Fiction: PostModern Fantasy
The Magician King by Lev Grossman (Viking)
Lev Grossman is a nerd. He wants you to believe that it’s cool to read fantasy fiction. As Time magazine’s book critic, Grossman brings a nerd’s depth of arcane knowledge and obsessive confidence to this ambition. He draws on some of the tropes and conceits of the classics of the genre, from “The Chronicles of Narnia” to the Harry Potter story, melding them into a modern psychological novel to create something entirely new.
The first volume, “The Magicians,” appeared in 2009, and this summer brings us “The Magician King,” which ends on an inkling for a third. Perhaps an entire Chronicles of the Magicians is forthcoming.
“The Magicians” is about a young boy named Quentin Coldwater who enrolls at Brakebills College, a secret school for magicians. With his friends, Quentin travels to Fillory, a Narnia-like kingdom that they all had known about through a series of children’s books. “The Magician King” picks up two years later. Quentin has joined his friends to become a quartet of kings and queens enjoying a peaceful life of privilege, presiding over their lands and people and magical creatures, when a sudden misfortune occurs that sets the plot in motion.
A spirit of disenchantment pervades this fantasy. The kings and queens of Fillory are polymaths, self-taught geniuses capable of incorporating dozens of foreign languages into their spells. They possess the secrets of magic and live in a storybook forest with talking sloths and Seeing Hares. They have been through a series of adventures that would sober any soul and yet, they remain petty, selfish and profane.
Quentin is no Harry Potter. The other humans in Fillory are not the Pevensie children. This isn’t a book for the kids. It’s not your father’s Narnia or your older sister’s Hogwarts. Something sadder and more sinister has entered this fantasy: the modern world.
Non-Fiction: Art of the Steal
Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
With its mammoth endowment from an oil tycoon’s fortune, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles has engaged in what the co-authors of this riveting expose call “aggressive buying” of antiquities. Curators of the Getty and other museums recognized the risk that their avidity would encourage looting, but they salved their consciences by emphasizing museums’ capacity to preserve and display artifacts that might otherwise molder in situ. “Ultimately,” Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino explain, “the ethical question comes down to this: Will the acquisition of an object do more to destroy the past or preserve it? Houghton argued that buying antiquities — even those that have been recently looted — does greater good than harm.”
A cop named Fausto Guarnieri disagreed. Working for the art squad of the Italian Carabinieri, he took notice when the Getty put on display “a seven-and-a-half-foot statue of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love.” With help from local archaeologists, he sniffed out a connection between the Getty’s much-ballyhooed acquisition and the looting of a site at Morgantina, Italy, in the late 1970s. By the time a lengthy process of trials and negotiations had ended, the Getty had returned Aphrodite to Italy (although with a new ID — experts now believe she is more likely to be Persephone, the goddess of fertility); and one of the museum’s curators suffered “the destruction of her career and reputation.”
Non-Fiction: Creepy
Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World by Marlene Zuk (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
If nothing else, “Sex on Six Legs” will make you think twice the next time you step outside — or anywhere, really. Biology professor Marlene Zuk’s look at the insect world is often insightful, especially for the parallels she draws between bugs and people. What sets us apart from insects now that scientists have shown that some can count, recognize individuals and communicate geography? Maybe just their torrid, ruthless sex lives. Woe to the female dung flies drowned or irreparably injured by overeager suitors. The less titillating material is just as buzz-worthy: More than 80 percent of all animal species are insects, including more than 350,000 species of beetles, one- fourth of all the creatures on earth.
Zuk conveys an obvious affection for the tiny critters, and her expertise, including her knowledge of other scientists’ research, is impressive. Sometimes, though, the text veers too far into academia for the layperson, sounding more like a digest of studies than a narrative.
Even readers with a basic biology background may find their eyes crossed after attempting the passage on insect sex ratios.
Still, Zuk peppers her writing with geeky wit and the underlying possibility that, when it comes to evolutionary superiority, humans may not be so big after all.
