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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling

The sixth installment in Rowling’s series finds Harry facing his greatest trial so far, with promises of graver difficulties to come, as he comes to face the dire nature of his (apparent) fate.

While I would not go so far as to compare Rowling’s opus to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, I do think it compares quite favorably to The Hobbit. Even as the adult themes become more pronounced, it is clear that Rowling’s intended audience is still a youthful one. Adults may certainly enjoy the HP series, as they enjoyed The Hobbit, that much is obvious, but one would never mistake it for, say, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of… books. This is not a complaint about Rowling’s series, which my pre-teen daughter has read and enjoyed every installment of, but an observation with an attendant caveat: the series, while engaging itself in lessons about the difficulties of growing up and the gray areas of life that must be dealt with, is written well within the parameters of “young adult literature”, and therefore does not provide the scope, in breadth or depth, of the adult register, even when the matter at hand is typically an adult one. For a contrast to the HP series, see Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which expertly introduces young readers to adult issues in a way that they can understand and learn from.

This brings me to my only real complaint about the HP series. As much as I have personally enjoyed the story so far, have grown attached to its main characters and been delighted by the world of wizards as Rowling has re-created it, I have felt somewhat disappointed in her handling of Harry’s maturation, especially as he is the protagonist, the sine qua non of her story. I found myself, at the end of The Half-Blood Prince (once the emotional turmoil of the last two chapters had faded, that is), feeling particularly critical of Harry’s rather unreflective behavior throughout the series, or, put another way, of Rowling’s handling of Harry’s psyche as adversity and tragedy continue to temper it. But perhaps I am missing something. Perhaps Rowling is simply portraying the truth of an adolescent boy, for whom such lessons are unconsciously assimilated at first, to be unpacked and dealt with only later. Perhaps Rowling has observed that, for a younger audience, it’s important to leave the emotional interpretations of story events to them, rather than to “tell” too much via the main character’s own dealings and understanding. Perhaps, in writing such a lengthy story, some things have to be left out. However, I think that Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy proves that a young person’s self-reflective maturation can be dealt with, and that doing so proves to be the more rewarding route for the story’s intended audience.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores, by Gabriel García Márquez

A lovely, disturbing, wonderful and moving work of literature. I am at a loss for words in its wake, if only because I don’t want to gush. In a mere 115 pages, the master of magic realism has shown his voice to be as strong as ever, his pitch perfect (for a novella), his vision pure and true to the heart of life in all its complexities and conundrums. While some have harshly criticized the work on a number of fronts – from subject matter to the treatment of same – I found the author to be, yet again, unfettered by convention and more than capable of spinning a fully realized tale worth the telling. It is no Lolita redux that we are offered here, but rather a mature view into an old man’s imperfect ex post facto coming of age. The story is provocative, certainly, but it is neither an exercise in pathos nor an ode to pedophilia. Looked at as a metaphor, it is easier to see where the author is going. There is, in the end, a very human redemption for the old man in his pursuit of a youthful love, and detractors who see only a perverse relationship unfolding are missing the psychologically rich quality of the story.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, by George Saunders

I can really do no better than to point you to Saunders’s own piece on why he wrote this remarkable, darkly comedic, highly recommended work. I suppose I could, in order to whet your appetite, quote this much from it:

I found myself writing, “Once there was a country that was too small for all its inhabitants to fit inside at once.” Soon the story was going off in an unexpected direction, and was becoming that rare and not-so-sought-after thing, a kid’s story about genocide. The characters evolved from abstract shapes to beings I thought of as Conglomerates, composed of flesh and machine parts and vegetative portions. One group, led by Phil, was soon trying to eliminate the other group, and Phil, talking in Stalinist rants whenever his brain fell off, was consolidating his power a lá Hitler, surrounding himself with brown-nosing Advisors, brainless needy henchman, and groveling media spokespersons, and then murdering the opposition in gruesome ways. Needless to say, all hope for marketing tie-ins vanished.

Really, you owe it to yourself to pick this slim novel up – perhaps along with Julio Cortázar’s also brilliantly entertaining work, Cronopios and Famas.