Laura
Really enjoyed about 90% of this book, but then he started going on about Camus and Nietzsche and I lost interest for a week. I shovelled through the rest on Saturday and accidentally took a nap less than a page before the end. Ooops. Kind of a sour ending to an otherwise really great read. I identified with the narrator (I won't say the author) a lot, although my own experiences are much milder and more internalized, easily overcome. Reminded me of Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot but with much more self-scrutiny and less literary somersaulting (I guess?). A great and hilarious cautionary tale, in spite of the repetition and the anger.
–
“The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; where the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. It is a very elaborate, extremely simple procedure, arranging this web of self-deceit: contriving to convince yourself that you were prevented from doing what you wanted. Most people don't want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he'd be lost without it. That's why children are so convenient: you have children because you're struggling to get by as an artists – which is actually what being an artist means – or failing to get on with your career. Then you can persuade yourself that your children prevented you from having this career that had never looked like working out. So it goes on: things are always forsaken in the name of an obligation to someone else, never as a failing, falling short of yourself.”
Loved this a lot, which surprised me. I mean I read A Room of One‰ЫЄs Own which didn‰ЫЄt do much for me and Mrs. Dalloway which I only really liked because it reminded me of Lord Peter Wimsey, but then I don‰ЫЄt think I paid much attention. (I also read Orlando but that was ages ago and I remember nothing except Tilda Swinton on the cover.) Is it crazy to say that here Woolf reminds me a lot of Thomas Pynchon? Fewer songs and dirty jokes but a similar swinging swirling narration through characters and perspectives, with oodles of compassion and understanding and more sentiment than you might think. I wish I had read this Virginia Woolf sooner.
I confess to being one of those insensitive creatures who are incapable of becoming really emotionally engaged and sympathetic with Emma. I could probably afford to be more understanding or whatever, but ugh, I spent way too much time a) being bored, and b) rolling my eyes at Emma for being such a drama queen. Sorry, I know, I‰ЫЄm a horrible reader and human being, however I will confess that there was some great writing and some really moving parts, even if I can't remember specifically what they were. Also, I think I might have a chronic condition that renders me incapable of appreciating literature translated from the French because I don‰ЫЄt think there are ANY French writers I really love (except for Beckett, who doesn't actually count because he wasn't even French and he often translated his own work). So that's a hypothesis I‰ЫЄll try to disprove one day. Boo to that and boo to me.
Brookner is good but I can never quite find her to be great. I keep waiting for one her books to really grab me. When I got to the end of this one, I couldn't understand why it had started the way it did, with “Dr. Weiss, at forty ....” I'm sure it would've made more sense if I'd read EugМ©nie Grandet or at least been more familiar with Balzac than I am (which is not at all). One of the things I liked most about this book was the emphasis on the daily need for food: the weight of being the person responsible for buying groceries and preparing food, the neediness of those who can't cook for themselves, the importance of food in relationships (seeking out an extramarital relationship purely for the comfort of feeding someone else or of being well fed). The eternal slog of having to keep oneself fueled! That was the main thing I got out of this book and somehow that doesn't seem right.
I read the first book of this series almost eight years ago, and every once in a while I thought about reading the following books, and reading something about Fforde (probably on Goodreads) pushed me to get this from the library. I remember very little from the first book aside from the general world in which the story takes place, but that didn't really influence my enjoyment of this one.
I was having a pretty good time until, about two-thirds through, the narrator describes Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility as “dressed in a Victorian dress, bonnet and shawl.” That a book like this could possibly mistake Jane Austen as Victorian is kind of the worst insult for a reader like me. Interpreting Jane Austen as Victorian means you don't understand Jane Austen or the Victorian era. At first I thought it was purposeful, that the Jane Austen of the book's world is not the same as Jane Austen in this world, but nothing in the text pointed to that. This series puts forward a world where books (at least books by British writers) are revered and protected, but then they make an elementary mistake about one of the greatest English writers of all time? I took away a whole star and a half for that.
Otherwise, the story is not bad and the world is a really interesting place with a handful of really clever things happening. It even reminded me of Douglas Adams, but less clever, less funny, and less absurd. Strangely, the end of the book – and I remember that this happened to me with the first book too – seemed pretty lame and too conventional for the rest of the book. Maybe it's because it's a series or maybe I just don't like the way most books end in general or whatever, but in any case I'm not terribly interested in picking up the next one. Maybe in another eight years.
Strangely enough, brought to mind Nick Jenkins's sometimes-ironic sometimes-breathlessly-enthusiastic observations in Dance to the Music of Time (especially since the narrator isn't directly involved in the action or even given a name until quite late in the book), but this was a little gentler and more compassionate. I loved the opening image of Cranford as a village of Amazons – not ultimately entirely accurate but it gives the place a funny mythical quality which sets off the narrator's tone. It's actually quite funny for most of the book before it gets all sentimental by the end. Also some interesting Johnson-Dickens arguments and juxtapositions about which certainly several articles have been written.
I was not expecting this to be a collection of linked short stories, because everyone keeps calling this a novel, but it's really a bunch of short stories. Each chapter feels like you're back at the beginning, with all the attendant confusion. I think this had to do with the voice, although maybe I'm just a lazy reader – didn't every story have the same voice, in spite of very different time and geography, even the first person ones? So it was very difficult to get situated at the start of every chapter.
I thought the PowerPoint chapter was effective and quite well done as an extension of the idea of pauses in music – the bulletpoints and spatial arrangement of text and empty space as ways of enforcing pauses in storytelling. Or is that stretching it too far? (It was also immensely pleasing to get through such a big chunk of the book so quickly!!)
I was relieved that the book wasn't as much about music as I was expecting – or did I just miss it? If it was there and I missed it without noticing, that's good, right? That is, bad for me but good for the book.
The final chapter pulled it all together nicely, perhaps too much so; the concert being held at the site of the towers (right?) was a bit heavy-handed. (I always feel like I can't appreciate the 9/11 stuff because I'm Canadian and it's not that I want to appreciate it but sometimes I want to roll my eyes but I can't.) The chapter portrayed a convincing version of the near future to a certain extent – not so much the handset-speak but the handsets themselves, the climate change (a wee bit extreme for 10-ish years from now), the latest baby boom (especially with all the TWINS), and the way people communicate.
Overall, as a novel, 3 stars; as a set of connected short stories a la Alice Munro and others I should probably know but can't name off the top of my head, 4 stars. So I'm feeling generous today.
Almost had to stop reading it for the constant use of the term “dago”. Otherwise, not bad and even a little bit fun in the last third or so, but not before a fair bit of tedium. I was hoping for something closer to Sayers and this is not it. Inspector Grant might've had a wee bit more personality, though hopefully in later novels Tey was able to develop him further.
Liked especially “The Cartoonist”, “Friday Afternoon, Her Father's Music Shop”, “Faulty Keys and Latches” (for “He dreams of doors hanging off their hinges like dislocated arms. Of warped wooden doors that stick. Of faulty keys and latches.”), “Warrior”, “Petunias”, “Cancer Arm”, “Bread”, “Hooligans”, “Spin”, and “Disassembly”. Going to re-read parts out loud as per Kevin's suggestion.
I would've given this two stars, but two of the four cases had unexpected resolutions, so props for that. I was probably expecting too much and should've been tipped off by the ‘family saga' descriptor, which I guess is code for child abuse. I was expecting unconventional, morbidly funny, literary detective fiction, and got none of these things.
The funniest part of the book was the Land sisters' complete lack of sadness upon their father's death, and it went downhill from there. Jackson wasn't a terribly compelling character. The prose style was kind of unnoticeable to me, which is supposed to be a good thing, but it's kind of disappointing when the writing doesn't do anything more than get the job done.
There are no motives for the crimes in this novel, which I think may have been part of what bothered me. The narrative focused on those suffering the aftermath of the crimes, with little to none of the usual attempts at discovering the criminal's motivation. That's usually one of the key problems to be solved in detective fiction. Instead, Atkinson just described what really happened to tie up the loose ends. The detective angle seemed to be a slapdash addition thrown in to pull the stories together, without any actual detecting happening. Perhaps it was because these were all cold cases, but there was no interest in the criminals themselves, just the victims.
Should that really bother me? I haven't read enough detective fiction to know whether that matters, but it just seemed too – okay, fine, I'll say it – sentimental. Call me heartless, whatever; I have not the heartstrings of parenthood that most adults have, but it was too easy to see the tugging for it to work for me.
I was kind of reluctant to pick up this one because of the title, but I wanted some Compton-Burnett and this was the only one the local libraries have that I hadn't read yet. But the title is only metaphorical, so it's all right. God = a horny writer family man and his gifts = the many children – some secret, some not – he fathers through various mothers. I'm pretty sure he was also going to try to sleep with one of his daughters, too, or am I reading too much into it? The conversation is fascinatingly bizarre and mysteriously insightful as always – might've even done without the plot.
I love Castle and enjoyed the Nikki Heat books so I was looking forward to seeing an adaptation of Castle's earlier work. But the story didn't really seem to be suited to this format. Why didn't they just release this as an actual novel? It would have made more sense and probably been way more fun, given Storm's narrative voice that was given pretty limited range here. The plot seemed chopped up, as though there were a lot of missing pieces. And I'm not sure why they couldn't have just gone a little longer to help fill those gaps? I was expecting it to be longer. Like, why didn't we get to see (the fake) Mrs. Grout earlier, or even just a flashback of her hiring Storm, instead of finally getting a look at her with Storm pointing her out to us three-quarters through the story?
I liked the bits with Storm's father (some insight into Castle's character there, especially given his comments in the foreword about comic book heroes serving as father figures), but I thought his relationship with Clara Strike was pretty weak. (Although who cares, since she dies at the end! But they're going to have to bring her back from the dead if they do any more Storm stories.) The artwork was kinda bad in places (Sassy's hand while she is sitting at Pumpkin's desk at the station? It's like the equivalent of a whole paragraph that makes no sense plopped in the middle of a page. Fix that shit, yo!), and way Storm is drawn at the government-plan house in Nicaragua seems really inconsistent with the way he is drawn elsewhere.
But then, I read very few graphic novels, so maybe the choppy story and drawing errors are fine with everyone? I know this is mostly just a publicity thing – perhaps even mainly a shot at getting the show more male viewers? – and it's based off a novel that doesn't exist written by an author who doesn't exist, but still, I was hoping for more.
A really engaging read even though I was kind of lost through most of it. Not up on my spy jargon obviously. It kind of tickled me that for the majority of the book the characters are sitting around reading documents. The writing style was not what I expected – it seemed a bit jarring and haphazard but nevertheless it pulled me along.
Yeah, so I picked this up from the library around 7pm and finished reading it at 11:30pm. A much-needed break from this last stretch of schoolwork for the year. Poor Miss Pettigrew is yanked from one end of the (figurative) seesaw to the other a few too many times, but it was light and fun and sweet and warmhearted. (I do have to note the few moments of shame for comments that were socially acceptable at the time but are no longer.) And yes, now I can watch the movie.
I couldn't get into the book until about a third into the third section, Ambros Adelwarth, when I realized that I was really enjoying it and it had stopped putting me to sleep. Not the easiest read, and I'm not really sure what to make of it, but it was nonetheless impressive and moving and enjoyable. I loved the most Ambros's travel diary, Luisa Lanzberg's memoirs, and the connection between Ferber's method of painting and Sebald's writing that comes up at the end.
“Now what was once the most luxurious hotel on the coast of Normandy is a monumental monstrosity half sunk in the sand. Most of the flats have long been empty, their owners having departed this life. But there are still some indestructible ladies who come every summer and haunt the immense edifice. They pull the white dustsheets off the furniture for a few weeks and at night, silent on their biers, they lie in the empty midst of it. They wander along the broad passageways, cross the huge reception rooms, climb and descend the echoing stairs, carefully placing one foot before the other, and in the early mornings they walk their ulcerous poodles and pekes on the promenade.”
“No one, he writes, could conceive of such a city. So many different kinds of buildings, so many different greens. [...] Every walk full of surprises, and indeed of alarm. The prospects change like the scenes in a play. One street lined with palatial buildings ends at a ravine. You to go a theatre and a door in the foyer opens into a copse; another time, you turn down a gloomy back street that narrows and narrows till you think you are trapped, whereupon you take one last desperate turn round a corner and find yourself suddenly gazing from a vantage point across the vastest of panoramas. You climb a bare hillside forever and find yourself once more in a shady valley, enter a house gate and are in the street, drift with the bustle in the bazaar and are suddenly amidst gravestones. For, like Death itself, the cemeteries of Constantinople are in the midst of life.”
“Since he applied the paint thickly, and then repeatedly scratched it off the canvas as his work proceeded, the floor was covered with a largely hardened and encrusted deposit of droppings, mixed with coal dust, several centimetres thick at the centre and thinning out towards the outer edges, in places resembling the flow of lava. This, said Ferber, was the true product of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure.”
The stories in this collection were interesting and well-written and effective and even fun sometimes, but it was the last story, “Swimming Lessons,” that really kicked the whole book up a notch. I was sitting on Sunday night with yet another so-so book for this class – good but probably not something I would ever read again or think much about – but then half-way through the final story I realized what was going on: Kersi learns to swim in Canada while his parents back home in India read and appreciate the very book of stories in the reader's hands. The book changes from a collection of linked stories held together by place and characters and theme to a collection of stories by one of those characters whose growth is hidden within and between the stories themselves.
“Don't you see, said Father, that you are confusing fiction with facts, fiction does not create facts, fiction can come from facts, it can grow out of facts by compounding, transposing, augmenting, diminishing, or altering them in any way; but you must not confuse cause and effect, you must not confuse what really happened with what the story says happened, you must not loose your grasp on reality, that way madness lies.”
Super amazing. Very similar in style to The Mezzanine, but centred around love and childhood memories and composing music and the sound of writing and commas – compassionate and full of wonder for what love can be compared to the more technical, everydayness of The Mezzanine (or am I misremembering it?). Baker circles between past and present across themes and connects memories and thoughts and moments in beautiful ways.
The book describes itself in the following passage from chapter 5:
“The artificial frog permanently influenced my theory of knowledge: I certainly believed, rocking my daughter on this Wednesday afternoon, that with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected; that is, that there was enough content in that single confined sequence of thoughts and events and the setting that gave rise to them to make connections that would proliferate backward until potentially every item of autobiographical interest – every pet theory, minor observation, significant moment of shame or happiness – could be at least glancingly covered; but you had to expect that a version of your past arrived at this way would exhibit, like the unhealthily pale frog, certain telltale differences of emphasis from the past you would recount if you proceeded serially, beginning with ‘I was born on January 5, 1957,' and letting each moment give birth naturally to the next. The particular cell you started from colored your entire re-creation.”
This book has been on my to-read shelf for ages because I was repeatedly turned off from continuing past the beginning of the first story, because the first story is a piece of Davis's later novel The End of the Story which made me kind of depressed when I read it on our honeymoon. Of all times to read that novel, on a honeymoon! It's the only sour impression I have of Davis's work, because I made the dumb decision to read a depressing book during a holiday that was meant to be even a better time than other holidays. So I would try to read this book but never get through the first story. Well, this time I braved it and finished and even moved on to the second story. Yay for me, because this collection is great and Davis is definitely a writer worth reading.
From “Break It Down”:
“Then you forget some of it all, maybe most of it all, almost all of it, in the end, and you work hard at remembering everything now so you won't ever forget, but you can kill it too even by thinking about it too much, though you can't helping thinking about it nearly all the time.”
From “Sketches for a Life of Wassilly”:
“Working on a list, he would send himself into a certain room to check a book title or the date and forget why he had gone there, distracted by the sight of another unfinished project. He received from himself a number of unrelated instructions which he could not remember, and spent entire mornings uselessly rushing from room to room. There was a strange gap between volition and action: sitting at his desk, before his work but not working, he dreamt of perfection in many things, and this exhilarated him. But when he took one step toward that perfection, he faltered in the face of its demands. There were mornings when he woke under a weight of discouragement so heavy that he could not get out of bed but lay there all day watching the sunlight move across the floor and up the wall.”
From “Five Signs of Disturbance”:
“Each time she looked down at them, the three quarters separated into groups of one quarter and two quarters, but each time she was prepared to put one back it appeared to her as one of a pair, so that she couldn't put it back. This happened over and over again as she rolled closer to the booths, until finally, against her will, she put one quarter back. She told herself the choice was arbitrary, but she felt strongly that it was not. She felt that it was in fact governed by an important rule, though she did not know what the rule was.”
Normally I adore the socks off of Barbara Pym, but this one seemed a little unlike her. Maybe it was the cold I had when I read this, but none of the characters were likable – normally Leonora's character would have some additional dimension that would endear her to the reader, or at least she'd have a level of insight to match what the author expects the reader to bring to the book, but she had little self-awareness and was hard to take seriously as the main character.
Is it wrong of me to say that this seemed more like Anita Brookner? Pym usually seems so warm and compassionate and witty, Brookner a little colder and more detached or refined (or “elegant”, Leonora's favourite word). Perhaps I haven't read enough (or thought hard enough) of either of them to really say.
P.S. Where were the anthropologists?!
This book sets up an interesting series of observed relationships that culminate first in Arjie's sexual awakening and then his political (or apolitical) awakening around the time of the civil war in Sri Lanka. The stories of the forbidden love and the politically-troubled relationships he observes as a child bear closely on the choices he makes in his relationship with Shehan. He sees his family constantly pushing against the social expectations of a Tamil family and is brought into danger by their actions, but he makes choices based on similar principles – that love and friendship are more important than politics, that people are not the ethnicity they belong to, that life should not be lived by the arbitrary rules of society.
Similar to Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, the story is also about the development of an artist, culminating the writing experiment/achievement of the epilogue. The stories within the novel – of bride-bride, Radha Aunty, Darryl Uncle, and Jegan – seem to serve as practice or setup for the ‘reality' of the epilogue – the real-life crisis that forces the family to leave Sri Lanka as refugees, made more immediate and critical through the diary form.
(I guess this is just going to be a three-star kind of class? Maybe I should try harder.)
Second book for a contemporary fiction course. An interesting blend of poetry & prose and family stories & memories. It took me a while to get into it and for the most part the sense behind the structure eluded me. The poems about the toddy tapper and the cinnamon peeler were great. I liked the meta-fictional moments where he writes about writing itself – sometimes in Ceylon, sometimes at home again in Canada (“Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen ...”). This book makes me think about the family stories I've heard (and the ones I haven't, or have heard only part of – although much less about affairs and feuds and more about embarrassing situations) in a different light – and makes me appreciate the ways in which my family retells the same stories again and again, often the same but sometimes different, sometimes arguing over who experienced what, because it's one of the few ways to hold on to those memories and to shape and organize our collective history.
“No story is every told just once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgements thrown in. In this way history is organized.”
“Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships. There are stories of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds, and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character – the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover.”
Post-class notes: So I guess the lack of structural sense is because Ondaatje‰ЫЄs all poststructuralist and stuff, right? (Downside to doing a combined degree – no room for as much theory as one might need.) So there's a complication of what is identity and how it can be discovered or developed, an erasure of the author from his own memoir, an attempt to draw together fragments of stories and memory and knowledge in order to gain identity that fails in interesting ways, a diasporic narrative, and so on.
The beginning chapter with the “bright bone of a dream” about his father and the black dogs in a tropical landscape is brought back near the end of the book with the chapter “The Bone” where the story of his father and the black dogs is a surreal and unbelievable, told by a friend of his father‰ЫЄs, and is not a dream. So his progression is a from a feverish, dreamy fear of what he sees as the reality of his father at the beginning of the book to an acceptance of what is supernatural and unknowable about his father?