the protagonist's personality. Clancy Martin is happy to reread it.

James Urquhart, critic for The Independent, is not. Above all, Urquhart is not convinced by Auster's use of all three narrative forms, describing it as "deliberately congested authorship" which yields a "confusing", "rather wearying" narrative style.

Edward Docx, reviewer for The Observer and himself a novelist, applauds Auster's novels generally, but pans this one. Apart from the sins of "precociousness" and endless "cultural citations", the novel evades the heart of the project: to perform the "nightmarishly difficult task of actually writing about character, rendering a scene vividly, describing incest."

My own response? I enjoyed and even welcomed the cultural references, including the mention of Perec, the exotic addresses in Paris, the names of foods - "croissants, brioches and tartines beurrées". The narrative successfully unites form and content such as in the last few pages of section three, written by Jim, which offer a condensation of events, stripped of detail because the protagonist is dying and can only muster a few scant notes. What pathos there is in the last sentence of that section: "They are all ghosts now, and W. will soon be walking among them." I'm with Clancy Martin here: Invisible "has the illusion of effortlessness... it is such a pleasure to read."

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The Enlightenment, Naturalism, and the Secularization of Values by Alan Charles Kors (2012)

Alan Charles Kors has written a twelve page article called The Enlightenment and the Secularization of Values which tracks the changing intellectual landscape of western thought from the end of scholasticism to the Enlightenment. He contextualizes ideas and encapsulates historical moments, moving from the abstract to the concrete, adding biographical detail and essentially making 300 years of shifting thought on a subject that is complex and still wholy relevant today, quite reader-friendly. His hand is even - athiests, deists, Christians and materialists are represented. As are French, British, Italian and Swiss thinkers. There is even a passing nod to Thomas Jefferson.

Can you trust this article? It comes from an organization called The Council for Humanist Secularism which publishes a number of magazines including Free Inquiry (the journal in which Kor's article can be found). The organization's mandate is to”advocate and defend a nonreligious lifestance rooted in science, naturalistic philosophy and humanist ethics”.

Can you trust the author? He is Princeton and Harvard educated, he currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes for libertarian and conservative journals, is an ardent defender of free speech and has most recently published a book about witchcraft in Europe.

Professor Kors writes sensitively about beliefs - be they religious, political or moral. I trust him.

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