Strangely beautiful

Two books that I've read (rather quickly and thus not very deeply) in the past week:

Foucault's Pendulum. Umberto Eco. This is the kind of reader resistant novel I'll admit to liking. Full of strange esoteric references and sparkling with unimaginable linguistic contortions, Eco manages an amazing blend of showy erudition and touching poignancy. Much like Pynchon's stuff, it's books like these that remind me why I do what I do.

The Namesake. Jhumpa Lahiri. This came in the mail yesterday (second-hand book buying is one of the best reasons of living here) and after some late night reading and a final burst this morning, I'm left tingling by the uncanny emotional resonance that tied me to the novel. It's not the immediately spottable New York references that struck a chord (those were fun, but on the level of spotting places from movie sets or on TV that you just wandered past the day before .... ). It was the strange journey that its protagonist takes to a place thousands of miles away, in order to be someone else; a journey which now so many take, that left the sense that our myths no longer map the epic, tragic and comic journeys home of Odysseus, Oedipus and Frodo; neither do they follow the aimless wanderings of Don Quixote or Dean Moriarty. Instead, they trace the unsettling attempts to find the self on distant shores. Amazingly well written, and though it goes flat in the middle (with cliched descriptions of yuppies in New York ... eeks ... ), it ends powerful.

There appears to be a film for the novel in production. But the trailer already seems to miss the point about the vexed nature of "home"!