Disgrace
Penguin :: 2000 :: 224 pp. :: $14.00 :: paperback
Read for the Complete Booker Challenge -- winner in 1999.
"For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well," opens Coetzee's slim, coolly-narrated novel of a middle-aged, divorced professor at a South Africa university named David Lurie who has, in fact, not solved the problem of sex very well at all. Regular appointments with a prostitute eventually don't suffice to quell his fears of aging, and so he seduces a young student in his class named Melanie, not even realizing how close he comes to destroying the girl. When the affair comes out and David refuses to apologize, he's fired.
From there what has been a claustrophobic, evenly-paced story of academic sterility expands messily outwards, sending David out to the country where his lesbian daughter Lucy is eking out a living from the land. There, what at first seems to be an entirely different story begins. Living with Lucy, David helps a plain woman named Bev put down sick dogs, and begins to write a libretto on Byron, whom he takes as a romantic idol. Only when a horrific act of violence is committed on himself and Lucy by do things really fall apart, however. Then the romantic, complacent, masculine solipsism with which David has always been able to view his life really undergoes a challenge. The problem of sex and the problem of power, so terrifically manifest in the novel's setting of post-apartheid South Africa, come to seem similar, even as one.
"Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone," David says to Melanie when he cajoles her to stay the night, in the beginning of the book. "It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it." He quotes Shakespeare to support his point, but the point is no longer appropriate, no longer acceptable, in our time. In fact it is merely a prelude to the violence of rape, and the novel takes us through the spectrum of violence and violation with a dooming sure-footedness.
I found this book subjectively difficult to get into, because its sexist, oblivious protagonist was naturally, immediately antagonistic to my sensibilities. But the book seems to draw back from David further and further as more characters from lower in the hierarchy of social power are allowed to view him, and to speak. The terror that enters the book when David and Lucy are attacked, the sheer physical horror of it, is like a release of tension from all the subtler attacks that David carries out earlier on in the novel, not only on Melanie but on the prostitute he believes he's treating well, the daughter he believes he's a good father to. They say there's no surer way to create sympathy for a character than to punish him far more than he deserves for a small sin, but the irony of it is that David's crimes against others are inextricably linked to the crimes committed against him.
Eventually, David begins to change his libretto and give Byron's women a voice. As he does so, he makes an attempt, which I see as doomed, to understand his daughter. Befitting the large and unsolvable problems with which it grapples, Disgrace doesn't wrap things up tidily at the end, not even, really, with a complete redemption for its protagonist. The David Lurie we see at the end of the novel is still a product of his environment, still essentially rooted in the power structure to which he belongs, and still easily recognizable as the same crudely, deeply flawed man he was when he was visiting the prostitute every week -- but the story and the subtle change in his perspective are all the more moving for that.
In Summary: Complex and beautiful and quietly moving despite its theme of violence. I highly recommend this book and definitely expect to pick it up many more times throughout my life.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Monday, October 29, 2007
Monday, October 22, 2007
The Stars, Like Dust (Isaac Asimov)
The Stars, Like Dust
Fawcett Crest :: 1950 :: 192 pp. :: paperback (out of print)
In Isaac Asimov's first novel, a part of what I can only imagine must be the painfully boring Empire trilogy, a young man named Biron Farrell wakes up to discover a plot on his life and, his father having been assassinated, jumps on a spaceship with a beautiful, spirited young woman and her caustic uncle to overthrow an intergalactic empire run by the Tyranni, who mostly just collect taxes and assassinate insurgents and wield a "neuron whip" that sounds kind of cool but doesn't exactly save the book.
Apart from an overly simplistic plot riddled with facile moral judgments and a lack of real interest or engagement with the social issues inherent in the fictional world, one of the novel's major flaws is in its characterization. The protagonist, in particular, is a sort of spineless, shapeless reactor to events around him, whose only major characteristic is an unconscious male chauvinism mirrored by the narrative itself.
Artemesia, the protagonist, fatefully sharing a name with a painter famous for being a victim of rape and torture, is introduced like a rather one-note imitation of a Katherine Hepburn heroine. She is spirited and not quite willing to stay within the bounds of propriety in her oddly old-fashioned yet space-travelling culture (a place where she wears skirts and makeup, premarital sex is somewhat frowned upon for women, and she is in danger of being essentially forced into an unwanted marriage). But, of course, rather like Hepburn, she is tamed by a good kiss from a decent man, even retracting her oh-so-bitchy opinions about the quality of food aboard her spaceship as a peace offering. (Though with Hepburn, there was arguably a disconnect between textual tamings of the shrew and the sense that her spirit was never defeated and would resurrect itself, if not by the end of the film, by the beginning of the next. Artemesia sort of just lies down and dies.)
There is little of political interest in this fairly straightforward parable, as one would expect when the villains are actually named "Tyranni." It's a thin novel, a pale, pasty story, with no real conclusion but also no real need to read to the next installment, and the only real interest it had for me was in the blatant misogyny. I know it was 1951, but come on!
In Summary: Graceless and backwards, Asimov's earliest novel is deeply underwhelming.
Fawcett Crest :: 1950 :: 192 pp. :: paperback (out of print)
In Isaac Asimov's first novel, a part of what I can only imagine must be the painfully boring Empire trilogy, a young man named Biron Farrell wakes up to discover a plot on his life and, his father having been assassinated, jumps on a spaceship with a beautiful, spirited young woman and her caustic uncle to overthrow an intergalactic empire run by the Tyranni, who mostly just collect taxes and assassinate insurgents and wield a "neuron whip" that sounds kind of cool but doesn't exactly save the book.
Apart from an overly simplistic plot riddled with facile moral judgments and a lack of real interest or engagement with the social issues inherent in the fictional world, one of the novel's major flaws is in its characterization. The protagonist, in particular, is a sort of spineless, shapeless reactor to events around him, whose only major characteristic is an unconscious male chauvinism mirrored by the narrative itself.
Artemesia, the protagonist, fatefully sharing a name with a painter famous for being a victim of rape and torture, is introduced like a rather one-note imitation of a Katherine Hepburn heroine. She is spirited and not quite willing to stay within the bounds of propriety in her oddly old-fashioned yet space-travelling culture (a place where she wears skirts and makeup, premarital sex is somewhat frowned upon for women, and she is in danger of being essentially forced into an unwanted marriage). But, of course, rather like Hepburn, she is tamed by a good kiss from a decent man, even retracting her oh-so-bitchy opinions about the quality of food aboard her spaceship as a peace offering. (Though with Hepburn, there was arguably a disconnect between textual tamings of the shrew and the sense that her spirit was never defeated and would resurrect itself, if not by the end of the film, by the beginning of the next. Artemesia sort of just lies down and dies.)
There is little of political interest in this fairly straightforward parable, as one would expect when the villains are actually named "Tyranni." It's a thin novel, a pale, pasty story, with no real conclusion but also no real need to read to the next installment, and the only real interest it had for me was in the blatant misogyny. I know it was 1951, but come on!
In Summary: Graceless and backwards, Asimov's earliest novel is deeply underwhelming.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
The Lovely Bones
Little, Brown and Company :: 2002 :: Hardcover :: 328 pp. :: $21.95
I assume most people remember when this book was all the rage with the book-club crowd. I saw so many people reading it and heard it recommended by so many of my classmates in high school; Oprah loved it; even Seventeen magazine, which I subscribed to for years, carried an excerpt in its glossy pages. For those who don't know yet, it's a novel narrated by a murdered child named Susie Salmon who looks down from heaven onto the people she left behind. The hype, combined with the prose of the excerpt, which was a little too precious for my tastes, made me completely unappetized by the idea of ever reading it.
But then I went shopping last weekend and, in the middle of a Victoria's Secret dressing room, found a slightly-beaten-up copy of The Lovely Bones sitting on the dressing room table. It said "Not Lost -- Free!" on a Post-It on the front, and was apparently a Book Crossing book. My roommate had once found one, so I knew that it was a sort of system where people leave books in public places for the next person to pick up, read, and pass on. The website keeps track of every book's comings and goings.
There's something delicious and romantic about finding an unexpected book left behind as if just for you. In a crowded store with an impatient line for the dressing rooms, the woman who had left it there somehow got out of the dressing room at a moment my back was turned, so I never saw her. I was excited about my magical find for days, although most of my friends, being less fetishistic than I am about their books, didn't really get why I found it so cool (hopefully some readers of this blog will!).
So I read the book, and to my surprise, I found it absorbing. The concept is original, and the execution is, though trite in exactly the ways you'd expect from a book set in heaven, still graceful. Susie, of course, is one of those schizoid child narrators you find in literature, with frequent deep insights into human nature and excellent vocabulary and poetic syntax, but with random interludes of naivete and simplicity thrown in there to remind you she's a child. She watches her parents' marriage suffer from her death, watches her sister and brother grow up deeply marked by her absence, watches her murderer and her childhood sweetheart and a young woman from her school grow up in the shadow of her murder. The first part of the novel is often moving while it deals with grief, but the end sprawls out over years and meanders to a resolution far too tidy for such a story.
If Sebold had, perhaps, focused more on Lindsey, Susie's slightly-younger sister, who hardens herself in reaction to the murder, I would have enjoyed it more. Dead!Susie's relationship to her sister is part envy, part passionate identification: Lindsey is a kind of surrogate life, the only one of the two who gets to grow up, so Susie follows her through her coming-of-age. "I roved where she roved," Susie says; "in watching her I found I could get lost more than with anyone else." The strange, asymmetrical relationship between the longing Susie and the scarred Lindsey strikes at the heart of sibling-hood in a unique way.
But Lindsey's story is interwoven with those of other characters, most of which I found boring and cliched. I thought that the "miraculous event" promised by the book jacket was hokey, and that for the last 100 pages or so it seemed the novel was simply wandering around in search of an ending (which, when found, was imbued with too much sense of its own meaningful-ness to be effective).
In Summary: I was right to expect that it wasn't my kind of book, but am glad I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Now I'm off to leave it at Darwin's, my favorite hippie sandwich place in Cambridge. Maybe Ben 'n' Jen will find it!
Little, Brown and Company :: 2002 :: Hardcover :: 328 pp. :: $21.95
I assume most people remember when this book was all the rage with the book-club crowd. I saw so many people reading it and heard it recommended by so many of my classmates in high school; Oprah loved it; even Seventeen magazine, which I subscribed to for years, carried an excerpt in its glossy pages. For those who don't know yet, it's a novel narrated by a murdered child named Susie Salmon who looks down from heaven onto the people she left behind. The hype, combined with the prose of the excerpt, which was a little too precious for my tastes, made me completely unappetized by the idea of ever reading it.
But then I went shopping last weekend and, in the middle of a Victoria's Secret dressing room, found a slightly-beaten-up copy of The Lovely Bones sitting on the dressing room table. It said "Not Lost -- Free!" on a Post-It on the front, and was apparently a Book Crossing book. My roommate had once found one, so I knew that it was a sort of system where people leave books in public places for the next person to pick up, read, and pass on. The website keeps track of every book's comings and goings.
There's something delicious and romantic about finding an unexpected book left behind as if just for you. In a crowded store with an impatient line for the dressing rooms, the woman who had left it there somehow got out of the dressing room at a moment my back was turned, so I never saw her. I was excited about my magical find for days, although most of my friends, being less fetishistic than I am about their books, didn't really get why I found it so cool (hopefully some readers of this blog will!).
So I read the book, and to my surprise, I found it absorbing. The concept is original, and the execution is, though trite in exactly the ways you'd expect from a book set in heaven, still graceful. Susie, of course, is one of those schizoid child narrators you find in literature, with frequent deep insights into human nature and excellent vocabulary and poetic syntax, but with random interludes of naivete and simplicity thrown in there to remind you she's a child. She watches her parents' marriage suffer from her death, watches her sister and brother grow up deeply marked by her absence, watches her murderer and her childhood sweetheart and a young woman from her school grow up in the shadow of her murder. The first part of the novel is often moving while it deals with grief, but the end sprawls out over years and meanders to a resolution far too tidy for such a story.
If Sebold had, perhaps, focused more on Lindsey, Susie's slightly-younger sister, who hardens herself in reaction to the murder, I would have enjoyed it more. Dead!Susie's relationship to her sister is part envy, part passionate identification: Lindsey is a kind of surrogate life, the only one of the two who gets to grow up, so Susie follows her through her coming-of-age. "I roved where she roved," Susie says; "in watching her I found I could get lost more than with anyone else." The strange, asymmetrical relationship between the longing Susie and the scarred Lindsey strikes at the heart of sibling-hood in a unique way.
But Lindsey's story is interwoven with those of other characters, most of which I found boring and cliched. I thought that the "miraculous event" promised by the book jacket was hokey, and that for the last 100 pages or so it seemed the novel was simply wandering around in search of an ending (which, when found, was imbued with too much sense of its own meaningful-ness to be effective).
In Summary: I was right to expect that it wasn't my kind of book, but am glad I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Now I'm off to leave it at Darwin's, my favorite hippie sandwich place in Cambridge. Maybe Ben 'n' Jen will find it!
Saturday, October 13, 2007
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie on Amazon
Everyman's Library :: 2004 :: 512 pp. :: $18.69
Read for the Unread Authors Challenge.
I don't know what I was expecting from this novel. Something prim and old-fashioned, from the "Miss Jean Brodie," something long-drawn-out and Dickensian, from "Prime"; really, I sort of expected to be bored. This was why Spark had remained on my list of authors to be read for so long.
In any case, I was very much not bored. The novel does take place at a prim, old-fashioned boarding school and spans a long period of time, but it's far from prim or old-fashioned itself. Rather, it reads like (what it is:) a New Yorker story stretched out into a novel. Spark tells of the five girls who make up the "Brodie set," a group of young women being educated by a woman named Miss Jean Brodie, who is in her prime, and who is, essentially, the school nutcase. The mystery of the novel is which of the girls betrayed Miss Brodie.
Really, though, far from a mystery, this is a sort of group coming-of-age novel. The girls' minds are opened by Miss Brodie to all sorts of insights about life -- particularly love and sex -- that they are not quite ready for. At first Miss Brodie is their absolute hero. Then, as they grow older, they learn to be skeptical. They learn to judge for themselves. And it's never quite clear whether Miss Brodie herself got crazier, or whether the girls just couldn't recognize it before.
The voice is quiet and sure and graceful in its quirkiness. It describes the five girls of the "Brodie set" in terms of what they are famous for, repeating each often -- whether they are famous for sex, stupidity, mathematics, etc. -- and this is certainly one of the most memorable stylistic tics of the book. In general the narration is distant and playful, not quite omniscient, but close to the girls' perspective, drawing closer, later on, to the mind of one of them without quite entering it.
I don't want to describe this book too much for fear of giving it away, and yet the only way I think I can tell why I loved it is to... give it away. Let me leave off the review with a quotation, one of the most memorable passages in the book. It describes the death of one of the girls years after the main events of the novel (we find out the futures of the other girls, too, though not quite as memorably as this).
"...[She] never again referred her mind to Miss Brodie, but had got over her misery, and had relapsed into her habitual slow bewilderment, before she died while on leave in Cumberland in a fire in the hotel. back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, through the thickening smoke. She ran one way; then, turning, the other way; and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her. She heard no screams, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no scream, for the smoke was choking her. She ran into somebody on her third turn, stumbled, and died. But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss Brodie's pupils."
It's this kind of thing, this strange telescoping through time, that made the novel so magical. As if all the things that happened in the girls' lives, though completely separate and not causally related, were still, somehow, contained and made meaningful within each moment of their childhoods.
In Summary: Highly recommended when you're in the mood for something different.
Everyman's Library :: 2004 :: 512 pp. :: $18.69
Read for the Unread Authors Challenge.
I don't know what I was expecting from this novel. Something prim and old-fashioned, from the "Miss Jean Brodie," something long-drawn-out and Dickensian, from "Prime"; really, I sort of expected to be bored. This was why Spark had remained on my list of authors to be read for so long.
In any case, I was very much not bored. The novel does take place at a prim, old-fashioned boarding school and spans a long period of time, but it's far from prim or old-fashioned itself. Rather, it reads like (what it is:) a New Yorker story stretched out into a novel. Spark tells of the five girls who make up the "Brodie set," a group of young women being educated by a woman named Miss Jean Brodie, who is in her prime, and who is, essentially, the school nutcase. The mystery of the novel is which of the girls betrayed Miss Brodie.
Really, though, far from a mystery, this is a sort of group coming-of-age novel. The girls' minds are opened by Miss Brodie to all sorts of insights about life -- particularly love and sex -- that they are not quite ready for. At first Miss Brodie is their absolute hero. Then, as they grow older, they learn to be skeptical. They learn to judge for themselves. And it's never quite clear whether Miss Brodie herself got crazier, or whether the girls just couldn't recognize it before.
The voice is quiet and sure and graceful in its quirkiness. It describes the five girls of the "Brodie set" in terms of what they are famous for, repeating each often -- whether they are famous for sex, stupidity, mathematics, etc. -- and this is certainly one of the most memorable stylistic tics of the book. In general the narration is distant and playful, not quite omniscient, but close to the girls' perspective, drawing closer, later on, to the mind of one of them without quite entering it.
I don't want to describe this book too much for fear of giving it away, and yet the only way I think I can tell why I loved it is to... give it away. Let me leave off the review with a quotation, one of the most memorable passages in the book. It describes the death of one of the girls years after the main events of the novel (we find out the futures of the other girls, too, though not quite as memorably as this).
"...[She] never again referred her mind to Miss Brodie, but had got over her misery, and had relapsed into her habitual slow bewilderment, before she died while on leave in Cumberland in a fire in the hotel. back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, through the thickening smoke. She ran one way; then, turning, the other way; and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her. She heard no screams, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no scream, for the smoke was choking her. She ran into somebody on her third turn, stumbled, and died. But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss Brodie's pupils."
It's this kind of thing, this strange telescoping through time, that made the novel so magical. As if all the things that happened in the girls' lives, though completely separate and not causally related, were still, somehow, contained and made meaningful within each moment of their childhoods.
In Summary: Highly recommended when you're in the mood for something different.
Monday, October 8, 2007
Jailbird (Kurt Vonnegut)
Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut
Dial Press Trade Paperback :: 1999 :: 320 pp.
For the Unread Authors Challenge, Book #1.
I picked this up because Galapagos and Cat's Cradle had already been checked out of the library, and I very much enjoyed it. It basically follows a "Harvard man" in his first days out of jail for his involvement in the Watergate scandal; the biggest preoccupation is his betrayal of an old friend during the McCarthy era. He has only loved four women, and he mentions each of them.
I felt quite off-balance reading this short little book, which didn't surprise me, given what I've heard of its author. I enjoyed the snappy humor, particularly when directed at the concept of the "Harvard man" ("I've heard you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much") -- I'm always, narcissistically, intrigued by literary portrayals of my venerable school -- and I liked the portrayal of the central character, who was very fully-developed and human and kind of crazy.
I wonder if I should've started with one of the classics. If I had read Jailbird out of context I would not, despite its dealings with major complications in American history, have immediately pegged it as an Important Book. Next I'll read Slaughterhouse 5 or Cat's Cradle. But I will certainly continue to read Vonnegut's work.
In Summary: A solid read.
Dial Press Trade Paperback :: 1999 :: 320 pp.
For the Unread Authors Challenge, Book #1.
I picked this up because Galapagos and Cat's Cradle had already been checked out of the library, and I very much enjoyed it. It basically follows a "Harvard man" in his first days out of jail for his involvement in the Watergate scandal; the biggest preoccupation is his betrayal of an old friend during the McCarthy era. He has only loved four women, and he mentions each of them.
I felt quite off-balance reading this short little book, which didn't surprise me, given what I've heard of its author. I enjoyed the snappy humor, particularly when directed at the concept of the "Harvard man" ("I've heard you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much") -- I'm always, narcissistically, intrigued by literary portrayals of my venerable school -- and I liked the portrayal of the central character, who was very fully-developed and human and kind of crazy.
I wonder if I should've started with one of the classics. If I had read Jailbird out of context I would not, despite its dealings with major complications in American history, have immediately pegged it as an Important Book. Next I'll read Slaughterhouse 5 or Cat's Cradle. But I will certainly continue to read Vonnegut's work.
In Summary: A solid read.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Miscellany
Sexing the Cherry (Jeanette Winterson)
1998 :: Grove Press :: 192pp. :: $12.00
My latest read, and I don't think I understood it well enough to review it properly. It involves a very fat woman who may not actually be fat so much as she has memories of being so, and her son Jordan. They live in like the 16th century, have lots of sex, and alternate narrating. I don't know, I really didn't pay enough attention to the first few pages, and then I was in the middle of a book that was way too confusing for me to follow while trying to read standing up at the cafe where I work part-time. I decided to just enjoy the language and images so far as I could, and certainly Jeanette Winterson, who I believe is known for her queer fiction (I read her Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for a Literature & Gender class a couple years ago, a lesbian coming-of-age novel -- forgive the pat labels, I'm trying to be brief -- that I very much enjoyed), can come up with weirder sexual imagery than anyone I can think of.
Also, I found this deleted scene, which I'd never seen, from season 8 of ER that reminded me of my intense love for the show, and for Alex Kingston's challenging, complicated portrayal of strong-willed surgeon Elizabeth Corday.
Thirdly, The Critical Lass just had its 1,000th visitor. Cool.
Now I need to go do math problems, so all the shiny pretty TV (Brothers & Sisters, Chuck, Reaper, House) will have to wait till tomorrow.
1998 :: Grove Press :: 192pp. :: $12.00
My latest read, and I don't think I understood it well enough to review it properly. It involves a very fat woman who may not actually be fat so much as she has memories of being so, and her son Jordan. They live in like the 16th century, have lots of sex, and alternate narrating. I don't know, I really didn't pay enough attention to the first few pages, and then I was in the middle of a book that was way too confusing for me to follow while trying to read standing up at the cafe where I work part-time. I decided to just enjoy the language and images so far as I could, and certainly Jeanette Winterson, who I believe is known for her queer fiction (I read her Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for a Literature & Gender class a couple years ago, a lesbian coming-of-age novel -- forgive the pat labels, I'm trying to be brief -- that I very much enjoyed), can come up with weirder sexual imagery than anyone I can think of.
Also, I found this deleted scene, which I'd never seen, from season 8 of ER that reminded me of my intense love for the show, and for Alex Kingston's challenging, complicated portrayal of strong-willed surgeon Elizabeth Corday.
Thirdly, The Critical Lass just had its 1,000th visitor. Cool.
Now I need to go do math problems, so all the shiny pretty TV (Brothers & Sisters, Chuck, Reaper, House) will have to wait till tomorrow.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Catching Up on Books
Y'all, I tried to watch the 14th season premiere of ER tonight, and it was such a mistake. I took two years off, and now I only recognize a handful of characters (well, I do recognize John Stamos of course, I just don't know what he's doing on my once-favorite show). Where is Luka? Where is Kerry? Why is Morris still there?
So a recap is not forthcoming, as I was totally lost and gave up 40 minutes in. And I'd review The Office season premiere, which was awesome, but I don't know the show very well, as this was maybe my fifth episode. (Here's my three-word recap: Jim. Pam. Squee.)
But, here are a few books I haven't gotten around to reviewing.
Camilla, by Madeleine L'Engle.
Laurel Leaf | 1982 | 278 pp.
A flimsy novel too deeply situated in the inspirational YA genre to grasp me at this age. I bought it for $2 at a street paperback sale the day after L'Engle died, thinking it a fit way to memorialize a writer that had a huge effect on me as a child with books such as The Small Rain (a fantastic coming-of-age novel much more mature than her YA stuff), A House Like a Lotus, Troubling a Star, and of course A Wrinkle In Time. But there's a reason no one makes us read Camilla in middle school. It deals with the romance between a girl whose parents are just getting divorced and a boy who's always seen his parents as fallible. Camilla learns to accept her parents as human beings who make mistakes, there's some extremely un-subtle God talk typical of L'Engle, she falls in love, and boom, it's over. And... I will probably never think about it again.
Republic of Dreams. Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960, by Ross Wetzsteon.
Simon & Schuster | 2002 | out of print
Ross Wetzsteon's book, purporting to be a history of Greenwich Village, consists largely of a series of mini-biographies of figures such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams, and Thomas Wolfe. These individuals move to the Village, usually with the hope of escaping and upending the conventions of society. Wetzsteon writes with deep affection and a satirical edge; we see that these flamboyant artist types are usually terribly lost, and that their attempts to live and love beyond the boundaries of, for example, monogamy and fiscal responsibility often end unhappily. Nevertheless, because I'm twenty years old, I could feel my soul being called out of my body by the grand dreams of the bohemians. Recommended to anyone who once wanted to be an artist.
Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene.
Penguin Classics | 2004 | 288 pp.
A story about evil, by the master of stories about the soul. I love Graham Greene to death; the sheer power of the end of The End of the Affair (snerk) changed the way I thought about spirituality; but I don't think I even finished the last few pages of this. It's about the covering up of a crime, basically, and the main character is terribly heartless and cruel. But it took a long time to get started and didn't seem to have a clear center. I feel sure that if I sat down and read this through with concentration a second time, I'd get more out of it, so I'd recommend it to other Greene fans who are willing to put in the effort.
So a recap is not forthcoming, as I was totally lost and gave up 40 minutes in. And I'd review The Office season premiere, which was awesome, but I don't know the show very well, as this was maybe my fifth episode. (Here's my three-word recap: Jim. Pam. Squee.)
But, here are a few books I haven't gotten around to reviewing.
Camilla, by Madeleine L'Engle.
Laurel Leaf | 1982 | 278 pp.
A flimsy novel too deeply situated in the inspirational YA genre to grasp me at this age. I bought it for $2 at a street paperback sale the day after L'Engle died, thinking it a fit way to memorialize a writer that had a huge effect on me as a child with books such as The Small Rain (a fantastic coming-of-age novel much more mature than her YA stuff), A House Like a Lotus, Troubling a Star, and of course A Wrinkle In Time. But there's a reason no one makes us read Camilla in middle school. It deals with the romance between a girl whose parents are just getting divorced and a boy who's always seen his parents as fallible. Camilla learns to accept her parents as human beings who make mistakes, there's some extremely un-subtle God talk typical of L'Engle, she falls in love, and boom, it's over. And... I will probably never think about it again.
Republic of Dreams. Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960, by Ross Wetzsteon.
Simon & Schuster | 2002 | out of print
Ross Wetzsteon's book, purporting to be a history of Greenwich Village, consists largely of a series of mini-biographies of figures such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams, and Thomas Wolfe. These individuals move to the Village, usually with the hope of escaping and upending the conventions of society. Wetzsteon writes with deep affection and a satirical edge; we see that these flamboyant artist types are usually terribly lost, and that their attempts to live and love beyond the boundaries of, for example, monogamy and fiscal responsibility often end unhappily. Nevertheless, because I'm twenty years old, I could feel my soul being called out of my body by the grand dreams of the bohemians. Recommended to anyone who once wanted to be an artist.
Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene.
Penguin Classics | 2004 | 288 pp.
A story about evil, by the master of stories about the soul. I love Graham Greene to death; the sheer power of the end of The End of the Affair (snerk) changed the way I thought about spirituality; but I don't think I even finished the last few pages of this. It's about the covering up of a crime, basically, and the main character is terribly heartless and cruel. But it took a long time to get started and didn't seem to have a clear center. I feel sure that if I sat down and read this through with concentration a second time, I'd get more out of it, so I'd recommend it to other Greene fans who are willing to put in the effort.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin | $18.98 | 544 pp.
Read for the Complete Booker challenge (my original review is here).
The Blind Assassin opens with the statement, "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." Only at the end of the book, when everything about this meandering, tragic, cryptic narrative of two sisters comes to its point, do you understand this sentence, down to the significance of its indefinite articles.
From the vantage point of old age, Iris, Laura's older sister, writes the story of their comings of age in the Depression. Laura is "strange," "odd"; she has deeply-held, unconventional religious beliefs, and exhibits a naivete dangerous for a young girl who is soon cut adrift by the falling apart of her family. Meanwhile, Iris understands more about the world around her. Two men dominate the lives and minds of each of the women in complex ways that Atwood only fully reveals near the end: one is a sinister figure, wealthy and powerful; one is an idealistic activist in hiding, easily worshipped.
Meanwhile, the story of two nameless lovers, written in the present tense, third-person, close but not too close to the consciousness of the woman. They tell each other stories, they sleep together, they play emotional games. He's harsh and often needlessly brutal, she's brave but vulnerable. Then there are newspaper articles, which use an amusingly cheesy style to encapsulate in puff pieces events which often have deep implications in Iris's or Laura's life.
To say more about the plot would give too much away, even though Atwood's beautiful prose is so prominent and memorable that it might be more of a draw than the story she spins. The deft way that she weaves this story and explores the identity of the two sisters, the artistry of it, become more and more apparent and then just dazzle in the climax. Iris's voice is authoritative and convincingly that of an old woman; her view on her own actions as a young woman is slightly more distant, and so focused on trying to find out more about the people around her that sometimes Young Iris is more of an enigma than her distracted, "odd" sister. Though the people in this book are very real, they're also separate and isolated in the labyrinth of human society.
If I had a complaint it was that the first couple hundred pages started so slowly. They were beautifully written, to be sure, but almost too mysterious -- I needed more. On the other hand, maybe it kept me reading, and I'm certainly glad that I did.
In Summary: Highly recommended.
Read for the Complete Booker challenge (my original review is here).
The Blind Assassin opens with the statement, "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." Only at the end of the book, when everything about this meandering, tragic, cryptic narrative of two sisters comes to its point, do you understand this sentence, down to the significance of its indefinite articles.
From the vantage point of old age, Iris, Laura's older sister, writes the story of their comings of age in the Depression. Laura is "strange," "odd"; she has deeply-held, unconventional religious beliefs, and exhibits a naivete dangerous for a young girl who is soon cut adrift by the falling apart of her family. Meanwhile, Iris understands more about the world around her. Two men dominate the lives and minds of each of the women in complex ways that Atwood only fully reveals near the end: one is a sinister figure, wealthy and powerful; one is an idealistic activist in hiding, easily worshipped.
Meanwhile, the story of two nameless lovers, written in the present tense, third-person, close but not too close to the consciousness of the woman. They tell each other stories, they sleep together, they play emotional games. He's harsh and often needlessly brutal, she's brave but vulnerable. Then there are newspaper articles, which use an amusingly cheesy style to encapsulate in puff pieces events which often have deep implications in Iris's or Laura's life.
To say more about the plot would give too much away, even though Atwood's beautiful prose is so prominent and memorable that it might be more of a draw than the story she spins. The deft way that she weaves this story and explores the identity of the two sisters, the artistry of it, become more and more apparent and then just dazzle in the climax. Iris's voice is authoritative and convincingly that of an old woman; her view on her own actions as a young woman is slightly more distant, and so focused on trying to find out more about the people around her that sometimes Young Iris is more of an enigma than her distracted, "odd" sister. Though the people in this book are very real, they're also separate and isolated in the labyrinth of human society.
If I had a complaint it was that the first couple hundred pages started so slowly. They were beautifully written, to be sure, but almost too mysterious -- I needed more. On the other hand, maybe it kept me reading, and I'm certainly glad that I did.
In Summary: Highly recommended.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
In Which I Love Used Book Sales and Expand My Library with Abandon
I had a lovely time in Maine, but the only part I'll bore anyone with in this venue is my glee at the books I scored while I was up there. The first was at a library in Bar Harbor, which was selling books at a ridiculously low price. I bought:
1. The Alpine Path, L. M. Montgomery
2. The Stars, Like Dust, Isaac Asimov
3. Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Czenzi Ormonde
4. Blood and Guts in High School, Plus Two, Kathy Acker
5. Revolution From Within, Gloria Steinem
6. The Terminal Man, Michael Crichton
7. In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck
8. Sphinx, Robin Cook
9. Coma, Robin Cook
10. Killed in the Ratings, William L. DeAndrea
11. Harvard Hates America, John LeBoutillier
12. Poet in the Gutter, John Baker
13. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, L. Frank Baum
14. They Cage the Animals at Night, Jennings Michael Burch
All for $4.75. Fourteen books for under five dollars, which just blew my mind, even if some of them will probably suck (see nos. 12 and 3, and possibly 4) and some of them I will probably never read but bought because they were a quarter (see nos. 13 and 14). Nevertheless, I'm excited about the Steinem, I picked up a respectable Steinbeck and a Crichton I've never read, and I love L.M. Montgomery so much that I will probably devour her slim autobiography like so much chocolate cake. And I mean, Killed in the Ratings. A novel that is apparently about TV, thus combining my two favorite things in a way that will probably be laughable but still totally awesome.
Then I went to one of the antique shops with a used book section that dot Rte 3, and bought Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson and The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, for somewhat less exciting prices. Which means that I will soon start in earnest on the Complete Booker challenge.
Looking forward to catching up on what everyone else has written.
1. The Alpine Path, L. M. Montgomery
2. The Stars, Like Dust, Isaac Asimov
3. Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Czenzi Ormonde
4. Blood and Guts in High School, Plus Two, Kathy Acker
5. Revolution From Within, Gloria Steinem
6. The Terminal Man, Michael Crichton
7. In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck
8. Sphinx, Robin Cook
9. Coma, Robin Cook
10. Killed in the Ratings, William L. DeAndrea
11. Harvard Hates America, John LeBoutillier
12. Poet in the Gutter, John Baker
13. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, L. Frank Baum
14. They Cage the Animals at Night, Jennings Michael Burch
All for $4.75. Fourteen books for under five dollars, which just blew my mind, even if some of them will probably suck (see nos. 12 and 3, and possibly 4) and some of them I will probably never read but bought because they were a quarter (see nos. 13 and 14). Nevertheless, I'm excited about the Steinem, I picked up a respectable Steinbeck and a Crichton I've never read, and I love L.M. Montgomery so much that I will probably devour her slim autobiography like so much chocolate cake. And I mean, Killed in the Ratings. A novel that is apparently about TV, thus combining my two favorite things in a way that will probably be laughable but still totally awesome.
Then I went to one of the antique shops with a used book section that dot Rte 3, and bought Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson and The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, for somewhat less exciting prices. Which means that I will soon start in earnest on the Complete Booker challenge.
Looking forward to catching up on what everyone else has written.
Monday, September 3, 2007
American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)
"My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard)."
American Psycho on Amazon
Patrick Bateman is a yuppie who works precious few hours on Wall Street, spending most of his time on alcohol, coke, consumerism, sex, and brutal murders. Bret Easton Ellis' novel is a narcissistic first-person account of a life of name brands and expensive restaurants, mixed with psychotic episodes of violence.
I don't know enough about the whole name-brand-dropping tradition in contemporary fiction to know whether Ellis invented it, but he certainly does it like it's about to... well, go out of style. In a totally deadpan tone, he describes the rat race of the Wall Street lifestyle, the competition for authority on everything from fashion to bottled water (aka "hardbodies"), the inability to think of anything except in terms of how it will look to others. Despite the whole serial-killer thing, Bateman will remind you of some of the i-bankers you know.
Plus, there's all the sex and violence. It's totally over-the-top, sometimes random -- Bateman will be in the middle of a discussion of some innocuous subject and suddenly switch to graphic plans to kill the person he's talking to. There's also a lot of humor, mostly, as stated, deadpan, but still quite funny. And then at the end Bateman sort of comes face-to-face with his total lack of humanity. (See the above quote, which amuses me partly because I also blame my time at Harvard for curing me of my adolescent hopefulness.)
In any case, I found the book exhilarating and absorbing. Sometimes the murders were too gruesome for me, but the writing was excellent, not only as satire but as an inventive, gripping story.
In Summary: Not for the faint of heart, but if you can take (or skim) the violence, it's worth it for sheer delightful insanity.
American Psycho on Amazon
Patrick Bateman is a yuppie who works precious few hours on Wall Street, spending most of his time on alcohol, coke, consumerism, sex, and brutal murders. Bret Easton Ellis' novel is a narcissistic first-person account of a life of name brands and expensive restaurants, mixed with psychotic episodes of violence.
I don't know enough about the whole name-brand-dropping tradition in contemporary fiction to know whether Ellis invented it, but he certainly does it like it's about to... well, go out of style. In a totally deadpan tone, he describes the rat race of the Wall Street lifestyle, the competition for authority on everything from fashion to bottled water (aka "hardbodies"), the inability to think of anything except in terms of how it will look to others. Despite the whole serial-killer thing, Bateman will remind you of some of the i-bankers you know.
Plus, there's all the sex and violence. It's totally over-the-top, sometimes random -- Bateman will be in the middle of a discussion of some innocuous subject and suddenly switch to graphic plans to kill the person he's talking to. There's also a lot of humor, mostly, as stated, deadpan, but still quite funny. And then at the end Bateman sort of comes face-to-face with his total lack of humanity. (See the above quote, which amuses me partly because I also blame my time at Harvard for curing me of my adolescent hopefulness.)
In any case, I found the book exhilarating and absorbing. Sometimes the murders were too gruesome for me, but the writing was excellent, not only as satire but as an inventive, gripping story.
In Summary: Not for the faint of heart, but if you can take (or skim) the violence, it's worth it for sheer delightful insanity.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Complete Booker
Oops, silly me! I forgot to post here when I joined this challenge -- things have been busy. The Complete Booker challenge is a nice, relaxed challenge to read all the Booker Prize winners. Apparently inspired by the Pulitzer Project, which was way too intimidating for me!
The list is as follows, and I'll go back and bold each one that I've read -- with a link to a review if I write one. As of the start of this challenge, my number is an unprepossessing 3...
2006 - The Inheritance of Loss (Desai)
2005 - The Sea (Banville)
2004 - The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst)
2003 - Vernon God Little (Pierre)
2002 - Life of Pi (Martel)
2001 - True History of the Kelly Gang (Carey)
2000 - The Blind Assassin (Atwood)
1999 - Disgrace (Coetzee)
1998 - Amsterdam: A Novel (McEwan)
1997 - The God of Small Things (Roy)
1996 - Last Orders (Swift)
1995 - The Ghost Road (Barker)
1994 - How Late It Was, How Late (Kelman)
1993 - Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Doyle)
1992 - The English Patient (Ondaatje)
1992 - Sacred Hunger (Unsworth)
1991 - The Famished Road (Okri)
1990 - Possession: A Romance (Byatt)
1989 - The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)
1988 - Oscar and Lucinda (Carey)
1987 - Moon Tiger (Lively)
1986 - The Old Devils (Amis)
1985 - The Bone People (Hulme)
1984 - Hotel Du Lac (Brookner)
1983 - Life & Times of Michael K (Coetzee)
1982 - Schindler's List (Keneally)
1981 - Midnight's Children (Rushdie)
1980 - Rites of Passage (Golding)
1979 - Offshore (Fitzgerald)
1978 - The Sea, the Sea (Murdoch)
1977 - Staying on (Scott)
1976 - Saville (Storey)
1975 - Heat and Dust (Jhabvala)
1974 - The Conservationist (Gordimer)
1973 - The Siege of Krishnapur (Farrell)
1972 - G. (Berger)
1971 - In a Free State (Naipaul)
1970 - The Elected Member (Rubens)
1969 - Something to Answer For (Newby)
The list is as follows, and I'll go back and bold each one that I've read -- with a link to a review if I write one. As of the start of this challenge, my number is an unprepossessing 3...
2006 - The Inheritance of Loss (Desai)
2005 - The Sea (Banville)
2004 - The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst)
2003 - Vernon God Little (Pierre)
2002 - Life of Pi (Martel)
2001 - True History of the Kelly Gang (Carey)
2000 - The Blind Assassin (Atwood)
1999 - Disgrace (Coetzee)
1998 - Amsterdam: A Novel (McEwan)
1997 - The God of Small Things (Roy)
1996 - Last Orders (Swift)
1995 - The Ghost Road (Barker)
1994 - How Late It Was, How Late (Kelman)
1993 - Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Doyle)
1992 - The English Patient (Ondaatje)
1992 - Sacred Hunger (Unsworth)
1991 - The Famished Road (Okri)
1990 - Possession: A Romance (Byatt)
1989 - The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)
1988 - Oscar and Lucinda (Carey)
1987 - Moon Tiger (Lively)
1986 - The Old Devils (Amis)
1985 - The Bone People (Hulme)
1984 - Hotel Du Lac (Brookner)
1983 - Life & Times of Michael K (Coetzee)
1982 - Schindler's List (Keneally)
1981 - Midnight's Children (Rushdie)
1980 - Rites of Passage (Golding)
1979 - Offshore (Fitzgerald)
1978 - The Sea, the Sea (Murdoch)
1977 - Staying on (Scott)
1976 - Saville (Storey)
1975 - Heat and Dust (Jhabvala)
1974 - The Conservationist (Gordimer)
1973 - The Siege of Krishnapur (Farrell)
1972 - G. (Berger)
1971 - In a Free State (Naipaul)
1970 - The Elected Member (Rubens)
1969 - Something to Answer For (Newby)
Monday, August 27, 2007
Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow (Orson Scott Card)
"He drank the creamy liquid. Immediately he began to inflate and rise like a balloon. The Giant laughed."
Ender's Game on Google Books / Ender's Game on Amazon
Ender's Shadow on Google Books / Ender's Shadow on Amazon
I know that the award-winning sf novel Ender's Game has had a lot of power for many of the sensitive and intelligent boys in my life. Reading it finally, I understand why. Brilliant young (very young: six years old) Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is recruited for Battle School by a futuristic society preparing for war against a race of alien "Buggers." Because of his intelligence and also his native leadership qualities, including an instinctive empathy but also a thousand other skills that interact to add up to a good leader, he is promoted quickly and a lot of responsibility lands on his shoulders.
Ender is not just your typical precocious character. He's not really a child, or at least not the way we think of children. His thinking is nuanced and precise, and he instinctively or consciously grasps a lot about human nature -- both the irrational, emotional side and the rational, calculating, manipulative side. In his introduction, Orson Scott Card defends himself against accusations that "children don't behave like this," saying that small children hide their rationality and understanding from adults. I don't know if this is true. Certainly I felt rational and understanding as a precocious little six-year-old myself, but do I believe that kids that age have as advanced an understanding of human nature as the characters in the book? Well... not really. I've read too many Newsweek articles about the development of the frontal lobe and what-have-you.
But that controversy, while Card takes it very seriously and passionately, is somewhat irrelevant to my enjoyment of the book, which was complete and absorbing. The "game" of the title (one of the games, anyway) is a simulation of war, and the book's discussion of strategies is simply fascinating. In addition there's Ender's own sense of burden and weariness as he gets more and more of humanity's hopes pinned on him. The characterizations are deeply felt and deeply human, while the action all takes place within a well-crafted, well-paced plot.
Ender's Shadow takes place over almost the exact same time-frame -- it follows the experience of Bean, who's even younger than Ender and possibly even smarter, making up in intelligence for what he lacks in the human understanding Ender is so remarkable for. It's interesting as a character study and provides a new perspective on a lot of Ender's experiences in the first book -- I read the two only days apart and it was quite the submersion experience. But it's not as affecting, because Bean, though fully-realized and extremely brilliant, doesn't have the same epic-hero quality as Ender does, and also perhaps because its pacing is a bit too sprawling -- it's significantly longer than Game.
I feel like I finished this book a better person. I'm not at all a fan of didacticism in books, but in this case I was living through a riveting, sometimes harrowing educational experience with Ender. And I feel very privileged to have done so.
In summary: Recommended, even if you're not a boy (I'm not), even if you're not into epics (I'm not), even if you're not into sf (despite the BSG obsession, I'm not).
PS. I was going to go into a whole rant about the paucity of female characters, but I'm too tired to write about it with much nuance. Let's just say it made me a bit cranky but didn't really spoil my enjoyment of the book.
Ender's Game on Google Books / Ender's Game on Amazon
Ender's Shadow on Google Books / Ender's Shadow on Amazon
I know that the award-winning sf novel Ender's Game has had a lot of power for many of the sensitive and intelligent boys in my life. Reading it finally, I understand why. Brilliant young (very young: six years old) Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is recruited for Battle School by a futuristic society preparing for war against a race of alien "Buggers." Because of his intelligence and also his native leadership qualities, including an instinctive empathy but also a thousand other skills that interact to add up to a good leader, he is promoted quickly and a lot of responsibility lands on his shoulders.
Ender is not just your typical precocious character. He's not really a child, or at least not the way we think of children. His thinking is nuanced and precise, and he instinctively or consciously grasps a lot about human nature -- both the irrational, emotional side and the rational, calculating, manipulative side. In his introduction, Orson Scott Card defends himself against accusations that "children don't behave like this," saying that small children hide their rationality and understanding from adults. I don't know if this is true. Certainly I felt rational and understanding as a precocious little six-year-old myself, but do I believe that kids that age have as advanced an understanding of human nature as the characters in the book? Well... not really. I've read too many Newsweek articles about the development of the frontal lobe and what-have-you.
But that controversy, while Card takes it very seriously and passionately, is somewhat irrelevant to my enjoyment of the book, which was complete and absorbing. The "game" of the title (one of the games, anyway) is a simulation of war, and the book's discussion of strategies is simply fascinating. In addition there's Ender's own sense of burden and weariness as he gets more and more of humanity's hopes pinned on him. The characterizations are deeply felt and deeply human, while the action all takes place within a well-crafted, well-paced plot.
Ender's Shadow takes place over almost the exact same time-frame -- it follows the experience of Bean, who's even younger than Ender and possibly even smarter, making up in intelligence for what he lacks in the human understanding Ender is so remarkable for. It's interesting as a character study and provides a new perspective on a lot of Ender's experiences in the first book -- I read the two only days apart and it was quite the submersion experience. But it's not as affecting, because Bean, though fully-realized and extremely brilliant, doesn't have the same epic-hero quality as Ender does, and also perhaps because its pacing is a bit too sprawling -- it's significantly longer than Game.
I feel like I finished this book a better person. I'm not at all a fan of didacticism in books, but in this case I was living through a riveting, sometimes harrowing educational experience with Ender. And I feel very privileged to have done so.
In summary: Recommended, even if you're not a boy (I'm not), even if you're not into epics (I'm not), even if you're not into sf (despite the BSG obsession, I'm not).
PS. I was going to go into a whole rant about the paucity of female characters, but I'm too tired to write about it with much nuance. Let's just say it made me a bit cranky but didn't really spoil my enjoyment of the book.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Enduring Love (Ian McEwan)
"I had fallen into a life in which another man could be saying to me, We can't talk about it like this, and, My own feelings are not important."
Enduring Love on Amazon
In Ian McEwan's lightweight 1997 novel, which was apparently made into a film of the same name in 2004 with Daniel Craig, a man in a happy heterosexual relationship acquires a fanatically religious male stalker after a tragic freak accident briefly unites them.
It all plays out sort of how it sounds. Ian McEwan has a lovely, languid prose style that slows what could be a thriller-paced plot down to an almost meditative pace. He also has a keen eye for the emotionally grotesque that made the stalking itself quite amusing.
But I had high expectations that were somewhat disappointed: the only other book I've read of McEwan's is Atonement. And where that seemed to me a work of art, this is kind of just a book. It was fun to read because it was exciting, story-wise, but didn't stick with me.
What I did get out of it was a sense of, not skepticism exactly, but interrogation of the established idea of romantic love. What do we share with the other person? How much of it is mere projection?
In Summary: Insightful, but not extraordinary.
Enduring Love on Amazon
In Ian McEwan's lightweight 1997 novel, which was apparently made into a film of the same name in 2004 with Daniel Craig, a man in a happy heterosexual relationship acquires a fanatically religious male stalker after a tragic freak accident briefly unites them.
It all plays out sort of how it sounds. Ian McEwan has a lovely, languid prose style that slows what could be a thriller-paced plot down to an almost meditative pace. He also has a keen eye for the emotionally grotesque that made the stalking itself quite amusing.
But I had high expectations that were somewhat disappointed: the only other book I've read of McEwan's is Atonement. And where that seemed to me a work of art, this is kind of just a book. It was fun to read because it was exciting, story-wise, but didn't stick with me.
What I did get out of it was a sense of, not skepticism exactly, but interrogation of the established idea of romantic love. What do we share with the other person? How much of it is mere projection?
In Summary: Insightful, but not extraordinary.
Friday, August 17, 2007
The Sportswriter (Richard Ford)
"When you look very closely, the more everybody seems just alike--unsurprising and factual."
The Sportswriter on Amazon
$11.16 :: Vintage :: 1995 :: 384 pp.
There's a genre of novel that I have outlined in my head -- I call it the Wonder Boys genre, and it's one of my favorites. It stars a hapless middle-aged man going through (or heading towards, or coming out of) a mid-life crisis, and the action takes place over a period of only a few days, during which the patches Mid-Life-Crisis Guy has sewn over the holes in his life start to fray and expose the inherent inadequacy of his coping mechanisms. There's usually at least two women in the picture: a woman close to the guy's age, weary of his antics and beginning to think she deserves better, and often also a pretty young thing. There's a child or a child substitute as well, who also deserves a better role model.
Richard Ford's The Sportswriter takes its place in this genre along with Wonder Boys and Nobody's Fool and others. Frank Bascombe is a sportswriter whose marriage to "X" failed when they lost their son, Ralph. He's now seeing Vicki, a pert young Texan, and meeting regularly with a Divorced Men's Club of which he says, "even though I cannot say we like each other, I definitely can say that we don't dislike each other," and "perhaps the only reason we have not quit is that we can't think of a compelling reason to." By the end of the book, expect upheavals in all these areas of his life.
One of the coolest things about this book is that despite the casual, witty, warm male narrator, the protagonist isn't a cliche. He is extremely sanguine and has a distanced, almost alienated outlook on life that he refers to as his "dreaminess"; he's also far more functional than the typical mid-life-crisis antihero. He's more okay with things than most of us, and frankly after awhile it does get weird, but I liked trying to get inside the head of such an oddly unworried character. The present-tense, flexible style encompasses both the humor and the philosophy of his life experience.
I liked the character of Vicki, the young girlfriend, as well. The dialect she speaks in can get totally annoying, but she is very real, so alive she brings warmth to the page. And in X you can see a sad, brave, vulnerable, confused woman, a bereaved mother, an appealing embodiment of the One Who Got Away. In general Ford does great with characterization. The plot wasn't a weak point so much as a moot point, since Frank Bascombe just doesn't have a lot invested in the outer trappings of his life; but the book was still an exciting read.
In Summary: Mid-life-crisis city, and Richard Ford makes it a fun visit.
The Sportswriter on Amazon
$11.16 :: Vintage :: 1995 :: 384 pp.
There's a genre of novel that I have outlined in my head -- I call it the Wonder Boys genre, and it's one of my favorites. It stars a hapless middle-aged man going through (or heading towards, or coming out of) a mid-life crisis, and the action takes place over a period of only a few days, during which the patches Mid-Life-Crisis Guy has sewn over the holes in his life start to fray and expose the inherent inadequacy of his coping mechanisms. There's usually at least two women in the picture: a woman close to the guy's age, weary of his antics and beginning to think she deserves better, and often also a pretty young thing. There's a child or a child substitute as well, who also deserves a better role model.
Richard Ford's The Sportswriter takes its place in this genre along with Wonder Boys and Nobody's Fool and others. Frank Bascombe is a sportswriter whose marriage to "X" failed when they lost their son, Ralph. He's now seeing Vicki, a pert young Texan, and meeting regularly with a Divorced Men's Club of which he says, "even though I cannot say we like each other, I definitely can say that we don't dislike each other," and "perhaps the only reason we have not quit is that we can't think of a compelling reason to." By the end of the book, expect upheavals in all these areas of his life.
One of the coolest things about this book is that despite the casual, witty, warm male narrator, the protagonist isn't a cliche. He is extremely sanguine and has a distanced, almost alienated outlook on life that he refers to as his "dreaminess"; he's also far more functional than the typical mid-life-crisis antihero. He's more okay with things than most of us, and frankly after awhile it does get weird, but I liked trying to get inside the head of such an oddly unworried character. The present-tense, flexible style encompasses both the humor and the philosophy of his life experience.
I liked the character of Vicki, the young girlfriend, as well. The dialect she speaks in can get totally annoying, but she is very real, so alive she brings warmth to the page. And in X you can see a sad, brave, vulnerable, confused woman, a bereaved mother, an appealing embodiment of the One Who Got Away. In general Ford does great with characterization. The plot wasn't a weak point so much as a moot point, since Frank Bascombe just doesn't have a lot invested in the outer trappings of his life; but the book was still an exciting read.
In Summary: Mid-life-crisis city, and Richard Ford makes it a fun visit.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Shardik (Richard Adams)
“A sword passed through me, I am changed for ever.”
Shardik on Amazon
I remember being so excited to buy this book when I first saw it. I’d read the fantastic Watership Down by the same author about ten times. In fact, someone once asked me, if there was just one book that I could make everyone in the world read, what it would be, and I answered Watership Down. For those who haven’t been lucky enough to read it, it’s a gripping epic about rabbits (seriously) who leave their traditional rabbit society and strike out for new ground.
This week, after several attempts over the past few years to get through Shardik, I made a concerted effort over five or six days without Tivo and internet to read the entire book. I’m not sure my life has been improved for it, though.
Shardik is different. Possibly, it’s harder to grasp; certainly, it’s the kind of book I should read more than once before making any judgments about just how much substance it contains. The essence of the plot is that a hunter named Kelderek finds a huge bear and becomes convinced that it’s a divine resurrection of the power of God, Shardik. His people decide to use the divine bear to recapture the power they once had, and six hundred pages of blathering about the power of Shardik commence. It gets repetitive, and despite the depth of Adams’ treatment of this concept, which I won’t deny, I was slogging through, rather than devouring.
Also, the epic simile thing just gets ridiculous. You know, the way Vergil used to do it, “And just as the ants carry their food back to their anthill, each one knowing his place, blah blah blah, [ten lines later] so did Aeneas and his buddies carry their burdens…” Or, you know, whatever. Richard Adams decides to resurrect something better left for the more-patient classicists (and don’t feel obliged to read this whole excerpt):
“As when villagers have taken away the calf from a strong cow she bellows with rage, breaks the rails of the stockade and tramples her way through the village, afraid of none and filled only with distress and anger at the wrong she has suffered; the villagers fly before her and in her fury she smashes through the mud wall of a hut, so that her head and shoulders appear suddenly, to those within, as a grotesque, frightening source of destruction and fear—so Shardik burst through the tall weeds…”
Etc, etc. The wordiness, particularly in these uselessly long similes, padded the book by at least a third. Then there was a lack of character development that was disconcerting, although I often feel dissatisfied with character depth when I read fantasy (which is infrequently; it’s not my genre). There’s a “romance,” in particular, that’s based on barely more than a man’s infatuation with a woman’s beauty.
The idea of exploring faith through this particular setup with the bear was actually pretty intriguing. I think Richard Adams did some cool things with it, but it got buried under flowery, oppressively wordy writing. There’s a really interesting part towards the end, if you make it that far, where Kelderek experiences a period of intense suffering; much of the beginning is somewhat slow and we aren't at first given much reason to care about this huge panoply of characters and their bear cult.
In Summary: Not recommended, except to the most patient of readers. Read Watership Down instead!
Shardik on Amazon
I remember being so excited to buy this book when I first saw it. I’d read the fantastic Watership Down by the same author about ten times. In fact, someone once asked me, if there was just one book that I could make everyone in the world read, what it would be, and I answered Watership Down. For those who haven’t been lucky enough to read it, it’s a gripping epic about rabbits (seriously) who leave their traditional rabbit society and strike out for new ground.
This week, after several attempts over the past few years to get through Shardik, I made a concerted effort over five or six days without Tivo and internet to read the entire book. I’m not sure my life has been improved for it, though.
Shardik is different. Possibly, it’s harder to grasp; certainly, it’s the kind of book I should read more than once before making any judgments about just how much substance it contains. The essence of the plot is that a hunter named Kelderek finds a huge bear and becomes convinced that it’s a divine resurrection of the power of God, Shardik. His people decide to use the divine bear to recapture the power they once had, and six hundred pages of blathering about the power of Shardik commence. It gets repetitive, and despite the depth of Adams’ treatment of this concept, which I won’t deny, I was slogging through, rather than devouring.
Also, the epic simile thing just gets ridiculous. You know, the way Vergil used to do it, “And just as the ants carry their food back to their anthill, each one knowing his place, blah blah blah, [ten lines later] so did Aeneas and his buddies carry their burdens…” Or, you know, whatever. Richard Adams decides to resurrect something better left for the more-patient classicists (and don’t feel obliged to read this whole excerpt):
“As when villagers have taken away the calf from a strong cow she bellows with rage, breaks the rails of the stockade and tramples her way through the village, afraid of none and filled only with distress and anger at the wrong she has suffered; the villagers fly before her and in her fury she smashes through the mud wall of a hut, so that her head and shoulders appear suddenly, to those within, as a grotesque, frightening source of destruction and fear—so Shardik burst through the tall weeds…”
Etc, etc. The wordiness, particularly in these uselessly long similes, padded the book by at least a third. Then there was a lack of character development that was disconcerting, although I often feel dissatisfied with character depth when I read fantasy (which is infrequently; it’s not my genre). There’s a “romance,” in particular, that’s based on barely more than a man’s infatuation with a woman’s beauty.
The idea of exploring faith through this particular setup with the bear was actually pretty intriguing. I think Richard Adams did some cool things with it, but it got buried under flowery, oppressively wordy writing. There’s a really interesting part towards the end, if you make it that far, where Kelderek experiences a period of intense suffering; much of the beginning is somewhat slow and we aren't at first given much reason to care about this huge panoply of characters and their bear cult.
In Summary: Not recommended, except to the most patient of readers. Read Watership Down instead!
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Lucy Gayheart (Willa Cather)
"In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart..."
Lucy Gayheart on Amazon
I rarely give myself the chance to reread old favorites, because the reading goals I set for myself in terms of new books are challenging enough. But this week, because I was on vacation, I picked up Willa Cather's ethereally tragic Lucy Gayheart, an old favorite from my early teens that I haven't read in at least five years.
The title character is, like many of Cather's heroines, a beautiful, fascinating girl from a small prairie town. Lucy is a talented pianist and the beloved younger daughter of a watchmaker, who sends her off to Chicago to study piano. Her third summer there, she is recruited as a substitute accompanist for famous, aging, burning-out singer Clement Sebastian, and romance kindles.
And Lucy is one of my favorite heroines of all time: she is so young, in the golden, desperate way that you just know can't last forever. I had that sense of tragedy when I last read it, but it was certainly easier to see now. She throws herself into everything, she dreams, she cares deeply, she is easily moved by small moments. On the first page, townspeople reminisce about Lucy Gayheart's way of walking through the snow, "not shrinking, but giving her body to the wind, as if she were catching step with it." Later, Lucy herself walks around on a cold night:
"...anyway, she was not afraid of the cold. She rather liked the excitement of winding a soft, light cloak abou ther bare arms and shoulders and running out into a glacial cold through which one could hear the hammer-strokes of the workmen who were thawing out switches down on the freight tracks with gasoline torches. The thing to do was to make an overcoat of the ocld; to feel one's self warm and awake at the heart of it, one's blood coursing unchilled in an air where roses froze instantly."
I always think of that passage when I have to walk around in the cold.
Lucy is a much more readable novel than My Antonia, the one so many of us had to read in high school. The third-person narration stays close to Lucy's point of view, except during sections when it draws close to her hometown suitor Harry Gordon or her bitter older sister Pauline. And it's short, at 195 pages. ...But it carries a lot of heft: the split of Lucy's heart between town and country, the chilling effect of Sebastian on her youth, the loneliness of city life and the crowding, caring intimacy of small-town life.
It's funny, I feel unqualified to write much about the novel because I've read it so many times, and my summary sounds like the trite sort of thing I'd dash off for an English class. This book is so familiar that it's like part of me, so hopefully the passage I quoted above recommends it more highly than this somewhat stilted post.
In summary: A favorite. Highly recommended.
Lucy Gayheart on Amazon
I rarely give myself the chance to reread old favorites, because the reading goals I set for myself in terms of new books are challenging enough. But this week, because I was on vacation, I picked up Willa Cather's ethereally tragic Lucy Gayheart, an old favorite from my early teens that I haven't read in at least five years.
The title character is, like many of Cather's heroines, a beautiful, fascinating girl from a small prairie town. Lucy is a talented pianist and the beloved younger daughter of a watchmaker, who sends her off to Chicago to study piano. Her third summer there, she is recruited as a substitute accompanist for famous, aging, burning-out singer Clement Sebastian, and romance kindles.
And Lucy is one of my favorite heroines of all time: she is so young, in the golden, desperate way that you just know can't last forever. I had that sense of tragedy when I last read it, but it was certainly easier to see now. She throws herself into everything, she dreams, she cares deeply, she is easily moved by small moments. On the first page, townspeople reminisce about Lucy Gayheart's way of walking through the snow, "not shrinking, but giving her body to the wind, as if she were catching step with it." Later, Lucy herself walks around on a cold night:
"...anyway, she was not afraid of the cold. She rather liked the excitement of winding a soft, light cloak abou ther bare arms and shoulders and running out into a glacial cold through which one could hear the hammer-strokes of the workmen who were thawing out switches down on the freight tracks with gasoline torches. The thing to do was to make an overcoat of the ocld; to feel one's self warm and awake at the heart of it, one's blood coursing unchilled in an air where roses froze instantly."
I always think of that passage when I have to walk around in the cold.
Lucy is a much more readable novel than My Antonia, the one so many of us had to read in high school. The third-person narration stays close to Lucy's point of view, except during sections when it draws close to her hometown suitor Harry Gordon or her bitter older sister Pauline. And it's short, at 195 pages. ...But it carries a lot of heft: the split of Lucy's heart between town and country, the chilling effect of Sebastian on her youth, the loneliness of city life and the crowding, caring intimacy of small-town life.
It's funny, I feel unqualified to write much about the novel because I've read it so many times, and my summary sounds like the trite sort of thing I'd dash off for an English class. This book is so familiar that it's like part of me, so hopefully the passage I quoted above recommends it more highly than this somewhat stilted post.
In summary: A favorite. Highly recommended.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (Gregory Maguire)
"You are too young to know how women must collaborate or perish..."
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister on Amazon
Gregory Maguire reimagines another old fairy tale, this one in 17th-century Holland, from the point of view of Iris, a plain-looking girl with aspirations to be a painter. Her mother, Margarethe, schemes to improve the lots of Iris and her silent, simple-minded older sister Ruth, finishing a brief stint with a painting master to become first the housekeeper and then the second wife of a flower merchant. His beautiful daughter, Clara, "Cinderella," retreats into the kitchen to avoid the challenges of the outside world. She thinks of herself as a changeling, turned by outside forces from a willful, strong child into a spoiled, terribly docile, contradictory young woman -- the ultimate Feminine, trapped in her beauty.
One of the major -- and believe me, I mean major; Maguire has about as much subtlety with his themes as Marilyn Manson with a stick of eyeliner -- motifs is the portrait that Schoonmaker, the painter, completes of Clara. It's so beautiful that everyone involved with it is torn between awed love and anxious resentment. Schoonmaker himself, though proud of his accomplishment, fears that after a work so beautiful, he will never be able to complete a better one. I wonder if Maguire felt the same way about Wicked; that was a fantastic book, and this feels at certain points like a pressured follow-up. Character development sometimes seems sacrificed, especially near the end, for the purposes of the plot. Even the text seems to admit it: "[Iris] thinks she may never again be sure of why she does anything--but it seems the only thing to do." It's almost like these characters no longer fit well enough into the Cinderella story to do what is required of them, but damned if they aren't going to be forced into it anyway.
Awkwardness with character choices and slight anviliciousness aside, though, this was a totally absorbing read. I couldn't put it down after I hit the halfway point, and Iris was an extremely sympathetic character with a lot of heart, but marked by her perceived "ugliness" in ways that I found really interesting. The prose has this weird quality of right-ness to it; even though sentence by sentence I knew the style was a little stilted and affected, as a whole I thought it was fitting for the story Maguire was telling.
There's some really interesting stuff going on here with regard to beauty. Clara is shaped by it, Iris is shaped by her lack of it; men stand around watching and desiring and owning Clara's beauty with their eyes, and Iris is free to discover love on her own without becoming a commodity. All that is pretty basic stuff, but the way it happens in the novel makes it, I think, more complex because the state of every character is so constantly in flux. Margarethe tries to change her social status, Clara her beauty, etc. Although I could have done without the constant heavy-handed meditations on the role of art, I could sit around all day analyzing what this novel does with femininity.
In Summary: Recommended, but if you only have time for one deconstructed fairy tale, read Wicked instead.
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister on Amazon
Gregory Maguire reimagines another old fairy tale, this one in 17th-century Holland, from the point of view of Iris, a plain-looking girl with aspirations to be a painter. Her mother, Margarethe, schemes to improve the lots of Iris and her silent, simple-minded older sister Ruth, finishing a brief stint with a painting master to become first the housekeeper and then the second wife of a flower merchant. His beautiful daughter, Clara, "Cinderella," retreats into the kitchen to avoid the challenges of the outside world. She thinks of herself as a changeling, turned by outside forces from a willful, strong child into a spoiled, terribly docile, contradictory young woman -- the ultimate Feminine, trapped in her beauty.
One of the major -- and believe me, I mean major; Maguire has about as much subtlety with his themes as Marilyn Manson with a stick of eyeliner -- motifs is the portrait that Schoonmaker, the painter, completes of Clara. It's so beautiful that everyone involved with it is torn between awed love and anxious resentment. Schoonmaker himself, though proud of his accomplishment, fears that after a work so beautiful, he will never be able to complete a better one. I wonder if Maguire felt the same way about Wicked; that was a fantastic book, and this feels at certain points like a pressured follow-up. Character development sometimes seems sacrificed, especially near the end, for the purposes of the plot. Even the text seems to admit it: "[Iris] thinks she may never again be sure of why she does anything--but it seems the only thing to do." It's almost like these characters no longer fit well enough into the Cinderella story to do what is required of them, but damned if they aren't going to be forced into it anyway.
Awkwardness with character choices and slight anviliciousness aside, though, this was a totally absorbing read. I couldn't put it down after I hit the halfway point, and Iris was an extremely sympathetic character with a lot of heart, but marked by her perceived "ugliness" in ways that I found really interesting. The prose has this weird quality of right-ness to it; even though sentence by sentence I knew the style was a little stilted and affected, as a whole I thought it was fitting for the story Maguire was telling.
There's some really interesting stuff going on here with regard to beauty. Clara is shaped by it, Iris is shaped by her lack of it; men stand around watching and desiring and owning Clara's beauty with their eyes, and Iris is free to discover love on her own without becoming a commodity. All that is pretty basic stuff, but the way it happens in the novel makes it, I think, more complex because the state of every character is so constantly in flux. Margarethe tries to change her social status, Clara her beauty, etc. Although I could have done without the constant heavy-handed meditations on the role of art, I could sit around all day analyzing what this novel does with femininity.
In Summary: Recommended, but if you only have time for one deconstructed fairy tale, read Wicked instead.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
dipping my toes in: the Unread Authors Challenge
Found this Unread Authors challenge over at Sycorax Pine. It seems like fun stuff, so here are my picks for authors I've never read:
1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
2. Consuelo by George Sand
3. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
4. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
5. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
6. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
I can't believe I've made it through high school and a dozen college English courses without reading Vonnegut. Can't wait to remedy the situation.
1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
2. Consuelo by George Sand
3. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
4. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
5. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
6. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
I can't believe I've made it through high school and a dozen college English courses without reading Vonnegut. Can't wait to remedy the situation.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."
Middlesex on Amazon
The narrator of this oh-so-cutely titled, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel inhabits the middle ground between male and female. Raised by unknowing parents as a girl, Calliope Stephanides, now forty-one-year-old Cal Stephanides, narrates her girlhood and the history of the two generations before her, whose inbreeding resulted in her condition. "Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!" Cal writes in the opening chapter. "Sing how it passed down through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family." Evoking epic tradition, Eugenides tells a sweeping tale of a Greek family who come to rest in Michigan, but while anchored in a very old tradition he has an original and arresting take on gender.
In this epic, an individual comes to terms with a destiny written by forces greater than herself. But those forces are no longer supernatural or divine, or even societal; they're genetic.
While the romance and intrigue of Callie's ancestors are absorbing and intrinsic to the impact of the story, the real fireworks start when Calliope enters the fictional world. She shatters the boundaries that we unconsciously expect in characters; she can't be categorized or contextualized, despite the copious amount of backstory. No wonder her favorite place at school is a basement bathroom -- not only, as the narrator says, because on its graffitied walls "people wrote down what they couldn't say" but because it's a marginal space. Outside of boundaries, outside time.
At first I thought Eugenides' writing might be too precious (in the "Sing, O Muse" sentences quoted above, for example). But after the grandiosity of the opening chapter the prose style becomes less intrusive, though never lacking in a somewhat mannered musicality. In short it's along the lines of what you'd expect from an Oprah selection, but slightly more cerebral (and palatable). I wouldn't read this book for sheer joy in how it's written; more, to devour the food for thought contained in every action of Calliope's, every machination that brings about her birth and her discovery of herself.
Not only this, but Callie is a believable adolescent, tortured by all the usual angst of a coming-of-age novel, and burdened with more than sufficient material for an existential crisis. The understanding of humanity contained within this novel is deep -- the breadth of sexuality and love and fear that individuals experience. From the 1920s' New Woman and unabashed lesbian Sourmelina to the 1990s' Zora, an academically-minded exotic dancer with Androgen Insensitivity and deep distrust of men, characters -- particularly women -- seem to form almost a catalog of the varieties of sex and gender in the twentieth century. The machinery of the narrative isn't always invisible, and sometimes it's even a bit creaky, but Cal often draws back to look at that very machinery and give us meta-commentary on his storytelling. Everything fits together. Everything has brought Cal to where he is now. Middlesex weaves a story at once organic and self-conscious, circular and linear, masculine and feminine.
In Summary: Highly recommended; a fascinating, complex exploration of gender among other questions.
Middlesex on Amazon
The narrator of this oh-so-cutely titled, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel inhabits the middle ground between male and female. Raised by unknowing parents as a girl, Calliope Stephanides, now forty-one-year-old Cal Stephanides, narrates her girlhood and the history of the two generations before her, whose inbreeding resulted in her condition. "Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!" Cal writes in the opening chapter. "Sing how it passed down through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family." Evoking epic tradition, Eugenides tells a sweeping tale of a Greek family who come to rest in Michigan, but while anchored in a very old tradition he has an original and arresting take on gender.
In this epic, an individual comes to terms with a destiny written by forces greater than herself. But those forces are no longer supernatural or divine, or even societal; they're genetic.
While the romance and intrigue of Callie's ancestors are absorbing and intrinsic to the impact of the story, the real fireworks start when Calliope enters the fictional world. She shatters the boundaries that we unconsciously expect in characters; she can't be categorized or contextualized, despite the copious amount of backstory. No wonder her favorite place at school is a basement bathroom -- not only, as the narrator says, because on its graffitied walls "people wrote down what they couldn't say" but because it's a marginal space. Outside of boundaries, outside time.
At first I thought Eugenides' writing might be too precious (in the "Sing, O Muse" sentences quoted above, for example). But after the grandiosity of the opening chapter the prose style becomes less intrusive, though never lacking in a somewhat mannered musicality. In short it's along the lines of what you'd expect from an Oprah selection, but slightly more cerebral (and palatable). I wouldn't read this book for sheer joy in how it's written; more, to devour the food for thought contained in every action of Calliope's, every machination that brings about her birth and her discovery of herself.
Not only this, but Callie is a believable adolescent, tortured by all the usual angst of a coming-of-age novel, and burdened with more than sufficient material for an existential crisis. The understanding of humanity contained within this novel is deep -- the breadth of sexuality and love and fear that individuals experience. From the 1920s' New Woman and unabashed lesbian Sourmelina to the 1990s' Zora, an academically-minded exotic dancer with Androgen Insensitivity and deep distrust of men, characters -- particularly women -- seem to form almost a catalog of the varieties of sex and gender in the twentieth century. The machinery of the narrative isn't always invisible, and sometimes it's even a bit creaky, but Cal often draws back to look at that very machinery and give us meta-commentary on his storytelling. Everything fits together. Everything has brought Cal to where he is now. Middlesex weaves a story at once organic and self-conscious, circular and linear, masculine and feminine.
In Summary: Highly recommended; a fascinating, complex exploration of gender among other questions.
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