I was reading this book and understood nothing.

The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha

2010-12-23T15:09:00.000-08:00

The story of Don Quixote is a simple one. Alonzo Quixada, an avid reader of tales of chivalry, decides one day that it is his destiny to become a knight-errant. He finds himself a knight-like name, some armour, a horse, a name for the horse, and a lady-love, and later a squire (the wonderful Sancho Panza), and sets off to do good deeds. This makes up the entirety of the content of Cervantes' masterpiece.

To be honest, until very recently I wouldn't have called this a masterpiece - in fact, the only reason I enjoyed this book at all was because I approached it not as a fun novel to read for relaxation, but as an intellectual challenge, a problem to be solved. I wrote summaries, I asked questions. The slightest, most irrelevant inconsistency warranted a note in the margin and a dog-eared page corner. But despite my perseverance, Cervantes' supposed genius largely eluded me. Having heard that it was at heart a very sad tale, I filled my notebook with naive ruminations about which part of the plot might turn out to be the 'sad bit'. Fascinated by the character of Sancho Panza, I underlined his every quotation, searching desperately for some hint of complexity, of charactorial depth. I found it not - every quotation seemed to prove that Sancho was exactly what he seemed to be: a stupid, greedy simpleton.

And yet, there were some things that stood out, questions which I kept coming back to and which seemed to be important. Why are there so many irrelevant stories woven into the plot? Why are the female characters as they are? Why is it so self-referential, so self-aware, in a way more similar to post-modernism than anything else I've read? And I started, gradually, as I thought about it, to realise that there was much more to this book than I had thought.

And then I went to the good old Melbourne University library and pulled out a stack of books of literary criticism, some of which turned out to be good enough to be read in their own right (not my usual opinion of literary crirticism). And I was swayed! When you read something as beautifully written as this, and true besides, can you not help but be moved, to tears and to hugs and to monuments to Cervantes' eternal genius?

"Like a butterfly from a chrysalis, Don Quixote emerges from his mediocre past with bright colours and a strange costume, ready to leave his friends and neighbours behind, ready to fly away. One day he looks around in his own backyared in his village and finds nothing that can compare with his readings. Surely the real world has sunk very low; certainly something must be done to lift it to a higher level. Don Quixote mounts his horse and goes forth. We know, as his readers, that he will fail time and time again in his quest for justice. But should he not have tried? Should no one have tried to bring a little justice, a little beauty, a little love to a sad world?"(Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote, Duran and Rogg, 2006, p69)

And I realised also that in my obsessive scrutiny of Sancho's character, I had completely neglected to notice the extraordinary way that he, and also Don Quixote, grows and changes throughout the novel (though probably this was also due to the rather stilted, exam-interrupted way in which I read it). I also learned a lot of other things worthy of being known and recited, some of which I here relate:

In Cervantes' time (the late 1500's) there existed a genre of fiction known as the chivalric romance, a type of book in which heroes go off to do battle against giants and armies of thousands to win the love of their pure, fair, dull-as-ditchwater lady waiting in a tower at home, waving a white handkerchief out the window and crying dulcet tears of rosewater and lily petals into an ewer of pure crystal. Or whatever. Anyway, this type of book was the trashy romance of the day - it was immensely popular (in fact, Cervantes has two characters discuss the dismal state of literature and theatre for the entirety of two chapters, and in the margin of the copy I borrowed from the library someone has written in beautiful Victorian handwriting 'Cervantes is truly a writer for all ages!'), and essentially a hangover from the Medieval period. So Cervantes sets out to write a parody of this genre, presumably to reveal to the masses the error of their ways and encourage them to read something decent for once, for god's sake. This is no secret; he announces it proudly and rather big-headedly in the preface to Part I.

But the chivalric romance is not the only thing influencing Cervantes. Two other contemporary genres also make an appearance: that of the pastoral novel (shepherds, sheep, Arcadia, unspoiled wilderness, sheep, etc.) and that of the picaresque adventure story (danger, excitement, deprivation, courage, etc.). In Don Quixote, Cervantes combines these three different aesthetics and effectively reinvents them, the alterations he makes revealing his dissatisfaction with the way they represent life, and truth. Life is quite clearly none of these three genres, even though it may occasionally possess elements of each (which, I posit, is the answer to my first question: "why so many irrelevant stories?" Many of these asides are textbook examples of the chivalric romance, pastoral fantasy or the picaresque. I would like to think that the somewhat clumsy way they are interwoven with the main story is an indication of their inability to represent reality - in contrast to the hard-headed grit of the main plot, the failure is obvious). None of these genres, alone or even combined, is enough to describe life with any semblance of accuracy. Hence, Cervantes satirises them, and reveals their essential futility by having his main character attempt to live one. And Don Quixote is forced to abandon his illusions one by one by the hard reality that surrounds him, to the point of his renunciation at the very last. This, my friends, is tragedy at its finest.

Don Quixote was written in two parts, the first published in 1605 and the second in 1615, just a year before Cervantes' death. The difference between the two is extraordinary. Part I is an amusing farce with some interesting aspects; Part II is a masterpiece that anticipates centuries of literary endeavour. It is deeply psychological, it treats its female characters in an entirely new way, and it is devastatingly self-reflective. And many other things that I haven't mentioned.

For me while I was reading, the most interesting aspect of the book was its metafictional qualities. It is confusingly self-aware, with the opinions of the narrator (Cervantes, whose books are mentioned in the prose and who also appears as a character at one point), the supposed 'author' (Cid Hamet Benengali), and the unnamed translator (Cid Hamet was a Moor, so of course it was originally written in Arabic) all appearing in the course of the text. Furthermore, the story is temporarily interrupted because a part of the manuscript is apparently lost and only found by sheer luck, and at least one chapter is suspected by the translator to be apocryphal (which means, of course, that Cervantes put it in deliberately). In Part II, it is announced that Part I has already been published, and thus the other characters are aware of Don Quixote and his madness - a narrative decision with very interesting consequences. Moreover, it emerges that a fake Part II has been published in which Don Q and Sancho have been portrayed most unflatteringly (and, it must be said, unfairly). (Amazingly enough, as an unusually helpful footnote of Edith Grossman's informed me, this actually happened, and this aspect of Part II was written in part as a rebuke to the guy who did it. A better example of life imitating - or complementing - art I have never encountered.) All these things and, I'm sure, many more that I've forgotten draw attention in a most conspicuous way to the problematic nature of fiction, and of texts in general.

So why does Cervantes do this? Tempting as it is to assume his motives were the same as those of the post-modernists who were to use similar techniques over 350 years later, I'm not sure that this is the correct answer. Is it possible that one man, writing in a way that had never been seen before (with the possible exception of The Tale of Genji, written six centuries earlier and on the other side of the world) (um, by the way, Cervantes is widely credited with the invention of the novel, I should probably have mentioned that earlier), could be making the same points as people who were writing to challenge the traditionalism of a medium that had existed for over three hundred years, a medium invented by Cervantes himself? (the mind boggles.) Maybe. After all, many people (numbering among them Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom), claim Don Quixote to be a work of genius (or words to that effect; I'm leaning towards that opinion myself); or even the greatest novel ever written (I hesitate to make such a claim, but it may well be true). Nonetheless, I suspect it to be unlikely (that Cervantes' and the pomos had the same motives; can you even follow my argument with all the brackets I'm using?); in any case, it is much more likely that Cervantes had entirely different, but still valid, reasons for doing what he did. I have a few theories:

1. Just for fun! Although I personally never found Don Q to be a total laff-fest (the underlying poignancy was too strong to completely dismiss, though my subconscious certainly did its best) it is most certainly written in a light-hearted, even playful way. Maybe this is just his friendly way of messing with his readers' heads. If so, he certainly succeeded - four hundred years later, the critics still can't agree.

2. To reinforce the main theme of the book, which, in case you haven't picked it up already, is most pithily summed up here. As an example, we are told, practically simultaneously, that all Moors are liars, cheats, idol-worshippers, incapable of understanding rational argument, and prone to criminal levels of exaggeration, and that the Moorish author Cid Hamet Benengali is an honest and truthful chronicler (at one point, he also swears on his faith as a Catholic Christian, whatever that's supposed to mean). "Don't trust everything you read!" is Cervantes' perpetual refrain (Wikipedia deniers, behold your new Messiah). "The truth is less straightforward than you think!"

3. He is simply engaging in some healthy parody. Another helpful Edith Grossman footnote (two in the same book! I would never have believed it) informs me that telling the story as if from the point of view of a traslator who happened to find a manuscript was a common trope used in, you guessed it, chivalric romances. So maybe Cervantes was just exaggerating this trait to the point of farce.

4. He wanted to create a sense of distance between the characters and author, and by extension, change the way they are perceived by the reader. By presenting the story as a history (even if the reader knows that it isn't really), he in a sense releases the characters from the restrictions of fiction. They are no longer creations of the heat-oppressèd brain, but independent entities who have control over their fate.

5. An interesting theory that I read is that Cervantes, like all authors who lacked a wealthy patron, existed on rather precarious finances. Perhaps, Duran and Rogg suggest, he constantly draws attention to the presence, or existence, of an author as an appeal to the reader to give him some money or something. Whether this is conscious or unconscious, Duran and Rogg do not specify.

In short (finally! you declare), do I recommend that you read this book? The answer, dear reader, is YES. However, don't expect it to be a walk in the park (to use a Sancho-esque proverb). Maybe I'm just stupid or whatever, but a lot of people on goodreads seem to have given it four or five stars without appearing to have had any trouble at all. I don't get that. For me, it was hard work, and it took two and a half months. BUT: incredibly rewarding.

If you do choose to read it, think carefully about the translation. I mainly read an 1868 translation by Charles Jervas, which had wonderful engravings and was basically wonderful, and which I sort of cross-referenced with the Edith Grossman translation. The Grossman translation seems to be widely acknowledged as the best (it was just the one that happened to be in the bookshop, for me - also it had a prettier cover than the Penguin edition), but I don't like it nearly as much. It is, I can tell, highly accurate, but the Jervas translation is so much more fun! It's much more idiomatic, much more lively, and feels much less like reading a translation. I've heard the original 1755 Tobias Smollett translation is good for the same reason, and it's probably much easier to find than the Jervas. There are certainly good arguments for accurate, literal translations, but who gives. Also the Grossman has tonnes of footnotes, most of which are useless and highly irritating (who cares how many US cents a maravedi is equal to? It's screamingly obviously a unit of currency, and that is ALL I WANT OR NEED TO KNOW), but every now and then comes along one that is incredibly useful, like the ones I cited in this review.

(Excellent) References (that you might want to consider reading yourself because they are so good)

Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote. Manuel Duran and Fay R. Rogg, 2006.

Beyond Fiction: the Recovery of the Feminine in the Novels of Cervantes. Ruth El Saffar

The Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote de la Mancha. ed. Sieber, McGraw-Hill, 2005.

I apologise profusely for my bizarrely inconsistent recording of bibliographic details.

EVERYONE! I HAVE - I HAVE A QUESTION:

2010-12-21T23:21:00.000-08:00

When you read to yourself, by which I mean, not aloud, do you speak the words in your head? Does the punctuation affect how you speak the aforementioned words? Does it change, as it were, your mental intonation?

It does mine. And hence why I have never understood why people have trouble with most punctuation. I can understand the problems with apostrophes. Even hyphens, to a large extent. The difference between single and double quotation marks is something with which I grapple daily and have decided is a case for inventing one's own convention. But these are all punctuation marks which you can't hear when talking. FULL STOPS, commas, ellipses, dashes, and even the dreaded semi-colon, however, are just representations of how people talk. Seriously, what's the deal, world? Is it really that hard? Can't you just listen to the words in your head and *hear* which punctuation mark to use?

Evidently not. And evidently I am some kind of grammar snob who reads too much, though to be honest I do remember a time when I didn't know how to use the semi-colon, but I seemed to develop the ability spontaneously because it's second nature now. But anyway. Punctuational musings aside and ON TO THE BOOK!

I had to re-rate this book from four stars to three. Somehow I didn't find it so funny the second time. The humour seemed forced, and formulaic (the Oxford comma has its place, by the way). Perhaps linguistics has spoiled me. One year of rabid left-wing hippy pot-smoking release-yonder-children-from-the-shackles-of-modern-education descriptivist linguistics lecturers has cured me (almost) completely of any lingering signs of prescriptivism (for all you who remain unconvinced, Stephen Fry and Language Hat will tell you why descriptivists have more fun).

In any case, I've seen curses rained upon Lynne Truss for her 'smug', 'self-righteous' 'linguistic snobbism', but she's a sweetie at heart, I believe. For all her grouchy, unconvinced and unconvincing attempts to paint herself as a not-too-prescriptive-prescriptivist (if that even makes sense), she's just a language lover (to hyphen or not to hyphen?) at heart. Observe:

"... it is a matter for despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don't know the difference between "who's" and "whose", and whose bloody automatic 'grammar checker' can't tell the difference either. [hear, hear! MS Word, are you listening?] And despair was the initial impetus for this book. I saw a sign for "Book's" with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft [sic]. I know that language moves on. It has to... But I can't help feeling that our punctuation system, which has served the written word with grace and ingenuity for centuries, must not be allowed to disappear without a fight."

And no, it's not just the Cherry Orchard reference that makes my heart go boompity-boomp. No matter how many linguistics lecturers I have, no matter how many blog posts written by celebrities advocating descriptivism I read, I will still share at least some of Ms Truss's sentiments. It's the same feeling of sadness I feel when I contemplate the word 'awesome' and how it can never really encompass all that it used to. The same feeling of tragic loss I experience when I realise that the phrase 'the stuff of magic' is actually kind of funny these days. The same half-smothered regret that is inspired within my soul as I cast around desperately for a synonym for 'random' that doesn't make me sound like an idiotic teen.

It's just nostalgia, pure and simple. Now let us alone, descriptivists.

Oh! All the memories

2010-12-15T04:32:00.000-08:00

I've spent the last few days rereading my copies of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers series. Unfortunately I only have the third, fifth and sixth, but I am now determined to get my hands on the other three and read them obsessively. I love them for a number of reasons, which I shall enumerate here:

1. They bring back so many memories. Primarily of the days when I actually read the damn things (when I was about six to eight years old). At the time I was living in England, where people actually did say "you'd jolly well better not do that again!" (not all that often, but the point stands), where it seemed not only possible, but likely that fairies lived at the bottom of the garden, where an adventure and a mystery was just waiting around every corner, and where life was so full of simple wonder.

2. They bring back memories of my school. Malory towers, though of course overly idealised and cliched to the point of near-death, reminds me a little of my own school and reading these books reminds me of some of the good times. (there were many - it was a good school and I was in the right mental place to enjoy it.)

3. It's just so GOOD! Good as in everyone is good and kind and perfect, except for the people who aren't. It's totally black and white, and the baddies always either get their commeuppance or get reformed, the goodies are always recognised and loved, the ending is always happy and OH MY GOD I LOVE ENID BLYTON. Example:

" 'Sometimes hard things are good for us,' said Miss Grayling, and Miss Peters nodded. After all, the girls didn't come to Malory Towers only to learn lessons in class - they came to leran other things too - to be just and fair, generous, brave, kind. Perhaps those things were even more important than the lessons!"

Kids these days don't read her, I've noticed. Perhaps even 'in my day' - gosh, that makes me sound old - they didn't. But I lived within miles of the house where darling Enid lived, and I was a sweet, happy little child to whom the idea of finding secret passages, tackling 'rogues' and writing school pantomimes was ridiculously appealing, and for whatever reason I read and loved those books for many years. Or, you know, one or two years. It felt like a long time at age six.

Then, all of a sudden, I went off them. This was because it abruptly dawned on me that the prose was crazy. Commonly used words include: 'super' as in 'oh super! Lacrosse game tomorrow!', 'rotten' as in 'rotten breakfasts they have here!', 'wizard' as in 'that's a wizard drawing, Belinda!', and many other wonderful examples that I noticed at the time but have now slipped my mind. Not to mention the overabundance of explanation marks, as evidenced by my thoughtfully chosen examples.

Despite all her faults, however, I am eternally grateful to Enid Blyton, because it was her (and Roald Dahl) who introduced me to reading, and IT'S SO GREAT GUYS HAVE A GO

Poetry is phun

2010-12-10T00:05:00.000-08:00

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars - men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku's name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

By Rihaku (Li T'ai Po) and Ezra Pound

That They May Face the Rising Sun: I really wish I could enjoy this book

2008-07-03T18:45:00.001-07:00

But it's driving me crazy. The slow pace, the stupid characters (by which I don't mean that the characters are badly done - on the contrary, stupidity is part of their nature), the constant use of the passive voice, the sort of skaz (I don't know if I'm using this term correctly) in the narrative... it all combines to make an extremely annoying book.

I see exactly what McGahern's doing (or I think I see it) and kudos to him, because it's brilliant. The book is a continuous stream of anecdotes, an exercise in the minutiae of characterisation and plot. It describes a year in the life of Joe and Kate Ruttledge and their neighbours. We meet the spine-chillingly horrid John Quinn, we hear the sad tale of Johnny, we learn about Bill Evans' unhappy childhood... it's all fascinating and beautiful, in its way. The prose mimics the slowness of life in a place where little happens, but everything that happens is news. It's a beautiful depiction of a place and an era, though it's not immediately clear to what era it belongs.

I think I'm too impatient, and that's why I can't like it. I'm constantly pressed for time at the moment, and I feel like I'm wasting it whenever I slip into the contemplative, relaxed state that I need to read this book. I thrive on tension, adrenaline, and that is something that has nothing to do with this wonderful book. I may finish it... one day. I may even get to it in the next few weeks or so, once all my assessment is over. In the meantime, I'll be moving on to The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster.

But what an amazing title!

Film adaptations of books

2008-06-27T23:31:00.000-07:00

I'm sure we've all had those times when some ignorant film maker slaughters our favourite book, then turns around and expects us to enjoy it - all while revelling in the fame of a box-office success. How is this fair? Why does the rest of the world have no taste? I would really like to know the answers. I have spent many an unsatisfying film session pondering what exactly it is that makes a film a good adaptation, and can even provide pertinent examples.

Some people have hard-and-fast rules: 'The book version is always better.' 'The movie version is always better.' 'Movie versions of action films are always better because they have more impact.' and so on. Some people refuse (as a general rule) to see the movie of a book or read the book of a movie, saying it will 'spoil it'.

I find it difficult to be so black and white. For one thing, despite my many unsatisfying cinema-going experiences, I am usually too curious to resist (with a few notable exceptions). Also I am not stubborn enough to resist an invitation from someone I want to go out with. (Hence why I saw Sex and the City the other day, and - surprisingly enough - enjoyed it!) But also I don't watch a great deal of film or television. Books will always hold the first place in my heart. I think this is because they offer so much more scope for the imagination. Also it's less bother. Borrowing books from the library or buying them second-hand has become second nature to me (I love my yearly pilgrimages to Borders to spend my birthday book vouchers too), but hiring a movie or going to the cinema or even setting up the video to record something on TV takes so much more effort.

My two favourite adaptations would have to be Atonement and The Virgin Suicides, both based on excellent books that I should really reread. In my mind they both captured the atmosphere which was so strong in both those books - the soporific heat of summer in Atonement and the cloying humidity of The Virgin Suicides. Even Keira Knightley didn't stuff things up, which was RATHER impressive.

I also like Lord of the Rings and The Golden Compass was quite good too. Lord of the Rings captured the epic quest spirit of the book and The Golden Compass was pretty good - though I can't now remember why. I think I was mainly just glad it wasn't another Harry Potter. Oh yes, I also liked The Da Vinci Code. It was much less annoying than the book. And Audrey Tautou was in it (speaking English with an adorable accent no less).

The ultimate of really bad adaptations, for me, is Harry Potter. Nothing matched the way I had imagined it, which pissed me off, but usually doesn't bother me as long as the alternative is good. In this case, however, the alternative was a piece of crap. Very few of the actors could act or were well-cast (Alan Rickman and the Hagrid guy being notable exceptions). In the third movie especially (I think that's the last one I've seen, though I seem to recall falling asleep during a later one), the characters seemed to slip frequently into lord-of-the-typical-medieval-traditional-fantasy-style syntax and vocabulary. This is NOT Harry Potter. Part of HP's genius and success is that it's about ordinary teenagers being placed in an extraordinary situation. Very few situations are extraordinary enough to make a fourteen-year-old speak like a Shakespeare wannabe.

Some films, though, are patently better than the book. I read The Notebook before I saw the film and thought it was the biggest piece of shit I'd ever laid eyes on. I didn't think the movie was great shakes either, but it was far, far better than the book.

Some films leave me feeling like I don't particularly want to read the book. The Bourne Ultimatum had enough for me, as did The Constant Gardener. And so you see that the extent of my film-watching experience is rather limited.

What makes a good adaptation, in my opinion, is a production that is true to the spirit of the book. Making a film that does that is easier said than done, I'm sure, but I know it's possible because I've seen it.

Unless by Carol Shields is quite good.

2008-06-25T05:30:00.000-07:00

And I mean literally quite good, without any sarcasm or hyperbole intended. It's quiet and peaceful and pretty and enjoyable without being mindblowing or brilliant. There are many beautiful moments in it, and the language is really nice. I enjoyed it for its subtlety. In fact, it's so subtle that it's difficult to work out why it works as well as it does. Maybe I'll just let the text do the talking.

"I'm not interested, the way some people are, in being sad. I've had a look, and there's nothing down that road. I wouldn't reply, as Anna Karenina does when asked what she's thinking about: "Always about my happiness and my unhappiness." The nakedness of that line of thought leads to a void. No, Ms. Winters of Orangetown much prefers the more calculated protocols of dodging sadness with deliberate manoeuvres. She has an instinct for missing the call of grief. Scouring the separate degrees of innerness makes her shy. A reviewer... charged...me with being "good" at happy moments but inept at the lower end of the keyboard. Well, now! What about the ripping sound behind my eyes, the starchy tearing of fabic, end to end; what about the need I have to curl up my knees when I sleep? Whimpering."

I picked this paragraph pretty much at random from among the pages I marked as having standout passages, and it's an excellent example of Shields' portrayal of the protagonist (Reta Winters) and her struggle to cope with her daughter Norah's withdrawal from society. One day, for no reason that her family can understand, Norah leaves her steady boyfriend and seemingly happy life as a student at the University of Toronto to take up a position on the footpath, begging for alms and wearing a cardboard sign with the word "goodness" written on it around her neck. Reta Winters is a writer of 'light' fiction and a translator; Unless charts the parallel journeys of the protagonist (Reta) and of the protagonist of Reta's book (Alicia?) until both reach their respective conclusions. In the sort of trick that some might call silly, naff or cheap but that makes a linguophile like myself want to squee, Unless embodies the uncertainty and conditionality encoded of the sense and connotations of the word 'unless'.

Thanks to its subject matter, this book immediately reminded me of Phillip Roth's American Pastoral (both are about a daughter performing an act that is shocking and seems completely out of character and her family's attempts to deal with it), and I originally wanted to write a comparison of the two, but I'll admit that it's been too long since I read American Pastoral and that I also just can't be bothered. In brief, though: for all the similarity of the plots (?), the two are very different. American Pastoral is "raging and elegiac" in the wonderful words of the reviewer who is quoted on the cover of my edition - it is anger, a cry of despair and why?? that echoes in my head even now. Unless is totally different. It is quieter and more restful, but no less meaningful and potentially heart-wrenching. Read them both for an interesting comparison.

Perfectly Good Words

2008-06-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

I have totally been feeling too randomly lazy to update the past few days. I have literally not had the energy to lift my hands to a keyboard. 'Oh my God', I hear you say; 'why has this totally awesome blogger, like, stopped blogging?' and I'm so like 'um, here's some shit I started writing ages ago because I really can't be bothered comparing Unless and American Pastoral like I was totally planning to do.' So the point of today's post (which is more linguistics than literature, but it's vaguely relevant) is that the semantic shift of modern language has led to what is known as 'lexical gaps', which is the phrase used when there is no word in a language to describe a certain concept. However, my knowledge of linguistics is a little sketchy/amateur, so don't quote me on this.

The words are:
Awesome: the former meaning of this word used to be something similar to 'awe-inspiring'. Now it just means 'great', 'cool', or a slightly superlative form of those or similar phrases. This irritates me no end because there are already a few ways to express this concept of coolness, but there is now no real way to express the feeling of awe that is brought on by something that is so amazing. 'awe-inspiring' is too unwieldy, long and compounded, but 'awesome' only retains its former meaning in certain contexts, such as 'the awesome power of nature'.

Totally: used to mean 'completely', except somehow it had connotations of being even more complete than completely, if that makes sense. Now it doesn't really mean anything, it's just a silly little word inserted into a sentence with no real semantic purpose,a s in the sentence 'I am totally pumped'. Which not only means that a new lexical gap has been created, but that the semantic shift was unnecessary and we have lost the ability to describe a perfectly good concept for no real purpose whatsoever.

Random: probably annoys me even more than the others because it's much harder to find a synonym for. Looking at The Free Dictionary's list of synonyms there is no word which comes close to encompassing all of the marvellous connotations of the word 'random'. Each word on that list only describes one of the facets, or connotations, of this tremendously varied and useful word.

Oh my God: it used to be shocking, because it was 'taking the lord's name in vain' (gasp!) but now it's just become jaded. What do you say now when you're really shocked? 'goodness gracious'? I think not.

Literally: no longer means the thing that is actually written down on the paper, or that is physically occurring, but is just used to add emphasis. In this way, the phrase 'it's literally raining cats and dogs!' doesn't mean that cats and dogs are actually falling from the sky, but that it's raining really, really hard.

One could argue that with all of these examples, it is still possible to use them in their former contexts, but I would argue in return that they will (at least in this era) still be 'tainted' (if I can be permitted such a lingustically-incorrect term) with the connotations that pop culture has given them. If I used the word 'random' in an essay - unless I am extremely careful - I would be laughed out of town.

Lastly, I'm really trying hard not to be prescriptive here. I understand, nay, I believe, that semantic shift happens, that language adapts and changes, and that that's not a bad thing but a fact of life. I'm just registering the fact that, as someone who writes (and not even fiction! Just anything, from book reviews to acrostic poems to instruction manuals), there are a few concepts out there that I can't really use any more without them meaning something different to my intention. Yes, writers have to adapt to that and take it into account, but oh - I just want to talk about stuff clearly and succinctly. Ooh, look! I just used another: 'stuff'. Think of Lady Macbeth's 'Oh, proper stuff!' the stuff of dreams, the stuff of life itself. It doesn't work like that any more.

I'm also aware that this sort of things has been happening for years - centuries! And will continue to happen whatever anyone does. The only thing that endures is change. I'm curious: will the knowledge of these concepts eventually die out as the generations who remember their former use die? Will they become words that must be thought about when read in archaic texts? Will the people of the future not have any word to describe the feeling you have when something is so amazing it moves something within you? Will they simply feel it as one of those nebulous emotions that can't be put into words? Without a word to describe it, is it possible that this concept could just disappear? Could another word jump in to fill its place? Big questions, indeed.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - a paradoxical beauty

2008-06-17T22:56:00.000-07:00

Firstly, I must say that The Unbearable Lightness of Being is up there with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for having the best title ever. I just love the titles of these two books; they're so evocative, so beautifully enigmatic.

In the case of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it's all about the paradox: how can something so light be unbearable, eh? And this exemplifies the paradox at the core of the book, the dichotomy between lightness and weight. I can't be bothered explaining this when Wikipedia does it so well already:

According to Kundera, "being" is full of "unbearable lightness" because each of us has only one life to live: "Einmal ist keinmal" ("once is nonce", i.e., "what happened once might as well have never happened at all"). Therefore, each life is ultimately insignificant; every decision ultimately does not matter. Since decisions do not matter, they are "light": they do not tie us down. But at the same time, the insignificance of our decisions—our lives, or being—is unbearable. Hence, "the unbearable lightness of being".

I love the existentialism of it all. It makes you think. It made me think; my current conclusion (updated daily) is that my life (and hence my decisions) matters to me and the people I touch. Therefore it is not particularly light. I don't find this particularly unbearable, but I do so love the paradox. I love its cleverness and its wit. The way it has, at its core, a kernel of sense, a kernel of something that comes closer to truth than anything else I know. They told me at school that absolute truth does not exist; I believe we come closest to that impossible goal in cliches and paradoxes.

Anyway. I copied no less than twelve passages into my little book of profound quotations; this book spouted profundity at a great rate of knots. And not just profundity, but really, really interesting ideas, such as shit.

"The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don't lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner [because we are ostensibly created in God's image. Ask yourself, did God shit? Blasphemy to think it, perhaps, but interesting]."

Isn't that a fascinating idea? This book is full of them. It is also absurdly, heart-wrenchingly beautiful. The image of the park benches floating down the river Vltava is piercingly melancholy. Karenin's death... I don't even want to think about Karenin's death.

The internet tells me that it is also an example of what is apparently known as 'disclaimed fiction'. This is when the author deliberately breaks into the narrative, destroying the illusion of reality created by the novel. He talks about where his characters come from: "... characters are not born of people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that an author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about." But then he says "But isn't it true an author can write only about himself?" Woohoo, two almost opposing ideas, mentioned in virtually the same breath, both equally fascinating and valid. I love this book, dammit.

It's set to the background of the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia, and is hence full of interesting political stuff. So we have the main character, Tomas, hounded for his rather fascinating likening of communists to Oedipus. It's complicated, but I'll try to explain. This is what he says about communism (incidentally, I've never seen a better summation of communism):

"Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers."

So he goes on to say that the enthusiasts/criminals defended themselves by saying "but I didn't know!" and that this was not at all a valid defence, because when Oedipus realised that he'd inadvertently fucked his own mother, he plucked out his own eyes in horror at the knowledge of his deeds. Interesting, n'est-ce pas?

Another good and interesting thing is that it pushes the boundaries of novel-writing. I find this fascinating, but in moderation. Soul Mountain, by Gao Xingjian, left me completely lost. No plot, no narrative, and often no punctuation - it was too much. Completely overdone. I should probably reread it, actually. But The Unbearable Lightness of Being is fascinating without being confusing; there's enough room for thoughts in between the disjointment.

Ayn Rand - EPIC CLICHE

2008-06-15T22:43:00.000-07:00

Ayn, my dear, dear friend. If only I knew how to pronounce your first name. Anyway. I have read only one of Rand's books, Atlas Shrugged. Since this seems to be generally accepted as her opus magnum, there didn't seem much point to me reading her other books, especially as finding the literary relevance in them is sometimes a bit of a struggle. This is what I wrote in my diary the first time I read Atlas Shrugged:

"...I am also reading 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand. I was somewhat doubtful as
to whether or not I should buy this book, but I had $5 left on a book voucher
and nothing else to spend it on, so I took the plunge. Let me tell you, that was
quite possibly the best spent $16 in my life. Whenever I stop reading it, I feel
as if have just surfaced from a whirlpool, gasping for breath and exhausted. I
feel like my emotions have been put through a wringer. I feel like everything I
have seen or heard in my life is worthless and I should simply commit suicide
because there is no point living anymore. I feel like I have suddenly succumed
to manic depression. So anyway, 'the Bronze Horseman' is getting deservedly
pushed to one side and 'Atlas Shrugged' will soon take pride of place on my
shelf of favourite books above my desk."

I've read that book once since, and these sentiments are still true, in a way. I know she's an unpopular old bitch, but she has her merits. Also her faults, but there is simply no doubt that she is far, far superior to Paullina Simons (author of the aforementioned The Bronze Horseman), or however the hell she spells her corrupted name. Here's the thing. Ayn Rand's prose is power. Pure, unadulterated power. It's brute force, but there's no subtlety, no beauty, nothing aesthetically pleasing. When you stop reading it, you do feel as if you're clawing your way out of a whirlpool. It's powerful all right, but somehow bruising.

She got me at an impressionable age - it was when I was just starting to read the odd bit of what I think of as 'proper literature'. I hadn't much experience with beautiful prose, and anything that moved me seemed good. Now, I like to think I'm older and wiser, and the second time I read it (which was about a month or so ago), I was less impressed. Even though I only vaguely remembered the plot, it was much less moving. This time I noticed the clunky prose, the one-dimensional characters and above all, the clichés. Her obsession with the naked shoulder, tension in the posture - after the first fifty or so times she uses those phrases, it starts to get a bit old. Actually, I've never seen anything so blatantly repetitive. It takes the cliché to a whole new level.

I must for a moment turn to her characters. Oh lordy! Cardboard cutouts have more personality and less predictability. THE GOOD PEOPLE HAVE NO FAULTS. THE BAD PEOPLE HAVE NO MERITS. I must say, though, I loved the names. Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, Francisco D'Anconia. They have an element of onomatopoeia, yet they are totally believable (the names, not the characters). Then, I think it's probably much easier to name her characters, because they have no subtlety.

And the philosophy! Oh, the philosophy! It is a philosophy of extremes, which is not totally unsurprising given she grew up in communist Russia. The most fervent admirer of her that I have ever met also grew up in a communist country. In my experience, extremes breed extremes, and neither side is any good. Her far-right obsession with capitalism had me reeling a bit. I couldn't quite work out if she was actually serious. Trying to prove a political theory by basing a novel on it in a world so one-dimensional and lacking in shades of grey that it actually. could. not. exist? And yet she actually expects us to be convinced? How could any theory based on such fraudulent premises ever carry any weight whatsoever? I find it impossible to evaluate her ideas because what she's talking about can never exist. It's so ridiculous that I feel like I've missed something big and obvious.

ETA: actually, possibly part of the big and obvious thing I'm missing is that part of her philosophy is the concept of man as a hero. In my opinion, this doesn't change the fact that it's totally ludicrous.

If anyone asked me (they probably won't), I think I'd say, don't read this book. According to Wikipedia it comes in, at about 645 000 words and 1056 bible-thin pages of miniscule print, just above A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. Set aside several months (assuming you want to continue your normal life at the same time) for A Suitable Boy instead, because it is far superior. Actually quite brilliant. Ayn Rand has written smaller books, such as The Fountainhead. I'd probably recommend reading one of them, because she's certainly memorable. Although I haven't read any of her other books, it's likely they'll be full of the same violent power, unrealistic characters and distinct lack of writing skill.

Now this is my kind of trash.

2008-06-15T00:16:00.000-07:00

I think today would be a good day to talk about trashy fantasy, since I just finished the Stone Key (book 5 of the Obernewtyn Chronicles) by Isobelle Carmody. I would like to offer the following observations about trashy fantasy:

1. it's addictive. I started reading this series when I was about ten or so, at the age where just about everything I read was trashy. Eight years later, I'm still reading it - not because I particularly like it any more, just because I want to find out what happens. See Harry Potter for a pertinent example.

2. Any literary merit the books possess is progressively leeched from them as the series progresses. Again, see HP. The first three books were good, then suddenly it didn't matter how she wrote as long as people kept reading it. I have several theories as to why this phenomenon occurs:

Fame (only in some cases, such as Rowling). Editors become afraid to alter anything because let's face it, the books sell. I can't blame them for this - it's the HPs and Da Vinci Codes of this world that pay for all the decent books.
The plot takes over. The author finds that the plot is becoming increasingly complex, and in order to keep the book at a manageable size, character development and all the other good stuff is sacrificed to the GOD OF PLOT. Beware a series whose books become progressively larger! It is almost certainly getting crappier and crappier as it goes. The Stone Key's at 997 pages, and it's not even the last in the series.
Fan pressure. I know that Isobelle Carmody, for one, is known for getting distracted with other books when devoted fans such as myself know she should be concentrating on the good stuff. (Are you reading this, Isobelle? Finish the Obernewtyn and Legendsong series already!) So anyway, the fans want the books. The authors don't want too many of the fans to grow up and grow out of their books, so they write quickly and perhaps without as much attention to detail as they could. I (not known for my perspicuity) noticed two contradictions that were positively GLARING in The Stone Key.

3. One becomes fond of the characters (or at least I do). Despite their increasing two-dimensionality and excessive Mary-Sue-ness, you want to know what happens to them. It's a bit like going to a school reunion - you know it's going to be awkward and probably embarrassing, but you positively need to know what those people are doing with themselves these days.

4. For me, at least, reading these books evoke memories of a more innocent time. A time filled with lazy summers and weekends sans homework. A time when a sex scene was a daring thing, causing giggles with fellow readers at lunchtime (incidentally, no sex scenes in the Obernewtyn chronicles). A time when I had known no sickness, no heartbreak, no despair. Looking back, it seems like they were my halcyon days - idyllic, perfect, and gone forever. Rereading the books I read then is like sinking into a soft, soft bed when exhausted. My life now's not so bad, ok? But sometimes you just want to get away.

6. There's always the joy of discussing them with friends. Well do I remember that abysmal compulsory religion day at school (actually, it was only last year). A couple of friends and I decided we had had enough of writing personal messages to God with lipstick on a tablecloth draped over a coffin, and we sneaked off into the pews of the church and lay there, whispering about, you guessed it, the Obernewtyn Chronicles. I look back on that day with the greatest nostalgia. Another telling anecdote would be about the week preceding the release of the final Harry Potter book. Every class was spent talking about HP. For me, who loves talking about books, it was literally the. best. thing. ever. Because suddenly it wasn't only the select few with whom I could discuss to my heart's content! It was everyone! Oh, those heady days.

7. You always know that at the end, good will defeat evil. Often I find this irritating, but sometimes it's nice. Even though they're full of magic and shit, the worlds of trashy fantasy seem simpler. Things are black and white. There are heroes and monsters, goodies and baddies. If a main character does die, they do so gracefully and elegantly. If there's a sad ending, it leaves you feeling uplifted, for even though you wept, it was beautiful (Bitterbynde, anyone?). And where there is beauty, there is hope.

Some authors try to get around this by blurring the lines between a 'goodie' and a baddie' - that is to say, the heroes may have questionable morals or snarl often (Anne Bishop, you scarred me for life at an impressionable age with your snarling, questionably-moraled characters. I never forgave you for that). It doesn't work. GIVE IT UP GUYS YOU FAIL AT SUBTLETY.

8. There's always a new vocabulary to be learnt and later recited! Actually, now I think of it, maybe this is why I read them so much. New words! Shiny! Anyway, my favourite has got to the be necromancer bells of Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy (it had to rate a mention somehow). Let's see if I can still do it: ranna, mosrael, dyrim, belgaer... all right, I suck. I forget the rest. BLASPHEMY!!!!

9. The fanfiction, oh the fanfiction! I actually rarely read the stuff, because it's too bad. But it's good for a laugh. Oh, the perpetual hilarity of the Hermione/Snape pairing! The ultimate badass-ness of Bible slash! (actually, God fails at trashy fantasy. 'nuff said.) ... moving on. The less time spent talking about fanfiction the better, is all I can say.

Specifically to The Stone Key, Carmody kind of tries to explore the theme of fate versus action - you know, like in Macbeth, Oedipus, and a trillion other works of literature throughout the ages - but rather unsubtly and clumsily. Give it up, Isobelle! I love your work, but don't try to be deep. BE SHALLOW AND INSUBSTANTIAL AND WITHOUT LITERARY MERIT, FOR THIS IS WHY I LOVE YOU.

P.S. I know I have used Harry Potter examples frequently throughout this epistle, but IMHO, HP is not trashy fantasy, for all that it conforms to most of the criteria. The trubbs with you, HP (soz) is that you're not obscure enough. To qualify as trashy fantasy, a series' following has to be hopelessly nerdy and confined to dusty corners of the internet (and crouched beneath a pew when there is nothing better to talk about). I only used HP as an example because everyone knows it, and it does exemplify trashy fantasy in many ways.

It's rather sad to see how much I have written about trashy fantasy, of all things. I defend myself by observing that I am still young and thus it forms a larger proportion of my reading life than it would to, say, someone in their middle age. Through fantasy, I came to bigger and better things!!! Rant rant rant!! Bombast! Grandiloquent rhetoric!!!!!!!1

Incidentally...

2008-06-13T06:52:00.001-07:00

Zombies are attacking right now, except I totally forgot because I was forced to distract myself by posting about The Light of Day, since the only thing worse (better?) than zombies attacking and taking over the world is bad prose.

Zombie related media - please read.

I can see where they're coming from, but I didn't get it.

2008-06-13T05:53:00.000-07:00

Graham Swift's The Light of Day is a sort of psychological/crime/love story. George Webb, a disgraced policeman, now works as a private detective, investigating the extra-marital affairs of the spouses of his clients. However, he gets emotionally involved with the case of Sarah Nash, whose husband had an affair with the Croatian refugee they sheltered in their home.

I didn't like it. I couldn't stand the prose style. He often uses short, pseudo-emotional sentences that lack a verb phrase (though don't quote me on that - I'm no expert on syntax) and rhetorical questions. I'll quote a bit:

"Or forgotten? Deliberately wiped from the record? A missing file. No, not here. You must be thinking of somewhere else."

To me, this is just plain bad writing. I used to write like that. I still write like that when I'm not writing well, and I read over it and shudder. It's a crude, unsophisticated method to try and create an emotional atmosphere. It fails. Majorly.

Other times, he slips into long, flowing sentences with far too much punctuation, which is just as bad:

"But this, this now, can't be what she would have imagined for me, what she would have wished. This woman in my life. That I'd be going, once a fortnight, two years now, to see - this prisoner. This killer."

Again, bad writing. It's better when he uses sentences of normal length, but then it slips into mediocrity. Frankly, I can't believe it won the Booker Prize.

The chapters are short and bitty - nothing of substance is said, ever. It is the final triumph of style over substance. Swift spends most of the novel skirting around the big issues, because he's evidently under the impression that withholding key elements of the plot for as long as is physically possible makes readers happy. I actually tend not to mind this, as long as the style is enthralling enough to keep me occupied, such as in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. It also helps for the book to be gripping enough that I don't notice the suppression of information that would make the story make sense. Gripping, however, is not how to describe The Light of Day. It's been ages since I counted pages so much. I was willing it to end.

The praise for this novel has been excessive. Arena says: "A book so shot through with pent-up emotion that it practically trembles in your hands." I looked so hard for that pent-up emotion, but I could not for the life of me find it.

However, perhaps I'm being overly harsh. Here are some other points made by the critics, who are quoted liberally on the cover (inside and out), perhaps trying to convince the innocent Swift-hater that there is something worthwhile to be found in this pile of random words that pretends to be a novel:

"how to explain the inexplicable things in life: the strangeness of love at first sight, love like a blow to the heart, love for the duration?" Guardian
"sees the poetry and the tragedy lurking in an ordinary life" Irish Times
"Asks profound questions about how we live and love" Big Issue

There's also much praise for his "prose of such sensitivity" - I beg to differ, as I believe I have already made clear. On the other hand, I can sort of see where they're coming from with the points I quoted above. But I couldn't for the life of me see past the execrable prose.

On Beauty: I find myself, for once, without much to say

2008-06-09T19:39:00.000-07:00

Zadie Smith's book On Beauty is about two families on opposing sides of the culture war: The atheist, liberal Belseys and the ultra-religious, ultra-conservative Kipps' on the other. It's also about race and racial identity: black versus white and the influx of poor Haitian immigrants into Boston. It's about Howard Belsey's affair with an old friend of the family and his wife Kiki's means of dealing with it. It's about Kiki's developing friendship with Carlene Kipps, the wife of her husband's sworn enemy.

All in all, it's not my thing, but it's a stunning example of something that's not my thing. I don't go for domestic drama - I find it too mundane - but I quite enjoyed this one. That's really almost everything I have to say about it, the other things being somewhat tangential.

I really liked the dialogue. It's real, it's energetic, it's got heart. It's so strong you can almost hear the characters' voices in your head. On the other hand, I didn't think the characterisation was particularly good. I didn't have a clear picture of any of the characters by the end, which is pretty pathetic.

A culture divide, perhaps? I think it probably was. I couldn't take them seriously because they used the word 'totally' too often. Here in Melbourne, Australia we (or at least, the people I know) use 'totally' either in its original sense ('fully', 'completely') or as a joke, a parody of some American stereotype we don't really understand. Like "omg, you should, like, totally dye your hair orange! It would like soooooo great." Dripping with sarcasm. In On Beauty they use it liberally in the slang sense, which is similar to my example above, except minus the sarcasm. They're serious about it, but I can't take it seriously. It really put me off.

Then there's the whole black/white thing. The extent of the racial divide shocked me. Again, here in Melbourne NO ONE CARES. One could argue it's because there are very few black people, and that a similar thing happens between whites and Asians instead, but it was just weird for me. In On Beauty, no one could just be "a person". They had to be "a white person", "a black person". Like their race was just as important a factor as their status as a human being. That really distracted me too.

It was mainly those cultural thingies that interested me about the book. It was funny, I guess, and sometimes depressing, but not at all the sort of thing I'd usually read and rather disappointing considering its reputation.

Reviews:
Sydney Morning Herald
New York Times
The Oxonian
Slate

On lists and the fact that exams are over so I can read more.

2008-06-04T21:20:00.001-07:00

I like to read from a list. I've occasionally copped a bit of flak for this. Some people have real problems with lists. I even feel (ever so slightly) ashamed about it, which is ridiculous.Like everything, a balance must be struck. I'm sure a list can be restricting if followed too religiously, but I don't believe in that.

I've tried a few lists. The first was just a list of the favourite authors of someone-or-other, and I discovered the odd good book there, such as Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper that I was into for a while and Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card which I am still into because hey, it's great! But overall it wasn't really that good. My next list - the Angus & Robertson Top 100 (except that it wasn't actually that list, it was a previous year's) - was a bit better. I discovered some good books, such as Cloudstreet by Tim Winton (which was like, wow - an Australian, writing something good about Australia!) and little else that was special enough to rate a mention. I think that that year's list had (possibly?) been decided upon by the staff of Angus & Robertson, which isn't a great bookshop anyway, and it is my belief that bookshop staff are rarely any more discerning than the rest of us. So, that list was way too highly weighted towards the popular stuff that I tend to hate (or at least not enjoy reading, I'm cool with it existing) - The Da Vinci Code, The Alchemist, Harry Potter, Across the effing Nightingale Floor, Jodi Picoult, Stephen King and everything by Paullina Simons (a jihad on Paullina Simons!)

I realised after some time that what I really wanted to do was read all the great classics. Because I had heard of so many of them, but never remembered to borrow them from the library or whatever. I wanted to read the things that consensus says is the good stuff because I am a literary snob and think thrillers and trashy romance are beneath me (and hypocritical too, because I can't help but love trashy fantasy). So I started to covet this book edited by Peter Boxall and eventually managed to get it given to me for my birthday. Immediately I abandoned the A&R top 100 and turned to this instead.

It's completely wonderful. It's a collection of 1001 of the most critically acclaimed novels ever written, and while there's a lot of controversy (why, for example, are there five books by Douglas Adams?), most of the greats are there. There's a short review on each book chosen, which is really helpful in deciding whether I want to read it or not and also in helping me interpret it once I've finished it. Most of the books I've written about in this blog are featured in that wondrous, wondrous book. Not only does it have all the books I want to read but was never organised enough to do so (namely, all the great classics ancient and modern), it also has many other brilliant and not-so-brilliant books that I would never have read otherwise, such as The Master and many others.

It's confusing though. I assumed that it was only a list of novels, hence the absence of Shakespeare, Sophocles etc. But then why is A Modest Proposal in it? It's like a 5-page essay, albeit a very good one. I'm pretty certain there are some short stories in there too. No matter! It's the novels I care about

I don't let it limit me, though. I disapprove of that. Whenever I want to, I read a book that's not on the list. Also I don't believe in setting time limits. At this stage I've read something like 50-60 of the books on the list (a miniscule number - I started with 30 which is even more shameful) and it's taken me about 1.5 years to get that far. I believe reading should take its own time. None of this "50 book per year challenge!!!!!" stuff for me, though I do see how that could work for some people by forcing them to set aside time to read. But reading is always a priority for me and I don't think it should be rushed. I want time to read slowly and let the language settle on the floor of my head, sinking into the soft peat of partially-digested words... I want to give a book time to settle into my consciousness and memory before I cast it aside for the next.

So, nothing works for everyone, and a lot of people hate lists (with Peter Boxall's being a typically loathed example), but it works for me at the moment, and that's good enough.

As for the other subject of this post, I think the title says it all. I'm going to go read now.

Margaret Drabble, Tracy Chevalier, Sarah Dunnant et al., please take note: This is good historical fiction!

2008-06-04T02:06:00.000-07:00

Although it was unclear to me at first the extent to which Colm Tóibín's beautiful book The Master is historical fiction and to what extent it is biography. Whatever it is, I absolutely adore it.

I don't know much about Henry James (in fact, I'm somewhat ashamed to say I've never read any of his books - I'll get to it eventually I promise), but from reading some reviews, I get the impression that The Master is a whole lot of speculation based around a framework of real events. This doesn't actually bother me at all. I am fast coming to realise that characterisation may well be my favourite thing about literature, and I know from experience that filling in the gaps of what you don't know about a character in a way that may not be strictly true but is true to the personality of the character as you know them is one of the single most enjoyable and satisfying things you can do.

In relation to this, I'd like to quote this review from The Guardian:

How the books grow out of the life is the novel's deepest story. The phrase "I can imagine" crops up several times in the imaginary conversations. It irritated me, as it seemed so anomalous - but it's a clue to what Tóibín is doing. He shows us James's capacity for imagining his way in minute detail into, say, the state of mind of an abandoned child, his superhuman attention to "figures seen from a window or a doorway, a small gesture standing for a much larger relationship, something hidden suddenly revealed". Tóibín too "can imagine" his way into Henry James with exceptional attention - and, particularly, into the process of turning his own "personal store" of memories and relationships into fiction. Sometimes he allows himself simplistic biographical links, but at its best, the novel deals carefully and subtly with the complicated, mysterious process of how a novelist - above all, this master-novelist - goes about "masking and unmasking himself".

It is such a clear, if often unflattering, portrait of James that I feel like I know this man I had barely heard of before. He is gorgeously flawed. He is idealistic, selfish, snobbish, self-absorbed, self-justifying and so, so, so believable. I fell in love with his flaws again and again and again. It helps that he is also endlessly introspective. I adore introspection. I suspect I indulge in it far too often, but then perhaps so does Tóibín's James.

I have only two possible criticisms of this book, and I say 'possible' because I'm not entirely convinced that they are bad things. The first is an occasional tendency to lapse into sentimentality. I hate sentimentality, so I suppose it's telling that it barely grated at all in this case. To me it seemed to be in character, and I barely noticed it except occasionally when it maybe got a tiny, tiny bit out of hand. So tiny I can't even think of an example, which is pretty pathetic on my part and says a lot for the inconsequentiality of this criticism.

The second is that it is highly episodic. First he talks about the failure of James's play Guy Domville, but then he goes straight onto something else, I think it might have been James's relationship with his cousin Minny Temple. From there, on to something else. It frustrated me a bit. Some novel-reading part of me wanted it to have some common thread arching throughout. Although Guy Domville is portrayed as such a crucial event of James's life, it is only mentioned occasionally in the latter part (by which I mean almost all) of the book, and then only as a very, very marginal comment. I didn't sense that any of the episodes were more important or central than any others, though of course there are themes present throughout - the conflict between public and private life being an obvious one - but somehow I wanted at least one of the events to be more omnipresent.

The reason I wonder if this is really a criticism is because once again, it is true to life. Life is episodic. We have our temporary preoccupations, our transient obsessions. Something that seems monumental at the time will have receded into the minutiae of the past after a few days - weeks - months - years. It is rare for one event to dictate the course of one's life, and for this I doubt my own assessment.

I'd like to end on a quote from the book itself.

' "I view the historical novel as tainted by a fatal cheapness and if you want a statement from me on the matter... it would be all one word." Henry said. "One simple word. It would all be humbug!" '

I too have felt this intrinsic 'cheapness' of the historical fiction genre, and it is so all-pervasive that I have come to equate the two. Perhaps this is unfair. No matter. Simply rest assured that there is nothing whatsoever that is 'cheap' or 'humbug' about The Master.

Perfectly good words or phrases that have been destroyed by pop culture

2008-06-03T01:56:00.000-07:00

I have totally been feeling too randomly lazy to update the past few days. I have literally not had the energy to lift my hands to a keyboard. 'Oh my God', I hear you say 'why has this totally awesome blog author, like, stopped posting?' and I'm so like 'um, here's some shit I started writing ages ago because I really can't be bothered comparing Unless and American Pastoral like I was totally planning to do.'

So the point of today's post (which is more linguistics than literature, but it sort of links) is that the semantic shift of modern language has led to what is known as 'lexical gaps', which means there is no word in a language to describe a certain concept. However, my knowledge of linguistics is a little sketchy/amateur, so don't quote me on this.

The words are:

Awesome: the former meaning of this word used to be something similar to 'awe-inspiring'. Nw it just means 'great', 'cool', or a slightly superlative form of those or similar phrases. This irritates me no end because there are already a few ways to express this concept of coolness, but there is now no real way to express the feeling of awe that is brought on by something that is so amazing. 'awe-inspiring' is too unwieldy, long and compounded, but 'awesome' only retains its former meaning in certain contexts, such as 'the awesome power of nature'.

Totally: used to mean 'completely', except somehow it had connotations of being even more complete than completely, if that makes sense. Now it doesn't really mean anything, it's just a silly little word inserted into a sentence with no real semantic purpose,a s in the sentence 'I am totally pumped'. Which not only means that a new lexical gap has been created, but that the semantic shift was unnecessary and we have lost the ability to describe a perfectly good concept for no real purpose whatsoever.

Random: probably annoys me even more than the others because it's much harder to find a synonym for. Looking at The Free Dictionary's list of synonyms there is no word which comes close to encompassing all of the marvellous connotations of the word 'random'. Each word on that list only describes one of the facets, or connotations, of this tremendously varied and useful word.

Oh my God: it used to be shocking, because it was 'taking the lord's name in vain' (gasp!) but now it's just become jaded. What do you say now when you're really shocked? 'goodness gracious'? I think not.

Literally: no longer means the thing that is actually written down on the paper, or that is physically occurring, but is just used to add emphasis. In this way, the phrase 'it's literally raining cats and dogs!' doesn't mean that cats and dogs are actually falling from the sky, but that it's raining really, really hard.

One could argue that with all of these examples, it is still possible to use them in their former contexts, but I would argue in return that they will (at least in this era) still be 'tainted' (if I can be permitted such a lingustically-incorrect term) with the connotations that pop culture has given them. If I used the word 'random' in an essay - unless I am extremely careful - I would be laughed out of town.

Lastly, I'm really trying hard not to be prescriptive here. I understand, nay, I believe, that semantic shift happens, that language adapts and changes, and that that's not a bad thing but a fact of life. I'm just registering the fact that, as someone who writes (and not even fiction! Just anything, from book reviews to acrostic poems to instruction manuals), there are a few concepts out there that I can't really use any more without them meaning something different to my intention. Yes, writers have to adapt to that and take it into account, but oh - I just want to talk about stuff clearly and succinctly. Ooh, look! I just used another: 'stuff'. Think of Lady Macbeth's 'Oh, proper stuff!' the stuff of dreams, the stuff of life itself. It doesn't work like that any more.

I'm curious: will the knowledge of these concepts eventually die out as the generations who remember their former use die? Will they become words that must be thought about when read in archaic texts? Will the people of the future not have any word to describe the feeling you have when something is so amazing it moves something within you? Will they simply feel it as one of those nebulous emotions that can't be put into words? Could this concept just disappear? Could another word jump in to fill its place?

Big questions, indeed.

Maybe if I write it down I'll be able to study chemistry... damnation upon those ideas that won't let me alone!

2008-05-30T20:49:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking about writing haiku versions of Great Works of Literature. Should be fun, right? Almost impossible, definitely. But worth a try, perhaps?

"the stories here are the truest of fiction"

2008-05-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

I found this great program about literature called Between the Lines. The particular episode I linked to has a reading of the particular poem I want to write about today, but there are plenty of other interesting poems and some fascinating discussion about the nature of poetry in general.

To Help the Monkey Cross the River,

which he must
cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts,
to help him
I sit with my rifle on a platform
high in a tree, same side of the river
as the hungry monkey. How does this assist
him? When he swims for it
I look first upriver: predators move faster with
the current than against it.
If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey
and an anaconda from downriver burns
with the same ambition, I do
the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey,
croc- and snake-speed, and if, if
it looks as though the anaconda or the croc
will reach the monkey
before he attains the river’s far bank,
I raise my rifle and fire
one, two, three, even four times into the river
just behind the monkey
to hurry him up a little.
Shoot the snake, the crocodile?
They’re just doing their jobs,
but the monkey, the monkey
has little hands like a child’s,
and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.

Thomas Lux, The Cradle Place: Poems, 2004.

There's not much critical analysis of this poem online, it's mainly just people saying "hai gaiz, i found dis rly kool pome haylookit." except with better English, and this person who made a little film about it for some reason. I wrote an essay about it as practice for my English exam, so I am happy to share my interpretations with my hordes of devoted readers.

Unfortunately I didn't get such a great mark as he last poem I analysed, but my teacher said he thought my points were right (I don't believe there's such a thing as 'right' ideas - sounds too much like China under Mao - just good ideas, I suppose?), I just needed to expand on them a bit more. And reading over it again, I agree.

It's quite allegorical, like one of Aesop's fables - using a simple, almost childish premise to illustrate something much more truthful and complex. I suppose what it's about is living in a predatory universe - a 'malign universe' (an English teacher trope) wherein the very forces of nature are out to get us, not for any intrinsic evil in ourselves or them, but because we all have to eat, not just hungry monkeys, but crocodiles and anacondas too.

I love the way you get such a shock when you get to "I raise my rifle and fire one, two, three, even four times into the river" and you think Oh My God! He's going to kill the monkey! Before you get to the next line and see that no, he's just firing into the river to 'hurry him up a little'.

I really liked the structure of the poem, because to me it seems to mimic the events it's describing. It's fast, with much enjambment - sentences continuing over line breaks - and little punctuation other than commas, so the rapid flow is hardly broken. Life is risky? Chances must be taken? Decisions must be made fast? All of this, I suppose. Above all, I think the slightly random structure reflects the nature of life. It's not ordered or structured, there's no use trying to find some sort of significance in what happens. If a crocodile eats a monkey, a crocodile eats a monkey. The fact that it has 'child-like hands' and 'he smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile' has no bearing on the situation. All my human smartness is not going to save me from being suddenly and unexpectedly struck by a potentially-fatal brain haemorrhage. I like this because it adheres to the absurdist philosophy which I like to call my "croyance du jour".

My teacher thought I needed to elaborate more on the nature of the 'malign universe' (of course!) and on the poet's choice of narrator. I said the narrator was like God (even his position, high in a tree, reflects God's position in heaven), having the power of life and death over the animals, but choosing not to exercise it. What sort of God would let his children die like that, and how are we supposed to react to such callousness, my teacher asks? Well, I say, our sort of God. The sort of God who sits up there in the sky and does bugger-all. Who does, in fact, even less than the God-figure in Lux's poem. I don't see it as callousness, but as a desire to let natural events run there natural course. This is how I see God. I don't really believe in him, but if he exists at all, he's just sitting there and letting us humans all blow each other up while some of us attempt to learn from our mistakes, like errant children.

Fascinatingly, in the radio program I linked to above, Thomas Lux said that the poem was about parenting, or even teaching. And I was like, that makes so much sense.

ETA: there's little on this specific poem on teh intarwebs, but there's a fair bit on Thomas Lux that's very good. Such as this article and interview, which is really interesting, and this article about his work which is similarly fascinating. I'm going to quote them here, they're so good:

Lux:I pay a great deal of attention to form. Poetry's an art form, a craft. About the lack of stanza breaks: I stopped using them entirely about a decade ago. I came to believe I was using them arbitrarily, to make a poem look like a poem. It most matters to me what a poem sounds like. I think line breaks are incredibly important—they are one of the most important ways one tries to make the reader hear the poem exactly as one wants the reader to hear it. Tone, which carries a lot of the reverberations one is hoping to catch, can really only be heard.

Lux: I like to make the reader laugh—and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humour.

Richard Damashek: Intensely personal, the poetry of Thomas Lux is tormented and tortured, full of complex and disjointed images reflecting an insane and inhospitable world.

The Red Queen: Did I miss something?

2008-05-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

Really did NOT like this book. Actually, could barely wait until it was over. Never been a huge fan of historical fiction - I just don't really like it. This particular (and hardly stunning) example of the genre is set in Korea, about 200 years ago. It's about the crown princess, Lady Hong. 200 years after her death, she looks back on her life as a ghost, a ghost who has used the past 200 years of death to study the ways of the modern world and to attempt to... I never quite worked out what it was she was trying to do. Manipulate some poor innocent into taking up her story and telling it to the world? Something like that.

So that was the first half of the novel. The second half is about the life of the person Lady Hong chooses to be her 'emissary', Babs Halliwell. She's a British academic who reads the memoirs of Lady Hong on the plane to a conference in South Korea. Fascinated by the story (but really, if the first half of this book is what Babs read, what's so fascinating about it?) she somehow manages to fulfil her role as the 'emissary' by adopting a Chinese baby. On the way she meets and falls briefly in love with the famous Dutch sociologist Jan van Jost. Far-fetched, random and pointless in the extreme.

OK, firstly the narrative point of view was totally bizarre and added nothing to the story. I mean, a ghost? 200 years in the future? Why would you do it? I think it might have been partially that which distanced me from the characters. Sure, she had a pretty awful life - having your husband starving to death in a rice chest over the course of twelve days is a little uncool - but I couldn't identify with it. Good historical fiction is good because it puts you there. You feel like you're living it. Putting the narrator at such a far remove spoiled this for me, I think. I couldn't and can't feel any sympathy for the characters, simply because it was so unsympathetically written. I had to physically stop reading the book and think about it before I realised that I was actually reading about something that should be quite tragic.

Maybe I should be more tolerant, more accepting. I suppose it is a change from your average common-or-garden historical fiction, which I don't like much anyway. But it just doesn't work.

The second half of the book was mildly more entertaining, but this IS NOT SAYING MUCH because it was just trashy. Trashy romance, trashy setting, trashy plot and trashy characters do not make for a satisfied reviewer. Seriously, it was literally like the Da Vinci Code or some crappy thriller, except without the thrills.

Reading back over this, I actually think I'm being a little harsh. While I was reading it, I didn't dislike it particularly - it was entertaining enough, I suppose. I was wanting it to end faster than it did, but I couldn't say I loathed it. It's just that writing about it makes me realise just how bad it really was.

The Sea - a funny title, but a good one in the end, I believe.

2008-05-16T20:24:00.000-07:00

John Banville's novel The Sea won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. A good sign, thinketh-moi for I tend to like books that have won the Booker or Man Booker. This notwithstanding (I love that word!!!), it took me some time to get into this particular book, so long in fact that I didn't really start liking it until the very end. No matter - analysing a book is almost as good (or as bad) as actually reading it!

It's quite a short book. This guy called Max goes back to the scene of his childhood holidays by the sea, a place where he hung out with the Grace family, who were of a higher class than him. He fell in love, first with the mother, Connie Grace, and later with her daughter, Chloe. The account of these past events is interwven with his present life, living as a lodger in The Cedars, (the former Grace family home) and the tale of his wife's unspecified illness. The book ends, gorgeously, with her death.

Not for the first time, it's all about style. Banville's pretty big on the imagery, and he does it beautifully. It's easy to visualise what he's writing about because the images he paints are so clear. Unfortunately, I've felt a bit saturated by this style ever since I read The English Patient. I wanted things to be stated clear as crystal, but still be amazing, like Solzhenitsyn, Coetzee and Camus. At the time I believe I referred to it as "beautiful obscurity - a cheap magic trick.", which is rather inaccurate and unfair, because as I just explained, Banville's imagery cannot by any means be called obscure, or cheap.

So I think I finally got over this mental block with this book. It's really quite wonderful. This is one of my favourite bits:

"In my mind they were held suspended in a vast bright space, upright, their arms linked and their eyes wide open, gazing gravely before them into illimitable depths of light."

This is about two people who just walked into the sea and kept walking until they drowned. Isn't that just a perfect image, right there?

It took me a similarly long tome to get used to the title. The Sea. Such a nothing title, I thought. Such a cop-out. It's set by the sea, so what? But I eventually realised that, somehow, the image of the sea is the most important one in the book, in a way I can't quite put my finger on. I don't know if I can explain it, but I'll do my best: it's an image of infinity, of flatness, of grey monotony (no stormy or sunny weather in this book) which to me seemed like a brilliantly accurate metaphor for Max's life. It permeates everything, flowing through and giving everything this grey, distant flatness, like looking at everything through clear water at the rippled miniature sand dunes on the ocean's bottom.

One thing I liked right from the start was the characterisation. I honestly don't think I've ever read a book whose characters are so uniformly dislikeable. I hate them all, but I love their realism. These are characters you can believe in, because they are all so faulty that they couldn't possibly not exist. No Mary Sues in sight!

I'll finish on another of my favourite quotes, a memorable paradox about the existence of God:

"Given the world he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him."

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies:"It's sort of like... a mini-Macbeth!"

2008-05-13T19:32:00.000-07:00

Alexander McCall Smith is now officially my hero. I'd read about three of his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, but for some reason I didn't quite realise how brilliant they are until I listened to the audio book version of In the Company of Cheerful Ladies.

No doubt, much credit must go to Adjoa Andoh, for reading absolutely brilliantly. The accents were perfect, and she did a fantastic job portraying all the different characters.

I suppose I should give a potted summary: Mma Ramotswe is a detective. In fact, she is the senior detective at the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, where she works with her secretary and assistant detective, Mma Makutsi, and later with the assistant assistant detective Mr Potokwami, who is very cool. They share their workplace with Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, proprietor Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni. This book is about their trials and tribulations, including Mma Ramotswe's having to deal with a blackmailing former husband, Mma Makutsi's attempts to meet a man by going to a dancing class, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni's problems with his wayward apprentice, Charlie, and so on and so forth.

From the very start of the book, when Mma Ramotswe inadvertently squashes an unknown intruder who is hiding under her bed thanks to her "traditional" build, you just know that it's going to be warm, funny, and best of all - it's going to have a happy ending. Sometimes you just need a good happy ending.

One of the greatest things about it is the way it portrays Motswana people and life. I'm no authority on the matter - I have spent three weeks in Africa and didn't visit Botswana. I also don't want to assume that all African peoples are the same or similar, because I know they're not. However, from what I know and also what a friend from Botswana told me, it's a very accurate portrayal of life in that part of the world. When I was reading it, I could smell it - that scent of desert and dust and animals and people that just says to me Africa. It's a beautiful thing.

I just love everything about it. It meanders around, and you kind of want it to just get on with the plot from time to time, but the plot isn't the point, so it doesn't really matter. You welcome the long and fairly irrelevant digressions because they develop the characters more, and if you don't like brilliant characterisation then you're reading the wrong book.

My favourite quote is when Mma Ramotswe says to Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni "You are a very great mechanic, and that is enough for anybody." This quote embodies for me what is so very wonderful about this book. The characters don't aspire to money or power, they just want to do the very best they can do in everything they do. They are proud of their achievements and don't long to prove themselves to others. Mma Makutsi's pride in her score of 97% in the exams of the Botswana Secretarial College is an example.

It's a story of human decency. Good people, doing their best to be good people. Facing up to the bad things in the world and trying to make things better. Upon reading this book, I actually understood for the first time what forgiveness is all about. Mma Ramotswe finds it within herself to forgive the man who, when he was her husband, beat her and treated her terribly. Now he tries to blackmail her and destroy the life she has painstakingly built for herself. This scene literally brought tears to my eyes.

It's a feelgood story, that's for sure, but we all need one from time to time and it doesn't make it any less meaningful.

A Good Concept Is Not Enough: Cloud Atlas

2008-05-12T18:05:00.000-07:00

I have a feeling this may well become my mantra. A Good Concept is great, but it Is Not Enough. David Mitchell, take note.

Cloud Atlas has a very good concept, but is only mediocre-ly executed, in my opinion. It contains six interlocking stories which have been recorded in various media. In each consecutive story, the manuscript of the previous story is discovered. In this way Adam Ewing's Pacific Journal (his account of his time voyaging in the Pacific Ocean) is discovered by the aspiring composer Robert Frobisher in the home of his mentor Vyvyan Ayrs in the Belgian countryside. Frobisher's letters to his British lover, Rufus Sixsmith, are discovered by a young journalist, Luisa Rey, as she investigates the mysterious death of the eminent physicist Rufus Sixsmith. Then Timothy Cavendish, a broke publisher, is given a copy of Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery to edit and possibly publish. The film made of Timothy Cavendish's life is watched by the genetic fabricant Sonmi-451 in a dystopian Korea of some lost time of the future. In the final story, Sonmi-451 has been elevated to the status of a god by the people of a post-acopalyptic Hawaii. So you see how Mitchell has succeeded in his aim of creating a set of stories like a Babushka doll?

I love this concept, and maybe it spoils it for a reader to have it explained to them as I just did, because much of the pleasure from this book for me was watching as the patterns emerged, his aims revealing themselves gradually to me.

But I thought the individual stories were not particularly well-realised. The first two, of Adam Ewing and Robert Frobisher, were slightly above-average historical fiction, but not really anything special. The Luisa Rey story was a thoroughly unremarkable thriller. But I've yet to encounter a thriller that I don't find thoroughly unremarkable, so there you go. Timothy Cavendish was... meh. I couldn't bring myself to care. Sonmi-451's dystopia was dull. For me, dystopia has been explored so thoroughly by so many authors that it has to either explore profound moral and ethical dilemmas or to be radically different from every other, and this example of the genre did or was neither. And Sloosha's Crossin' and ev'rythin' that happ'nd after (the post-apocalyptic Hawaii story) was positively painful. Writing in a dialect is all very well, but it is so. hard. to. read. that it takes away any pleasure I could somehow have found in that rather uninteresting tale.

There were some interesting and relevant ethical (actually I don't think that's the right word) dilemmas touched upon, such as the plight of the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands in Adam Ewing's Pacific Journal, and this general theme of dispossession by a more violent race was touched upon again in Sloosha's Crossin', but I didn't find that it was examined in enough depth to make it worthwhile.

One of the main problems with this book, in my opinion, was that, due to the constraints of the concept, the stories were necessarily short. For me, much of the wonder of a novel is the building of a storyline that arches over everything, dictating structure and form. This seems to me to be the thing that is most difficult to do well. Thanks to the concept, this book couldn't do that at all, so I had no opportunity to admire the storytelling prowess of the author, much as I do admire the concept very much.

I don't really see why everyone makes such a big deal about the 'linguistic brilliance' of writing in different styles. Maybe I'm naive and/or big-headed, but I don't find it at all difficult to write pastiche, and this makes it difficult for me to admire it in anyone else because it doesn't seem like a difficult thing to do. As I said above, what I do find difficult is the over-arching plot thing, so maybe this is why this book completely failed to speak to me in any way.

Actually, many of the stories were quite entertaining in their own right, but the rapid switches between them were very irritating and broke up the flow too much.

In fact, after writing this review, I'm finding this book much more interesting, because it required me to examine a concept that seemed brilliant on the surface and discover its faults and weaknesses. One of my theories about art in general is that anything that forces me to think and examine my beliefs is a good thing, even if I don't like the work of art itself. I've spent longer thinking about Cloud Atlas than I do about most books, so I suppose I must take back much of what I've said and say instead that Cloud Atlas is, in some ways, an excellent book.

A good title - Hideous Kinky

2008-05-03T02:23:00.000-07:00

An interesting book for its narrative point of view. It is the story of two children going to Morocco with their thoroughly Bohemian mother and is told from the perspective of the youngest child (aged three or four). It was fascinating because there was very little in the way of tone - defined by the IB English A1 Bible as 'the attitude of the author or narrator to their subject'. What I mean is that there was very little judgement - everything was described, but the only conclusions were directly observable ones, like that she didn't like something because it was dirty, not because it was necessarily bad. And it's incredibly accurate because little kids don't judge, they just observe. They have so little experience that they think everything that happens to them is normal, regardless of how abnormal it actually is. In this case, I kept waiting for something to be judged. For example, it being set in a predominantly Muslim country, and being interspersed with descriptions of women wearing veils and things like that, I kept expecting that someone would say something disapproving, because I kept forgetting it was written from a child's point of view.

But that never arrived. After a while I thought I detected a hint of dislike for the unstable, nomadic, hand-to-mouth existence the characters were living in, but at first I thought it was just the biases of my relatively conservative upbringing rearing their ugly heads. But later events proved that it was not all of my imagination.

I didn't like it that much, really. I only read it because I'd heard it was good. But definitely an interesting exercise in narrative point of view. It's a quick read - if you're interested in literary technique at all, it would be worth reading it just for that.

One gets inspired by the darndest of things

2008-04-29T02:55:00.000-07:00

From here, about the still-enigmatic A Prayer for Owen Meany:

"A lot of the book falls prey to Irvingisms: he digs his own pits -- incest, New Hampshire, freak accidents and amputations, untimely death, ironic sexual shame -- and falls into them in nearly every book. That doesn't matter: any Irving fan reads his books for precisely these flavors."

Too, too true. But before I go on, I'd like to apologise sincerely to Bryce Courtenay for all the invective he most likely didn't even notice he was getting from me.

Just to restate: it's true. No matter how crappy and ridiculous you know it is, you just keep coming back to it because, let's face it, you like it and
you don't care what the literary snobs say. (Are you reading this, English teacher?)

I haven't read a Bryce Courtenay book for years, though I'm forever grateful to the dear man. You see, he was my bridge from trashy fantasy to the so-called 'real literature' that I read today (and enjoy a lot more). I totally lost any respect for the guy when he advertised his latest book, Sylvia, on Australian TV. I mean, what self-respecting author would do that? People read Bryce Courtenay, so friggin' put his books on a specials table at Big W already! Don't advertise on TV!

I'm not being clear and/or coherent, I know. What I'm trying to say is that Courtenay is a prime example of someone who repeats the same themes again and again and again. Some of his books are so similar you can basically substitute one major war for another and find that otherwise, they're the same. I told myself this was the
reason I stopped reading his books at the age of 10 or whenever. But fuck that! It's not that I didn't like his repetition, it's that I got sick of his themes! I had had enough of maudlin sentimentality, cardboard characters and impressively unbelievable plots! And go me for that! And I don't begrudge Courtenay at all, good on him for finding a winning formula! If only I could do the same! And it would be nice to stop using exclamation marks at the end of every sentence, too!

My epiphany on this matter was nudged into position by the afore-quoted quote, and cemented by the fact that I just reread Howl's Moving Castle for about the tenth time. I realised that I keep reading Diana Wynne Jones, and will probably keep reading her, until my already-battered copies fall to pieces. I read her for exactly the reasons my friends hate her: her rueful, mistake-making, irrepresibly modest characters who almost without exception never realise that they actually have stronger magic than anyone else in the world; her really, really cool parallel universes; her perpetual happy endings; her lovers who love with no sex; her idealised, imaginative, funny books that I will be reading aloud to my children and grandchildren if indeed I ever have any.

So yes. I hope I have got my point across, albeit in a rambling, uncoordinated way. My point is, possibly, that no one should feel bad about reading stuff that is ad nauseumly repetitious, as long as they enjoy it. And nor should they necessarily criticise the authors too much (cough cough: SORRY!!!) - one has got to make oneself a buck, n'est-ce pas?

SPOILER ALERT: A Prayer for Owen Meany - still trying to work out what the hell it's on about

2008-04-25T03:52:00.000-07:00

I liked this book. I didn't find it powerful, or moving - it wasn't one of those books that seems to have singled me out at a crowded party, taken me to a quiet bedroom and stolen my literary virginity - but I enjoyed it. It never dragged, was never boring, always entertaining, often good for a laugh... but I just. don't. get. it.

I was waiting for something more spectacular to happen at the end. That there was all this build up just for him to save a bunch of children seems a bit odd to me. Similarly the reason his voice didn't change. Perhaps I'm just a cold-hearted bitch, but the whole ending didn't really make sense to me.

What it does show me, though, is how much I've changed over the past few years. A couple of years ago I would just have read the story and left it at that - never questioning, never asking why, never looking beyond the surface. I would have seen this as a nice, often ironic, story, but I would never have tried to work out why I felt so... short-changed at the end. I believe this is a good thing.

Notes on books and various other written media I have read lately

2008-04-04T16:16:00.000-07:00

The Plague by Albert Camus

The Plague is about a plague that strikes the town of Port Oran in Algeria. It describes the behaviour of the populace and of several specific characters over the course of the plague. It's existentialist and emphasises the inevitability of life and our inability to control our own destinies (I wrote a major essay on a similar theme about Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn, so it's a topic of which I am rather fond).

Something I spend quite a lot of time thinking about is the relationship between style and the quality of a book. The Plague was very interesting in terms of style. It was narrated by someone who calls themselves 'the narrator', and we find out only at the end that 'the narrator' is actually Rieux, the main character. This gives it a really detached air. Yet it still manages to describe the events with the utmost compassion. Some parts were very moving. The prose is bare and unadorned, yet still beautiful. It's like those European trees in winter, stark and black against the white sky. Those trees are beautiful enough to make me want to live in Europe. But it's interesting that such objective prose can be so emotive. I used to think that beauty came from the use of intricate metaphor and imagery and stylistic techniques, but I've started to change my tune, and reading The Plague only confirmed this for me.

Harper's Bazaar

Has incredibly boring articles. A friend lent a few magazines to me in an attempt to convert me to fashion. The fashion was pretty, but the articles...... there was one about models being too thin, and I suppose it was always a hard ask to expect someone to come up with an original article on such a hackneyed topic, but I mean, really. It just went round and round and round, going over the exact same things, not even attempting to assert an opinion or make a statement. Euhhhhh. The other articles were similarly boring, because really, who wants to read about Katie Holmes or 'your definition of luxury'? I skipped most of them and looked at the pictures, like a little kid.

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

I have been wanting to read this book for aaaaaaages, because it has a fantastic concept. Queneau wrote about an inconsequential meeting on a bus and a short conversation about a button. The story has no point, which is the point in itself. It's just a vehicle for the exercises in style. He writes the about the same sequence of events in 99 different styles, from haiku to sonnet. I was kind of waiting for it to tell me something profound about style (which I'm so into right now) and it kind of did, but not how I expected it to. More than anything, though, it's funny. I especially laughed at the opera one. It must have been the most enjoyable thing to translate (originally written in French). I might write something more profound about it later, but at the moment I'm feeling like my brain is leaking out of my ears.

Phosphore

I don't know if there's any point me writing about this. Basically, it's a French magazine for teenagers about... stuff. I'm reading it to improve my French, and it seems pretty good to me. It seems to lack the slightly patronising attitude magazines for this age group often have, but I have doubts that my French is good enough that I could pick it up, anyway. With French, I never have any trouble understanding anything, but I can't pick up tone or more subtle things like that. I should read more in French. Basically, I only mention this to remind myself to write sometime about the differences in reading in different languages, because it's pretty interesting.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

I have heard so much about Neil Gaiman that when my friend sent me a link to an e-book of American Gods I started reading it straight away. So far, though, it's rather dull. It's intriguing, but in the way a thriller is intriguing, i.e., boringly. It's written like a thriller but with less action and I like it not. I'm just waiting for something decent to happen. I am not reassured about the tastes of the human race.

In other news, I gave my Dad Cat's Eye to read and HE LOVES IT. Interestingly, he seemed much more affected by it than I was. He said he was crying his eyes out as he read it on the plane. Which is odd, or maybe I am just cold-hearted. But I love discussing it with him, and contrary to my expectations, he still made me think of new things about the book. I thought that he wouldn't have assimilated it enough after the first reading to be able to discuss it properly (only because I wasn't able to after my first reading, but maybe I'm just dumb) but he made me think - maybe the reason I like it so much is because I can identify with Elaine's isolation in primary school. That's why it made him so sad - it reminded him of his own misery in primary school. Except it's not really misery, because as we were saying, kids have such limited experience that they just accept all this bad stuff that's happening to them as normal, natural, the way of life. I certainly did, Dad did, Elaine did. She captures perfectly the exquisite loneliness and unhappiness of those days, except that you're not really lonely or unhappy because you never take a step back to evaluate it objectively. Or you're not able to take that step back, either way. So go Dad for being smart and cool.

This is why I love reading so much; there is always more to find in even the most shallow of books. This is basically the only reason I liked Harry Potter so much; for the only time ever (probably in all of history) there was this book that almost everyone had read, and almost everyone was happy to talk about it and discuss it. It made me very happy. In terms of booktalk, the week before the last HP book emerged was the best in my life.

So I guess maybe today I'll write about reputations.

2008-03-31T03:23:00.000-07:00

How important is a book's reputation? Let's have a couple of telling anecdotes and see what conclusions we can draw, eh?

So, once upon a time about ten or so years ago Yours Truly went to the local library. Back in the days when she was pretty unsure about what she wanted to read because there are so few decent kids' books out there, and tended to borrow pretty much at random, unless there was a Cassie at the Ballet School book hanging around, or alternatively Put a Sock in it, Percy! that she could read for the umpteenth time.

And this fine day, she borrowed a book with a red cover and a picture of a bemused-looking boy with what was supposed to be tousled black hair, glasses and a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead, standing in front of a red steam engine (keep in mind that editions from different countries have different covers). Have you guessed which book it was yet? Let me assure you that I had no idea at the time what a phenomenon Harry Potter was going to become. I had never heard of J. K. Rowling, Albus Dumbledore, or indeed Marie Curie. I borrowed the book totally at random (I don't even remember reading the blurb) and returned it a couple of weeks later without having opened it. I used to do that a lot - just not be bothered reading books I borrowed because of laziness or they looked too stupid or just for no particular reason at all. How much times have changed!

For some reason, this book that I didn't even read stuck in my head somehow and when I was about eleven or something I walked into my school library and pulled HP3 off the rack, thinking vaguely to myself 'This book's supposed to be good'. This was not long before the Harry Potter thing really took off, so I suppose it's not surprising that I recognised it. This time I actually started reading it, and continued reading it all the way through my ballet show, instead of playing cards and dancing and eating junk food like I usually did. It was very gripping, and not knowing who Neville Longbottom was really didn't matter for very long.

So I suppose this means I can claim to be one of the 'original', non-bandwagon jumping onto HP fans, even if my instinct for a good book failed me on the first occasion I came across it. But look what reputation does! Reputation turned Harry Potter from just another drop in the ocean to something that was practically an ocean itself. Reputation turned what was (for the first three books) a nice, decently characterised and written children's series into a behemoth of gargantuan lack of literary merit and an entire industry's worth of merchandise and spinoffs. It also enticed people, children and adults alike, who hadn't picked up a book in years to start reading. And maybe some of them continued. I don't really know, I never had that problem. But maybe for some J. K. Rowling is my Yves Klein. I certainly hope so.

There's no doubt that reputation is a pretty powerful thing. It can both make and break a concept, simultaneously in HP's case.

A caveat: I'm talking about reputation as a vague, nebulous thing that sort of hangs in the air and permeates peoples' brains without them even realising (as HP did to me).

Going again by this amorphous thing loosely termed 'reputation', I'm currently reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I just kept hearing his name everywhere, including from sources I deemed vaguely respectable, and I thought I should see what all the fuss is about (incidentally, read it here for free!). So far I'm disappointed. Page 70 and it has shown no signs of being anything other than a common or garden thriller. And I dislike thrillers at the best of times.

I suppose what I might be trying to say is that I don't have a huge amount of confidence in reputation's taste. In almost every case, reputation's choices disappoint me. I think this is generally because reputation likes thrillers much more than I do; but that's a topic for another post. Refusing to read books with reputation (or roundly condemning them before even having read them) is just as bad as only reading or making opinions from reputation. In the end, anything that gets people reading is a good thing in my book (haha hilarious pun). As I've said before, extremes are bad.

I read by reputation partly from curiosity and partly from a sense of social enquiry. It's fascinating to wonder why reputation amasses around some things with such a hugeness of volume (such as Harry Potter) but virtually ignores other things that on first glance seem to have the same potential. I don't understand why just yet, but rest assured that I'll let you know as soon as I work it out.

Alors, who really wrote Shakespeare's plays?

2008-03-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

So I borrowed Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair because I wanted some light, amusing reading for the Easter break. I was expecting something along the lines of Terry Pratchett, funny and satirical, especially after reading the blurb: "Thursday Next is a literary detective without equal, fear, or boyfriend." I love this linguistic tweaking: taking a rule that works in some situations and applying it to one of the rare situations where it doesn't work. What I mean is, in most situations you can add a theoretically unlimited number of nouns after the words 'with' or 'without'. But when using the phrase 'they were without equal', you don't usually do that. So go blurb writer!

I don't think I came across that phrase in the book, though I might be wrong. If I'm right, it means that the writer of the blurb is a better comic writer than Jasper Fforde. I have to admit I was disappointed. His writing style is, frankly, boring. I was anticipating the dry, ironic wit similar to Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. This book frequently bordered on the amusing and sometimes approached outright funny, but I never laughed out loud. Fforde's strength is in his concept.

It's not a bad plot, for sure, though I've known better. Ingenious is a good word to describe it. He does all the stuff with popping in and out of time - Thursday (the main character) is in hospital when a car appears in her room. In it is herself. The Thursday in the car yells at her "take the job in Swindon!" before disappearing, sans puff of smoke. Thursday realises she's just been visited by her future self. So it creates a neverending loop. Later in the book she inadvertently travels back in time and yells at herself to keep it working. The question is, how did the first Thursday know? I guess the only answer is that there was no first Thursday.

One of the themes of the book that keeps popping up is the question about who really wrote Shakespeare's plays. I spent most of the book going w...t...f...surely no self-respecting author really cares? I mean, it doesn't matter who wrote them. The fact is, we have a bunch of pretty amazing plays, and even if experts analyse them and say that they weren't written by the same person, it doesn't matter. The plays are what matter! The beautiful, glorious use of language in ways it was never used before is what matter!

The only argument that I can see having any merit is the one that if it was actually Anne Hathaway who wrote them, and then used Shakespeare's name to cover up the fact she was a woman, she deserves credit for the sake of feminism. But that's only a valid argument to feminists, of which I am one. Even so, it's a bit feeble. The plays are what matter! I was surprised that Fforde cared, or appeared to care. It was the resolution of this subplot that redeemed the book in my eyes. I won't spoil it (I detest spoilers), but dammit, it's smart, and mind-boggling, and revolutionary, and quite funny too. And it convinced me that Fforde thought the same way as I do, or at least similarly.

But, as I mentioned earlier, it's the concept which is best. A parallel universe which is very similar to our own, save that the Crimean War, by 1985, has been going for 131 years, Winston Churchill never existed, and several other trifling differences? Brilliant! Or not, depending on the mood I'm in. What I loved was the fact that in this universe literature is important enough that they have a special department of literary detectives and the death of a very minor character from one of Dickens' books caused 150 000 people to attend his funeral. Great stuff!

Also, you can put 10 p into a little box and it will start reciting Shakespeare at you. Also, Jane Eyre was stolen from her book and held to ransom, and the whole of England was up in arms. I can't help but think there wouldn't have been such an outcry if it happened in our distressingly aliterate universe.

So, strong concept, decidedly mediocre writing. The ending saved it for me. I loved the way it twisted up history and time-travel, two of my favourite ingredients in any book. Nevertheless, I doubt I'll be reading another one.

Channel Firing

2008-03-26T23:41:00.000-07:00

I don't read much poetry, because I find it difficult to get anything out of it on a quick reading and in general I'm too lazy to analyse it further. I should, though, because I do love it so. Today's poem is Thomas Hardy's Channel Firing and I read it and feel confident talking about it because I just wrote an essay on it.

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds,
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe-cow drooled. Till God called, “No,
It's gunnery practice out at sea.
Just as before you went below,
The world is as it used to be:

All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters,
They do no more for Christes sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

That this is not the judgment-hour,
For some of them's a blessed thing,
For if it were, they'd have to scour
Hell's floor for so much threatening ...

Ha, ha! It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do — for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again. “I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,”
Said one, “than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!”

And many a skeleton shook his head.
“Instead of preaching forty year,”
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

I like it muchly. Reading stuff on the internet, it's great to see how many interpretations there are that are different to my own. I must say, I totally failed to see any irony or humour in it (cf. this blog) but maybe I'm just dumb. Or different! Or different! This is what I tell myself daily. But darn, it's clever. I love the way he uses dead people as the narrator, and God as a character. I said that the use of iambic tetrameter mimicked the throbbing sound of guns, but someone pointed out in the comments of the blog I linked to earlier that Hardy plays around with the stresses of the beats a lot, which is true too, and could even be interpreted in the same way - guns don't fire regularly, after all. I even noticed it, but didn't comment on it in my essay. Ah well.

So basically, what's going on in this poem is dead people being woken up by the sound of gunfire - people practising for WWI (the poem being written just weeks before it started) and it being loud enough to wake the dead. So in comes God, and tells them it's ok, it's just humans doing what humans do - killing each other. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Human nature will not change - we grow no wiser as our race grows older. I found this pretty poignant, to say the least.

But I'm quite proud of my interpretation of the choice of landmarks in the last two lines. Stourton Tower and Camelot are both to do with wars, right? Stourton Tower to commemorate King Alfred vanquishing someone-or-other (probably at Thanet) and Camelot is King Arthur, no duh. But Stonehenge is like, what is this shit for? No one knows why it was built. So I say, Hardy put it in as a sort of metaphorical question mark. Why the hell do we continue to fight stupid wars, huh?

I probably shouldn't rant about my exams in this blog, but how the hell are you supposed to analyse this poem effectively under exam conditions, when you can't look stuff up? According to something I just read, Hardy was an atheist or a pagan or something, which is what makes the appearance of God so ironic and satirical. And now I get it! But how was I supposed to know that? Anyway, a glebe cow (a cow kept in the field attached to the vicarage to keep the grass short) is supposed to be mad, which makes perfect sense. I was just lucky I happened to know something about Stourton Tower, Camelot and Stonehenge. What the hell's a 'chancel', anyway? I had to look that one up in a dictionary. Also I said the 'mad as hatters' bit was a reference to Alice in Wonderland, an absurd tale if ever there was one, pointing out the absurdity of war.

I also found the use of euphemisms intriguing. 'going below' and 'being sent under' are both used instead of 'dying', which is interesting since you'd think the dead people would have come to terms with their death by now. I said it was to blur the boundaries between the living and the dead, and to show that in war the line between living and dying is pretty easily crossed. I for one didn't realise that it was dead people talking at first (I read too fast! It's a curse), so that also helps confuse things.

Impervious scintillation of the thirteen

2008-03-18T01:13:00.000-07:00

My muse has been too tired/busy to write for the past few days. I'm thinking that now probably wasn't the best time to start a new blog that I want to update regularly. No matter! Today, kids, we're going to be talking about Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, because I can't get over how amazing it is.

I believe a chronological explanation is in order: I first read this book at the end of 2005. I found it mired in depression, in such a way that it weighed me down, though it was otherwise quite fine. I usually love depressing books, but this one seemed to sit heavily in the pit of my stomach and it wouldn't go away. As it was, I had to study it for an exam, so I read it again a few months later. I loved it. I have heard similar stories from other people, so if you've read it once and didn't like it, FOR THE LOVE OF PETE GIVE IT ANOTHER CHANCE.

All up, now, I have read it almost five times and it is quite unique. I read it slowly, revelling - no, wallowing - in the voluptuous beauty of the language, savouring every tiny detail. It has got to be the sole book I read only for the aesthetic qualities of the language.

It's also quite clever. There are metaphors five layers deep, and a cyclical structure that is not only symbolic, but ingenious. And did I mention that it's beautiful? I don't think I did, I'll just have to say it again. IT'S BEAUTIFUL.

It's also thought-provoking, and I quote:

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also... I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing.

This theme of time as a dimension, introduced on the first page, no less, permeates the entire book and is mirrored beautifully in a number of metaphoric ways. It's certainly an interesting idea, no? It's mixed up with all of the most interesting parts of physics, the parts that can be understood at a shallow level without all the maths and stuff. Like walking through walls and travelling in time.

Not so long ago, I read a quote about literature that struck me as being deeply profound. I'll have to paraphrase it, because for some unfathomable reason I didn't write it down, but it was something along the lines of "the greatest thing about literature is seeing in print an idea you had thought was yours only". Ever experienced that weird, almost deja vu-like feeling when you read something that perfectly encapsulates something you believe? I experience it on a daily basis. I have a notebook in which I write these down, so as to preserve their universality (or so I like to think about it) in an easily-accessible place.

The reason I mention this is because there are a few of these in Cat's Eye. It's important to realise that these soul-touching quotes are going to be different for everyone, but the one that really stood out for me was this (again paraphrased): "little girls are small and cute only to grown-ups. To each other they are life sized." Something about this dully stated truth chills me to the core, though perhaps it is only in the context of the book that I understand it.

Here are some more amazing quotes:

"We’re impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen..." has a better description of teenagehood ever been written? I Think Not.

Actually, I can't be bothered finding more quotes. Just read the damn thing. Read it and weep, weep for the beauty, the beauty of tragedy. Weep for the salvation of the human race, in the eternal form of Cat's Eye.

The Cherry Orchard has been quiet lately, mainly because I’ve been occupied with an emergency technical redesign of my other blog.

2008-03-09T01:40:00.000-08:00

Given that Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is my current literary obsession, I thought it might be an appropriate focus for the penproximate (I just made that word up, but hey, it's a good word) entry of my new literary blog, which, incidentally, is named for the words of Lopakhin himself, in the opening moments of Act I. "I was reading this book and understood nothing. I read and I fell asleep."

I have never read anything like the Cherry Orchard. It was radical for its time, and it was radical for me, too. I'd already read, and fortunately studied, some of Chekhov short stories beforehand, so I was prepared, and I enjoyed it from the outset. Nonetheless, it improved (if this were even possible) with further study. I then plunged into a deep, platonic love affair from which I have yet to emerge.

Chekhov's a bit of a legend, if you ask me. According to my hastily scrawled notes, Chekhov disapproved heartily of didacticism, aiming not to teach, but instead to 'hold the mirror up to society', as my English teacher is so fond of saying. He wanted to cause the audience to reflect upon their own lives. The play is peppered with pauses and empty sets, forcing the audience to fill the vacuum with their own conclusions. At one stage, hilariously, one of the characters says "You shouldn't go to plays but look more often at yourselves." This cracks me up.

It's simultaneously hilarious and tragic, which is pretty cool. I find it hard to pin down exactly why I love it so much, and even harder to understand why no one else seems to share my opinion. It's something about how every character is portrayed "warts and all" - another oft quoted English-teacherism - or, as I prefer to put it, with all their quirks and foibles. They are both infuriating and lovable. They encompass all of life. "[They] talk well, with feeling, only you can't understand." (Act I)

It's telling that one of the most oft-written about things in literature is the snapping string of the Cherry Orchard. For me, it sums up the play. I don't know what it means, exactly, I don't know what on earth Chekhov was trying to say - it could have been any number of things - but I how sad it is. I feel what the characters do when they hear it. And this is it. Chekhov trusts that the audience will feel whatever is appropriate, even if they don't understand really the point. He places a sort of confidence in his audience that I had never seen before, or have seen since. I feel honoured to be so trusted.

I'm not feeling very eloquent tonight, I'm afraid. I'm talking well (or at least without too many spelling mistakes), with feeling, only you can't understand.

Just see the fucking play, ok?

Mockingbirds are a group of New World passerine birds from the Mimidae family.

2008-03-08T02:06:00.000-08:00

Today I went book shopping. A few weeks ago, I discovered this little bookshop in Mont Albert, in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. It's called the Mockingbird Bookshop and it's owned by a Canadian (I think, I didn't actually ask) lady who not only works there almost every day, but personally selects every book that is sold in the shop. As a result, it has a very small, very exclusive, range of books. There are a few books I don't like (Da Vinci Code, anyone?) and there are many books that, if I was doing the ordering, would be in pride of place, but aren't there at all.

Nevertheless, it makes me happy that there is someone out there that does this. I'm a big fan of Borders, simply because it's massive and has almost every book I could ever want on its illustrious shelves. But this is something else. It's a bookshop for the love of books, not for commercial gain. The owner's tastes are slightly different to mine, but no one's perfect - and really, I don't care. I'm overjoyed to have discovered a kindred booklover. There aren't enough of us out there.

When I go to Borders, they keep. trying. to. recommend. me. books. And I'm like, fuck off! Because they make no effort whatsoever to ascertain what kind of book I'm interested in, and just point me towards the bestsellers. Jodi Picoult, Dan Brown, Bryce Courtenay, Khaled Hosseini. As authors, yes, they have their strengths, but been there, done that, didn't like it the first time.

So, if you're ever in the area, drop into the Mockingbird Bookshop. It's on Mont Albert Road, which runs parallel to the railway line, right near the station. If you are truly a booklover, you won't regret it.