So the back of the book tells me all the prizes that Troy by Adele Geras has won or been shortlisted for: ALA Best Book for Young Adults, Publisher's Weekly Best Children's Book of the Year, A Carnegie Medal Finalist, etc. Before reading I was highly impressed. As I've been teaching The Odyssey and working my way through The Iliad and The War that Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander, I though that Troy would fit right in. And for the most part, it was a pleasant little excursion into the personal lives of some rather unimportant inhabitants of Ilium, Priam's town, who nonetheless interact with all the notables - Priam, Hector, Paris, Andromache, and Helen. But my god if the writing didn't make me want to strangle myself.
I've read some horrible writing recently - the worst being Angelogy by Danielle Trussoni, perhaps the most poorly written book of the new century. The one thing the poorly written books I've read seem to have in common is that their idea is original and engaging but the execution destroys the value the once-shining original idea ever had. And I think, rather unfortunately, that Troy fits the bill as well. Geras has created some likable characters with enough depth to keep them engaging. The story centers around young Xanthe, who is the nursemaid to Hector and Andromache's young son Astyanax. She falls in love with a young soldier named Alastor when Aphrodite appears and makes her smitten. Aphrodite goes on to complicate things in the way that only the capricious Greek gods can by forcing Alastor to fall in love with Xanthe's sister, Marpessa. Shenanigans ensue.
But the shenanigans, which are artfully setup to play out in the waning months of the ten-year war, are just so annoyingly described. Take this comment from the scene in which Paris kills his son in a case of mistaken identity: "I never knew I had a son. Can you believe that? And no sooner does he announce himself than I kill him. A terrible sin...the worst sin in the world to kill your son." (214) Wow! Really? You think? Way to sum it up for the readers there Ms. Geras.
I know that this book is written for the younger reader in mind, but I think the simplicity with which Ms. Geras describes the life of her characters is insulting. Part of learning to become a good reader is being able to tell a character's emotions without having them announce it in the easiest terms possible. After all, most humans don't go around saying, "I'm mad because my boss blamed me for something that was caused by someone else. And that is why I feel terrible." Frankly, the reason we have therapy is so that people can spend years and thousands learning to say things like that, but Ms. Geras rarely lets readers make any inferences at all. I think we need to let teen readers understand inferences. Too much concrete thinking leads to simplicity, and we could all use a good dose of intellectual complexity in our lives.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Wao ruminations concluded
The world seems to be caught up in an overwhelming tide of
tragic-ness. This is true most intensely in literature. I can't
think of too many books that I've read recently that aren't built
solely around exploring every possible nuance of a tragedy and how it
effects me, and Oscar Wao fits into this category as well. I've been
recommending The Road by Cormac McCarthy to a lot of people recently,
and I've been thinking about why this book has so struck a chord with
me, and I think it's because while it addresses the theme of tragedy
and explores it in-depth, it doesn't end with tragedy as the be-all,
end-all function of existence. Admittedly, the ending is bleak, but
it's also inspiring at the same time. And I don't think I can say
that about Oscar Wao. I mean Diaz built the ending up 100 pages
before it actually occurred, and I had to spend the last part of the
book watching it move inexorably closer, and the pain of reading it
was only increased by the fact that I knew I was going to read it for
so long. Then of course the book ended in its own bleak way, and
other than the physical text itself resting comfortably in your hand
or on your bookshelf, there wasn't a whole lot that you could walk
away with and be encouraged about.
Maybe my expectations for books are unreasonable, but Mark Twain's
books didn't always end with a bereft longing glance at nostalgia and
tragedy. Neither did Steinbeck or Garcia Marquez (well, ok Marquez is
generally pretty bleak, but he usually transcends that after a page or
two), or even Michael Chabon, who has to write 'genre' just so he can
have positive endings or think transformational thoughts. Are we that
caught up in the bitterly pessimistic worldview these days? I think
we are, I think almost all of us are despite our protestations that we
have happy moments or weeks or years. I think we tend to define
ourselves by our tragedies, and I wonder if that has anything to do
with world events - 9/11, Katrina, war, etc - or if it is the defining
zeitgeist of our generation. And if it is, what the fuck? I mean we
have to move past that at some point don't we? And I'm not sure I
need to hear that it could only be a white American asking this
question, because that sentiment, however true, only pulls us back
into the morass that so many people of so many different backgrounds
are trying to escape - hence the reason for the book Oscar Wao in the
first place, am I wrong?
So, while I loved the book, I am struck by the tone in a deeply
philosophical and existential way. And that tone seems to be an ever
present burden on the shoulders of everyone, and I am wondering if we
haven't set for ourselves an inescapable trap. And our books are just
the explanations of these traps, and sometimes that gets ridiculous.
And if that's the existential reality of the book and of our lives,
well then that just plain sucks. I don't think I can buy into a
paradigm that says life will be shitty forever and ever and oh woe is
me and all that crap. And that seems to be the approach of so many
books that I've read. It's like we can't seriously talk about the
transformational value of literature anymore because literature has
become a solipsistic cesspool. Is it any wonder that no Americans
have won the Nobel in a good long time. We're all focused on one
thing, and that one thing isn't terribly affirming, unless of course
if you count the fact that it is about 'me' and 'I' and certainly not
about the other because they can worry about their own damn selves.
Well, I've rambled enough and not all of it about the book.
tragic-ness. This is true most intensely in literature. I can't
think of too many books that I've read recently that aren't built
solely around exploring every possible nuance of a tragedy and how it
effects me, and Oscar Wao fits into this category as well. I've been
recommending The Road by Cormac McCarthy to a lot of people recently,
and I've been thinking about why this book has so struck a chord with
me, and I think it's because while it addresses the theme of tragedy
and explores it in-depth, it doesn't end with tragedy as the be-all,
end-all function of existence. Admittedly, the ending is bleak, but
it's also inspiring at the same time. And I don't think I can say
that about Oscar Wao. I mean Diaz built the ending up 100 pages
before it actually occurred, and I had to spend the last part of the
book watching it move inexorably closer, and the pain of reading it
was only increased by the fact that I knew I was going to read it for
so long. Then of course the book ended in its own bleak way, and
other than the physical text itself resting comfortably in your hand
or on your bookshelf, there wasn't a whole lot that you could walk
away with and be encouraged about.
Maybe my expectations for books are unreasonable, but Mark Twain's
books didn't always end with a bereft longing glance at nostalgia and
tragedy. Neither did Steinbeck or Garcia Marquez (well, ok Marquez is
generally pretty bleak, but he usually transcends that after a page or
two), or even Michael Chabon, who has to write 'genre' just so he can
have positive endings or think transformational thoughts. Are we that
caught up in the bitterly pessimistic worldview these days? I think
we are, I think almost all of us are despite our protestations that we
have happy moments or weeks or years. I think we tend to define
ourselves by our tragedies, and I wonder if that has anything to do
with world events - 9/11, Katrina, war, etc - or if it is the defining
zeitgeist of our generation. And if it is, what the fuck? I mean we
have to move past that at some point don't we? And I'm not sure I
need to hear that it could only be a white American asking this
question, because that sentiment, however true, only pulls us back
into the morass that so many people of so many different backgrounds
are trying to escape - hence the reason for the book Oscar Wao in the
first place, am I wrong?
So, while I loved the book, I am struck by the tone in a deeply
philosophical and existential way. And that tone seems to be an ever
present burden on the shoulders of everyone, and I am wondering if we
haven't set for ourselves an inescapable trap. And our books are just
the explanations of these traps, and sometimes that gets ridiculous.
And if that's the existential reality of the book and of our lives,
well then that just plain sucks. I don't think I can buy into a
paradigm that says life will be shitty forever and ever and oh woe is
me and all that crap. And that seems to be the approach of so many
books that I've read. It's like we can't seriously talk about the
transformational value of literature anymore because literature has
become a solipsistic cesspool. Is it any wonder that no Americans
have won the Nobel in a good long time. We're all focused on one
thing, and that one thing isn't terribly affirming, unless of course
if you count the fact that it is about 'me' and 'I' and certainly not
about the other because they can worry about their own damn selves.
Well, I've rambled enough and not all of it about the book.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
some continuations
Recently I have found myself reading books that are entries in long-standing series. On one level this bothers me because it suggests that a) there is nothing 'new' out there worth reading or b) I don't know what new books I should be reading. In either case, I'm not very happy. But I have been reading some good stuff recently. Here's a run-down:
A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire:
The third book in the Wicked series chronicles the life of the cowardly lion, named in this book at least Burr. Maguire has written a fascinating character in Burr. He is a lonely, ashamed soul seeking redemption in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. He is America before we found ourselves and voted for the symbol of Obama. He is materialistic and opportunistic because he thinks that is how to get fame (as my students would put it). He is lost and empty because nothing he does provides joy or solace, and the book is a brilliant examination of his psycho-social development to the point where he sees himself truly for the first time. This book is more complete than the middle entry in the series - Son of a Witch - because Burr is more fully realized than Nor, the son of Elphaba. (Ironic isn't it, and intentionally so, that the Lion is the most fully realized character since Elphaba.) The tortuous route to self discovery made by Burr is paralleled by another character, of Maguire's own devising, called Yackle, who has floated mysteriously throughout the other books in the series. Her presence bothered me immensely in Wicked because it was completely indecipherable; here she comes through in a most winning way and her own story makes me want to go back and read Wicked again just so I can see what she was really all about. Good writing that.
Rubicon by Steven Saylor:
Yes, I am a lonely man looking for prostitute fiction written about ancient Rome. This series is the high class hooker. The Falco books by Lindsey Davis are the joyful BJ or handjob or backseat quickie, but Saylor writes about the overnight stay at the Mustang Ranch where one's needs are really met. I say all that mostly so you will pick up the other books in the series which are all quite good. This one, however, is average. Gordianus, our delightfully aging protagonist, makes some ethical leaps in the book that are inconsistent with his character as it has been built in the previous books. It's still a good read, and it takes up during a period about which we know the most historically. But I think Saylor did a better job writing about the more obscure historical developments in Rome - dealing with Sulla and Crassus and the notable poet Catallus. This one features Ceasar and Pompey, two of the giants of Antiquity, and Gordianus really has no reason to be involved with them. And that of course is my dilemma with the book. But it's a rollicking good adventure nonetheless.
The Gunslinger by Stephen King:
I have never before read King, and I may never again. King's ideas are quite original, even when he's riffing off of Robert Browning, which he is in this book. But his prose is so tromping and his situations so blah. I will continue to read the Dark Tower series because I'm intrigued to see where King goes, and Roland his protagonist is well-written primarily because he's written as the slightly less intellectual fanatic. He tends to have notions rather than ideas, and he understands that things will change without actually being able to predict those changes. He is more like you and I than most epic heroes. But I'm never quite sure why he finds himself in half the situations that he does. What's the point, big Stephen? I'm still trying to find out.
A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire:
The third book in the Wicked series chronicles the life of the cowardly lion, named in this book at least Burr. Maguire has written a fascinating character in Burr. He is a lonely, ashamed soul seeking redemption in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. He is America before we found ourselves and voted for the symbol of Obama. He is materialistic and opportunistic because he thinks that is how to get fame (as my students would put it). He is lost and empty because nothing he does provides joy or solace, and the book is a brilliant examination of his psycho-social development to the point where he sees himself truly for the first time. This book is more complete than the middle entry in the series - Son of a Witch - because Burr is more fully realized than Nor, the son of Elphaba. (Ironic isn't it, and intentionally so, that the Lion is the most fully realized character since Elphaba.) The tortuous route to self discovery made by Burr is paralleled by another character, of Maguire's own devising, called Yackle, who has floated mysteriously throughout the other books in the series. Her presence bothered me immensely in Wicked because it was completely indecipherable; here she comes through in a most winning way and her own story makes me want to go back and read Wicked again just so I can see what she was really all about. Good writing that.
Rubicon by Steven Saylor:
Yes, I am a lonely man looking for prostitute fiction written about ancient Rome. This series is the high class hooker. The Falco books by Lindsey Davis are the joyful BJ or handjob or backseat quickie, but Saylor writes about the overnight stay at the Mustang Ranch where one's needs are really met. I say all that mostly so you will pick up the other books in the series which are all quite good. This one, however, is average. Gordianus, our delightfully aging protagonist, makes some ethical leaps in the book that are inconsistent with his character as it has been built in the previous books. It's still a good read, and it takes up during a period about which we know the most historically. But I think Saylor did a better job writing about the more obscure historical developments in Rome - dealing with Sulla and Crassus and the notable poet Catallus. This one features Ceasar and Pompey, two of the giants of Antiquity, and Gordianus really has no reason to be involved with them. And that of course is my dilemma with the book. But it's a rollicking good adventure nonetheless.
The Gunslinger by Stephen King:
I have never before read King, and I may never again. King's ideas are quite original, even when he's riffing off of Robert Browning, which he is in this book. But his prose is so tromping and his situations so blah. I will continue to read the Dark Tower series because I'm intrigued to see where King goes, and Roland his protagonist is well-written primarily because he's written as the slightly less intellectual fanatic. He tends to have notions rather than ideas, and he understands that things will change without actually being able to predict those changes. He is more like you and I than most epic heroes. But I'm never quite sure why he finds himself in half the situations that he does. What's the point, big Stephen? I'm still trying to find out.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Dropped Books
While I had a successful reading summer, getting through a modest 12-15 books, it has ended on a low note. I recently had to retire a book before completion. This, to me, is disastrous. The book was Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves. I have read some of Graves' other works including I, Claudius, the sequel Claudius the God, and some of his brilliant poetry. Overall I find him engaging, spritely, and emotionally complex - just the sort of qualities that tend to get my attention. However, Homer's Daughter was a wreck. The premise, in the form of a question, is quite simple: what if The Odyssey wasn't in fact written by Homer, but instead by a young noblewoman from Sicily during early antiquity? Beyond the premise, I can't think of much else worthy of mentioning because its execution barely touched upon the intrigue articulated in the premise.
How, I ask myself, could something so promising become so ass-boring? (Ass-boring is of course a highly technical critical term involving all sorts of detailed criticisms relating to characterization, plot, style, pacing, etc.) Homer's Daughter fails to be readable on any level. It's connections to The Odyssey are sophomoric and quite a bit silly to boot. And the plot is so contrived, building as it does on a series of random selections from The Odyssey, that each chapter hits like a wave of bilious bitch-slap. Ouch! And the most distressing fact of all is that I've been waiting to read this book for nearly 3 years. The letdown of course was all the more painful since I all but devoured an historical novel by Bernard Cornwell post-haste. Cornwell, while lacking in the literary credentials of Graves, does all the small writerly things well, things like characterization, plot, style, and pacing.
I believe that narrative, far from reflecting our lives, is a survival mechanism that is simultaneously simplistic yet defining in that it brings order out of chaos and allows our communal minds to coalesce around shared experiences that are too often denied our waking lives. So, thank you Bernard Cornwell, thank you for being entertaining and engaging and salvific when I lost myself in the hands of one whose job it was to redeem my wayward soul. I haven't made it back to dry land, but I'm clinging tightly to a stout board, there is an island in the distance, and I am paddling slowly but surely in its direction.
How, I ask myself, could something so promising become so ass-boring? (Ass-boring is of course a highly technical critical term involving all sorts of detailed criticisms relating to characterization, plot, style, pacing, etc.) Homer's Daughter fails to be readable on any level. It's connections to The Odyssey are sophomoric and quite a bit silly to boot. And the plot is so contrived, building as it does on a series of random selections from The Odyssey, that each chapter hits like a wave of bilious bitch-slap. Ouch! And the most distressing fact of all is that I've been waiting to read this book for nearly 3 years. The letdown of course was all the more painful since I all but devoured an historical novel by Bernard Cornwell post-haste. Cornwell, while lacking in the literary credentials of Graves, does all the small writerly things well, things like characterization, plot, style, and pacing.
I believe that narrative, far from reflecting our lives, is a survival mechanism that is simultaneously simplistic yet defining in that it brings order out of chaos and allows our communal minds to coalesce around shared experiences that are too often denied our waking lives. So, thank you Bernard Cornwell, thank you for being entertaining and engaging and salvific when I lost myself in the hands of one whose job it was to redeem my wayward soul. I haven't made it back to dry land, but I'm clinging tightly to a stout board, there is an island in the distance, and I am paddling slowly but surely in its direction.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Two Old Friends
I recently reread two books that I've thought about a lot in the last couple of years. The first was Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King. It is the seventh book in a series that takes up the life of Sherlock Holmes just at the beginning of the Great War, which is where Conan Doyle left him in the last stories about the eponymous detective who defined the genre. In King's world, Holmes is a retired beekeeper in 1915 when he is stumbled upon (literally) by a precocious fifteen year old orphan who he decides to train and mentor. Over the course of the next few books, their intricate relationship evolves slowly into a professional partnership and a romantic relationship via a series of highly engaging murders, thefts, and world travels. Did I forget to mention that the orphan is female? Oh well she is, and her name is Mary Russell, and she is half-English, half-American, tall, blond, and ridiculously intelligent and charming. I read the first book in the series when I was 15 and instantly connected with Mary, or Russell as she is affectionately called by Holmes. Like me she is always reading, has or will take an advanced degree in theology, and needs constant challenges to avoid boredom. Unlike me, she is female and married to a much older spouse, though my partner is an "older woman," living in a decidedly different age, and gets to daily engage in conversation and problem-solving with the best possible mind on the planet (fictional of course).
Laurie R. King's books can occasionally get bogged down in plot minutiae - the latest entry in the series was disastrously slow-paced and a bit pedantic, and a 'to be continued' which just plain annoyed the shit out of me. But King is easily the best character writer in the business. Her Holmes is better than Conan Doyle's, and Mary Russell may be one of the best multi-dimensional characters in modern literature, which probably annoys the hell of writers of 'serious' literature because I haven't read much recently that even comes close to a multi-dimensional character in any work from the last 20 years. Locked Rooms is one of my favorite books in the series because it is a psychological study of Mary Russell which reveals so many new and interesting things about a character that had been well fleshed out in the previous six books. The plot is slow and is resolved out of nowhere, except for an engaging section where Sherlock Holmes must recruit a new batch of irregulars while in San Francisco with Mary working on the death of her parents many years before. But the slow realization by Mary that she wasn't responsible for the death of her family is quite magnificently worked out, and the peripheral characters that help in this realization are really quite impressive: flappers and other excitable folks living in the high-rolling 1920's when Prohibition was failing so dramatically and comedically. King has a tendency to add prominent fictional and historical characters into her novels to spruce things up, and in Locked Rooms she writes of an incredible encounter between Sherlock Holmes (who I probably forgot to mention is portrayed as a real historical fellow who tends to get quite pissed off when his literary executor Conan Doyle goes around talking to ghosts) and Dashiell Hammet, the tubercular writer who is credited with having taken detective stories and made them 'hard-boiled,' the guy who came up with Sam Spade and the Maltese Falcon. Hammet was real, and a fairly admirable fellow in real life, and his encounter with Holmes is absolutely priceless considering that the real Hammet spent some time as a workaday detective for the Pinkerton Agency. Locked Rooms is truly a magficent look at how to write characters with depth and put them in situations where their depth is called upon to drive a book. King does a great job with this in all the ten or more books of hers that I've read. She is truly gifted if a bit unknown outside the mystery 'genre.'
The other book that I reread was written by an incredibly well-known writer who hasn't been overlooked by anyone since writing Wonder Boys and the Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Michael Chabon, who took his own stab at Sherlock Holmes in The Final Solution, is one of the few prominent writers around that has actually berated the literate world for creating categories of literature - things like mystery, science-fiction, and romance. His claim, that writing is about entertainment, which I've explored elsewhere, and is either done well or poorly regardless of genre, is one that has helped me immensely in my own writing and reading. In Gentleman of the Road, which I believe I've written about before as well, and which Chabon had given the working title of Jews with Swords, Chabon writes a delightful action story whose intended audience would probably be a bunch of 12 year old boys with absurdly wonderful vocabularies. The story is even better the second time around, particularly as I was less daunted by his obscure verbiage, and I got a better look at the two characters. Chabon, like King, does a pretty great job at giving his characters depth. Amram and Zelikman, the Jews with Swords, are a bit less multi-dimensional than Mary Russell; however, for a two-hundred page action thriller, they are more like Meryl Streep and Judi Dench than Paris Hilton and Cameron Diaz. Writers like Chabon and King are great precisely because they come up great characters, which seems to be the overall theme of this post, that thrive despite awkward plotting or distracting vocabulary. It is not fashionable these days to talk about literature outside of culture, history, or other interpretive lenses, but I think the farther we get from the core elements of literature like characters, the more we miss the essence of what makes reading a uniquely human and enjoyable activity. I'm all about talking about literature as a humanizing activity, and the best literature is that which helps us connect with others by showing us what our humanity is and how it works. And if you can do that as a writer, then, at the very least, you'll be admired by me.
Laurie R. King's books can occasionally get bogged down in plot minutiae - the latest entry in the series was disastrously slow-paced and a bit pedantic, and a 'to be continued' which just plain annoyed the shit out of me. But King is easily the best character writer in the business. Her Holmes is better than Conan Doyle's, and Mary Russell may be one of the best multi-dimensional characters in modern literature, which probably annoys the hell of writers of 'serious' literature because I haven't read much recently that even comes close to a multi-dimensional character in any work from the last 20 years. Locked Rooms is one of my favorite books in the series because it is a psychological study of Mary Russell which reveals so many new and interesting things about a character that had been well fleshed out in the previous six books. The plot is slow and is resolved out of nowhere, except for an engaging section where Sherlock Holmes must recruit a new batch of irregulars while in San Francisco with Mary working on the death of her parents many years before. But the slow realization by Mary that she wasn't responsible for the death of her family is quite magnificently worked out, and the peripheral characters that help in this realization are really quite impressive: flappers and other excitable folks living in the high-rolling 1920's when Prohibition was failing so dramatically and comedically. King has a tendency to add prominent fictional and historical characters into her novels to spruce things up, and in Locked Rooms she writes of an incredible encounter between Sherlock Holmes (who I probably forgot to mention is portrayed as a real historical fellow who tends to get quite pissed off when his literary executor Conan Doyle goes around talking to ghosts) and Dashiell Hammet, the tubercular writer who is credited with having taken detective stories and made them 'hard-boiled,' the guy who came up with Sam Spade and the Maltese Falcon. Hammet was real, and a fairly admirable fellow in real life, and his encounter with Holmes is absolutely priceless considering that the real Hammet spent some time as a workaday detective for the Pinkerton Agency. Locked Rooms is truly a magficent look at how to write characters with depth and put them in situations where their depth is called upon to drive a book. King does a great job with this in all the ten or more books of hers that I've read. She is truly gifted if a bit unknown outside the mystery 'genre.'
The other book that I reread was written by an incredibly well-known writer who hasn't been overlooked by anyone since writing Wonder Boys and the Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Michael Chabon, who took his own stab at Sherlock Holmes in The Final Solution, is one of the few prominent writers around that has actually berated the literate world for creating categories of literature - things like mystery, science-fiction, and romance. His claim, that writing is about entertainment, which I've explored elsewhere, and is either done well or poorly regardless of genre, is one that has helped me immensely in my own writing and reading. In Gentleman of the Road, which I believe I've written about before as well, and which Chabon had given the working title of Jews with Swords, Chabon writes a delightful action story whose intended audience would probably be a bunch of 12 year old boys with absurdly wonderful vocabularies. The story is even better the second time around, particularly as I was less daunted by his obscure verbiage, and I got a better look at the two characters. Chabon, like King, does a pretty great job at giving his characters depth. Amram and Zelikman, the Jews with Swords, are a bit less multi-dimensional than Mary Russell; however, for a two-hundred page action thriller, they are more like Meryl Streep and Judi Dench than Paris Hilton and Cameron Diaz. Writers like Chabon and King are great precisely because they come up great characters, which seems to be the overall theme of this post, that thrive despite awkward plotting or distracting vocabulary. It is not fashionable these days to talk about literature outside of culture, history, or other interpretive lenses, but I think the farther we get from the core elements of literature like characters, the more we miss the essence of what makes reading a uniquely human and enjoyable activity. I'm all about talking about literature as a humanizing activity, and the best literature is that which helps us connect with others by showing us what our humanity is and how it works. And if you can do that as a writer, then, at the very least, you'll be admired by me.
Monday, June 29, 2009
I finished Gone With the Wind and The Wind Done Gone
So yeah, I finished the second-longest book I've ever read in my life. After a time, the length became so overwhelming that it really seemed to swallow the narrative, and I just kept pushing myself to finish the book. This was relatively easy to accomplish because the book, or rather the character of Scarlett O'Hara, is so engaging. But it was still a long, onerous bastard, and I tip my hat to a book so challenging and simultaneously so enthralling. I have two perspectives on the book which I shall relate below, in the order in which I had them:
#1 - Scarlett O'Hara might be the quintessential American female epic heroine. I can't think of any other woman who so forcefully shapes her own destiny and the world around her. I'm not saying that all the things she does are terribly moral or even helpful, but Scarlett does do things with an epic flair that is unmatched in American letters, perhaps even world letters. I spent a long day and night trying to come up with any other epic female characters in my meager knowledge of world literature, and I had a hard time. A friend suggested that several of Shakespeare's females were vastly superior to Scarlett O'Hara, and I would agree that the emotional complexity of two or three of Shakespeare's women - Lady MacBeth, Kate from the Taming of the Shrew, and possibly Hamlet's mother - rival that of Scarlett O'Hara, but I definitely would not go so far as to say that they were vastly superior. Scarlett makes her world, and more than anything I think that is the single most important factor for an epic hero or heroine. Furthermore, she is not very likable, which makes her abilities at creation all the more intriguing. By sheer force of will and and a powerful ability to ignore potential obstacles, Scarlett O'Hara figures out the means to survive events that would flatten most people, and then she takes it a step further and figures out a way to turn every situation to her advantage. I feel almost traitorous with what I'm about to write. . . . but these are the very characteristics that make Odysseus so powerful and transcendent. I think that the female persona that Virginia Woolf created throughout her works demolishes Scarlett O'Hara in terms of being epic status and the ability to make the world, but that creation came about over several different books and under the guise of several different characters, all of whom were, of course, Virginia Woolf herself, but I just thought I'd throw that idea out there.
#2 - Margaret Mitchell has crafted a completely adorable version of the South, both before and after the Civil War, which is so wonderful and pleasant that I wouldn't particularly mind having lived in that time and place. Oh wait, I forgot. It's completely fake, absurdly romantic to the point of outrageous fabrication, and quite possibly one of the single largest hoaxes perpetrated in American literature. In Mitchell's Georgia, the slaves love their situations, their is virtually no violence committed against slaves by white people, and the Civil War is presented as an affront to the very dignity of slavery. What the fuck?!? Oh and of the few male characters I remotely connected with, most turned out to be leaders of the local KKK, which was presented as an almost benign organization. Again, what the fuck!?! If people make the mistake of reading Gone With the Wind as any sort of historically accurate portrayal of the American South in the 1860's and 1870's, then it's no wonder Americans are looked on as ignorant brutes by the world. Mitchell lived in the first half of the twentieth century and undoubtedly had access to the works of folks like Mark Twain, who was himself under no illusions about the brutal legacy of American slavery on every soul in the nation. Yet, she seems to have created a South that was nothing by happiness and joy. And the Civil War came along and destroyed that happiness and joy, and damn those Yankees for messing things up. Now, obviously this seems to be the dominant perspective of Scarlett O'Hara, but I have a difficult time believing that Mitchell could so easily present such a malformed notion of one of the central episodes in U.S. history. It's really quite baffling to me. Either she did it intentionally as part of the romanticism of the world created by Scarlett O'Hara and felt readers would be under no illusion that Scarlett's paradigm was itself an illusion of such vast and comic scope that readers would never entertain the notion of it being anything other than farce. Or - there's something more substantial to Mitchell's portrayal of South, something sinister like revisionist history. And I say this because I've been to parts of the South that so directly contradict Mitchell's paradigm, even 150 years later, that I am so pissed at her for even making the implicit argument that underlies so much of the book.
#2.5 - Which leads me to the book I read immediately after Gone With the Wind: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall. The central premise of Randall's book is that Mitchell is a big fat liar when it comes to writing about plantation life, so she takes it upon herself to describe a more realistic version of the events in Gone With the Wind from the perspective of a mulatto slave child fathered by Scarlett's Irish father and Mammy the predominant black female slave in Gone With the Wind. The character is Scarlett's half sister, though as a slave her status in the family is nothing more than property. Randall wondered why Mitchell left out this particularly bleak part of history that was so essential to plantation life: white men raped their female slaves repeatedly in order to create more property thus making them richer. The Wind Done Gone is an incredibly rich look at Gone With the Wind and I suggest that it is required reading for anyone bold enough to take on the dual challenge of Mitchell's book: the first being its daunting length and the second being its fantasy-filled look at historical antebellum Atlanta. Randall, furthermore, is a prose genius. The language of The Wind Done Gone is haunting and beautiful and art of the highest caliber, almost more verse than prose. Cynara, Scarlett's half-sister, tells her reader early her ability to read and write were earned through struggle and she does not take them for granted. It's almost as if Randall is implying that it's easy to romanticize history in the way that Mitchell has done but the truth is hard and vicious and not for the meek, and she intends to communicate that truth in a way that will leave the reader no doubt as to the historical veracity of her work over Mitchell's. There was much controversy surrounding the publication of Randall's book because the Mitchell trust tried to get it from being published, though ultimately they failed, and I am grateful to Randall for writing an antidote to the sweet-tasting poison that Mitchell presents so sumptuously on a silver tray. The Wind Done Gone shows that true literature cannot help but guide us through the trauma and beauty of history with elegance, force, and art.
#1 - Scarlett O'Hara might be the quintessential American female epic heroine. I can't think of any other woman who so forcefully shapes her own destiny and the world around her. I'm not saying that all the things she does are terribly moral or even helpful, but Scarlett does do things with an epic flair that is unmatched in American letters, perhaps even world letters. I spent a long day and night trying to come up with any other epic female characters in my meager knowledge of world literature, and I had a hard time. A friend suggested that several of Shakespeare's females were vastly superior to Scarlett O'Hara, and I would agree that the emotional complexity of two or three of Shakespeare's women - Lady MacBeth, Kate from the Taming of the Shrew, and possibly Hamlet's mother - rival that of Scarlett O'Hara, but I definitely would not go so far as to say that they were vastly superior. Scarlett makes her world, and more than anything I think that is the single most important factor for an epic hero or heroine. Furthermore, she is not very likable, which makes her abilities at creation all the more intriguing. By sheer force of will and and a powerful ability to ignore potential obstacles, Scarlett O'Hara figures out the means to survive events that would flatten most people, and then she takes it a step further and figures out a way to turn every situation to her advantage. I feel almost traitorous with what I'm about to write. . . . but these are the very characteristics that make Odysseus so powerful and transcendent. I think that the female persona that Virginia Woolf created throughout her works demolishes Scarlett O'Hara in terms of being epic status and the ability to make the world, but that creation came about over several different books and under the guise of several different characters, all of whom were, of course, Virginia Woolf herself, but I just thought I'd throw that idea out there.
#2 - Margaret Mitchell has crafted a completely adorable version of the South, both before and after the Civil War, which is so wonderful and pleasant that I wouldn't particularly mind having lived in that time and place. Oh wait, I forgot. It's completely fake, absurdly romantic to the point of outrageous fabrication, and quite possibly one of the single largest hoaxes perpetrated in American literature. In Mitchell's Georgia, the slaves love their situations, their is virtually no violence committed against slaves by white people, and the Civil War is presented as an affront to the very dignity of slavery. What the fuck?!? Oh and of the few male characters I remotely connected with, most turned out to be leaders of the local KKK, which was presented as an almost benign organization. Again, what the fuck!?! If people make the mistake of reading Gone With the Wind as any sort of historically accurate portrayal of the American South in the 1860's and 1870's, then it's no wonder Americans are looked on as ignorant brutes by the world. Mitchell lived in the first half of the twentieth century and undoubtedly had access to the works of folks like Mark Twain, who was himself under no illusions about the brutal legacy of American slavery on every soul in the nation. Yet, she seems to have created a South that was nothing by happiness and joy. And the Civil War came along and destroyed that happiness and joy, and damn those Yankees for messing things up. Now, obviously this seems to be the dominant perspective of Scarlett O'Hara, but I have a difficult time believing that Mitchell could so easily present such a malformed notion of one of the central episodes in U.S. history. It's really quite baffling to me. Either she did it intentionally as part of the romanticism of the world created by Scarlett O'Hara and felt readers would be under no illusion that Scarlett's paradigm was itself an illusion of such vast and comic scope that readers would never entertain the notion of it being anything other than farce. Or - there's something more substantial to Mitchell's portrayal of South, something sinister like revisionist history. And I say this because I've been to parts of the South that so directly contradict Mitchell's paradigm, even 150 years later, that I am so pissed at her for even making the implicit argument that underlies so much of the book.
#2.5 - Which leads me to the book I read immediately after Gone With the Wind: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall. The central premise of Randall's book is that Mitchell is a big fat liar when it comes to writing about plantation life, so she takes it upon herself to describe a more realistic version of the events in Gone With the Wind from the perspective of a mulatto slave child fathered by Scarlett's Irish father and Mammy the predominant black female slave in Gone With the Wind. The character is Scarlett's half sister, though as a slave her status in the family is nothing more than property. Randall wondered why Mitchell left out this particularly bleak part of history that was so essential to plantation life: white men raped their female slaves repeatedly in order to create more property thus making them richer. The Wind Done Gone is an incredibly rich look at Gone With the Wind and I suggest that it is required reading for anyone bold enough to take on the dual challenge of Mitchell's book: the first being its daunting length and the second being its fantasy-filled look at historical antebellum Atlanta. Randall, furthermore, is a prose genius. The language of The Wind Done Gone is haunting and beautiful and art of the highest caliber, almost more verse than prose. Cynara, Scarlett's half-sister, tells her reader early her ability to read and write were earned through struggle and she does not take them for granted. It's almost as if Randall is implying that it's easy to romanticize history in the way that Mitchell has done but the truth is hard and vicious and not for the meek, and she intends to communicate that truth in a way that will leave the reader no doubt as to the historical veracity of her work over Mitchell's. There was much controversy surrounding the publication of Randall's book because the Mitchell trust tried to get it from being published, though ultimately they failed, and I am grateful to Randall for writing an antidote to the sweet-tasting poison that Mitchell presents so sumptuously on a silver tray. The Wind Done Gone shows that true literature cannot help but guide us through the trauma and beauty of history with elegance, force, and art.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
So I finished Oscar Wao, which I'll write about more at a later date after I've had the chance to discuss it with some friends. And I've started Gone With the Wind. I've never seen the movie, which is a benefit in this situation, besides which I have other motives for reading the book.
You see my grandmother is old and very sick and it's her favorite book. I often connect with people via books - I mean there is something incredibly profound about reading someone else's favorite book and then talking about that book together. It's a window into another person's soul, and books are so multi-faceted that you get the joy of figuring out which part of the book touched their soul and then you get to see if any part of the book touched your soul too. Sounds a bit corny, I know, but I seem to spend a lot of time with people yet I often feel that I don't know them, and books are one way to expand any type of relationship.
I'm hoping to expand the relationship with my grandmother through Gone With the Wind. I already have several interesting insights about that book and her personality. But the book is so gall-darn long - my copy is 1,000 pages which is incredibly daunting. I often ask myself: is this 1,000 pages the best possible use of the finite number of pages you will get to read in your life? It's kind of a jacked-up question, but I still ask myself all the same. And so far. . . it's been worth the effort. I'm only 1/3 of the way through so I might change my mind, but it's been an intense ride so far.
You see my grandmother is old and very sick and it's her favorite book. I often connect with people via books - I mean there is something incredibly profound about reading someone else's favorite book and then talking about that book together. It's a window into another person's soul, and books are so multi-faceted that you get the joy of figuring out which part of the book touched their soul and then you get to see if any part of the book touched your soul too. Sounds a bit corny, I know, but I seem to spend a lot of time with people yet I often feel that I don't know them, and books are one way to expand any type of relationship.
I'm hoping to expand the relationship with my grandmother through Gone With the Wind. I already have several interesting insights about that book and her personality. But the book is so gall-darn long - my copy is 1,000 pages which is incredibly daunting. I often ask myself: is this 1,000 pages the best possible use of the finite number of pages you will get to read in your life? It's kind of a jacked-up question, but I still ask myself all the same. And so far. . . it's been worth the effort. I'm only 1/3 of the way through so I might change my mind, but it's been an intense ride so far.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Oscar Wao installment two
I was a bit perturbed before starting chapter three, as you may well have guessed. Then chapter three went and completely blew my mind. I'm almost done with the book, and I must admit that chapter three is the highlight. It's the kind of writing that I fell in love with in college: uber-personal, mini-Marxist press type of stuff that no one was reading or had even heard of. It's like the clandestine shit that was being snuck out of the dictatorial southern Americas in people's asses, but of course Diaz won the Pulitzer so I guess we're 'dealing' with that wicked part of our history that still tends to be largely ignored by everyone except over-educated leftists.
A while back, Dave Eggers edited one of the books in the Best American series. It was something like Best American Non-Required Reading, and I'm pretty sure that it still comes out annually and Eggers is still probably the series editor. That fucker has his hand in just about every pie these days, which is starting to make me suspicious. But I digress. In the one that I read, there was this absolutely insane article about all the horrible things that Saddam Hussein and his sons did to people in the country - things like kidnap the hot daughters of just about anyone they wanted and then do horrible things to them. And when I read this (I was on vacation of course), I was completely terrified by the article, and actually happy for about six months that the Iraq war was in progress because I was convinced that the Hussein family needed to get assassinated or blown up.
So then I go and read and chapter three, and it's this really beautifully written piece that could easily stand on its own, the centerpiece of the artwork that is the book, in my opinion. And it's basically a narrative from the perspective of a family that gets horribly fucked over by a tyrannical dictator who has completely lost all touch with reality, morality, sanity, and has quite clearly embraced solipsism in the worst possible way. And in reading it I'm terrified and traumatized all over again - "it was the end of language, the end of hope. It was the sort of beating that breaks people, breaks them utterly. --- and in the gloaming of her dwindling strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she'd not even had her own name." But then there's the prayer scene which has all the physical anguish of a marathon, only in words, and it probably saved me from putting the book down, but I was still reading with every intention of quitting because I have enough traumatic shit to deal with on a day-to-day basis in my own life without being horribly depressed when I'm home with my family. And then Junot Diaz does something quite brilliant and possibly of the highest nerd order ever. He resuscitates Beli in the name of the comic-sci-fi-miracles that have always occupied a separate part of the literature section of my brain. And I could feel all these synapses connect in that moment, synapses that had never before even conceived of connecting with one another in ways that I thought impossible, if I ever thought of them at all. And it all made sense because in that moment Beli had to be a comic/sci-fi/fantasy superhero. She had to be Superman who lost his entire planet and was orphaned millions of light years away, and she had to be Batman who watched his parents die in front of him and then deal psychotically with the aftershock the rest of his life, and she had to have an animal daemon (Phillip Pullman) that was her soul outside her body act to save her, and I understand now why Diaz uses fantasy literature to describe a person completely oblivious to the world of fantasy literature: "a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequena that you'd need the whole of Mordor to overcome it." So it was worth it.
And Diaz writes this completely amazing chapter using the nerd lexicon he has established early in the book, which is creatively about the coolest thing I've read in eons. And I envy him, because I think I could've pulled something like this off myself, only I never in a million years even conceived of such a thing, which makes Diaz all the more brilliant because I don't think anybody thought of doing something like this, or if they did, I've never heard of it.
So now I'm having trouble ending this email, because I finished the book between when I started writing and this moment, and I really just wanted this to be about chapter 3 which is my favorite part of the book.
A while back, Dave Eggers edited one of the books in the Best American series. It was something like Best American Non-Required Reading, and I'm pretty sure that it still comes out annually and Eggers is still probably the series editor. That fucker has his hand in just about every pie these days, which is starting to make me suspicious. But I digress. In the one that I read, there was this absolutely insane article about all the horrible things that Saddam Hussein and his sons did to people in the country - things like kidnap the hot daughters of just about anyone they wanted and then do horrible things to them. And when I read this (I was on vacation of course), I was completely terrified by the article, and actually happy for about six months that the Iraq war was in progress because I was convinced that the Hussein family needed to get assassinated or blown up.
So then I go and read and chapter three, and it's this really beautifully written piece that could easily stand on its own, the centerpiece of the artwork that is the book, in my opinion. And it's basically a narrative from the perspective of a family that gets horribly fucked over by a tyrannical dictator who has completely lost all touch with reality, morality, sanity, and has quite clearly embraced solipsism in the worst possible way. And in reading it I'm terrified and traumatized all over again - "it was the end of language, the end of hope. It was the sort of beating that breaks people, breaks them utterly. --- and in the gloaming of her dwindling strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she'd not even had her own name." But then there's the prayer scene which has all the physical anguish of a marathon, only in words, and it probably saved me from putting the book down, but I was still reading with every intention of quitting because I have enough traumatic shit to deal with on a day-to-day basis in my own life without being horribly depressed when I'm home with my family. And then Junot Diaz does something quite brilliant and possibly of the highest nerd order ever. He resuscitates Beli in the name of the comic-sci-fi-miracles that have always occupied a separate part of the literature section of my brain. And I could feel all these synapses connect in that moment, synapses that had never before even conceived of connecting with one another in ways that I thought impossible, if I ever thought of them at all. And it all made sense because in that moment Beli had to be a comic/sci-fi/fantasy superhero. She had to be Superman who lost his entire planet and was orphaned millions of light years away, and she had to be Batman who watched his parents die in front of him and then deal psychotically with the aftershock the rest of his life, and she had to have an animal daemon (Phillip Pullman) that was her soul outside her body act to save her, and I understand now why Diaz uses fantasy literature to describe a person completely oblivious to the world of fantasy literature: "a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequena that you'd need the whole of Mordor to overcome it." So it was worth it.
And Diaz writes this completely amazing chapter using the nerd lexicon he has established early in the book, which is creatively about the coolest thing I've read in eons. And I envy him, because I think I could've pulled something like this off myself, only I never in a million years even conceived of such a thing, which makes Diaz all the more brilliant because I don't think anybody thought of doing something like this, or if they did, I've never heard of it.
So now I'm having trouble ending this email, because I finished the book between when I started writing and this moment, and I really just wanted this to be about chapter 3 which is my favorite part of the book.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao...
An update in installments...
I spent an inordinate amount of time as a young writer developing
voice. For essays I came up with a very personal one-on-one voice,
which utilized a lot of contractions, direct address, and even
footnotes to establish a rapport with my readers. Probably the best
compliment a teacher ever gave me was when one of my thesis advisers,
the one who didn't particularly like my thesis mind you, suggested I
send one of my pieces in to McSweeney's for publication. I mention
this because the introduction to Oscar Wao accomplishes all the
writerly-type things that I spent hours trying to figure out so long
ago.
I have been arguing with a mentor for the last two years on the merits
of both first-person and narrative. He is of the opinion that
first-person is a selfish, solipsistic style of writing that leads to
the egomaniacal tendencies of liberal-democratic heads-of-state (and
Dick Cheney). Furthermore he believes that narrative is a leftover
relic of the Victorian era that offers nothing substantive when it
comes to storytelling. I, of course, end up being the conservative in
our arguments when I say that first-person is as reasonable as
third-person or even stream-of-conscious because it is the only truly
legitimate encounter a person can have as they walk the earth -
face-to-face that is. And then I usually go on to argue that
narrative is an absolutely essential characteristic for all humans,
whether it be in storytelling, religion, or even the way in which
one's brain helps one to get through the day. It is how we create
order out of chaos and find beauty in what I believe are ultimately
empty existential realities (depressing I know). And I mention this
because the introduction to Oscar seems to strike a fairly nice
balance between first-person, where the narrator is present but is
telling a story about someone else which is then interspersed with the
first-person perspective of Oscar's sister, and narrative, in that we
get (through the first 75 pages of Oscar's life and his sister's) a
narrative that is not necessarily chronological or even trustworthy
but highly reminiscent of the fragmented way in which most people tend
to walk the earth and encounter others.
So, basically, I enjoyed the shit out of starting the book last night.
It was great. I immediately fell in love with the narrator and the
characters. I liked the hints about the political tones that will
eventually influence the story, but even more I liked Oscar. He has a
good heart, and the older I get the more I look to that one thing -
having a good heart - as the only criterion I use when I think about
the people around me. Some of the kids I knew in high school remind
me a lot of Oscar: they were lonely and thoughtful and many of them
read a lot of 'genre,' because it was a more rewarding relationship
than seemed possible with the ugly-hearted sons-of-bitches around
them. It was an escape from the ugliness that tends to be ubiquitous
if you haven't yet trained yourself to find beauty in the obscure
little spots that beauty tends to hide in. Hell, that was me half the
time too. So I feel a kinship with Oscar right from the start, and it
doesn't really matter that we are separated by race, language, family,
geography, etc, etc.
I wasn't expecting the jump from the narrator of the first chapter to
Oscar's sister in chapter two. It threw me off, and I sort of had to
work my way through the second chapter in a more blue-collar-like
effort than the ease with which I floated through the first 50 pages.
It wasn't that the second chapter was bad (except that the male writer
of the book doesn't seem to pull off female consciousness quite as
seamlessly as I would like), it was just out of the blue and
unexpected, and basically I'm wondering what the fuck happened to
Oscar? And is Junot Diaz just being a narrative cock-tease for
awhile? Because I can handle it, if that's the case, but if the rest
of the book is gonna jump around like this, then I need to prepare
myself.
So that's where I'm at as I head off to read a shorter chunk tonight.
All told I read like 150 pages of text yesterday, only half of which
was Oscar, so I'm a little burned tonight, and if I knew the chapter
one narrator was coming back I'd be ready for another 75 pages, but
I'm predicting some
crazy-backwards-chronological-character-jumping-shit and I don't want
to miss anything
I spent an inordinate amount of time as a young writer developing
voice. For essays I came up with a very personal one-on-one voice,
which utilized a lot of contractions, direct address, and even
footnotes to establish a rapport with my readers. Probably the best
compliment a teacher ever gave me was when one of my thesis advisers,
the one who didn't particularly like my thesis mind you, suggested I
send one of my pieces in to McSweeney's for publication. I mention
this because the introduction to Oscar Wao accomplishes all the
writerly-type things that I spent hours trying to figure out so long
ago.
I have been arguing with a mentor for the last two years on the merits
of both first-person and narrative. He is of the opinion that
first-person is a selfish, solipsistic style of writing that leads to
the egomaniacal tendencies of liberal-democratic heads-of-state (and
Dick Cheney). Furthermore he believes that narrative is a leftover
relic of the Victorian era that offers nothing substantive when it
comes to storytelling. I, of course, end up being the conservative in
our arguments when I say that first-person is as reasonable as
third-person or even stream-of-conscious because it is the only truly
legitimate encounter a person can have as they walk the earth -
face-to-face that is. And then I usually go on to argue that
narrative is an absolutely essential characteristic for all humans,
whether it be in storytelling, religion, or even the way in which
one's brain helps one to get through the day. It is how we create
order out of chaos and find beauty in what I believe are ultimately
empty existential realities (depressing I know). And I mention this
because the introduction to Oscar seems to strike a fairly nice
balance between first-person, where the narrator is present but is
telling a story about someone else which is then interspersed with the
first-person perspective of Oscar's sister, and narrative, in that we
get (through the first 75 pages of Oscar's life and his sister's) a
narrative that is not necessarily chronological or even trustworthy
but highly reminiscent of the fragmented way in which most people tend
to walk the earth and encounter others.
So, basically, I enjoyed the shit out of starting the book last night.
It was great. I immediately fell in love with the narrator and the
characters. I liked the hints about the political tones that will
eventually influence the story, but even more I liked Oscar. He has a
good heart, and the older I get the more I look to that one thing -
having a good heart - as the only criterion I use when I think about
the people around me. Some of the kids I knew in high school remind
me a lot of Oscar: they were lonely and thoughtful and many of them
read a lot of 'genre,' because it was a more rewarding relationship
than seemed possible with the ugly-hearted sons-of-bitches around
them. It was an escape from the ugliness that tends to be ubiquitous
if you haven't yet trained yourself to find beauty in the obscure
little spots that beauty tends to hide in. Hell, that was me half the
time too. So I feel a kinship with Oscar right from the start, and it
doesn't really matter that we are separated by race, language, family,
geography, etc, etc.
I wasn't expecting the jump from the narrator of the first chapter to
Oscar's sister in chapter two. It threw me off, and I sort of had to
work my way through the second chapter in a more blue-collar-like
effort than the ease with which I floated through the first 50 pages.
It wasn't that the second chapter was bad (except that the male writer
of the book doesn't seem to pull off female consciousness quite as
seamlessly as I would like), it was just out of the blue and
unexpected, and basically I'm wondering what the fuck happened to
Oscar? And is Junot Diaz just being a narrative cock-tease for
awhile? Because I can handle it, if that's the case, but if the rest
of the book is gonna jump around like this, then I need to prepare
myself.
So that's where I'm at as I head off to read a shorter chunk tonight.
All told I read like 150 pages of text yesterday, only half of which
was Oscar, so I'm a little burned tonight, and if I knew the chapter
one narrator was coming back I'd be ready for another 75 pages, but
I'm predicting some
crazy-backwards-chronological-
to miss anything
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Monthly Update
Books I’ve bought or otherwise received as a gift in December:
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Claudius the God by Robert Graves
Angler
The Return of Depression Economics by Paul Krugman
The Best in American Sportswriting 2008
A Little History of the World, E.H. Gombrich
Hope on a Tightrope, Dr. Cornel West
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, Nikos Kazantzakis
Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Books that I’ve read completely or at least enough of during the month of December to talk about them to other folk:
I, Claudius
The Archer’s Tale
To Kill a Mockingbird
Claudius the God
The Odyssey
Hope on a Tightrope
Saturnalia
So I started the month by rereading To Kill a Mockingbird with one of my high school classes. I don’t really know how to assign books to high school readers, the fickle little a-literates that they are trying so desperately to remain. So I usually just tell them to read the book some time in the next two months, and then I give them random quizzes to make sure that they are doing at least some of the reading. It’s an incomplete method of which I’m fully aware, but I haven’t found or invented anything better, so for the moment I’m stuck with what I have. But that is a terrible digression that is about teaching far more than it is about reading. And the students have actually done a good job with this book – many were reading ahead of the quizzes because they liked it so much. I was reading ahead of the quizzes myself (I always make new quizzes every year so that I have to be involved in the reading too; otherwise I would probably rest on my laurels and read other things completely unrelated to class).
Long ago I decided that To Kill a Mockingbird was one of my top-five favorite books – being on the list meant that I had to read at least one of the books every year. Other top-fivers from the last decade included: The Lord of the Rings (which counted as one), The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, The Grapes of Wrath, and Little Women. I’m not sure what I would put on a top-five list right now, but I’m pretty sure that To Kill a Mockingbird would remain, especially since I fell in love with it all over again. There are usually one or two emotionally or socially devastating books on the list. If I were making a new list, I’d probably add The Life of Pi, which is at least as emotionally overwhelming as The Grapes of Wrath, just on a more personal level. The Claudius books also have an element of catastrophe and desperation – how goes the emperor goes the empire. And it rarely went well. Cornel West, whom I’ve also been reading a lot of lately, focuses on literature that is catastrophic – literature that so deeply conveys the painfulness of life that the primary reaction is despair. And from despair, Dr. West leads us with unending conviction to either or both resistance and hope. Dr. West’s deeply philosophical readings of literature, music, art, and life tend to follow this line: catastrophe, despair, resistance, and hope. The authors he loves are those who masterfully create catastrophe and despair and conclude by giving readers either the sense of resistance or hope. To Kill a Mockingbird fits this paradigm quite nicely and is, because of it, one of the very best books in American literature. It captures so many of the catastrophic elements that make America the tragic land it is: injustice, hatred, and despair. But it never fully gives in to the tragedies. Instead it tells us that to reach justice and tolerance we need to work harder.
Perhaps because of my recent readings of Dr. Cornel West, I have been wondering without answering the question of how to understand Atticus Finch. He is a highly compassionate man who nonetheless is no dedicated freedom fighter. He takes the case of Tom Robinson because he is asked to by the judge, not because he volunteered or offered his services out of any conviction that an essential injustice was taking place. Of course once he took the case, he did more than necessary and more than another lawyer would have in his place. The only plausible explanation given in the book comes fairly early when he justifies taking the case by telling his daughter Scout essentially that he couldn’t be a parent, or role model, if he shirked his moral duty in this case. The deep irony underlying this comment is that Atticus Finch long ago gave up public practice to focus on wills and contracts and land disputes, while living comfortably in a highly segregated society.
This more nuanced reading makes me suspicious of Atticus Finch in a way that I was not when I read the book in high school. At the same time, it makes Atticus Finch more fully human than I previously thought. I am reminded that Odysseus too had many flaws, and it was those flaws that made him so interesting. The deeply flawed character has come to the fore in the late postmodern period. Odysseus was always this way, which is one of the reasons that his story has survived so successfully for so long. Atticus Finch is another. Two of the other books I’ve read this past month also feature a flawed character in a central role. I, Claudius by Robert Graves and its sequel Claudius the God are the ‘autobiographical’ reminiscences of the Roman Emperor Claudius who ruled in the middle of the first century. Claudius survives the tyrannical rule of his nephew Caligula, his uncle Tiberius, and the machinations of Augustus’s wife Livia primarily because he is partially crippled with a speech impediment. These so-called flaws allow him to be seen as lacking ambition because no one believes he actually has any worthwhile abilities; consequently he is proclaimed Emperor by the Roman military and must then deal with an empire’s worth of machinations rather than just those of his family.
Finally and on a completely unrelated note, I read The Archer’s Tale while on vacation. Having never read anything by Bernard Cornwell, I was unsure what to expect. He’s a good storyteller who researches meticulously to write historical fiction. The book was good, perfect in fact as vacation reading. The story flowed well and the characters, while obviously of the ‘stock’ variety, had enough depth to keep me reading. The book ends rather abruptly, and I suspect that there is either a sequel out that I don’t know about or one in the works just waiting to be published. As for Cornwell, I will keep him in mind for more fun reading.
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Claudius the God by Robert Graves
Angler
The Return of Depression Economics by Paul Krugman
The Best in American Sportswriting 2008
A Little History of the World, E.H. Gombrich
Hope on a Tightrope, Dr. Cornel West
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, Nikos Kazantzakis
Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Books that I’ve read completely or at least enough of during the month of December to talk about them to other folk:
I, Claudius
The Archer’s Tale
To Kill a Mockingbird
Claudius the God
The Odyssey
Hope on a Tightrope
Saturnalia
So I started the month by rereading To Kill a Mockingbird with one of my high school classes. I don’t really know how to assign books to high school readers, the fickle little a-literates that they are trying so desperately to remain. So I usually just tell them to read the book some time in the next two months, and then I give them random quizzes to make sure that they are doing at least some of the reading. It’s an incomplete method of which I’m fully aware, but I haven’t found or invented anything better, so for the moment I’m stuck with what I have. But that is a terrible digression that is about teaching far more than it is about reading. And the students have actually done a good job with this book – many were reading ahead of the quizzes because they liked it so much. I was reading ahead of the quizzes myself (I always make new quizzes every year so that I have to be involved in the reading too; otherwise I would probably rest on my laurels and read other things completely unrelated to class).
Long ago I decided that To Kill a Mockingbird was one of my top-five favorite books – being on the list meant that I had to read at least one of the books every year. Other top-fivers from the last decade included: The Lord of the Rings (which counted as one), The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, The Grapes of Wrath, and Little Women. I’m not sure what I would put on a top-five list right now, but I’m pretty sure that To Kill a Mockingbird would remain, especially since I fell in love with it all over again. There are usually one or two emotionally or socially devastating books on the list. If I were making a new list, I’d probably add The Life of Pi, which is at least as emotionally overwhelming as The Grapes of Wrath, just on a more personal level. The Claudius books also have an element of catastrophe and desperation – how goes the emperor goes the empire. And it rarely went well. Cornel West, whom I’ve also been reading a lot of lately, focuses on literature that is catastrophic – literature that so deeply conveys the painfulness of life that the primary reaction is despair. And from despair, Dr. West leads us with unending conviction to either or both resistance and hope. Dr. West’s deeply philosophical readings of literature, music, art, and life tend to follow this line: catastrophe, despair, resistance, and hope. The authors he loves are those who masterfully create catastrophe and despair and conclude by giving readers either the sense of resistance or hope. To Kill a Mockingbird fits this paradigm quite nicely and is, because of it, one of the very best books in American literature. It captures so many of the catastrophic elements that make America the tragic land it is: injustice, hatred, and despair. But it never fully gives in to the tragedies. Instead it tells us that to reach justice and tolerance we need to work harder.
Perhaps because of my recent readings of Dr. Cornel West, I have been wondering without answering the question of how to understand Atticus Finch. He is a highly compassionate man who nonetheless is no dedicated freedom fighter. He takes the case of Tom Robinson because he is asked to by the judge, not because he volunteered or offered his services out of any conviction that an essential injustice was taking place. Of course once he took the case, he did more than necessary and more than another lawyer would have in his place. The only plausible explanation given in the book comes fairly early when he justifies taking the case by telling his daughter Scout essentially that he couldn’t be a parent, or role model, if he shirked his moral duty in this case. The deep irony underlying this comment is that Atticus Finch long ago gave up public practice to focus on wills and contracts and land disputes, while living comfortably in a highly segregated society.
This more nuanced reading makes me suspicious of Atticus Finch in a way that I was not when I read the book in high school. At the same time, it makes Atticus Finch more fully human than I previously thought. I am reminded that Odysseus too had many flaws, and it was those flaws that made him so interesting. The deeply flawed character has come to the fore in the late postmodern period. Odysseus was always this way, which is one of the reasons that his story has survived so successfully for so long. Atticus Finch is another. Two of the other books I’ve read this past month also feature a flawed character in a central role. I, Claudius by Robert Graves and its sequel Claudius the God are the ‘autobiographical’ reminiscences of the Roman Emperor Claudius who ruled in the middle of the first century. Claudius survives the tyrannical rule of his nephew Caligula, his uncle Tiberius, and the machinations of Augustus’s wife Livia primarily because he is partially crippled with a speech impediment. These so-called flaws allow him to be seen as lacking ambition because no one believes he actually has any worthwhile abilities; consequently he is proclaimed Emperor by the Roman military and must then deal with an empire’s worth of machinations rather than just those of his family.
Finally and on a completely unrelated note, I read The Archer’s Tale while on vacation. Having never read anything by Bernard Cornwell, I was unsure what to expect. He’s a good storyteller who researches meticulously to write historical fiction. The book was good, perfect in fact as vacation reading. The story flowed well and the characters, while obviously of the ‘stock’ variety, had enough depth to keep me reading. The book ends rather abruptly, and I suspect that there is either a sequel out that I don’t know about or one in the works just waiting to be published. As for Cornwell, I will keep him in mind for more fun reading.
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