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.
Showing posts with label style. Show all posts
Showing posts with label style. Show all posts
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Friday, June 13, 2008
I can see where they're coming from, but I didn't get it.
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:
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:
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:
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
Friday, May 16, 2008
The Sea - a funny title, but a good one in the end, I believe.
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:
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:
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."
Friday, April 4, 2008
Notes on books and various other written media I have read lately
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Impervious scintillation of the thirteen
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:
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.
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.
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