Kurt Vonnegut, Look at the Birdie, 2009

Fourteen previously unpublished short stories, all enjoyable at the very least, although it would have been useful to know from what stages of Vonnegut’s career each of them were written – were they all recent, or do some perhaps date back decades? Then there’s the genre question: there’s roughly a 50/50 genre/mainstream split, with the more imaginative and fantastical stories not necessarily being the best, although the opening story ‘Confido’ sets a superior quality mark that those following don’t always match. The collection is prefaced with Vonnegut’s 1951 letter to Miller Harris, in which he states his creative position as a writer since quitting his job at General Electric in 1951; it’s an odd way to open a collection such as this as the stories, with a few exceptions, rarely stand out as boldly imaginative. And Vonnegut’s satirical purpose is not always present either, with stories such as ‘The Honor of a Newsboy’, ‘Ed Luby’s Key Club’ and the charmingly sweet ‘A Song for Selma’ being as sentimental about ‘the ordinary little guy’ as Vonnegut probably ever got. For a sharper tone of storytelling the best here is probably ‘Little Drops of Water’ about a spurned lover’s attempts to get back her man, and the most satirical is the clever ‘The Petrified Ants’, which takes a jaundiced view of the Soviet approach to making an amazing scientific discovery. It provides the best laugh-out-loud moment and this collection, admirable as it is, could probably have done with a few more of those.  PY

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Sebastian Faulks, Pistache, 2006

A while before Faulks had written a new James Bond novel he’d already done a ‘pistache‘ (pastiche, piss-take, whatever) of Ian Fleming, one among many other short pieces for BBC Radio 4’s The Write Stuff that are collected here as flash fictions and poetry written in the styles of others. I can appreciate perfectly about half of them (and they are all indeed rather clever), but that half also reveals my own tastes and prejudices: Martin Amis has his first day at Hogwarts (probably my favourite), James Bond goes shopping, Dan Brown visits the ATM, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five are drafted by the Anti-Terrorist Squad, George Orwell confronts the real 1984, Harold Pinter writes a TV sitcom, Shakespeare composes a speech for Basil Fawlty... and on and on. The mind does boggle a bit at how diverse Faulks has shown he can be, and stay funny and mostly original too.  PY

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Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers, 1997

This bizarre novel has a superb opening sentence that takes up two pages, in which the highly unreliable and self-deceiving narrator Doug introduces his ninety-nine brothers (aged from 30 to 93) and explains what they plan to do over the course of a single night in the collapsing library of their late philandering father’s decrepit mansion. Of course, it doesn’t go exactly according to plan, instead it ends up the way these gatherings always do, in a squall of fights, exhibitions of puerile insecurities and generally asinine behaviour. It’s a black comedy of manners in which little gets resolved, a skillfully crafted and often surreal work that’s set in the present day, although at times it’s given a historical feel largely through the Rabelaisian extravagance of the brothers’ caricatures, done in a way that makes it feel as if one’s viewing an animated Hogarth sketch. But The Hundred Brothers is also as conceptual as it is comedic as the brothers’ childish antics are played out in sections of the library that allude to the loftiest aspirations of Western thought, and it will inevitably appeal to fans of Robertson Davies largely because of the comic intelligence with which it’s written. The cover notes go in for things like “the Marx Brothers - times twenty-five - performing a Harold Pinter play”, but the most succinct is the pull-quote “A mad wrestling match of a book”, because that feels exactly right. We could certainly do with reading a few more erudite comedies like this largely because they set a very high watermark indeed.  PY

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Chart Korbjitti, Carrion Floating By, 1987

You’re driving at night and fall asleep at the wheel, triggering a car crash: in Thailand, this makes you fair game for everyone else involved who will claim compensation for injuries, damage and loss of income, and the cost to you now has to be negotiated and bargained. You’re now carrion for the vultures who all want a piece of you, but when you happen to work in advertising, doesn’t this then become tit-for-tat? This is a dryly amusing book and mildly satirical even though it’s deliberately light on laughs. Told throughout in the second person, Korbjitti intended the narrator’s gender to be undetermined but this somehow became lost in translation from Thai to English, with the reader, at key points, necessarily being provided with a male narrator; otherwise, barring a few minor errors in English this is a translation that reads very fluently. I’m getting to understand Korbjitti’s point of view: he’s uncompromisingly socialist, and his books that I’ve read so far have been well-observed and unremittingly mundane in subject matter, yet with an emotional impact reserved for the closing scenes that has so far never failed to hit the mark.  PY

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Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog, 1925

The Heart of a Dog has ingredients that make it a satirical classic, yet it would surely have been funnier still to its intended Russian audience. Bulgakov had constant problems with censors and he never saw publication of The Heart of a Dog in the Soviet Union in his lifetime: he died in 1940 and it was suppressed there until as late as 1987, appearing only a few years before the fall of Soviet Communism. Philip Philipovich, a rich and respected Moscow doctor who specialises in rejuvenation, decides to experiment with some transplant surgery on a stray mongrel known as Sharik with a few body parts from a recently deceased prole, and unwittingly transforms the dog into a poor resemblance of a cultured man. What gives this book its spark is the downtrodden dog’s character, which kicks off and then punctuates the rest of the story very nicely indeed. Bulgakov displayed a splendid sense of fun in this satire on the Russian Revolution, in which the uneducated and common proletariat expected to simply be handed a share of the wealth, and when encapsulated in the character of Sharik they’re also satirised as aspiring – and of course failing – to take on the airs and graces of the bourgeois elite. The doctor’s frequent counter-revolutionary rants are what help this novel endure as a modern and edgy one: right or wrong, Bulgakov gave the reader room to still wish the world was a fairer and more evenly divided place, despite the entrenched imbalance between rich and poor that became the source of his best jokes. A book that can’t be missed by those with a taste for sharp satire.  PY

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Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, 1948

This was described by Anna Haycraft (better known as Alice Thomas Ellis) as ”One of the funniest and most significant books of the century”. The friction that drives it is the awkwardness of British cultural attitudes in post-war Los Angeles, set mostly in the Whispering Glades Memorial Park – a kind of Disneyland for the dead – and involving a young British poet who falls for a young American corpse beautician while he himself works secretly as a mortician at a pet cemetery. Waugh is funniest when he lets his characters’ veneer of civility slip to reveal something far more feral underneath, and I can almost sense how he filled in some laugh-free zones with just that kind of unexpected viciousness to keep the humour levels up. Some mocking characterisation and a few very memorable turns of phrase make this a wickedly funny book.  PY

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James Morrow, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, 2009

In 1945 the US Navy developed a top secret biological weapon: giant mutant fire-breathing iguanas bred to stomp Japanese cities. Hollywood monster-suit actor Syms Thorley is drafted to put terror into the hearts of a group of visiting Japanese diplomats with his depiction of what might happen if Emperor Hirohito doesn’t surrender; and if that doesn’t work there’s always the Manhattan Project. Shambling Towards Hiroshima takes the form of a suicide note written at a 1984 horror movie convention in Baltimore, but outside of that frame this is a lovingly crafted satire that is also a tribute to Hollywood’s monster movies, with educated nods in all directions. The first three quarters of this novella feels self-consciously ridiculous because Morrow is depicting military life imitating what is essentially a pretty ridiculous art, but he has serious points to make and there comes a well crafted moment towards the end at which he wants you stop laughing and consider a few things. Morrow is interviewed on video about the story here, but it’s worth indulging in this wry, clever book first.  PY

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Julian Barnes, The Porcupine, 1992

A fictional satire of the fall of Communism in an unnamed East European country, loosely based on the trial of former Bulgarian Communist president Todor Zhivkov. Bulgarians are suspicious of Westerners writing about their country but The Porcupine turned out to be a bestseller there. It also became a minor footnote to Communist Bulgarian history when Zhivkov himself requested a copy to read while under house arrest; also, his prosecutor Krasimir Zhekov later identified with the persona of the book’s fictional prosecutor Peter Solinsky when he later introduced himself to Barnes, declaring “I am Peter Solinsky.” This is a memorably good a book. It’s relentlessly cynical, angry, funny and sharply observed, and cleverly blurs any easy distinctions the reader can make between what constitutes either good or bad ideological politics. Barnes puts across a vital, incipient energy very easily in the first few pages and then carries it through right to the aftermath. A very well crafted novel indeed, recommended unreservedly if only because it’s vastly more entertaining that its subject matter might suggest.  PY

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