Monday 17 March 2008

"Amsterdam," Ian McEwan

I fully expected to hate this book, and I'm pretty sure that my not hating it is contingent on reading it after finishing a third-rate thriller. Still, I didn't hate it. In fact, there were several points where I laughed out loud.

Then again, I was reading it not as Great Prize-Winning Literature but as a thriller, or a parody of a thriller. I wonder if the book was written as a piss-take of the format. Or just as a piss-take in general. I mean, come on, who the hell writes something like:

'I can never remember sex,' he said after a pause. 'I'm sure it was brilliant. But I do remember her teaching me all about porcini, picking them, cooking them.'

with totally serious intent? There are also gloriously long passages on how to write a symphony, which must be the museum member's equivalent of those passages in Tom Clancy books about ships and guns, and since it's a McEwan novel of course there's sexual violence. Everything is in this novel, except a realistic description of how anything worked in the existing world, ever. Maybe that's why I liked it.

A few years later McEwan would use the exact same silly bourgeois stereotypes in "Saturday," only now they were bulwarks of Western civilization and also they had magic powers (don't tell me that fending off muggers and robbers with poetry alone isn't magic). Maybe "Saturday" is McEwan's high fantasy novel!

Friday 14 March 2008

"The Remains of the Day," Kazuo Ishiguro

I can see why this won a Booker Prize - it's an easy, well-written read. And I enjoyed it, too, because who doesn't love character studies full of pathos?

Still, I couldn't help but do an alternate reading of the book, in which Stevens (the repressed butler) is not just a repressed butler but also a high-functioning autistic. The storyline really seemed to make more sense that way, although then it was no longer a pathetic story of a man holding himself back from love and life, but instead a Time magazine piece on amazing people who happen to have crippling mental disorders. Of course, it could just be that 1930s England was a society based entirely off an autistic concept.

"Regeneration," Pat Barker

The professor who assigned this book for class did so because he wanted to tear it down and complain about it in public, which is a noble cause and certainly more interesting than when everyone pretends to like the book, but still it isn't quite as bad as he made out. (As everyone knows, the worst assigned reading-type book ever is Ian McEwan's "Saturday," or if you want to go back to the American high school experience, probably "The Scarlet Letter." It's scientifically proven, they keep a copy of "Saturday" in a vault somewhere, just like they used to do with the meter bar. Really!)

In any case, the book read a little like fanfic, which I guess it is - real person fanfiction starring the war poets. Everyone is a little too nice and they all solve their problems by talking them out (which makes sense for a book about psychoanalysis, in a way, but still). Also, everybody is gay.

I might be biased because "Regeneration" is part of a trilogy and I read the 2nd book, "Eye in the Door," first, and that book is all about hustling and blackmail and pacifists starving themselves and 47,000 perverts. Maybe I was expecting something darker.

"The Wasp Factory," Iain Banks

I've attempted Iain M. Banks before - "Consider Phlebas," which is part of his sci-fi "Culture" series - but was never able to get very far into it. So I didn't think I'd like him very much with the M. taken out, but I was wrong. In fact, I liked the book enough that I don't really want to read anything else of his because I'm afraid it will all turn out to be crap and disappoint me. Stupid, but there it is.

Really, this book is hilarious in a way that only a book about a 16-year-old serial killer can be. Highly recommended to anyone who likes Gothic tales, ladies kept in attic, and gun wankery. Love the "happy ending," as well.

"Nightwood," Djuna Barnes

More lesbians! Only this time, they are modernist lesbians.

I really have a problem with High Modernism, at least when it's the "let's use racial tropes and talk about race memory for pages!" High Modernism. It sort of reminds me of the time when I tried to play a Dungeons & Dragons type game back in high school and you had to pick a race of ugly elf being or whatever and each one of the races of elf beings had Racial Characteristics. Or maybe it reminds me of Star Trek. In any case, it reminds me of something very nerdy. Maybe Dungeons & Dragons is like what High Modernism degenerated into. It is the Morlock to T.S. Eliot's Eloi.

So, anyway, yeah. I had a problem with Nightwood.

Supposedly Djuna Barnes slept with her grandmother.

"Zami: A New Spelling of My Name," Audre Lorde

"Zami: A New Spelling of My Name" was written by Audre Lorde, black lesbian feminist poet. Books written by 70s feminists are always discussed as Historical Artifacts, because 20 years later everyone has realized (come back to the realization?) that women are conniving bitches who will go any lengths in their quest to leech off the power of the Man, since they have none of their own. Still, I personally like the idea of sisterhood better than the idea that I was born into something akin to Highlander, only determined by social codes of decorum and attractiveness instead of swords, even if the idea of sisterhood is a lie. So I liked "Zami."

It's odd, anyway, because most of the book isn't a manifesto for sisterhood, it's about growing up in Manhattan (way up in Manhattan) and about growing up lesbian. It's all very romantic, in a good way, not in a "they gazed sadly at each other and then spent the rest of the book angsting about their inversion" way. The descriptions of 1940s/50s New York are very evocative and make me nostalgic for my own imagined past - mainly a past made up of stories my mother told me, not from my own experiences in New York.

Friday 7 March 2008

"A Wizard of Earthsea," Ursula K. Le Guin

I picked this YA fantasy up on a whim and spent a weekend night reading it - the equivalent of staying in and drinking hot cocoa, I suppose, comfort-wise. I had read "Tombs of Atuan" (the second in the Earthsea series) beforehand and found it absolutely fascinating - the girl-priestess wandering around in the secret caves, the air of cloistered unreality - so "Wizard" was a bit of a let-down in that it was a classic Hero's Journey. I'm just not much of one for the Hero's Journey in its classic form, I guess - give me the point of view of the wicked villain or the hanger-on or the tragic lovers. I do like Baby Cakes' description of the Hero's Journey, though. "I guess every one of us is just hoping to turn out to be one of those forgotten chosen ones." "Right!"

Fortunately, even so-so Le Guin is still a good read, and the prose was spare, which was a bonus. So much of adult fantasy is overwritten - "Wizard" seems quite similar in plot to "Name of the Wind," but it's about an eighth of the size, I'd estimate. Perhaps someday I will get round to finishing "Name," or perhaps not. There might be a call for a "Books I Haven't Read (And Why)" section on here. It would be more vituperative, at least.

PS. Ged is brown!

"Lady Chatterley's Lover," D.H. Lawrence

Everyone in the world (by which I mean everyone in my graduate-level English class) is still embarrassed by this book, although now it's probably more because of the written-out dialect than the sex. Also, whatever happened to Lady Chatterley's clitoris? This is a mystery that haunted me throughout my reading of the book.