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| 0735243344
| 9780735243347
| 0735243344
| 4.15
| 1,062,088
| Jul 05, 2022
| Jul 05, 2022
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did not like it
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That’s it, no more Gabrielle Zevin for Kara. Granted it had been fifteen years since the last book I had read by her. Moreover, both of the books I’ve
That’s it, no more Gabrielle Zevin for Kara. Granted it had been fifteen years since the last book I had read by her. Moreover, both of the books I’ve read have been YA novels. So maybe I could be forgiven for talking myself into trying Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, given the hype it has received. Sometimes the hype is worth it, and I shout, “Why did you all let me sleep on this?” Today is not one of those days, my friends. I did not enjoy this book, and the only reason I’m not giving it one star is because I am much kinder than twenty-year-old Kara was with her ratings. Sam Masur is working on a math degree at Harvard when he reconnects with Sadie Green, his onetime friend from childhood in Los Angeles, who is now attending MIT to design video games. Sam and Sadie start working on a video game together, which propels them into a lifelong career. Sam’s roommate, Marx, joins them as the business leg of their tripod. As the sands of time, etc., the three experience the vicissitudes of life, love, and game design. Sam and Sadie quarrel and reconcile, Sam deals with disability, Sadie with sexism, both of them with loss. Marx is pretty much the only tolerable thing about this book. Now, I do have some words of praise! First, although I’m not really qualified to comment on it, I liked Zevin’s portrayal of disability through Sam and his foot. It feels good to see this foregrounded in a way that shows the complexity of Sam’s condition. He is neither a saint nor a martyr; there is no disability porn here, nor is there a magical moment of Sam becoming a better person. It’s hard to write unsympathetic characters (which is what I found Sam to be) who are also disabled, and I want to emphasize that I found Sam’s unsympathetic nature to be separate from his disabled status. For what it is worth, I thought Sadie is super unsympathetic too. Oh wait, I am supposed to be compliment still. Damn it. Let me try this again. Another highlight of Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the setting of a video game studio. Again, since I was a baby when most of this stuff happened, I am not the most qualified to comment. Still, I thought the depiction of nineties and early 2000s video game development was spiritually accurate if not factually accurate. Zevin captures the infectious enthusiasm that was the zeitgeist of the industry. These decades were a tipping point when PCs had started to saturate households and their capabilities had improved just enough to really do some amazing things (for the time) with graphics, yet such developments were expensive and time-consuming. The push-pull tension between “video games are art” and “video games are consumer products” feels very real and truthful, and I enjoyed these facets of the plot. That being said, if you thought this book was about video games, you are wrong. Sam and Sadie’s relationship is the heart of this novel, and I really wanted to love it. Though there are elements of longing, theirs is ultimately a platonic relationship. As an aromantic asexual reader, it’s so valuable for me to see platonic relationships foregrounded as equal to romantic relationships. It feels like Zevin is trying to do that here, albeit in a messy and very unsatisfying way. Which is ultimately why, despite this positive aspect of the book, I can’t really say I enjoyed it. See, Sam and Sadie suck. They are just terrible people. I think Zevin knows this. I think she wants us to think they are terrible people but also sympathize with them because, hey, aren’t we all? Isn’t that the point of life, haha, we all hurt each other but we can kiss and makeup and move on? About the third or fourth time Sam and Sadie had a falling out, I felt like I was watching one of those TV shows where the two leads are stuck in a will-they/won’t-they for seven seasons because writers have forgotten how to write tension into will-they relationships. Only in this case, it’s watching a friendship circle the drain. I get it—sometimes friends fight and don’t talk for years and then reconcile! I am old enough to finally grasp what friendship can be in all its glorious diversity, including the turbulence of decades. But why, Sam? Why, Sadie? You just keep hurting each other like moths drawn to a flame that arms them with chainsaws and then sets them against one another. But let’s say you’re into chainsaw moth fights. Let’s say you are buying what Zevin is selling with the Sam/Sadie arc. OK, cool. Can we talk about the writing? The writing is clunky, and in particular, the sex scenes are just … wow. The best way I could describe it to a friend was that the author, a cis woman, writes sex scenes like a cis man—by which I mean, even when the perspective is focused on a woman’s sexual experience, the scene feels like it’s written by someone who has no idea what a woman’s sexual experience is like. Don’t believe me? I will hit you with a small dose. Brace yourself:
Well, I can’t erase that phrase from my mind and now neither can you! Zevin cheerfully glosses over an incredibly abusive relationship—doesn’t deny it, mind you; Sadie and the others acknowledge it as abusive and it’s actually one of the many bombs that go off in her and Sam’s friendship. But Dov also gets to be smarmy, “haha, yes, I know I am a fuckboi, aren’t I incorrigible?” Similarly, Zevin orchestrates a gun-violence subplot that has all the emotional resonance of a sledgehammer against concrete. Oh, and that casually upbeat reference to “the creation of Israel” hits different in August 2024, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to dunk on this book for being Zionist like some have and don’t know much about Zevin herself, all I can say is … yeah, not a good look. I am certain the critical defence of all this is simply “that’s the point, Kara.” Zevin doesn’t acknowledge the depth of these moments because this is supposed to be one of those books where “life happens.” It’s all literary and pretentious and shit, like she’s Douglas Coupland mixed with Philip Roth. And I don’t. Care. If Zevin is master of anything, it’s banality. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is boring. It has all the ingredients of a deep and important book. It wants you to think it’s saying a lot by not saying much at all, hoping you will fill in the blanks yourself rather than realizing there is nothing to read between the lines. But this book is nothing more than a long, empty promise. Oh look, I talked myself into giving it one star. Is 2009 Kara coming back with a vengeance? Incidentally, this is my 2000th book review published on this my review website. When I was pondering if I should do something to mark the occasion, maybe pick a particularly special book, it never occurred to me that if I left the book to chance, it would end up being a one-star review. But I guess that is its own kind of special. If I ever pick up another Gabrielle Zevin novel, please smack it out of my hands, OK? Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 03, 2024
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Aug 04, 2024
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Aug 13, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0385697376
| 9780385697378
| 0385697376
| 4.29
| 1,468,449
| Mar 31, 2022
| Jan 01, 2022
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it was amazing
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My bestie Rebecca lent this to me, and I am glad she did—I don’t think I would have picked it up otherwise, and that would have been my loss. Lessons
My bestie Rebecca lent this to me, and I am glad she did—I don’t think I would have picked it up otherwise, and that would have been my loss. Lessons in Chemistry stands out. It is quite a literary novel, full of narrative tricks and idiosyncrasies and enough contrived character circumstances to make John Irving or Heather O’Neill jealous. But Bonnie Garmus is on a mission in this book. She’s laser-focused on the unfairness of life—not just in terms of institutional sexism but also the way in which life robs us of the ones we love the most. This is a sad yet hopeful story that made me laugh and cry, and sometimes those are the best. Elizabeth Zott is a chemist. She would be a PhD., except for—well, you know, she’s a woman in science in the 1960s. So she ends up as a researcher at a small institute in California, where she unexpectedly falls in love with Calvin Evans, the institute’s brightest and most eccentric researcher. But when Calvin dies, Elizabeth is left as a single (unwed!) mom, and sexism continue to impede her ability to earn money or move forward in the world. Opportunity arrives in the form of an afternoon cooking show—for Elizabeth to host—but neither the television producer who discovers her nor Elizabeth herself know what to make of the success of Supper at Six. Meanwhile, Elizabeth tries to raise her precocious daughter, Mad, the only way she knows how: scientifically. There’s probably many ways for this book to lose the reader. Garmus’s narration is, by and large, flat albeit extensive in description, prone to tangents and meandering towards its point. The dialogue sputters onto the page in fits and spurts before drying up again. Each chapter flits between times and memories, occasionally with an attention span so frenetic it’s hard to read. The characters are caricatures—some of them so sexist and boorish it borders on the incredible, others so buffoonish or farcical as to nearly undermine the seriousness of the story. But I think that’s rather the point, and that’s kind of what Garmus is getting at here—sexism is silly. This is a story about a woman who refuses to settle. Throughout Lessons in Chemistry, so many people—including other women—tell Elizabeth that she just has to accept the way the world is. Maybe you can make a little headway, but eventually you have to give in and play by the patriarchy’s rules. You have to be a Miss Frask instead of an Elizabeth Zott. Garmus perfectly portrays so many of the tropes I see in social justice spaces—women weighed down by so much internalized misogyny it’s painful to see; men who profess to be allies but only if it means you’ll sit down now, please, you’re being disruptive; people of all genders who stand with you and mean well but really don’t understand just how far the fight for liberation must go. From Frask to Walter to Harriet, the characters jump off the page because they are caricatures. Indeed, Lessons in Chemistry rather feels like Garmus is screaming into the void. Because the world has not changed much since the 1960s. Last year I watched Picture a Scientist, a Netflix documentary about historical and present-day sexual harassment in science. While the language we use and some laws have changed, what Elizabeth experiences here remains very much part of women and non-binary people’s experiences in science. Moreover, if there is a flaw in this book, it is the whiteness of it—racialized women continue to face even more hurdles than women like me and Elizabeth. So Garmus wrote a book to scream, and scream, and scream, at the unjustness of it all. There is a love story here too. It’s couched in the language of beakers and rowing and leash laws, but it’s here, on paper, a slow-burn romance that ends too soon and turns into a meditation on grief. Elizabeth and Calvin never had a chance. Calvin and his mother never had a chance. Calvin and Mad never had a chance. Sometimes life just happens, and you never get a chance. I loved all of Elizabeth’s relationships in the book. She’s so careful with her daughter yet so oblivious. Mad is a delightful child, slightly creepy but never in an overwhelming way—I don’t think I would have liked to see her try to carry the whole book, but as a protagonist who joins us midway through, she is great. Harriet too—her development from housewife with little ambition to Elizabeth’s close friend … it’s just so neat, and in the hands of another writer perhaps could have been trite, but Garmus somehow pulls it off. That’s what this is: a magic trick. This book is so raw yet so carefully and precisely crafted, a chemical—nay, alchemical—chain reaction of storytelling culminating in a coda that left me crying. When Elizabeth signs off, when she finally reads the cue cards … well, not to spoil it, but there were tears in my eyes—though so much of the finale is predictable, it is predictable in such a way that Garmus has earned it through foreshadowing. The payoff is so well executed, so satisfying, that I just feel like I’ve come full circle. I want this to be a movie. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 15, 2022
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Nov 20, 2022
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Nov 24, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0553212583
| 9780553212587
| 0553212583
| 3.89
| 1,879,938
| Dec 1847
| Oct 2003
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liked it
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**spoiler alert** I previously read Wuthering Heights over 10 years ago, and I might not ever have revisited it until my pal Julie roped me into a re-
**spoiler alert** I previously read Wuthering Heights over 10 years ago, and I might not ever have revisited it until my pal Julie roped me into a re-read. You can read her review here. Our reactions are quite different, although I think we share many observations about the nature of the story and its legacy. First, as always, a quick plot summary: the year is 1801 and a dandy gentleman named Mr. Lockwood shows up to assume tenancy of Thrushcross Grange, a smaller property near Wuthering Heights. Lockwood’s initial meeting with Heathcliff, the enigmatic owner of both properties, doesn’t go well. Neither do his subsequent meetings! Heathcliff and the other denizens of the Heights, Cathy and Hareton and the grizzled servant Joseph, are cold, unwelcoming, and somewhat off. Lockwood, being the nosy gadabout that he is, presses his housekeeper to spill the tea. Mrs. Ellen Dean does just that, and the majority of the narrative is told in her voice while she traces the intertwined histories of the Grange and Heights and two generations of two families, the Lintons and Earnshaws. Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff (it’s a mononym) had a bit of a thing, but this is not a story of starcrossed lovers. It’s a story of intergenerational trauma, a story of terrible people being terrible to each other as well as other, slightly-less terrible people, the terrible-ness percolating down like the world’s worst drip coffee until it results in DEATH. Lockwood remains cheery and unaffected throughout. One thing my review of the previous decade didn’t adequately convey is the sheer lunacy of this book’s events. Lockwood bumbles into Wuthering Heights like the world’s most awkward guest. He literally shows up during one subsequent visit by trudging through a snowstorm to the house, necessitating his stay overnight (which no one seems super excited about). This is one of the difficulties of reading a book like Wuthering Heights. Beyond language and social conventions, sometimes the environments are difficult for us to understand as modern readers. I live in a house in a city; the idea of leaving my house and being stranded at my neighbour’s house because of a snowstorm is a bit difficult for me to grasp. (This is not a criticism of the book—you’ll know when I get to those—it’s an observation of some of the challenges of reading Regency fiction set in rural England.) It just goes off the rails from there. There is a lot of domestic violence and child abuse in this book—it’s basically an advertisement for children’s aid services. In this way, Emily Brontë explores the major motif of nature vs nurture. So many characters refer to Heathcliff as an inherently dark, rogueish or evil person. Yet Brontë demonstrates that Heathcliff and Hareton’s attitudes are heavily influenced by their mistreatment at the hands of Hindley (uh, what’s with the H names, anyway?). Hindley is an incompetent and spiteful paterfamilias who alienates Heathcliff as well as his sister, Catherine while simultaneously gambling himself so far into debt that he creates the opportunity for Heathcliff to assume control of the estate. Is Heathcliff a villain? Sure. But he is an opportunistic villain in the sense that his actions are always a result of seizing opportunities that present themselves. He seldom goes out of his way to plan anything beyond his reaction to the latest slight. Catherine Earnshaw, on the other hand, is a piece of work. She isn’t just attracted to the bad boys; she is a bad boy. One might imagine Emily pours into her all the darkest desires she herself experiences growing up in Haworth. Yet as with Heathcliff, Catherine is a product of her environment. If she is petty, if she is vindictive, if she is unwise, it’s only because those who had charge of her education and upbringing failed to instill better values. To an extent, Mrs. Dean recognizes this as she unravels her narrative, and laments the inefficacy of her own interventions while housekeeping for Catherine and Edgar at the Grange. Catherine’s decision to invite Heathcliff back into her life, despite the conflict between him and Edgar, and flaunt Heathcliff’s presence so cruelly, reverberates throughout the novel and influences Heathcliff’s meddling to bring about the marriage between Isabella and his own son. Although not a very long book, at times Wuthering Heights feels repetitive, and that’s one reason I didn’t enjoy my re-read as much as I wanted to. Lots of dead mothers in this—and death in general. Emily tends to kill off characters who aren’t needed anymore. I was tempted to read this as an inexperienced author’s beginner attempts at plotting. More charitably, though, I’d read this as Emily attempting to create cyclical patterns within her story. The repeated deaths of the mothers, for example, lead to a kind of scene-and-reprise structure that help the reader draw parallels between what happened in each generation that Mrs. Dean recounts. It’s actually a more sophisticated structure than a cursory glance might credit. (That doesn’t mean I like it any better, though.) Julie’s review discusses the miscategorization of Wuthering Heights as a grand romance. She comments, “It’s melodramatic like an outright telenovela at times, including people being kidnapped and trying to stab each other with knives.” I love this statement! And I agree that we have historically done this novel a disservice. More generally, I’d assert we do a terrible job these days of really explaining what “Gothic” fiction actually is, what it entails, and examples of it in popular literature of the day. We also don’t talk enough about Wuthering Heights as a feminist work of fiction. The Gothic elements here are inextricably entwined with the lives of the female characters and the constraints in their choices. Each time one of the women gets married, she’s packed off to live at the opposite household and inevitably doesn’t enjoy her new situation. This is some interesting commentary from an author who never married and died fairly young. Emily makes it clear that she isn’t impressed by the repressive options available to women of her station in the 1800s. My most favourite elements of this book, the parts that made me think the most, are the parts where I consider how Emily depicts the plight of her female characters at the hands of the patriarchy. Heathcliff, Hindley, and Hareton are all textbook examples of toxic masculinity, and Brontë is so good at demonstrating how even drive-by toxic masculinity has the worst fallout for the women of a family. Where I diverge from my esteemed buddy reader and many critics is simply in my enjoyment of Emily’s writing, storytelling, and characterization. Wuthering Heights is a good novel. But there’s a lot more that could be done or told here. Characters just kind of … go away … when not needed anymore. Heathcliff disappears and comes back, and we don’t really know what happened to him beyond Mrs. Dean’s speculation. I can’t help but compare this approach to storytelling styles of Eliot and Hardy and find Emily wanting—is that unfair of me? Maybe. But that’s just my taste for Victoriana: I want these thicc books that telescope into their characters’ lives (that being said, Bleak House excepted, I admit to not being too keen on Dickens). Brontë doesn’t deliver the depth I crave, which is not to say that I think she’s incapable of it. Alas, we didn’t get any other works from her, so who’s to know to what other heights she could have risen? Wuthering Heights is all we have, and it might be all right, but that’s about as far as I go with this book. That’s why I write these reviews. An astute reader will notice I’ve rated this book 3 stars this time, rather than the original 5. That reflects my enjoyment of the book this time around. But stars can’t convey the depth of what I really experienced—the nuances of the things I liked, didn’t like, and what makes the novel worthwhile (regardless of enjoyment) as a piece of literature. That’s what reviews are for, and Wuthering Heights demonstrates the importance of thinking holistically about what we read. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 30, 2019
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Nov 09, 2019
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Oct 30, 2019
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 037575718X
| 9780375757181
| 037575718X
| 3.88
| 39,185
| 1878
| Feb 13, 2001
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really liked it
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I'm not sure if I reviewed the wrong edition last time, or if I bought another copy of The Return of the Native a while back having forgotten I read i
I'm not sure if I reviewed the wrong edition last time, or if I bought another copy of The Return of the Native a while back having forgotten I read it 3 years ago (my bookshelves are still in the disarray of nonexistence for now, so I'm not sure I know where all my Hardys are). Anyway, I’ll direct you to my review from 2016. It’s remarkable how similar my reactions were during this second reading. I immediately noticed Hardy’s obsessive descriptions of the heath. I once again thought the plot took too long to get going. I’m actually very proud of the first review—it took a book I didn’t really “get” and helped me like it better for the thinking about it. Even though this isn’t one of my favourite Hardy novels, it was still nice to spend some time back in Wessex. I was having a downer weekend, and I enjoy reading Hardy when I’m blue, because no matter how bad off I am, his characters have got it worse. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 31, 2019
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Sep 05, 2019
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Aug 31, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0156030438
| 9780156030434
| 0156030438
| 3.38
| 12,406
| Jun 2004
| Jun 05, 2006
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it was ok
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It occurs to me that, with the exception of
The Prague Cemetery
, since I bought that when it was released, I have basically been reading Umberto E
It occurs to me that, with the exception of
The Prague Cemetery
, since I bought that when it was released, I have basically been reading Umberto Eco’s books in publication order. This is entirely unintentional, and now I only have one more to go … but on the bright side, that sounds like an excuse, after I finish that one, to wrap around and start re-reading them all, in order again! But I don’t think I’ll be eager to return to The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. This is, by far, my least favourite Eco book I’ve read. As usual, I love the insistent intertextuality and the depth of Eco’s writing. As always, he has produced a masterpiece of literature. As sometimes happens with masterpieces of literature, however, the story itself falls flat—and, dear review reader, you know that for me, story is the ultimate drug here. With previous Eco experiences, he always managed to blow my mind while telling an intricate, fascinating tale. With this book, it’s more like he’s reflecting on a number of other tales, many of which I’m not familiar with. Let’s get into it. Yambo, as he styled himself before the incident, has amnesia (from a stroke, apparently). He wakes up in a hospital, is reacquainted with his wife and his profession as an antiquarian book dealer. Eventually he ends up in his family country home in Solara, where it’s hoped that spending most of the summer there will jog his lost episodic memory. Although that doesn’t seem to happen—at least not as dramatically as he might like—he does end up kind of “recreating” a generic type of childhood experience by organizing and reviewing the documents and music that he finds there. He listens to “radio” from the 1940s while poring over old comics, magazines, and newspapers, and he ponders growing up as a boy under fascism in Italy. In one sense, it seems like this whole book exists so Eco can mention and sometimes provide commentary on various forms of pulp fiction, both imported and Italian, in the 1940s. And let me be clear: I’m here for it. I really enjoyed this exploration, because it’s fascinating, from a literary perspective. I know very little about Italy’s literature (from any period), and most of the foreign stories Eco mentions are not familiar to me either. Oh, I’m aware of Flash Gordon and Mickey Mouse (although the stuff Yambo was reading is obviously much older Mickey than I would be used to). And I’ve read The Count of Monte Cristo, which comes up from time to time in this book. Nevertheless, for the most part, I was in the dark about a lot of this—and that’s OK. I never felt like that hindered my ability to enjoy Yambo’s ramble through his past. On another level, this rambling journey is commentary on growing up under fascism, something Eco has in common with Yambo. Our main character constantly considers how the literature he examines would be received during a time when censorship and doublespeak was rife. He thinks about how growing up around his dissident grandfather might have influenced him. And, of course, he filters everything through his antiquarian book dealer’s mindset—since these skills, unlike his autobiographical memories, have not fled him. Many of the stories Eco features involve the struggles of heroes or rogues against fascist-like dictators. From Flash Gordon to Sandokan, Yambo remembers growing up on stories of struggle. Eco reminds us that reading a comic where Flash Gordon takes on Ming the Merciless would be a very different experience in Mussolini’s Italy than it would for me here today in Canada. (I guess this is my attempt at syncretizing New Historicism and Reader Response theory?) So from this intertextual perspective, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana has a lot I can appreciate. Unfortunately, as far as the story goes, it’s fairly lacklustre. Certainly nothing like some of Eco’s other novels that I’ve loved. The majority of the book takes place in or around Yambo’s family summer home. Towards the end, he finally begins to relive some of the memories of his youth, which are also mostly in the same area. Without spoiling the ending, I’ll say that the last part of the book is kind of a fugue of memories and can occasionally feel incoherent. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t skim a couple of places where I was getting bogged down. When that happens, I know a book has really lost me. Sometimes this happens with difficult books—but that’s just the thing. This is not a difficult book. I don’t think the level of philosophical depth here is anywhere near the level of The Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum . (On the other hand, please don’t interpret that remark as a charge that there is zero depth here. As mentioned above, Eco always has intensely fascinating things to say—but this book is far less inscrutable than some of his others.) The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana has long been on my to-read list in my quest to read all of Eco’s novels. I picked up this used copy from a bookstore in Montreal, so I’ll always fondly remember that. The story herein? Probably not so much. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 17, 2018
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Oct 21, 2018
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Oct 17, 2018
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140431314
| 9780140431315
| 0140431314
| 3.83
| 73,250
| Apr 16, 1895
| Jan 01, 1998
|
really liked it
|
Nine years ago I listened to Jude the Obscure as a free LibriVox audiobook (I love LibriVox!), mostly while cycling to and from my summer job at an ar
Nine years ago I listened to Jude the Obscure as a free LibriVox audiobook (I love LibriVox!), mostly while cycling to and from my summer job at an art gallery. This was not my first Hardy (I had read The Mayor of Casterbridge for my first year of university), but obviously as his last novel, Jude the Obscure has a special place in Hardy’s canon. I quite like my original review, if I do say so myself, so this is just a short update based on what I thought this time around. Obviously I’m in a different place in my life right now, and so slightly different things resonated for me. This past year saw me move into my own house, and while I’m not married (and that is not on the horizon for me), I’ve definitely been adulting more and forming some of the first adult friendships of my life. So I paid a lot of attention to the way Jude conducts his relationships with Arabella and Sue, and in particular, to the way Sue vacillates in her desires for a relationship—and the nature of that relationship—with Jude. It’s fascinating because there isn’t that much of a rivalry between the two women. Certainly they are wary of one another, and neither is really all that happy to have the other in Jude’s life. Yet theirs isn’t so much a competition for Jude’s affection as it is an alternating of roles. Whichever one isn’t living with Jude as his wife is automatically more attractive and desirable, because, of course, the grass is always greener. So much of this is wrapped up in respectability politics. Sue begs Phillotson to let her leave him, despite the hit he will take professionally for allowing that to happen. Sue and Jude essentially fake getting married because they can’t stand the thought of actually marrying, yet they crave the respectability that the appearance of legitimate marriage might bring to them in these rural towns they inhabit. It doesn’t work, of course, because Hardy’s whole point is that once a group of people have taken against you and picked you as their morality whipping couple, they aren’t going to let up because you pretended to get married. Jude’s presence in the liminal space between tradesperson and scholar also jumped out at me more. Specifically, I see now how his failure to obtain the education and position he originally desired isn’t just a disappointment to himself: he is literally trapped between two worlds. He definitely isn’t a scholar; there is no way he can hold any respectable scholarly position with what little he has studied so far. Yet his fellow tradespeople look down on him, mock him, or pity him, for aspiring to more than his class would let him be. It isn’t just the scholars and academics policing Jude: even the people of the same class resent him for trying to make “better” of himself. I don’t know if I picked the worst or the best time to read this book … my dad has had some serious health issues this summer, prompting far too many hospital visits, and I read a good chunk of this while sitting in the ER with him very late one night/early one morning. Yet as depressing and bleak as this is (the whole fate of the children still freaks me out, although it wasn’t as bad this time around now that I wasn’t listening to someone else describe it to me), there’s something really … nice … about reading this when I’m feeling drained or down. For one thing, Hardy can write. His descriptions, of settings and of characters, are just so lush and detailed. This is what I love about the late Victorian novelists. Yes, sometimes they can be too verbose … but Hardy, I think, largely avoids that issue. He wraps himself in words just enough to immerse the reader in his Wessex, and it’s beautiful. Jude the Obscure is not a happy or uplifting book by any means, yet it is still a beautiful book to read. Hardy’s love of words, as evidenced in the poetry he would later go on to publish after leaving off novel-writing, shines through, particularly here. I also think the distance of the setting (more so in terms of time than place) is very comforting. It’s difficult for me to read about sad things happening in contemporary fiction, because that feels too real. But sad things happening to someone in the late 1800s? The culture and society are so different that it’s basically like science fiction (which I also enjoy reading when I’m down): I have to figure out the rules based on what exposition the author gives me, and I can feel sorry for how the characters are constrained by their society without feeling constrained myself. That being said, I’ll close with this thought of how we haven’t changed that much from Hardy’s time. While leaving one’s spouse for a lover has become slightly more commonplace and perhaps acceptable (depending on your circles), in general, our society is still quite repressive and conservative when it comes to codifying relationships. We still emphasize marriage as a much bigger deal than it should be—that is, I understand that some couples want to get married, for various reasons, and celebrate their love, and they should be allowed to—but by the same token, people who don’t want to get married deserve the same respect and status—and people who elect to be single, likewise. While we have left Hardy’s time behind, we are still hung up on a lot of the same issues. And that’s why, some hundred odd years on, Thomas Hardy’s writing reaches out across time and space and still touches me. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 17, 2018
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Aug 18, 2018
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Aug 16, 2018
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Paperback
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| 3.83
| 56,611
| Apr 04, 1860
| 1981
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it was amazing
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This is my second reading of The Mill on the Floss. You might want to read my original review of 6 years ago. I stand by it; however, I have additiona
This is my second reading of The Mill on the Floss. You might want to read my original review of 6 years ago. I stand by it; however, I have additional thoughts to augment what I said previously. George Eliot is one of my favourite Victorian novelists (one of my favourite novelists, indeed), and The Mill on the Floss is my favourite of her works and one of my favourite books—so much so that I actually own 5 copies. I have two different editions of the Penguin Classics, then a few antique editions I found in England. The edition I chose to read this time is relatively recent—1981—published by the Franklin Library with illustrations by Herbert Tauss. To be honest, the illustrations are extremely lacklustre. They lack much in the way of detail, and there aren’t even captions below them. Not appoint. However, the rest of this edition is quite beautiful and high quality, from the texture and weight of the paper to the cover to the print. It was nice to read. Re-reading my old review, I’m mostly struck by how verbose and descriptive I am, and how much plot summary I give. How things have changed in 6 years! Back then, I was deep into academia and writing essays. Nowadays sometimes I can barely be bothered to record my thoughts—but I do, because I love looking back and remembering what my past self thought about a book. In this case, my feelings remain the same, but my appreciation is rekindled. I’d remembered that The Mill on the Floss has some very feminist messages in it, but I’d forgotten how overt and continuous those messages are! From the very beginning of the novel, Eliot’s narrator points out that Maggie is going to suffer because she is far too clever for “a gell”. Her mother laments her intractable hair and “dark” colouring; her father laments that she wasn’t born a boy. We see Maggie wrestle with the conflict between what’s expected of her as the daughter of a fairly well-off, and then bankrupted, miller and what she desires as a curious, intellectually-driven individual. And we see the gatekeeping, the way that even people who recognize Maggie’s precocity attempt to channel it into socially-acceptable avenues, or suppress it simply because that’s what’s done. I didn’t forget the importance of the sibling relationship to this novel, but I had forgotten how much of it takes place while Tom and Maggie are children. This time around, too, I was more sensitive to the way people treat Tom and force various expectations upon him. The difference, of course, between Tom and Maggie is that Tom has the privilege of proposing and, ultimately, taking courses of action. Even if his relatives disagree with him or think that he’s wrong, they will allow him to act as he sees fit. Maggie, on the other hand, isn’t even responsible for her unplanned excursion with Stephen, yet she is held responsible and judged anyway. So much more appreciation this time around too for Mr. Tulliver’s legal battles and bankruptcy. Now that I’m older and I’ve bought property myself and hold a mortgage, maybe I’m just more sensitive to these issues! Eliot seems to want us to both sympathize with Tulliver and shake our heads at him, which I’m happy to do, on both counts. In general, though, I just love the development of this plot. I love the way that Tulliver is so confident he can always produce the money, that he can outsmart the “raskill” Wakem, and the way that Mrs. Tulliver inadvertently provokes Wakem. There’s a delightful combination here of tragic flaws and terrible happenstance. One new criticism: the ending kind of feels hokey and contrived now that I read it. Actually, it reminds me a lot of some of Hardy’s endings, the way he conjures up nature as an avenging force. Compared to everything else that has happened in the book, the sudden flood and Maggie’s subsequent attempt to find and save Tom happens very quickly. It’s all over far too fast. But, like Tulliver’s ill-timed fall from his horse just as he’s having a go at Wakem, this all seems par for the course in novels from this era—a certain amount of convention, in the twists and turns of the story. In this case, Eliot gives us the best ending for this drama—she can’t very well have Maggie and Tom grow into old age as if nothing else interesting happens in their lives, can she? One of my friends asked me what I was reading for my first book of the year while she was over, and I showed her The Mill on the Floss and explained my feelings for it. We chatted about nineteenth-century novels; she asked about the language in this, confessed she hadn’t made it through Pride & Prejudice as a result of the novel’s style. Here’s the thing: I love this book, love Eliot’s writing, and view both as sublime examples of human storytelling. Her grasp of the human condition, of the way families interact like constructive and destructive waveforms, of the tension between desire and duty, is second to none. I would love for nothing better than to see more people reading this book—but I’d also like them to enjoy it. And I also know that I just happen to be privileged to have the patience, tolerance, and background that lets me get through a book so far removed from our current literary styles and cultural touchstones. That is the thing about classics. Sometimes we forget that we don’t have to enjoy a classic, even if others do, because it might not speak to us. There are certainly classics I’ve put aside or given low ratings to because I couldn’t identify with it. And I think that if you do want to start reading older classics like this, you have to start from this position of understanding why they are more difficult to read. They aren’t “harder” in the sense that you need to be more intelligent; they’re just different. They may or may not be for you. But if you want to read them, and if you work at them, and you get help when you need it, then you just might find something spectacular. The Mill on the Floss remains, hands down, one of my favourite books of all time. This is how I chose to start my 2018 reading year. I hope this puts me on the right foot: now I move forward, seeking fresh books, new experiences, and more challenges. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 2018
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Jan 03, 2018
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Jan 01, 2018
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Leather Bound
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| 0399592806
| 9780399592805
| 0399592806
| 3.67
| 10,480
| Sep 05, 2017
| 2017
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liked it
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If I were younger, I would be all over this book. If I were slightly older than that, but still younger, then I would probably sneer at this book’s pr
If I were younger, I would be all over this book. If I were slightly older than that, but still younger, then I would probably sneer at this book’s pretentiousness. As it is, having advanced to the ripe old age of 28, I have now acquired enough wisdom neither to gush nor to sneer but simply to shrug. The Golden House is most definitely Salman Rushdie, but it’s also a little bit different. And perhaps one of the marks of a great writer isn’t just the quality of their books but whether or not they are willing to experiment with their style. Réne Unterlinden is an aspiring filmmaker. He befriends his neighbours, the Goldens, expatriates from an unknown country. The patriarch, Nero Golden, has an imperial presence that would make politicians squirm, and each of this three sons has their own unique hang-ups and personalities. Réne watches it all, takes it all in, taking notes for his eventual film about this enigmatic family. Unfortunately, he also finds himself drawn into their drama, so that the subject becomes a character in his own story…. The somewhat embarrassingly ingratiating jacket copy calls this Rushdie’s “triumphant return to realism”, but I disagree. The Golden House might not be magical realism (aka fantasy) in the same sense as Midnight’s Children or many of Rushdie’s other novels. However, to label it realism in the strictest sense indicates that the marketing department in charge of this book just missed the point. This book is a mirror to the present-day situation in the United States, and it achieves that through a healthy dose of surrealism. This is a modern-day fairy tale. The surrealist elements of the story actually work well for me. I almost see this as a Wes Anderson kind of film, with characters who are more caricature than people. Rushdie explicitly sets them up this way, with our narrator dressing them up in pseudonyms and assigning them roles as he plans to turn their stories into a film of his very own. These aren’t people. They’re plot points, and the fact that they are plot points is the point. Réne is totally an unreliable narrator too. I wonder how much of what we see or hear is made up or embellished. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s unhinged, but I definitely get the impression that Réne, in his retelling of the events to us, has started mixing his film with reality. And, of course, that brings us to the whole postmodern question at the centre of this book: who are people, really, except the stories we tell about ourselves and each other? Unlike my last foray into Rushdie, with the beautiful-but-redundant Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights , The Golden House didn’t leave me feeling like I’ve seen this all before. I admit that the last part of the book really dragged for me: Rushdie spends a lot of time following Réne down these rabbit holes of backstory, and at some point I was just ready to call it quits. Nevertheless, I stuck it out … and it was mostly worth it. There is some interesting commentary here on how we perceive the lives of others, particularly those we call the rich and powerful. There’s some commentary here on taking responsibility for one’s own actions (see how Réne deals with the situation he creates with Vasilisa). For all of the caricaturization happening, at the end of the day, characters like Nero are the ones who seem most real, most human in this book—perhaps because they are the most flawed. Is Nero Golden a mobster at heart? Or is he an exiled emperor? A disgraced kingpin? A dolorous yet doting father? A jealous husband? Is he all of these things? None of them? Same goes for Vasilisa, or any of Nero’s children, or Réne himself. Each of them is all just a story, packaged and presented to us by Réne, and Rushdie goes out of his way to point this out to us. He draws the reader in and reminds us that characterization is a fragile form of narrative. We see this, too, in the events that play out in the background, the constant references to American politics, to Donald Trump (the Joker) running against Hillary Clinton (Batwoman). The Golden House feels very topical because of how it was written, but the truth is that this is a story that could be told anywhere, of any time. I suspect it will endure long after the current political climate has faded. I really like how Rushdie experiments in this book, even if there are times when that experiment feels too drawn out or errs towards the side of pretentious. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 24, 2017
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Dec 26, 2017
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Dec 24, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0140180788
| 9780140180787
| B001027VJU
| 3.90
| 189,952
| 1908
| 1990
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it was ok
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This is a tough one, because I’m feeling pretty conflicted about A Room with a View. On one hand, I’m pretty sure I didn’t like it—despite being only
This is a tough one, because I’m feeling pretty conflicted about A Room with a View. On one hand, I’m pretty sure I didn’t like it—despite being only 220ish pages, it took me a long time to read, because I kept putting it down and looking for other, more interesting things to distract me. On the other hand, this is not a bad or poorly-written book. I can see what E.M. Forster is trying to do; I have seen other writers tell similar stories and knock my socks off. So what do George Eliot or Thomas Hardy have over Forster for me? The plot is tedious and dull, and that’s likely my chief problem. Lucy Honeychurch is an eligible young lady on vacation in Italy with her chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett. She ends up associating with an ensemble cast of characters, one of whom makes a move on her and kisses her (scandalous!). When she returns to England, she accepts the third marriage proposal from a persistent suitor who is not suited to her at all. Then the cad from Italy intersects her life again, and of course, there is suspense as Lucy tries to figure out if he has feelings for her (or if she has feelings for him) and if anyone other than Charlotte knows of, and could reveal, that Italian indiscretion. It’s pretty standard fare as far as these types of stories go. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be many stakes here (beyond, perhaps, Lucy’s reputation were her out-of-school kissing to become common knowledge). The supporting characters, like Charlotte and Mrs Honeychurch and Freddy, Lucy’s brother, tend to be fairly flat, stock types who don’t offer much in the way of conflict. There is no one, central figure who dominates the page and stands out as a strong antagonist. Not even Cecil, who is indeed trying to project his idea of what a woman should be on to Lucy, really deserves such a label. I felt like I was trapped in the prequel to an Agatha Christie mystery. I kept waiting for someone to drop dead and Poirot to burst onto the scene with Hastings and Japp, so he could start using his little grey cells to figure out that, egads, Emerson is no murderer—it was Mr Beebe all along! A good murder would really have lightened the mood, I think, and made A Room with a View more bearable. That or maybe some kind of natural disaster plunging the family into penury. But no, Forster instead offers up a very bland look at English country life circa 1900, the British Empire riding high into the twentieth century with the rumblings of the Great War still far off on the European horizon. Lucy can go for a jaunt around Italy all she wants in the first half of the book, then noodle about her neighbourhood, playing tennis and mulling over marriage … and it’s just. so. boring. Maybe it’s my misanthropic distaste for socializing, but I just can’t bring myself to care or be interested in the quotidian happenings of these various characters. The book picks up a little towards the end, and it certainly has some moments. Lucy has a pretty badass moment in Chapter 17, “Lying to Cecil”, when she explains why she has gone off marrying him: “… When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you’re always protecting me.” Her voice swelled. “I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can’t I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman’s place! You despise my mother—I know you do—because she’s conventional and bothers over puddings; but, oh goodness!”—she rose to her feet—“conventional, Cecil, you’re that, for you may understand beautiful things, but you don’t know how to use them; and you wrap yourself up in art and books and music, and would try to wrap up me. I won’t be stifled, not by the most glorious music, for people are more glorious, and you hide them from me. That’s why I break off my engagement. You were all rigth as long as you kept to things, but when you came to people—” She stopped. You go, girl! There, now you’ve read the best part; I’ve saved you the trouble of having to read the whole book. I also like how this chapter and subsequent chapters are titled, “Lying to …”, giving us explicit acknowledgement that Lucy is deceiving herself and others about her feelings. There is a level of introspection here, which, combined with the above speech, definitely elevates A Room with a View above the frivolity of mere romance. Yet Lucy is about all that is interesting about this book, as I mentioned above. George is no Mr. Darcy or Captain Wentworth. As far as I’m concerned, Lucy would be better off burning everything down and moving to Canada. Hmm. Not a bad fanfic idea…. Anyway, Forster’s writing just doesn’t get to me. It’s an incompatibility of style and of plotting rather than ability, though. I can recognize that Forster is trying to do interesting things here, and I see why other people might find this book captivating. It does not speak to me, though. Some books, the right books, will transport you into their world and make you never want to let go. And when you’ve read enough of those, you know immediately when you’ve cracked open a book that won’t. A Room with a View is such a book for me. It might not be the same with you, but that’s not enough for me to recommend it. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 27, 2016
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Dec 28, 2016
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Dec 27, 2016
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0679410430
| 9780679410430
| 0679410430
| 3.88
| 880,258
| Sep 1955
| 1992
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liked it
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It’s the penultimate read for the Banging Book Club! Arguably the most well-known of this year’s selections and easily the most controversial from the
It’s the penultimate read for the Banging Book Club! Arguably the most well-known of this year’s selections and easily the most controversial from the moment of its release, Lolita is definitely complex and not an easy book to read. Lolita reminds me of Lullabies for Little Criminals , one of my favourite books and one that I revisited this year in preparation for teaching it to my adult learners (I’ve since taught it twice, to good reception). Both books deal with the sexual abuse of a pubescent girl. Whereas Lolita is abused by her stepfather, Baby, the 13-year-old protagonist of Lullabies for Little Criminals, falls in with a twenty-year-old pimp because her father is negligent, and she has sex with him in addition to prostituting herself for him. Both girls are victims of circumstance and the men who take advantage of that circumstance, although both also seem intrigued by their role in these relationships. What strikes me as the key difference between the two books, however, is the narration. Baby narrates Lullabies for Little Criminals, so everything we learn is from her perspective. We understand why she finds Alphonse an attractive option, both as a replacement kind of father figure and as a romantic/sexual mentor. Lolita, in contrast, comes to us as the ramblings of Humbert. Reliability of his recall and honesty aside, Humbert doesn’t truly know what Lolita was thinking or feeling. So it’s interesting that Nabokov chooses to tell the story this way, to objectify Lolita so totally. Despite its title, Lolita is not really about Lolita at all. It’s about Humbert, and Humbert’s dark obsession. I’m glad now that we read Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us back in the summer. Thanks to Jesse Bering, I can use the proper term for Humbert’s attraction to Lolita: hebephilia, rather than pedophilia. It doesn’t make the attraction any better or less squicky, but it’s nice to be accurate here, it helps us better understand how Humbert operates. Humbert isn’t turned on by infants or very young children; he is specifically attracted to pubescent girls, or “nymphets” as he designates them. Vladimir Nabokov does not go into much depth regarding why Humbert might have this attraction, and indeed, despite Humbert’s numerous stays in sanatoriums, little reference is provided for the psychological status of hebephilia in that time. Instead, Nabokov chooses to focus on the depths to which Humbert sinks in pursuit of his perversion. I started reading this book with a hesitant mindset. Did I want to read this? Was I going to get squicked out and have to stop halfway through? It’s not dirty in the same way that, say, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is. But it is really creepy. Nabokov is creepy good at writing a creepy character, and while I don’t agree with the people who banned (and even seized at the border, in the UK!) this book when it was first published, I understand why some people are happy to give it a miss forever. If I hadn’t been reading this for the Banging Book Club I’m not sure when, if ever, I would have picked it up. After Humbert meets Charlotte Haze and begins his relationship with her, first as lodger then as lover, I began to find the book more tolerable. Oh, his descriptions of his attraction to Lolita were still creepy—but there is something fascinating about Humbert as a character. Like any good villain, the act of exposing his thought process gives us a glimpse at the darkness within all of us as human beings. Though not everyone is attracted to pubescent children like Humbert is, we all have some measure of personality that we dislike or find shameful. Humbert, however, has clearly embraced this aspect of his personality even if he acknowledges that society disapproves of it, and he produces endless rationalizations for it. There is so much more to Humbert’s darkness than his abuse of Lolita, too. He is a narcissistic man whose first reaction to every event is how it could affect him. Long before he engages in the act of murder, he contemplates it in cold blood—and merely as a device for getting someone out of the way so he can get closer to his target. He is misogynistic, as seen in his treatment of his first wife. In general, he’s just not a nice dude. The narrative reads like Humbert attempting to convince us that his lust after nymphets is, if not acceptable, excusable. Yet by his own admission, he does terrible things to secure his dalliance with Lolita. And he knows that what he does is wrong, for he is constantly paranoid that the state is going to find out and put him in jail. I’m not just talking about the sex either—I’m talking about the negligence in his role as Lolita’s de facto guardian. There is a gulf between action and intent. We can decry the creepiness of hebephilia all we want, but if Humbert had only gawked at Lolita from afar and told us over and over about how attractive he finds pubescent girls, he would not be a monster. It’s his actions that matter in the book, not his desires, which is why it is so telling that he tries to focus the reader on the latter as if they excuse the former. Humbert’s attraction to Lolita is not the issue—it’s the length to which he blows up her life to act on that attraction. (Although Lolita’s untimely expiration is a requirement to have this memoir published so soon after the events it chronicles, I also feel like Lolita dying in childbirth is a huge cop-out on Nabokov’s part. Once again it emphasizes that this book is not about her, and in the end she was simply a loose thread that needed snipping. The book is always about Humbert, and how events affect him.) It’s also worth examining how the semiotics of Lolita have changed given our culture’s changing attitudes towards sex over the past 50 years. Lolita gained its controversial label for its depiction not just of Humbert’s sexual appetites but of any sexual appetites whatsoever. Nowadays, the depiction of a diversity of sexual appetites is so commonplace that it is literally more accessible to millions of people than, say, healthcare. My, oh my, how things have changed. I’m reading Trainwreck, by Sady Doyle, at the time of writing this review. In one chapter, Doyle describes Britney Spears’ first magazine cover, Rolling Stone April 1999, when Spears was seventeen: Inside the magazine, you could find her posing in a cheerleader outfit, coyly pulling the skirt up toward her hips, or posing in that doll-stuffed bedroom in underwear and high heels, or shot from behind, walking a pink tricycle, wearing short-shorts with the word “BABY” emblazoned in rhinestones on one ass-check. Men were supposed to want to sleep with Britney, that was clear enough. But they were supposed to want it specifically because she was a child. Those last two sentences though. I can’t underscore Doyle’s observation enough: our current society doesn’t just sell sex; it sells an ideal of sex embodied by the titillating appeal of youthful (female) bodies. While it’s reductive to view the 1950s as a less sexually-permissive time than our own, this shift in attitudes towards sex and what the media promote as “sexy” is clear. In the aftermath of the sexual revolution of the latter half of the 20th century, sex has become an endlessly packaged commodity, one sold primarily to (presumed straight) men—or to (presumed straight) women in the form of messaging about how to “get a man”. And entire industries make billions selling ephebophilic visions of barely-legal women hovering on the cusp of adulthood—not quite nymphets, then, strictly speaking in chronological terms, but culturally close enough to offer that hint of forbiddenness without all the messy moralizing. And it’s not like this is a huge secret. Indeed, to bring this experience full circle, on the next page of Trainwreck Doyle quotes Britney Spears from her 2000 interview with Rolling Stone, where Spears says, “I don’t want to be part of someone’s Lolita thing. It kind of freaks me out.” Just as mainstream culture has regrettably reduced Pride & Prejudice to a mere romance novel, so too has Lolita suffered that ignominious fate of the literary classic and become a synecdoche of itself. But the irony is that in many ways our society is much closer to validating Humbert than it is to rejecting him these days. Humbert’s lack of appeal, as a character, is both intentional and regrettable. Towards the end of the book, it got harder to read again. The narrative starts to become unhinged as Humbert searches for Lolita in vain, then discovers what has happened to her and decides to exact revenge on Quilty. It was not as tense as it should have been—and not just because we know that he is a murderer, thanks to the prologue and Humbert’s own foreshadowing. But there is also very little drama in Humbert’s confrontation with Quilty. It is too scripted, too stulted, because both men are irredeemable asses. I’m reminded of two hosts in Westworld having the same scripted conversation over and over before shooting each other as the conclusion to their loop. Nabokov states in his afterword that there is no moral to be found here. I disagree. There are no heroes in Lolita. That’s the moral. Russians, huh? I can see why some people love this book. I can see why others hate it. For me, it just puts the focus too much on the wrong things—on the villain rather than the victim, on the nihilism of the abuse rather than the society that enables it. Some of this I can lay at Nabokov’s feet, and some of it is simply where I’m coming from, in 2016, with my perspective on social justice and gender issues. Lolita is every bit as polarizing and complicated as I thought. It is an interesting look and somewhat thought-provoking. It’s not a must-read classic, though, and I think there are many more recent books written since that tackle these ideas with more relevant approaches. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 24, 2016
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Nov 27, 2016
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Nov 24, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0345810228
| 9780345810229
| 0345810228
| 3.39
| 13,617
| Sep 08, 2015
| Sep 08, 2015
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liked it
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In Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie combines the literary traditions from A Thousand and One Nights with aspects of Arab
In Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie combines the literary traditions from A Thousand and One Nights with aspects of Arabic mythology and a dash of our own fascination with apocalypses of the modern age. It is an entertaining novel in its own right, but I can’t help but feel like Rushdie has gone and pulled a John Irving on me and written something on repeat. All the old standbys are here. Rushdie’s particular brand of magical realism has always been one of absurdity layered atop mysticism. As with Midnight’s Children , this book features people receiving powers all at the same time. The themes here are very much concerned with the nature of God, as well as the nature of humanity itself, and whether humanity is at essence good, evil, or neutral. These sound like heavy questions, and Rushdie occasionally engages with them directly—but at its heart, this is a story about a conflict between the jinn, in which Earth essentially becomes a battleground and the people with powers—descendants of a jinnia princess and therefore part-jinn themselves—conscripts into Dunia’s army to fight the dark jinn who killed her father. Rushdie’s writing and style are, as always, up to this monumental philosophical undertaking. His prose is beautiful, and reading Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is relaxing even at during its most violent confrontations or wretched moments. I particularly like his descriptions of Peristan and the lives of the jinn. I appreciate his tongue-in-cheek comments about the jinni obsession with sex, or the one off-handed remark he makes about magical realism authors. This kind of wit is a nice tonic to what otherwise might be an odd clash of tones going on here: the over-the-top supernatural and the heavy-handed theological. Nevertheless, something stopped me from really embracing this book and enjoying it as I have with other novels of Rushdie’s in the past. I blame the characterization, or perhaps the narration. None of the characters felt very real to me. The book is narrated in a dry, textbook style, framed as a chronicle of history from a millennium after these events. And this just makes it difficult to connect to any of the characters. We’re talking evil beings from another world invading ours, and the closest we get to heroes is a geriatric gardener who starts hovering and a psychopath who kills people with lightning. These are interesting ideas for characters, but I didn’t really find myself interested in them as people. Perhaps ironically, the character I ended up sympathizing most with was Dunia. Her grief over losing her father, and the knowledge of the burden she had to assume now as ruler of his kingdom, is a poignant moment that shifts the tone of the novel into decidedly more serious territory. This book is more literary experiment than actual narrative. Rushdie is very consciously attempting to emulate the stories-within-stories that comprise Arabian Nights. And while I have a lot of appreciation, and sometimes occasionally patience, for these types of experiments, I find myself less and less tolerant of them when their stories and characterization don’t match up. It’s not that I disliked this book. It’s good, on most such metrics. Yet I find myself asking the question: would I rather have read this, or re-read another Rushdie novel I’ve previously enjoyed? It’s not good—or at least, not good for this book—that my answer is the latter. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights has its moments, but in the end all it really did was make me want to read The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children again. So … yay? I guess? [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 24, 2016
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Oct 28, 2016
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Oct 24, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0345808274
| 9780345808271
| 0345808274
| 3.27
| 3,859
| Sep 30, 2014
| Sep 30, 2014
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it was ok
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Reading Adult Onset feels like watching someone else watch a movie inside a glass box: I can see them enjoying the movie but can’t quite join in. I th
Reading Adult Onset feels like watching someone else watch a movie inside a glass box: I can see them enjoying the movie but can’t quite join in. I think I’ve come to terms with the fact I didn’t like this book, but I’m still trying to figure out if it’s well written or not. That is, I’m pretty certain most of what I didn’t like is on me, not on the book—but maybe a little of it is the book’s doing. Ann-Marie MacDonald is a versatile, clever author, and I admire what she attempts with this book. But it just doesn’t quite work for me. Ostensibly a week in the life of Mary Rose MacKinnon, aka “Mister”, liberal use of flashbacks and interstitial pseudo-narratives allows MacDonald to delve deeper into Mary Rose’s past. We get to see Mary Rose’s struggles with the quotidian tasks of taking care of a toddler and small child while her partner is out west directing a play. Meanwhile, Mary Rose ruminates on her mother’s many miscarriages and the impact this might have had on Mary Rose’s childhood and upbringing. Phantom pain in her arm from childhood bone cysts causes worries, which combine with the stress of childrearing to fray Mary Rose’s temper and set her off in front of her toddler multiple times. Adult Onset’s title, then, is meant to imply the recapitulation of crisis, emotional as well as physical, as Mary Rose worries that she might be following down the path of her own mother. I had a hard time gaining traction when it comes to sympathizing with Mary Rose. I understand, even if I don’t know, that raising children can be hard, especially when your partner isn’t always around to help. I get that Mary Rose is exhausted and stressed and occasionally overwhelmed with all the different asks on her time. But she seemed determined to take the difficult path and to refuse the help of people around her. Conversations with Hilary that should have been sweet and routine quickly became battles in which Mary Rose validates her decision to be a stay-at-home mumma by asserting her fatigue. This portrayal and the frustration it causes for some readers are probably intentional on MacDonald’s part, and maybe I would have appreciated it more if I had found other things to enjoy about the book. Alas, all I can say is that Adult Onset bummed me out, and not in a good or cathartic way. I tip-toed through the chapters with a sense of dread. MacDonald’s writing just seems to highlight the negatives here: Dolly’s encroaching senility and its parallels in Mary Rose’s forgetfulness; her parents’ dual homophobia when she first comes out; Mary Rose’s chronic inability to engage with the other mothers because of the age gap; the stuff with Daisy and the mail delivery; and, of course, Mary Rose’s actions verging on child abuse. This is third person stream of consciousness narration, and it just seems to jump from one negative fixation to another. This book probably needs a big ol’ trigger warning slapped on it. As Mary Rose tries to tread the water of her life and ends up flailing, I’m just left wondering what I’m supposed to take away from it all. Being a child is hard? Growing up is hard? Mothering is hard? Loving is hard? We get it: life is hard. For all that MacDonald puts Mary Rose and her friends and family under a microscope for our examination, we get only those scenes and little else. This is a snapshot of a life, presented for our consideration, with little in the way of editorializing or endings. There isn’t so much a climax as a kaleidoscope of events affixed to a merry-go-round tour of Toronto. I just kept waiting for something to happen, but instead we get more plodding through day after day. It isn’t quite postmodern but it comes close. This book strikes me as dithering between two paths like an uncollapsed wavefunction. It could seriously tackle issues of childhood abuse, domestic abuse, parenting, and relationships. Or it could take a more humorous tack, smile and wave at the bad while luxuriating in the essential goodness of family and community. Unfortunately, Adult Onset doesn’t ever seem to make up its mind about what sort of book it should be. It brings up serious issues, then skirts their edges and draws back, non-confrontational-like. It uses humour for highlights and shadows, but it also seems to want to be taken seriously. The thing is that all of this seems intentional. MacDonald borrows a lot from her own life, from Mary Rose’s heritage and birthplace to her wife sharing an occupation as a theatre director with MacDonald’s wife. I don’t know (or care, really) the extent to which Mary Rose’s childhood and experiences parallel MacDonald’s. Regardless, the structure and style I’ve been criticizing are not accidental flaws. MacDonald is too careful and precise a writer for that. She has clearly tried something very different as a novel here, and it just didn’t work for me. Although I think there are some for whom this novel might work, I’m not chalking up my indifference solely to my own personality. Strive though she might to present an intriguing snapshot into this character’s life, MacDonald isn’t completely successful with this story. Adult Onset is an interesting yet flawed experiment, and those flaws chafed for me. Fall On Your Knees is one of the few books that has a reasonable claim to being my “favourite book of all time” (such a nonsense idea that you could only have one favourite book). It is about as sublime and amazing as literature can get. I think I read The Way the Crow Flies when I was a teenager, but I don’t remember it at all, so I guess it wasn’t as impressive. I admit to some trepidation starting Adult Onset, wondering what would happen if I didn’t like it. Well, I didn’t like it. The world hasn’t ended. I’m OK with the fact that I absolutely love one of MacDonald’s novels and am lukewarm on another. It’s unfortunate, in the way that not liking a book by a talented author always is, but I’m going to recover. I mean, if you want to send me cards and chocolate (or more books), please feel free. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 03, 2016
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Aug 05, 2016
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Aug 03, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0771037937
| 9780771037931
| 0771037937
| 3.19
| 644
| Sep 02, 2003
| Sep 07, 2004
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it was ok
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Oh, man, when I fall into the CanLit tree, sometimes I manage to hit every branch on the way down. I say I like character-driven stories, but Garbo La
Oh, man, when I fall into the CanLit tree, sometimes I manage to hit every branch on the way down. I say I like character-driven stories, but Garbo Laughs is a harsh reminder of how important plot is even when your character drives things. Because in this case, Elizabeth Hay’s characters aren’t driving the story, so much as sitting around while a narrative just kind of tumbles desultorily around them, tugging at them occasionally in vain attempts to get their attention. They steadfastly refuse to engage with it, however, so it eventually passes them by (but not before raining revengeful death upon some of them!). As the title and cover copy promise, this book is inextricably tied up in “old” movies and Harriet’s love, bordering on obsession, for them. I don’t know enough about early cinema to understand all the allusions or the ins-and-outs of these conversations. I’m aware of the names Sinatra, Astaire, Kelly, Brando, etc. I’ve seen The Godfather (which I don’t actually consider an “old” movie). The oldest movie I’ve probably watched is the restored Metropolis, but that doesn’t really intersect with American cinema. I don’t know what the oldest American movie I’ve watched is—maybe Casablanca. Anyway, while I don’t share Harriet’s fascination, I do understand her passion. Thanks to the way Hay describes it, I can liken it to my own love for books. Where Harriet loves snuggling up with an old movie, I love snuggling up with an old book. There is nothing like it and nothing better. Surrounding Harriet are a panoply of characters who together might form an ensemble cast, if this book needed a cast. What it really needs is more conflict than the nebulous antipathy between Harriet and Leah or Harriet’s own internal struggle with her inability to write comedy. Hay even throws in the spectre of a possible affair, whether it’s Harriet’s unwanted attraction to Jack or Lew’s easygoing friendship with Dinah. These are strong beginnings, great characters. But Hay doesn’t give them quite enough leeway, doesn’t spool out quite enough leash, and so their conflicts don’t actually go anywhere. In particular, Harriet’s children are important characters in relation to her, but their development is stunted. Kenny is adorable and precocious, and he does get a subplot about being bullied for his oddball movie passions inherited from mom. Jane, while happy enough to respond to inquiries, is a less known quantity, and I wish that we heard more from her. Unfortunately, the narration sticks pretty tightly to Harriet, so your mileage with this book is greatly influenced by your tolerance for her particular neuroses. I say that glibly but don’t mean to make light of them. For some people I can see this being an excellent work. I’m sure Harriet will strike a chord with many. Hay’s choice to portray a marriage that is not broken or dysfunctional yet still abjectly unsatisfying is a good one. Harriet and Lew love each other in a way, but neither seems to have the key to making the other one happy. They just kind of putter along, except they aren’t quite old enough for that old married couple stereotype to kick in. It’s interesting the few times that Hay shows them having sex, because it tends to happen out of the blue and Harriet seems to indicate she enjoys it—but I guess her emotional needs aren’t being met. She wants someone who is a little more combative, hence the attraction to Jack, or even the little thrill she gets from being so annoyed by Leah’s manipulations. So I’d be lying if I claimed nothing happens in this book. There are many interesting character dynamics. Hay has that easygoing, classically CanLit style of narration with smooth dialogue full of names of people I don’t recognize because I was born after the Turner years. The point being: there is an audience for this book, and I’m not quite it, but I’m probably next door to the people who are it. Garbo Laughs is sincere in its attempt to blend humour, hubris, and humility into a kind of sharp and pointed look at modern married life through the lens of the golden oldies. It reminds me a bit of Georgian novels, but Hay’s writing doesn’t quite sing to me the way Austen’s or Brontë’s does. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 15, 2016
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Jul 16, 2016
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Jul 15, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0140620559
| 9780140620559
| 0140620559
| 3.88
| 39,185
| 1878
| Jan 01, 1994
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really liked it
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**spoiler alert** I’m not sure Thomas Hardy knows what love is. Or maybe I don’t know what love is. Does anyone know what love is? Haddaway has been z
**spoiler alert** I’m not sure Thomas Hardy knows what love is. Or maybe I don’t know what love is. Does anyone know what love is? Haddaway has been zero help, by the way. If I was worried I’ve been ploughing through Hardy’s novels too fast, I shouldn’t be: my last review was over a year ago! Time to rectify that! It’s also a nice break from the YA/SF-heavy binge I’ve been on (and to which I will likely return shortly!). The Return of the Native is firmly in the middle of Hardy’s career as a novelist, and it shows. The novel opens with an exhaustive description of the picturesque Egdon Heath and its bucolic pre–Industrial Revolution furze-cutters and reddlemen. Hardy wants you to understand that this is the most beautiful green place in all the beautiful green places in England—and unlike the rest of England, in Wessex it only rains when Hardy needs pathetic fallacy. It also exists in a kind of bubble, with only the barest of interruptions—all of Wessex is like that, of course, but Egdon Heath seems isolated even from wider Wessex itself. There is something so profanely ironic about Hardy setting such unabashed tragedies within these idyllic pseudo-utopian worlds. So this book has the same environmental sensations as the earlier Under the Greenwood Tree and, like Far from the Madding Crowd, it flirts with the theme that loving “wrongly” leads to disaster. Hardy’s fascination with Greek and Shakespearean modes of tragedy is on full display here. While the characters’ downfalls are rooted in their personalities, arguably the tragedies that befall them are also an indictment of contemporary norms around love and relationships. This is a proving ground for Hardy’s cynicism, much more fully explored in his later novels and poems, about the influence of class, wealth, and misguided moralism on people’s happiness. As such, The Return of the Native might be simultaneously one of Hardy’s best and worst novels, for it has such deep, abiding passion yet also suffers from rough edges. I was not feeling this novel at first! It wasn’t just the seemingly-endless pages of description of the heath. None of the characters seemed remotely likeable or even sympathetic. Wildeve is a cad; Mrs Yeobright is stuck up on her high horse; Thomasin might as well be a washboard for all the personality she has; and Eustacia, while fuller in character, has a massive chip on her shoulder (to the point where I was starting to agree with Mrs Yeobright’s evaluation of her, and that made me feel weird). Even as the novel progresses and the actual plot emerges (this takes too long), I couldn’t bring myself to care. I didn’t find myself wanting any of these people to be happy. I criticize Hardy for it above, and I’m only half-joking: the word love gets tossed around very lightly. I don’t really think this is Hardy’s fault; however, it does make the characters seem more like players in a melodrama than actual people. Eustacia convinces herself she is “in love” with Clym after about a night of spying on him. It’s pretty clear that this is wishful thinking on her part, a psychological duplicity visited upon herself because Clym, the eponymous native, is an enigmatic unknown to Eustacia who holds the possibility of rescuing her from her benighted existence on the heath. She falls out of love just as easily when—surprise, surprise—no such extraction to even greener pastures emerges. With this failure on Clym’s part to abandon his stupid schooling plan take Eustacia to Paris—or even Budmouth!—Hardy makes some genuinely interesting observations about our propensity for deceiving ourselves about others. Eustacia is convinced that, despite Clym being very upfront about his intentions prior to marrying her, the marriage itself will somehow help her change his mind. So, I mean, I can be critical of the ease with which Eustacia or Wildeve keep falling in/out of love with each other and other people. But real human follies lie at the heart of all these relationships. So we might summarize Hardy’s position as being, “Everyone is an idiot, so why does society punish us for it?” He acknowledges that people are making bad, rash decisions about things like marriage. But it seems self-defeating, and even cruel, for our society to make it so difficult to make amends. The Return of the Native is set in the 1840s, a decade prior to England’s first stab at proper divorce proceedings. Once hitched, our couples have but two choices: live together in discontent, or separate in semi-scandal. Hardy explores the former state with the Wildeves. It’s not so much that Thomasin doesn’t love Wildeve as I suspect she’s the type of person who doesn’t love any of these characters in a romantic way. Rather, my reading of Hardy’s subtext is that Thomasin represents the type of woman who loves being courted. Hence her excitement and breathlessness at Wildeve’s pursuit, particularly when his suit was forbidden by her aunt and guardian. Deep down, Thomasin knows—and rebels against—the pressure in English society to make a “respectable” marriage. Hardy, as is typical of his somewhat proto-feminist writings, deftly illustrates how women of any class had few options beyond marriage; once married, even the rustic women who populate the Wessex countryside are judged more harshly than their menfolk if they stray. Thinking about it now, I’m actually getting angry about this: Wildeve knocks up Thomasin, and then while she is at home nursing their kid, he has the luxury of debating whether or not to run away with Eustacia. (I’m angry in part because of how Wildeve treats his wife and child, but also because a hundred years on, this kind of double standard still exists.) With the Yeobright–Vye marriage, on the other hand, Hardy gives us two people are just so ill-matched for one another, and everyone except them sees it from the beginning. Eustacia seems more classically suited to the judgement I passed on Thomasin above. She certainly loves the attention Wildeve pays her. But I think that’s more a symptom of her general boredom from life on the heath. And whether or not Eustacia really is suited for town life, she definitely thinks she is. She doesn’t love Clym so much as the idea of everything Clym represents, the possibility of escape from Egdon Heath. Throughout the novel, she remains remarkably consistent in this goal—hence, when Wildeve eventually presents her with the escape route, she seizes upon it immediately and fatally. Like Eustacia, Clym is a very driven individual; however, he allows himself to be seduced by the simplicity of furze-cutting life. There is a rich dramatic symmetry to the fates of the characters as well, once again hearkening back to classical tragedies. Eustacia wants to leave the heath, so she dies in the river—symbolically, she is now part of the heath forever. Wildeve is punished for wanting to leave his wife to follow Eustacia by being allowed to follow her in the universe’s ironically macabre way. Clym gets to live—but he essentially abandons his project of intellectual enlightenment in favour of moral enlightenment, because he recognizes that the universe has been punishing him for his hubris. Thomasin’s fate, even altered by the final chapter Hardy added at the end to appease serial readers, is a type of “punishment.” Venn loves her more than she loves him (again, see above, I don’t think she loves anyone). She essentially agrees to marry him because she doesn’t want to be a widow or dependent on her cousin. Hardy once more uses her to show the pragmatic attitude women often had to take towards marriage. The book’s original ending would have been Clym’s words: Do what you think right, dear. I am only too glad that you se your way clear to happiness again. My sex owes you every amends for the treatment you received in days gone by. Clym totes wouldn’t have been tweeting using #notallmen; he gets it! Hardy still manages to conclude the story with a focus on Clym (part of me wonders if Clym’s fate as revealed in “Aftercourses” is a kind of rebuke or “f u” to the magazine/readers who demanded a happy ending). His epilogue is a philosophical return to the physical descriptions visited upon us by the opening of the book: Hardy disdains organized religions or philosophies and prefers instead simpler wisdom, simpler times. Typical Hardy. See, this is why I write reviews. Actually reading The Return of the Native was not as energizing as some of Hardy’s other books. There were certainly parts that I liked, moments that made me gasp or groan as I anticipated what was to come—everything that makes Hardy a great writer is here, on display, in one way or another. But it doesn’t have that central protagonist present in some of Hardy greater works, or that sublime plotting of The Woodlanders . In writing this review, however, I have had to grapple more intensely with the book’s meanings, and my appreciation has deepened as a result. There is plenty to talk about here, with this one volume, even without attempting to converse about it in the context of Hardy’s wider works. The Return of the Native is never going to vie with some of Hardy’s other novels as my favourite, nor would I consider it his “best.” I definitely see its appeal more now than I did when I began reading it, and I suspect any other Hardy fan will as well. I would like to conclude with a shout-out to my man Hardy for his mad naming schemes. Far From the Madding Crowd gave us Bathsheba Everdeen, and now here we have Eustacia Vye, Thomasin Yeobright, and Damon Wildeve. Hardy is a master of unusual naming, and it oddly makes these books that much more delightful to a modern audience. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 10, 2016
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Jun 12, 2016
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Jun 10, 2016
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Paperback
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| 4.06
| 43,198
| 1990
| Mar 01, 1991
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liked it
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I’m very ambivalent about this book. Skinny Legs and All is a dense, intricate spiral of a story with funny characters but serious messages. However,
I’m very ambivalent about this book. Skinny Legs and All is a dense, intricate spiral of a story with funny characters but serious messages. However, Tom Robbins’ style grates on me a little bit. There’s nothing egregious about it, but maybe I’m just getting less patient with purpler prose as I approach the ripe old age of 26. In any event, I appreciate and respect this book, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. Skinny Legs and All follows Ellen Cherry Charles, a small-town Virginian woman, as she grows older and wiser in New York City. Owing to her crazy fundamentalist uncle and estranged art-nouveau husband, not to mention her employment at a restaurant owned by an Arab and a Jew, Ellen finds herself adjacent to all sorts of events related to the tension in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. It’s also about a Dirty Sock, Can of Beans, and Dessert Spoon who join up with an ancient Painted Stick and Conch Shell to make their way to Jerusalem and await the coming of the Third Temple. There’s a great deal of allusion here, Biblical and otherwise, and it’s easy to get lost down the rabbithole. The plot doesn’t move forwards so much as spiral around and around the drain. The main focus seems to be on Ellen’s struggle to redefine herself after separating from Boomer. She was supposed to be the artist, the hip and trendy participant in New York’s cultural scenes. Then Boomer, the welder who couldn’t see the point in art, suddenly finds himself caught in the maelstrom, while Ellen watches from the sidelines and finds her own inspiration and direction drying up. Meanwhile, the anthropomorphized household articles are on a quest of their own, in a sideplot that is so bizarre I can’t do it justice. Ultimately I’m not sure it ever really comes to fruition—it’s fun, I guess, but it never held my attention for too long. I feel like Robbins is just having fun riffing off these characters he created, while also playing around in the sandbox of Middle Eastern history and mythology. And if that’s what he wanted to do, fair enough. As far as the commentary on the Middle East goes: this novel predates September 11, 2001. I couldn’t help but fixate on this fact and wonder how it would be different if Robbins had written it ten years later. There is an atmosphere of optimism even amidst all the strange and sometimes upsetting things that happen, as if Robbins believes that humanity might possibly just manage to muddle through this all. The Middle East is an appropriate focal point for exploring our species’ foibles because of how it is the birthplace both of Abrahamic religions and so much strife in the contemporary world—how can a place named for peace be the centre of so much conflict? This contradiction proves to drive the most interesting moments of the book. Yet for all its intensive soul-searching and intriguing commentary on religion, Skinny Legs and All strikes me as ultimately a disappointing and empty book. It’s nearly five-hundred pages of rumination on why humans band together with common beliefs and then proceed to be massive dicks to the rest of humanity. And none of what Robbins says about religion is really all that original or thoughtful—he says it very well, of course, but if you’ve read any critiques of or apologies for organized religion, you’re already going to be familiar with these themes. What redeems the book, if anything, is Ellen. I enjoyed reading about her, sympathizing with her, and even being annoyed with her sometimes. Robbins gives Ellen sexual agency in a way that many male authors fail to do with their women characters—Ellen has a healthy internal and external sex life. The sexuality of women and the way our society and religions police it is one of the pillars of Robbins’ critique of organized religion, of course—hence the allusions to Jezebel and Salome and the veil dance that comprises the entire structure of the narrative. Whereas I wasn’t that impressed by the overall commentary on religions, I did appreciate this facet. This is the third in a trio of books lent to me by a friend ( Gould’s Book of Fish and Sweet and Vicious being the other two). I think I enjoyed the ride that was Sweet and Vicious most, but Skinny Legs and All is probably the best book of the three. Although it took too long to read for what little reward I got from it, I can still appreciate. For me this book is an example of how literature is like art—sometimes you know something is important, even though it doesn’t really speak to you on an emotional level. It’s intellectually satisfying, even though viscerally you’re left wanting something else, something different. This won’t be everyone’s reaction, of course, and I’m sure there are plenty of Robbins fans out there who love this book to pieces. I’m just not one of them. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 14, 2015
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Sep 16, 2015
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Sep 14, 2015
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1476775427
| 9781476775425
| 1476775427
| 3.47
| 638
| May 12, 2015
| May 19, 2015
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it was ok
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This is not the type of novel I am meant to enjoy. Even meant as satire, War of the Encyclopaedists just screams “I am the product of an MFA writer.”
This is not the type of novel I am meant to enjoy. Even meant as satire, War of the Encyclopaedists just screams “I am the product of an MFA writer.” It flounders in its pretentiousness, then washes up on the rocky shores of “but … but … plot?” before an errant wave knocks it loose and the undertow drags it out to the sea of irrelevance. Hey, I can write metaphors too. Graduate degree, please! In all seriousness— —actually, no, I can’t lie to you, Reader. I started this review tongue-in-cheek and will likely remain that way. So, in very little seriousness… Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite are two young men, one a graduate of a Bostonian MFA program, the other a platoon leader who served in Baghdad. They teamed up and produced a book about Halifax Corderoy and Mickey Montauk, who are two young men, one who studies in a Bostonian literature program and the other a platoon leader who serves in Baghdad…. Oh. I see what you did there. The “write what you know” advice is sound in most cases, and I won’t knock Robinson and Kovite for taking that route. It’s obvious that Corderoy and Montauk are not them—names like that should clue you into the fact the book is satirical, even if every other clue flies over your head. And I’ll grant them this: the juxtaposition of Corderoy’s semi-privileged but dull and pointless grad school experience with Montauk’s semi-privileged but dangerous and pointless deployment experience is interesting. Or, at least, it should be. The Montauk parts in Iraq kept me riveted. I don’t subscribe to the idea that war is glorious, and generally I don’t read books about war. But I genuinely enjoyed all the details that Robinson and Kovite include about the training Montauk undergoes leading up to his deployment and his actual tour in Iraq. In particular, they focus a lot on his relationship with the men under his command and his lack of confidence as a leader. Corderoy’s sections, on the other hand, were uphill filler between Montauk’s, at least for me. I cannot bring myself to care about the fact that this whiny brat is bored by school and just wants to slack off. Excuse me while I play my extremely tiny violin, Mr. Corderoy—what, you borrowed it to do lines of coke off it and then sold it for whiskey? That’s fine, son. Go have unprotected sex with your girlfriend. Because you’re wild and carefree and don’t have any connection or sense of responsibility as a twenty-something in the 2000s. I get it! The forced pretentiousness of both the novel’s content and style is a response to “Great American novels” about men and youthfulness that have seeped into our collective consciousness. Corderoy and Montauk are spoofs and riffs off Holden Caulfield, Gatsby, Stephen Daedalus, and half a dozen other characters I don’t know about because I tend to avoid such novels. That this could work at all is only because of the very postmodernist/deconstructionist schools that Robinson and Kovite satirize in this story. So … yeah. Paradoxical postmodernist self-criticism. Unfortunately, that’s why despite enjoying the story on the surface, I can’t say I enjoyed War of the Encyclopaedists. It smugly wears its pretentiousness like a badge of literary achievement, and that rubs me the wrong way. It’s like the comic friend you have who keeps going, “Eh? Eh? See what I did there?” after delivering her latest zinger. I totally saw what you did there, but thanks for pointing it out and ruining the joke. Of course, the other danger with a satire is that, in attempting to emulate the form or content you’re satirizing, you become that thing. War of the Encyclopaedists has an omniscient narrator—the most pretentious and literary of narrators; to compound this effect, Robinson and Kovite deploy the narrator in the least efficient, most annoying way. Omniscient narrators are like the nuclear weapons of narration: extremely powerful, very easy to mishandle, and prone to being messier and not worth your time. Writers who know what they are doing can use them tactically to good effect. In the hands of some writers, though, omniscient narrators become mushroom clouds of exposition. I don’t, actually, need to know every interior and ancillary thought and feeling that all these characters have. Why not show instead of tell? If high-concept literary takes on literary-ness from MFA grads are your thing, then you’ll probably like War of the Encyclopaedists. It is competently constructed in that most technical of senses—so technically that anything resembling a soul or spirit has fled. I damn it with faint praise not so much because it isn’t clever but because it just isn’t as clever as it wants to be (or as it thinks it deserves to be)—and that is a sin I don’t quickly forgive in my books. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 25, 2015
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Aug 26, 2015
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Aug 26, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0802139590
| 9780802139597
| 0802139590
| 3.70
| 5,590
| Jun 1997
| Dec 26, 2002
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it was ok
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Britain had some whack ideas. Remember that time they colonized an entire continent with convicts? That was whack. Gould’s Book of Fish is the epistola Britain had some whack ideas. Remember that time they colonized an entire continent with convicts? That was whack. Gould’s Book of Fish is the epistolary adventure of William Gould, a convict imprisoned on Sarah Island. Somewhere along the way he picked up enough painting skills to become an artist, and he starts painting fish for the island’s science-and-status–obsessed Surgeon instead of working on the chain gang. I enjoy books ( The Luminaries comes to mind) set in this frontier period of the colonization of Australia and New Zealand. Like The Luminaries, this book has a somewhat pretentious structure and style as Flanagan attempts to use Billy Gould to plumb the depths of human suffering and soul-searching. Each chapter is headlined by a particular fish from this book that Gould is working on, and the fish becomes a metaphor for the philosophical ramblings of that instalment in Gould’s life. Basically this book is an account of Gould’s suffering on Sarah Island, and of the various strange and nonsensical happenings that he witnesses there. Since we’re being told this all from Gould’s perspective, there are some serious unreliable narrator issues here. So it’s not possible to take the events of the story at face value, to say, “this happened,” and use that certainty as the metric by which we can judge Gould’s rambling. Case in point: the characters of this book aren’t so much people as they are examples of types of excess that afflict the human experience. (This is confirmed, in the most postmodern of ways, by the “afterword” note.) Each character is a facet of Gould’s madness—a madness that might have been exacerbated by his imprisonment but maybe has lurked there all along, lurks beneath all of us. Two things that I loved about this book. Firstly, Gould’s narrative voice is rich. It’s one thing to write a book set in a historical period and another thing to write with the voice of someone from that period. Through diction, sentence structure, and punctuation, Flanagan makes Gould’s voice come alive. This makes the book entertaining despite the darkness inherent in Gould’s experiences. Secondly, just when you think you’ve seen all Flanagan has to offer, he manages to change things up and deliver an even crazier situation. He certainly has imagination, and it shows on every page here. This is a very creative book, and that made it more enjoyable. So what stops me from singing more than dull praises? Is it the weird ending? The bizarre use of a frame story that Flanagan never returns to (except with one passing reference)? Or the constant parade of deaths, either real or metaphorical, without much in the way of happiness? Gould’s is a very Hobbesian view, mixed in with a certain amount of postmodern irony. Humans are just other animals, full of natural and atavistic urges. We pretend we suppress those urges, but that’s a lie. And that’s apparently the source of our unhappiness. This is a book that tries to be deep, and I suppose if you are willing to spend the time to study and analyze and prod it, you’ll find those depths. Maybe I’m just growing impatient in my old age. Maybe I’m losing my enjoyment of subtext. Whatever the reason, Gould’s Book of Fish was an adequate way to spend my time. But neither Gould’s voice nor Flanagan’s capacity for storytelling surprises could quite compensate for the almost desultory atmosphere that pervades the text. Maybe this will be the intensely philosophical, brooding text that you have been waiting for—I can’t discount that possibility. It just didn’t speak to me. I know this because I’m not particularly proud of the quality of this review. I could have spent more time talking more deeply about the philosophical underpinnings of this book. I just don’t care enough about it to do so. I’m going to go buy tea now instead. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 17, 2015
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Aug 20, 2015
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Aug 17, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0060926082
| 9780060926083
| 0060926082
| 3.96
| 51,155
| 1979
| Jan 01, 1996
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liked it
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Remember when David Mitchell came out with Cloud Atlas and everyone freaked out? Was it a novel? Inter-related short stories? What was with the weird
Remember when David Mitchell came out with Cloud Atlas and everyone freaked out? Was it a novel? Inter-related short stories? What was with the weird nesting? I don’t get the movie! All our neat little categories are coming tumbling down and now it’s the end of the world! Well, Milan Kundera does much the same in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (but since it hasn’t become a Major Motion Picture, only literary snobs care to comment on it). The cover proudly proclaims that this is “a novel,” which is a stretch by any definition of the word. It’s more like a 300-page meditation of getting old under Communist rule. I’m not so bothered by what this book is, however, or how to label it. Let’s talk about more interesting things, like sex! There’s a lot of sex in this book, or talk of sex. Most of the characters are middle-aged, and Kundera conveys the way this turning point in life heralds a subtle shift in our perspectives. (Or, you know, so I gather, not having quite reached it myself.) The title is a good hint at the lines of inquiry Kundera lays down: there are relationships that make us happy, and there are ones we would rather not dwell on; there are relationships that make us rueful, and there are ones that never happened, so we wonder what never will be. And in this pursuit of memories real and unattainable, Kundera tries to sort through some of the psychic baggage the Russian invasion has left behind on Czech culture. Mostly my experience with this book was one of treading water. Almost everything in here concerns things I don’t know much about. I can’t pretend to talk intelligibly about Kundera’s response to Communism in this, because I know little enough about that period. This is not a novel about being under Communist rule in the sense that Kundera isn’t about to give us exposition; it very much expects a certain familiarity. Similarly, the emphasis on sex just reminds me how much this activity baffles me at the best of times. I get the basic idea, understand its evolutionary origins and its utility as motivation in so many tragedies. I can empathize with the characters here—but I can’t sympathize, and I’m not sure I reacted to the events in these stories in the way most readers would. It’s not just the presence of sex, because of course that happens in a lot of stories! It’s more Kundera’s emphasis on the way emotion is mixed up in the embodied sensuality of the act. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting places a lot of importance on the awareness of bodies and embodiment. Much of the sparse physical description in the book is devoted to appearances and shapes and movements of limbs. We are our bodies, or at least, the way we interact with the world is informed by them—and while I agree with that thesis to an extent, mostly I’m just reminded of my own discomfort with it. Nevertheless, there are definitely moments that spoke to me here. I very much enjoyed “Mama,” in which Karel and Eva play host to Karel’s elderly mother the same weekend they’re having a threesome with another woman. Oops. And as hilarious as the situation is, Kundera manages to turn it into so much more than a farce. He illustrates how each of our actions can have a litany of unforeseen effects. And he manages to create three-dimensional characters in a short span of pages. Karel’s mother isn’t just a stereotypical disapproving matriarch growing ever more infirm: she is as much of a person as her son or her daughter-in-law, and thanks to the limited omniscience of our narrator, we get to see the perspectives of both generations. Kundera reminds us that the people who sit across from us are … well, people, who have thoughts and feelings and failing memories as much as we do. Kundera reminds me of a few writers. Vonnegut is one, because there is an almost weary acceptance of the absurdity that comes with authoritarianism. Orwell, another, for the commentary on the futility of fighting that absurdity. He reminds me of Murakami too, not just because of the foreignness of the experience of the stories, but for the way his characters reflect on their bodies as four-dimensional objects—existing in time as well as space. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is fun, but in a subtle rather than exciting way. It made me think—a little about life under an occupation, a lot about how we change over the decades. I’m not sure “enjoyed” is the word for this book. I don’t know if I “got” it. It’s not really my cup of tea, but I can appreciate how it might be for others. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 05, 2015
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Aug 08, 2015
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Aug 05, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0312330871
| 9780312330873
| 0312330871
| 4.28
| 1,440,769
| Nov 06, 1939
| May 03, 2004
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really liked it
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Hot on the heels of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd we have Agatha Christie’s other “best novel”, And Then There Were None, alternatively known under a fe
Hot on the heels of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd we have Agatha Christie’s other “best novel”, And Then There Were None, alternatively known under a few other racist titles. Loosely woven around an equally racist poem, the actual mystery is not in itself racist but instead another one of those clever stories that blew minds all around. I, however, didn’t like it very much. I’m not going to argue that this is a bad book or even a bad mystery. I understand why other people enjoy it so much. Despite the twist, however, I feel like Christie’s technical achievements here have been overrated compared to something like The Murder of Rogery Ackroyd, which is indeed quite a feat. Beyond that, this just doesn’t have what I’m looking for in a mystery. The whole premise is mind-boggingly unrealistic. I can believe a retired judge buying an island under an assumed name. Even if he manages to dig up the necessary information on all these people, what are the chances they are all available to travel to this island? And they all manage to arrive on the same day, at roughly the same time? British trains are not that reliable. And Then There Were None is like an episode in the seventh or eighth season of a procedural: the writers have literally been doing the same thing for so long that they have to come up with increasingly contrived ideas to keep the plots fresh. Note, however, that I’m not going to extend that metaphor and claim Christie was just retreading old ground here. The plot is original, and the story might even be entertaining. The atmosphere is certainly one of suspense: with everyone unsure as to the identity of the murderer, everyone becomes increasingly paranoid. It’s lovely. In this respect, Christie is one of the inventors of the modern thriller; And Then There Were None is a literary version of an extreme, life-or-death Survivor. But there isn’t much mystery to it. I think one reason the Poirot mysteries, above Christie’s other work, stick with me is the sheer presence of Poirot. His personality, his unique combination of egotism and brilliance, makes those mysteries work. I love watching Poirot on the case, because it’s like watching an amazing concert pianist or an Olympic athlete: you just know they’ll nail it. In contrast, all these amateur detectives running around feels like changing channels from the Olympics to a kids’ sports match. It’s not bad, just like kids’ sports are not bad—but it certainly can’t be judged by the same metrics. So I’m forced to concede this kind of conflict between my subjective taste and my appreciation, at a remove, for what Christie has accomplished here. Though I’m inclined to disagree with those who label it her best work, I agree it’s a masterful piece of storytelling. As a mystery, as a Christie mystery, however, it just leaves so much to be desired. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 26, 2015
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Jun 26, 2015
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Jul 06, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0140431268
| 9780140431261
| 0140431268
| 3.96
| 157,696
| 1874
| 1978
|
really liked it
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I learned I’d prefer to save my Hardy reading for the summer. There is nothing better than being able to read Hardy outside in summer, when the warmth
I learned I’d prefer to save my Hardy reading for the summer. There is nothing better than being able to read Hardy outside in summer, when the warmth and greenery makes it easier to imagine the bucolic setting of the Wessex novels. Plus, having the day available for reading allows me to sink my teeth into novels like Far from the Madding Crowd, which are meant to be read in big gulps rather than sipped here and there as free time allows. I’ll re-read this one day, in a summer, and I know I will like it even better then. For now, though, I’m content to say that I liked it—as I was bound to do, with Hardy being one of my favourites—but it doesn’t have that weight of his later works. I know some view that as a positive: this is Hardy at his most upbeat. I could totally see Hollywood doing an adaptation of this in the style of 10 Things I Hate About You’s adaptation of Shakespeare—this is an almost-textbook romantic comedy that happens to have been written in the Victorian era. Even this early in Hardy’s career as an author there are hints of his iconoclastic willingness to skirt the bounds of propriety. At the same time, there are conventions—Oak’s bald-faced proposal to Bathsheba not weeks after meeting her for the first time is one—that are more than comical by our standards. Now, I bought this copy used, as I like to do with classics. (There’s just something that feels right about reading a classic that has been read before.) And this copy comes with a bonus: reader annotations! It bears the price tag of Mount Allison University’s bookstore, and as far as I can tell, it once belonged to a student in a Victorian literature class. I assume the student is male, because of the messiness of the writing and the way the notes are … phrased. Every chapter has two or three thoughts jotted at the end to summarize the key events, and passages here or there throughout are marked up with choice commentary on the part of this reader. I love annotating books. I don’t do it often enough, even with books I own, because I am lazy. (And I don’t do it with books other people own, unless they give me express permission. And I don’t do it with library books, because the library would frown at me and kindly ask me to refrain from ever patronizing it again, which would make me sad.) Discovering the comments of a previous owner in the margins of a book is one of the benefits of buying used. I feel like I’m part of a long-delayed conversation, and I’m always keen to discover if the past reader and I share sensibilities and reactions to the story—or if we differ and diverge along the way. These notes, though … these are fascinating, in an anthropological kind of way. So rather than review Far from the Madding Crowd directly, I instead present to you Review of Select Commentary on Far from the Madding Crowd. The first few chapters suffer from a dearth of commentary. In Chapter 3, we get a few passages underlined; the sole note at the end of this chapter is “cool” in reference to the chapter’s closing remark: “‘Now find out my name,’ she said teasingly; and withdrew.” Clearly this person is getting sucked into the plot! We do just that—find out her name—on the next page. It’s Bathsheba Everdene. Either this student is a stone wall, or he’s reading this prior to The Hunger Games, because there is no comment on how much that sounds like “Everdeen.” May the odds be ever in Bathsheba’s favour—she’s going to need it. The notes don’t really pick up until Chapter 10, when the student correctly picks up on the importance of Bathsheba’s interaction with the people who work her land. The student has some interesting comments on Hardy’s dry observations about marriage. In this quotation, about one of the wives of Bathsheba’s farm workers, the student underlines the sentence I’ve emphasized: She was a woman who never, like some newly married, showed conjugal tenderness in public, perhapbe because she had none to show. He marked this up with an arrow and “PDA.” Actually, I thought it said “POA” and struggled with it, until a coworker quite rightly corrected me: it’s public display of affection, anachronistic but nonetheless accurate. The passage and commentary continues: “Oh, you are,” said Bathsheba. “Well, Laban, will you stay on?” The above highlighted passages are annoted, respectively, with “Ball n’ chain” and “Bitch.” Classy. This is also the chapter with the first real summary note at the end—just quick observations on the important characters here. Chapter 13 is interesting, though. When Bathsheba and Liddy unwisely cook up the prank valentine they send to Boldwood, our intrepid reader writes: Flip the book. *slow clap* Could not have said it better myself, really. But wait, what’s this on the next page, at the end of the chapter? Did it cuz mad cuz he no look at her. On some level, he’s correct—if not really willing to look much deeper into Bathsheba’s motivations. But I don’t get it. You’re a university student who clearly has enough intellect to pick up some of the subtext of this book. Why the hell are your abbreviating “because” as “cuz”? In Chapter 14, we get to see how Gabriel Oak interacts with the other labourers on the farm. This portrayal, so essential to the Hardy vision of rural England, the student boils down to: They admire Gaberial cuz he's “smart” Gaberial, folks. Can’t even be bothered to spell the main character’s name right in your notes. It’s literally a few centimetres up the page. By the end of Chapter 18, though, he has clued into the fact he can just abbreviate Gabriel’s onerously long name, and he does it correctly: Gabe knows of letter Those mindfucking lady farmers, I tell you. Boldwood clearly can’t take it, because in Chapter 20 he breaks down and begs Bathsheba to marry him. Let’s look at how the student interprets this scene: Boldwood “Begs” for marrige Hey, I know I’m being cheeky in my commentary on this commentary, but I’ll level: questionable syntax and spelling aside, that’s not a bad summary of what happens in this chapter. The top of Chapter 20 shows the student took a break and also switched pens, because the formerly red ink is now blue. Squeezed above the chapter header, we have: Should treat Farmer Boldwood fairly sez Oak The student picks up on all the hinky sexual and romantic symbolism in “The Great Barn and Sheep-Shearers,” noting (in red pen again) that it is “very imp chapter = read again, very symbolic,” and I hope they did. So far, his level of insight continues to bely his hopelessly crude notetaking skills. I continue to vacillate in my opinion regarding whether the student is just lazy or genuinely has bad spelling. This is a pretty insightful summary for Chapter 26: very imp Really, if we all wrote our literary criticism like this student, wouldn’t the world be a better place? Sometimes, as is the case at the end of Chapter 31, the student gets even more real: Boldwood sez “Fuck you bitch for fucking with my mind” He stole yr heart with his lies I’ll kill him “you've hurt me bitch!! And back in blue pen at the top of Chapter 32: Troy must marry or else shell be thought a slut cuz everyone knowz about her woody fer Troy OMG, did you hear about Miss Everdene’s woody? She’s, like a total slutbag! I know, right? Why can’t she just choose between Gale or Peeta already?!! Like, WTF? She certainly seems DTF with Troy. Unfortunately, as we learn in Chapter 41, Troy is DTF with someone else and totally 3 Bathsheba’s heart: Bash an Troy fight cuz Bash finds lock of other gurlz hair. Troy won’t burn it cuz loves other girl Oh no he didn’t. Interestingly, the student is pretty quiet on “Fanny’s Revenge,” the pivotal chapter in which Bathsheba looks in the coffin—even though she shouldn’t—and discovers Fanny actually had Troy’s child. Oops. There’s a lacklustre summary at the end of the chapter but none of the inline commentary during the important scene. There’s plenty of underlining but a dearth of commentary in the subsequent chapters, mostly very short summaries and little notes like “read again.” At this juncture, the student was probably reading the book at a healthy clip in order to meet some deadlines, and just absorbing the basic plot was good enough for him. Hopefully he clued into the foreshadowing that while Fanny’s fate is a tragedy in and of itself, it is merely the opening act in a much more involved tragedy that wrecks Bathsheba and Troy’s marriage not once but twice. And yes, this is still one of Hardy’s lighter works. The last two or three chapters are entirely devoid of notes or even underlining. And so I am left in suspense. Did he even finish the book? What did he think of it? There’s not even a “Nice” or “Cool” on the last page to let me know he is satisfied with the happy ending. Did you read this book for a Mount Allison University Victorian lit course, only for it to somehow end up in a used bookstore in Thunder Bay? Did you annotate it in red and blue pen? Let me know what you thought of the end of the book. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 17, 2015
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Feb 21, 2015
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Feb 17, 2015
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Paperback
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my rating |
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| 4.15
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did not like it
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Aug 04, 2024
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Aug 13, 2024
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| 4.29
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it was amazing
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Nov 20, 2022
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Nov 24, 2022
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| 3.89
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liked it
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Nov 09, 2019
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Oct 30, 2019
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| 3.88
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really liked it
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Sep 05, 2019
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Aug 31, 2019
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| 3.38
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it was ok
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Oct 21, 2018
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Oct 17, 2018
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| 3.83
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really liked it
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Aug 18, 2018
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Aug 16, 2018
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| 3.83
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it was amazing
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Jan 03, 2018
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Jan 01, 2018
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| 3.67
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liked it
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Dec 26, 2017
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Dec 24, 2017
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| 3.90
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it was ok
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Dec 28, 2016
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Dec 27, 2016
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| 3.88
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liked it
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Nov 27, 2016
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Nov 24, 2016
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| 3.39
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liked it
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Oct 28, 2016
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Oct 24, 2016
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| 3.27
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it was ok
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Aug 05, 2016
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Aug 03, 2016
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| 3.19
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it was ok
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Jul 16, 2016
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Jul 15, 2016
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| 3.88
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really liked it
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Jun 12, 2016
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Jun 10, 2016
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| 4.06
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liked it
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Sep 16, 2015
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Sep 14, 2015
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| 3.47
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it was ok
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Aug 26, 2015
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Aug 26, 2015
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| 3.70
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it was ok
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Aug 20, 2015
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Aug 17, 2015
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| 3.96
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liked it
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Aug 08, 2015
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Aug 05, 2015
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|||||
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| 4.28
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really liked it
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Jun 26, 2015
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Jul 06, 2015
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|||||
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| 3.96
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really liked it
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Feb 21, 2015
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Feb 17, 2015
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