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.
Friday, August 28, 2009
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.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
A little Zorro anyone?
Isabel Allende is the masterful Latin American author of such classics as The House of Spirits and City of the Beasts. In Zorro, she takes the now infamous character and attempts to trace his origins and influences. She weaves a magical tapestry of indigenous and colonial characters who serve in various roles as mentors or foils to the young Diego de la Vega.
I remember my first encounter with the fox. I was a young boy who was mostly unsupervised during Saturday morning TV viewing. Consequently I ignored the more traditional cartoons and scanned the movie channels for something more exciting. I was delighted when I found "The Adventures of Robin Hood" starring Errol Flynn. It was magnificent swashbuckling at its very best. And that smile. Flynn never loses his smile through highly choreographed fight scenes. A close second was "The Mark of Zorro" starring a fairly dashing Tyrone Power. Little did I know that this was merely the fifth movie featuring the masked crusader and precursor to the comic heroes of today. Tyrone Power was not quite Errol Flynn but his sword fights with Basil Rathbone were the equal of anything done by Errol Flynn. And he did his best to keep a dashing grin plastered to his visage throughout many exploits of daring-do. Then of course, there are the more recent films starring Antonio Banderas, whose Spanish heritage and language provided a slightly more realistic portrayal of the masked hero. (Sorry Tyrone, you were just a little too white to be believable.)
So I jumped at the chance to read Allende's version of the legend who had shaped my childhood. I hoped that Allende would do justice to the hero of justicia. I hoped that she would de-Europeanize an essentially indigenous colonial hero. And in so doing, I hoped that she would not over-intellectualize a character who has more in common with Spiderman than Che Guevara. I lay a tremendous burden on the authors I read, but I felt confident that Allende would be able to pull it off. And for the most part, she did.
Allende's Zorro is mestizo. He is half indigenous American and half European colonizer. Given his heritage, it is no wonder that he would grow to live a life full of conflict. Allende goes about describing his Diego's mestizo heritage in a tricky way. Diego's Spanish father is a coldly efficient man, a father who loves deeply but from a distance, while Diego's india mother and milk-brother Bernardo are cautious yet deeply loving and caring. On the one hand, you have a large cold room in the mansion, while on the other lies the cozy bedroom with a roaring fire, warm blanket, and hot cup of cocoa. In his early years, Diego's life is a balancing act between his heritage. He is expected to be the Don, a wealthy colonial landownder who keeps order, provides for the people, and is above reproach. Yet Diego secretly yearns for the almost mystical life represented by his mother, grandmother, and milk-brother. And before long (this is Zorro after all) Diego finds a way to be both the son of a Don and a living embodiment of the indigenous culture that is slowly being destroyed.
Allende often uses magical realism as a technique to explore the metaphysics of the Americas, and she takes it a step further in this book utilizing what I like to call 'tragic magic realism.' The history of the United States is a violent clash of ideas, cultures, and people, and Allende does not attempt to hide this or write her way out of it. She embraces this history (the tragic) but does so in way that respects it and brings it to life without overly romanticizing it (the magical realism). I think that one major danger she faced was to lose the European heritage of the character, but she manages to narrate his time in Spain in an honest, engaging way. However, Allende does not let the reader lose sight of the cultural struggles that engulf Diego de la Vega. In the Americas, he is confronted with the clash between indiginismo and colonialism, while in Spain he is confronted with the vulgar class violence and nationalism that rocked the Napoleanic Age. Allende adds another layer of complexity by introducing a tribe of Roma, or gypsy, who for ages have been amongst the most discriminated against and persecuted groups in Europe. Members of this tribe become fast friends and mentors to young Diego, which gives him another 'cause' to fight for. Allende's task in taking on the Zorro story was made all the more difficult because he was written essentially as a pulp hero. Yet, she gives Zorro cultural depth and complex emotional issues without turning her novel into some sort of insipid melodrama - no small feat. This is her major accomplishment in this book.
But there are problems - the first and most pressing is the narration. The book begins with a narrative voice that is very dry, bland, and unsentimental. The narrator, whose identity is revealed in the end (though astute readers will figure it out well before then), has absolutely no reason to be so boring, which makes the reading of this book all the more laborous. In the beginning, I fervently hoped that the bland narrative voice would give way to something less formal and more organic, more wholesome, yet this change never occured. It seems that Allende was made aware of this dilemma and tried, during very short interludes, to add more character to the narrator. She failed. Her editor failed. And the book suffers. Aside from an emotionless narrator, the narrative style of this text should have been reconsidered. The narrator is a character in the text looking back on the formative history of Diego de la Vega. A third-person perspective would have accomplished much the same in telling the story and perhaps given Allende a more colorful palette to choose from. Second, Allende has a multi-volume story on her hands. Unfortunately, she chose to pack it all into one book. In addition to bland narration, Zorro suffers from poor pacing and a lack of strong editing. Allende or her editor should have been courageous enough to develop certain characters and scenes at length while leaving others on the cutting-room floor. Instead, there are one or two well-developed characters who reside in a fairly 2-dimensional world. Ultimately, Allende's skill is not put to full use in this novel. Finally, but in relation to the issue of narration, Allende's skill does not shine forth in the words on the page. There is an unacceptable distance between the text and the reader, and it is a distance that absolutely should not exist given the subject, the author, and a potentially vast reading audience of all backgrounds.
Despite its inconsistencies I recommend this book to others. There are many serious political writers in the world and there are many entertaining ones. Allende made her reputation as the former but in Zorro manages to pull of the latter as well. It is a delightful and welcome addition to my bookshelf and can be for yours as well.
I remember my first encounter with the fox. I was a young boy who was mostly unsupervised during Saturday morning TV viewing. Consequently I ignored the more traditional cartoons and scanned the movie channels for something more exciting. I was delighted when I found "The Adventures of Robin Hood" starring Errol Flynn. It was magnificent swashbuckling at its very best. And that smile. Flynn never loses his smile through highly choreographed fight scenes. A close second was "The Mark of Zorro" starring a fairly dashing Tyrone Power. Little did I know that this was merely the fifth movie featuring the masked crusader and precursor to the comic heroes of today. Tyrone Power was not quite Errol Flynn but his sword fights with Basil Rathbone were the equal of anything done by Errol Flynn. And he did his best to keep a dashing grin plastered to his visage throughout many exploits of daring-do. Then of course, there are the more recent films starring Antonio Banderas, whose Spanish heritage and language provided a slightly more realistic portrayal of the masked hero. (Sorry Tyrone, you were just a little too white to be believable.)
So I jumped at the chance to read Allende's version of the legend who had shaped my childhood. I hoped that Allende would do justice to the hero of justicia. I hoped that she would de-Europeanize an essentially indigenous colonial hero. And in so doing, I hoped that she would not over-intellectualize a character who has more in common with Spiderman than Che Guevara. I lay a tremendous burden on the authors I read, but I felt confident that Allende would be able to pull it off. And for the most part, she did.
Allende's Zorro is mestizo. He is half indigenous American and half European colonizer. Given his heritage, it is no wonder that he would grow to live a life full of conflict. Allende goes about describing his Diego's mestizo heritage in a tricky way. Diego's Spanish father is a coldly efficient man, a father who loves deeply but from a distance, while Diego's india mother and milk-brother Bernardo are cautious yet deeply loving and caring. On the one hand, you have a large cold room in the mansion, while on the other lies the cozy bedroom with a roaring fire, warm blanket, and hot cup of cocoa. In his early years, Diego's life is a balancing act between his heritage. He is expected to be the Don, a wealthy colonial landownder who keeps order, provides for the people, and is above reproach. Yet Diego secretly yearns for the almost mystical life represented by his mother, grandmother, and milk-brother. And before long (this is Zorro after all) Diego finds a way to be both the son of a Don and a living embodiment of the indigenous culture that is slowly being destroyed.
Allende often uses magical realism as a technique to explore the metaphysics of the Americas, and she takes it a step further in this book utilizing what I like to call 'tragic magic realism.' The history of the United States is a violent clash of ideas, cultures, and people, and Allende does not attempt to hide this or write her way out of it. She embraces this history (the tragic) but does so in way that respects it and brings it to life without overly romanticizing it (the magical realism). I think that one major danger she faced was to lose the European heritage of the character, but she manages to narrate his time in Spain in an honest, engaging way. However, Allende does not let the reader lose sight of the cultural struggles that engulf Diego de la Vega. In the Americas, he is confronted with the clash between indiginismo and colonialism, while in Spain he is confronted with the vulgar class violence and nationalism that rocked the Napoleanic Age. Allende adds another layer of complexity by introducing a tribe of Roma, or gypsy, who for ages have been amongst the most discriminated against and persecuted groups in Europe. Members of this tribe become fast friends and mentors to young Diego, which gives him another 'cause' to fight for. Allende's task in taking on the Zorro story was made all the more difficult because he was written essentially as a pulp hero. Yet, she gives Zorro cultural depth and complex emotional issues without turning her novel into some sort of insipid melodrama - no small feat. This is her major accomplishment in this book.
But there are problems - the first and most pressing is the narration. The book begins with a narrative voice that is very dry, bland, and unsentimental. The narrator, whose identity is revealed in the end (though astute readers will figure it out well before then), has absolutely no reason to be so boring, which makes the reading of this book all the more laborous. In the beginning, I fervently hoped that the bland narrative voice would give way to something less formal and more organic, more wholesome, yet this change never occured. It seems that Allende was made aware of this dilemma and tried, during very short interludes, to add more character to the narrator. She failed. Her editor failed. And the book suffers. Aside from an emotionless narrator, the narrative style of this text should have been reconsidered. The narrator is a character in the text looking back on the formative history of Diego de la Vega. A third-person perspective would have accomplished much the same in telling the story and perhaps given Allende a more colorful palette to choose from. Second, Allende has a multi-volume story on her hands. Unfortunately, she chose to pack it all into one book. In addition to bland narration, Zorro suffers from poor pacing and a lack of strong editing. Allende or her editor should have been courageous enough to develop certain characters and scenes at length while leaving others on the cutting-room floor. Instead, there are one or two well-developed characters who reside in a fairly 2-dimensional world. Ultimately, Allende's skill is not put to full use in this novel. Finally, but in relation to the issue of narration, Allende's skill does not shine forth in the words on the page. There is an unacceptable distance between the text and the reader, and it is a distance that absolutely should not exist given the subject, the author, and a potentially vast reading audience of all backgrounds.
Despite its inconsistencies I recommend this book to others. There are many serious political writers in the world and there are many entertaining ones. Allende made her reputation as the former but in Zorro manages to pull of the latter as well. It is a delightful and welcome addition to my bookshelf and can be for yours as well.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Whatever happened to Scout?
I am not a terribly good reader of non-fiction. I've done my fair share so far with graduate school and all on my resume, but I was never particularly delighted by the whole thing. I cannot pinpoint my internal angst over the "real" stuff. My father, who taught me to read primarily by modeling what an avid reader does, is a prolific reader of non-fiction - two or three books a week if he can afford to get new ones. (The library long ago banned my family from its cozy confines.) And when he can't get anything new he just rereads the books in his thousand-deep library. (He suffers from an inability to read fiction. Go figure.) My mother is a librarian. Given this literary genealogy, you'd think that I'd be okay with books of all sorts, but the non-fiction tomes usually elicit a grimace followed by avoidance or a deep sigh that presages a Sisyphisian-like effort. I'll read 'em, but by god I won't be liking it.
Unless a book's author is a member of or devotee to the Frankfurt School, I really don't have the sustained ability to read non-fiction. There's very little inherent puzzle-solving in the genre. It's very tiered and organized and nicely laid out for the detail-oriented types who get into such things. I prefer the psychological zaniness that comes from narrative, that macabre technique that attempts to bring individual structure to pyschological chaos. And I like mysteries (not only the genre but in general). Fiction in its various forms tends often to be about mystery and puzzle-solving, which I suspect is why I love it so. Good fiction is like finding yourself in a new city without a map, a friend, or any food. Survival becomes a matter of some urgency, and you have only your wits to guide you. It's quite a thrill. (When reading a favorite author the situation is the same except you've got that friend encouraging you along your journey.)
Recently though I took a delightful stroll through a rather interesting piece of non-fiction. Mockingbird by Charles Shields is a brilliant biography of the infamously shy and notoriously quick-tongued Nelle Harper Lee, beloved author of To Kill a Mockingbird. While Shields' writing is more Beverly Cleary than Frederic Jameson, his investigative skill is top-notch. Lee quit giving interviews several decades back and never appreciated public attempts to intrude on her private life. This made Shields' task significantly more difficult, yet he somehow manages to paint a mysterious and deeply enduring picture of an author who wrote not merely of an era but of the entirety of American history through the eyes of a precocious pre-pubescent.
Most astute readers figure out the deeply autobiographical features of To Kill a Mockingbird quite early on, and many are left wondering whatever happened to young Scout, serious Jem, and the other residents of Maycomb. (Of course, there is very little mystery left surrounding young Dill, except perhaps the source of Capote's deep suspicion of those who dared love him.) Lee never wrote anything else, despite several different on-going projects, and has quietly slipped into the mists of her fictional alter-ego, Jean Louise. Yet the real Nelle Harper Lee is alive and well, living an active life in Monroeville, Alabama (the source of the fictional Maycomb), with annual sojourns to New York City, the town that nurtured her budding genius. Shields does an excellent job of charting Nelle's life in tiny, yet thriving, Monroeville up to the success of her first and only book. He finds long-lost friends, antagonistic sororiety sisters, and fellow literary aspirants, all of whom spoke candidly about the brash young Nelle. Lee became quite famous during the decade or so following the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, and Shields keep readers informed of the most historically documented portion of her life. Then he uses his impressive research skills to speculate on the last 4 decades of her life. He reaches very few solid conclusions, though his speculations are sound, fair, and obviously the result of a someone who loved her book as much as the rest of us.
In the end, he does justice to the book, the author, and to the mystery that continually surrounds Nelle Harper Lee. I don't make it through many of the "real" ones, but this one is excellent, well worth the time and the puzzle.
Unless a book's author is a member of or devotee to the Frankfurt School, I really don't have the sustained ability to read non-fiction. There's very little inherent puzzle-solving in the genre. It's very tiered and organized and nicely laid out for the detail-oriented types who get into such things. I prefer the psychological zaniness that comes from narrative, that macabre technique that attempts to bring individual structure to pyschological chaos. And I like mysteries (not only the genre but in general). Fiction in its various forms tends often to be about mystery and puzzle-solving, which I suspect is why I love it so. Good fiction is like finding yourself in a new city without a map, a friend, or any food. Survival becomes a matter of some urgency, and you have only your wits to guide you. It's quite a thrill. (When reading a favorite author the situation is the same except you've got that friend encouraging you along your journey.)
Recently though I took a delightful stroll through a rather interesting piece of non-fiction. Mockingbird by Charles Shields is a brilliant biography of the infamously shy and notoriously quick-tongued Nelle Harper Lee, beloved author of To Kill a Mockingbird. While Shields' writing is more Beverly Cleary than Frederic Jameson, his investigative skill is top-notch. Lee quit giving interviews several decades back and never appreciated public attempts to intrude on her private life. This made Shields' task significantly more difficult, yet he somehow manages to paint a mysterious and deeply enduring picture of an author who wrote not merely of an era but of the entirety of American history through the eyes of a precocious pre-pubescent.
Most astute readers figure out the deeply autobiographical features of To Kill a Mockingbird quite early on, and many are left wondering whatever happened to young Scout, serious Jem, and the other residents of Maycomb. (Of course, there is very little mystery left surrounding young Dill, except perhaps the source of Capote's deep suspicion of those who dared love him.) Lee never wrote anything else, despite several different on-going projects, and has quietly slipped into the mists of her fictional alter-ego, Jean Louise. Yet the real Nelle Harper Lee is alive and well, living an active life in Monroeville, Alabama (the source of the fictional Maycomb), with annual sojourns to New York City, the town that nurtured her budding genius. Shields does an excellent job of charting Nelle's life in tiny, yet thriving, Monroeville up to the success of her first and only book. He finds long-lost friends, antagonistic sororiety sisters, and fellow literary aspirants, all of whom spoke candidly about the brash young Nelle. Lee became quite famous during the decade or so following the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, and Shields keep readers informed of the most historically documented portion of her life. Then he uses his impressive research skills to speculate on the last 4 decades of her life. He reaches very few solid conclusions, though his speculations are sound, fair, and obviously the result of a someone who loved her book as much as the rest of us.
In the end, he does justice to the book, the author, and to the mystery that continually surrounds Nelle Harper Lee. I don't make it through many of the "real" ones, but this one is excellent, well worth the time and the puzzle.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Of Mice and Men
I just finished reading Of Mice and Men with one of my high school classes. I had never read it before and my students had barely read anything before, so it was a perfect fit. It was a great book to learn about the nuances of relationships. It's also great because you have to be a detective-reader and discover those nuances in between the commas, from page to page. Steinbeck is not out to trick you, but he wants to paint a complete picture. And he wants you to look at it.
One source of conflict in the book comes from an emotionally unstable housewife. She is never given a name, though her crude interruptions in the lives of the other characters results in the loss of the American dream. "The bitch" as she came to be called in my class is a walking bundle of loneliness, and her only means of creating her community is through her overdeveloped sexuality. Interestingly, she was the most talked about character in class, though she was one of the least prominent in the narrative. The scene between her and slow-minded Lennie was probably one of the most interesting pieces of dialogue I have read in quite some time. There are two people talking at each other, though it is quite clear they aren't talking to each other. The absolute absurdity of the situation does nothing to mitigate the impending disaster, which makes Steinbeck the undisputed master of contemporary realism . Steinbeck's writing in this scene is sheer brilliance. More than the much-ballyhooed ending, this scene is easily the best in the book. The tragedy is all the more powerful because it is shared evenly between Lennie and Curly's wife, and because their lives are destined to end in this particular circumstance. Lennie's fate is sealed simply because he lives in a world with women. George tries his hardest to create a world where women are all but non-exisistent, but George knows the first time he sees Curly's wife that Lennie's life is in danger. Curly's wife, bitch though she is, was destined to die at the hands of a man, and her tragedy is being trapped on an all-male ranch. It is a destiny she laments to anyone who will listen. I coulda been in pictures, she announces repeatedly, though no one understands the plea behind this ego-driven statement. She has no words to say, "Get me outta here," though she screams it with every fiber of her being. It was inevitable that the two would find each other and end each other.
There is a disturbingly journalistic quality to the portrayal of race relations in this book. Derogatory words are thrown around casually, and Curly's wife's threats to Crooks, the black stable-worker, are depressing to modern readers given their absolute matter-of-factness. Curly's wife lives a nearly powerless existence, yet she takes a perverse joy in tormenting the only person in a worse situation than her. Crooks for his part reminds me of Tiresias, the blind prophet who haunts ancient Greek literature. There is a somber quality to his pronouncements, though he knows how to survive better than anyone else in the text. He knows before anyone else that the American dream they all seek is a mirage. Yet he too finds a way to believe, to see the vision on the hill, if only for a few minutes. And it is at this point that the text reaches its pinnacle, only to plunge downwards a few brushstrokes later.
If you haven't read this book, you should. It is short and beautiful - more beautiful, I think, than any of Steinbeck's other works save perhaps The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck had the courage to go where Twain only hinted at going in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - he took the narrative to its logical conclusion given his understanding of the world. Twain chickens out at the end Huck Finn, bringing in the endlessly Romantic Tom Sawyer to initiate a fantasy conclusion. Steinbeck points to a happy ending and brutally but perhaps necessarily rips it away to reveal it as the fantasy it always was. That is the truth of the American Dream for all but the most fantastic of us all.
One source of conflict in the book comes from an emotionally unstable housewife. She is never given a name, though her crude interruptions in the lives of the other characters results in the loss of the American dream. "The bitch" as she came to be called in my class is a walking bundle of loneliness, and her only means of creating her community is through her overdeveloped sexuality. Interestingly, she was the most talked about character in class, though she was one of the least prominent in the narrative. The scene between her and slow-minded Lennie was probably one of the most interesting pieces of dialogue I have read in quite some time. There are two people talking at each other, though it is quite clear they aren't talking to each other. The absolute absurdity of the situation does nothing to mitigate the impending disaster, which makes Steinbeck the undisputed master of contemporary realism . Steinbeck's writing in this scene is sheer brilliance. More than the much-ballyhooed ending, this scene is easily the best in the book. The tragedy is all the more powerful because it is shared evenly between Lennie and Curly's wife, and because their lives are destined to end in this particular circumstance. Lennie's fate is sealed simply because he lives in a world with women. George tries his hardest to create a world where women are all but non-exisistent, but George knows the first time he sees Curly's wife that Lennie's life is in danger. Curly's wife, bitch though she is, was destined to die at the hands of a man, and her tragedy is being trapped on an all-male ranch. It is a destiny she laments to anyone who will listen. I coulda been in pictures, she announces repeatedly, though no one understands the plea behind this ego-driven statement. She has no words to say, "Get me outta here," though she screams it with every fiber of her being. It was inevitable that the two would find each other and end each other.
There is a disturbingly journalistic quality to the portrayal of race relations in this book. Derogatory words are thrown around casually, and Curly's wife's threats to Crooks, the black stable-worker, are depressing to modern readers given their absolute matter-of-factness. Curly's wife lives a nearly powerless existence, yet she takes a perverse joy in tormenting the only person in a worse situation than her. Crooks for his part reminds me of Tiresias, the blind prophet who haunts ancient Greek literature. There is a somber quality to his pronouncements, though he knows how to survive better than anyone else in the text. He knows before anyone else that the American dream they all seek is a mirage. Yet he too finds a way to believe, to see the vision on the hill, if only for a few minutes. And it is at this point that the text reaches its pinnacle, only to plunge downwards a few brushstrokes later.
If you haven't read this book, you should. It is short and beautiful - more beautiful, I think, than any of Steinbeck's other works save perhaps The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck had the courage to go where Twain only hinted at going in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - he took the narrative to its logical conclusion given his understanding of the world. Twain chickens out at the end Huck Finn, bringing in the endlessly Romantic Tom Sawyer to initiate a fantasy conclusion. Steinbeck points to a happy ending and brutally but perhaps necessarily rips it away to reveal it as the fantasy it always was. That is the truth of the American Dream for all but the most fantastic of us all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)