Myths for growing girls

Excellent news, fellow book-readers: Not only does my reading block seem to have been defeated, but I've also finished the book it forced me to put down so much against my will: Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle. I'm happy to report that this book was extremely enjoyable from beginning to end.

Spoilers
That said, I'm rather disappointed about the book's gender politics. In true fairy tale fashion, we are presented with a misunderstood wizard (Howl), a skittish and reserved young lady (Sophie) who is cursed in life-changing fashion by a sexually dominant witch (the Witch of the Waste). Specifically, Sophie is transformed into a shrivelled old lady from the lovely young woman she doesn't realize she is. Having been thus translated, Sophie hies her crickety bones hence and begins wandering the land to try to figure out how to reverse the spell. She ends up as Howl's cleaner in his moving castle.

Many unique and incredibly fun adventures ensue as the well-written story moves towards its inevitable climax, in which Howl and the Witch engage in a battle to the death. Now, where Jones takes a somewhat different tack from the usual fairy tale clap trap is that Sophie turns out to be a witch of not inconsiderable power. It is Howl who defeats the Witch of the Waste and her fire demon, but if Sophie hadn't kept her fire demon at bay while Howl was unconscious and, literally, given him back his heart after freeing it from his fire demon, he wouldn't have lived to do so.

She's got power but she doesn't win the day. Which is fine, I suppose; she is afflicted with a rather debilitating case of family of origin anxiety. My problem is that she doesn't realize she has witchy powers at all until she's told, and she can't figure out how to use them effectively until Howl gives her some pointed advice - and even then, things are going wrong and can only be righted when Howl wakes up. Jones then seems to take a glance at the fairy tale ending by having Howl's suggestion to the newly un-cursed Sophie that they "live happily ever after" followed directly by both of them acknowledging that by "happy ending" they mean something like "extremely bumpy and fractious ride".

It could be a send-up - or, it could be Sophie settling for a wizard she may very well have been magicked into falling in love with in the first place. Hmmm. Meanwhile, Sophie's sister Lettie - pushy, confident, and also talented in witchy ways - is finding out that the milksop she thought she was in love with is actually a recently un-cursed wizard with powers far superior to her own - and whose aggressive last words to her are that he'll be happy to accept her as a student! In the end, Jones's story reiterates many of the fairy tale ideologies surrounding gender she seemed at points like she might be questioning, for the only really powerful female character, The Witch of the Waste, is dead - at Howl's hands. And, of course, the other potentially powerful female characters are gathered safely back into the fold of dominant male authority.

Now, I'm not saying that I enjoyed this book less because of its ultimately very traditional gender values. I am noting that the possibility of female power (such an over-used and increasingly meaningless phrase; I wish I were less buffleheaded from the hellish hot heat so I could think of something new and better) in fantasy fiction, YA or otherwise, seems 99% of the time to end up this way. If this weren't so common, Terry Pratchett wouldn't have had so much to so easily make fun of in Equal Rites. I wonder why this continues to happen and when I try to think of exceptions, all I can come up with are Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (but then, Lyra is a bit too young for such things to really be issues yet) and Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, in which Sabriel is truly the hero; when she and Touchstone marry, they are made to appear as though they have a marriage that really is based in equality.

This is also one of the reasons why I liked Y.S. Lee's first novel, The Agency: A Spy in the House, so much: Mary Quinn and James Easton have sexual chemistry, in spades, but Mary is not overwhelmed by it. Indeed, she is aware that to choose to succumb to it means losing other opportunities in life she mightn't want to lose - the point is, she contemplates the consequences of acting on this particular desire. Fairy tale females, including Sophie Hatter, do not contemplate such consequences - and this is what I find annoying - even when they are presented as being able to contemplate the consequences of every other action they consider taking. Saying yes to the sexually compelling man is too often presented as a question that doesn't even need to be asked.

This brings me to something I've been thinking about since the weekend, in relation to YA fiction geared specifically towards girls. Hubby and I had dinner with some friends on Saturday and we had some discussion about Twilight, which one half of the couple forced her book club to read. It was theorized by someone in the book club that one of the reasons girls like these books so much is that Bella is just a normal, kind of weak, kid; she is in no way special, and this is compelling because girls don't want to have to feel that they need to be at all strong or in any way special.

If this is true, I must say I find it extremely disheartening but in no way surprising for this is what's really at the heart of fairy tale gender politics: in the end, it's the sexually compelling male who one doesn't even need to consider saying no to, that makes the girl exceptional; she is made exceptional precisely by the exceptional male who chooses her. In Bella's case, a beautiful, sparkly vampire AND a REALLY sexually compelling in a deliciously animalistic but restrained werewolf add meaning to a life seemingly without hope of...well, much of anything; for Sophie and Lettie, two powerful wizards both confirm and contain their magical powers. In Cinderella's case, the wealthy prince...ad infinitum.

Like all fiction, YA fiction and fairy tales fall firmly within the category of the imaginative, the fantastical. But these things do not ipso facto preclude the insertion of problematic ideologies into narrative and plot; indeed, as scholars of children's lit may suggest, fantastical narrative details may make such inclusions harder to detect. I don't know if I would like to insist YA authors think harder about this or not; too often, authors who decide to be polemical in their fiction writing produce literarily disappointing works, which can only make the polemic less effective anyway. At the same time, one wishes for a book world in which Pratchett's parodying of such conventions weren't so effortless and the results so recognizably apt.

Also, that so many girls would apparently rather be placated than inspired depresses the hell out me.

A blip, nothing more

I think treating YA lit as medicine for what ails me has generally been the right choice - The Graveyard Book was really enjoyable and Howl's Moving Castle, my current read, is proving to be as well. My interim choice, however, was a big fat fail.

I read David Almond's Skellig about a year and a half ago and loved it in spite of its obvious attempts at emotional manipulation; I was thus fairly certain that another of Almond's books could be counted among the reliable. Wrong. Wrong. I was willing to forgive the terrible title - Heaven Eyes - and the cringe-worthy cover but I shouldn't have - both reflect the damp and spongy schlock between the covers.

I like the idea of the book - three orphans run away from their orphanage together (well, float away, on a homemade raft. Note to David Almond: if George Eliot can't make that work, no one can) and end up finding an abandoned warehouse with a girl (like them, at some stage in her teens) named Heaven Eyes and Grandpa, her guardian. Grandpa is senile and crazily protective of Heaven Eyes, and Heaven Eyes has webbed feet and hands, is strangely innocent, and perhaps not to be considered among the intellectually gifted. Alright, this doesn't sound like a good idea at all. I take it back; my bad. But like I said, Skellig was really good. You blind-sided me with your shit, Almond! Damn your eyes!

Really, the problem was not the idea of this book but rather the execution. For one thing, in Heaven Eyes, we don't meet characters, we meet clichés. The three main characters - Erin, January, and Mouse - are your basic orphan stock types, alternately angry and just aching to be loved with no nuances in between or beyond. Especially clichéd was the orphanage director, who was a broken-hearted (because childless) woman named Maureen who couldn't decide if she wanted to either destroy or save her wards. Yawn.

But Heaven Eyes. Lord, why don't you smite your enemies to good writing? Your ways are mysterious. Heaven Eyes, fish girl, is supposed to be the epitome of sweet innocence; like I said, she also seems to be developmentally challenged. That would all be good and well if Almond had anything, anything, in his rhetorical arsenal to make this clear besides the god-damned verb "to giggle". Heaven Eyes says sweet and innocent things in messed up syntax and diction (which is entirely inexplicable as she was raised by an adult who appears to have had a full working life amongst other normal humans), and she 95% of the time follows them up by giggling. Really, Almond, really? That fatuous, un-mellifluous, over-used word was the only one you could think to (over-)use to make it clear that Heaven Eyes is a bit slow but super, super nice?

I don't think it's unreasonable to demand that professional authors possess and display a hold on the language that is superior to your average grade 11 student's. I don't care what anyone says, but a story isn't - can't - be a really phenomenal story if the writing is either only merely adequate or downright offensive. Luckily, there are people like Neil Gaiman and Diana Wynne Jones to save our childers (and myself) from completely drowning in a sea of semi-literate and undeservedly* self-indulgent shit.

*Some authors, I believe, are sufficiently talented to be entirely forgiven for extreme self-indulgence, e.g., Orhan Pamuk.

Perhaps this is what summer reading can mean to me even now

Friends, I continue my battle with my own brain and its attempt to disallow me my favourite thing in the world: reading. I've taken some very much appreciated blogular advice and am not even trying to read anything but the lightest of light, fun stuff (which, for me, tends to translate as children's and YA lit).

I've begun with Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and it turns out that was a damned fine idea. What a delightful book! A lot of story, some nice pictures to accompany courtesy of Dave McKean, and the crackly, taped-on Broadart covering the book (because it's from the library). All these things together provided me with the superexcellent reading experience I needed.

(Who else associates the sound and feel of a hardcover library book wrapped in plastic with the halcyon days of their childhood summer reading? It just makes me feel so...young...in the best possible way.)

In case you don't know or trust Neil Gaiman sufficiently to just read every damned thing he's written, The Graveyard Book is about a young boy who escapes his intended murder at the hands of a bad and mysterious man named Jack; the rest of the boy's family doesn't escape, unfortunately. The boy (later to become known as Nobody Owens; Bod, for short) toddles off, unaware of the danger he's in, to a nearby cemetery where he's protected by the local inhabitants who most people can't see. He's given Freedom of the Graveyard which means that, besides growing up with a family of ghosts, he possesses some of their powers and freedoms. It's grim, spooky, and fun; Gaiman never lets things get too dark for, I think, he can't forget just how good reading a crackly library book should be.

If this summary which doesn't spoil anything doesn't convince you, the first line should: "There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife." Simple. Perfect.

I have several more hardcover, Broadart-bound, crackly, YA novels from the library to choose from next and they all look so good that I don't know where to begin. In any case, I hope I'll manage to do some of this reading in a park somewhere. A crackly library book in the grass with the sun sneaking its way to me through the branches of the trees above? The circle will be complete.

The difference between good men and scoundrels

In The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman re-imagines the rise of Christianity as resulting from a series of carefully orchestrated events and consciously rewritten histories; history is re-imagined in the service of the "truth", the "truth" being something that transcends the merely actual:

There is time, and there is what is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God. (p. 99)

Who speaks this mush, you ask? It may be an angel or it may simply be a very wily bureaucrat (or they're one and the same); all we know for sure is that it's a mysterious stranger who convinces Christ to record his brother Jesus's words and then make them better, for posterity and to help create a church for the ages. That's right, there are two of them. Mary gives birth to twins, one sickly little crinkle-face she calls Christ and one robust little caterwauler she calls Jesus.

The boys grow up together and Christ is a smart 'un, very good at quoting scripture and saving Jesus's butt, and Jesus is a punk-ass little kid that everyone likes and who does dumb stuff and gets into trouble. It seems like Christ should be the saviour but, in fact, people think he's a little weird and also he has no charisma. Later, Jesus has a spiritual awakening and starts preaching. The thing is, he says and does most of the things Jesus is credited with saying and doing, but he's also kind of a jerk and is mean to his family and is a bit racist. Christ loves his brother but can't get Jesus to listen to his notions about institutionalizing his good ideas and so just follows him around, copying down everything he says, and improving it as per the bureau-angel's instructions.

So, why is Jesus a good man and Christ a scoundrel when Christ is small and fearful and Jesus is big and compelling but still kind of a dick? Well, for one thing, Judas wasn't real; it's Christ who betrays his brother, but in a hapless, dumb-ass sort of way. Also, he's sacrificing Jesus's real words and actions to the needs of a religious monolith in the making; he's amplifying, elevating, adding pretty touches, and generally taking the human out of his brother and making him divine, for as he's told, this is the only way anyone will remember Jesus anyway; the angelcrat says to Christ:

"You told him that peopled needed miracles and signs; you told him of the importance of dramatic events in persuading them to believe. He didn't listen, because he thought that the Kingdom was coming so soon that no persuasion would be necessary."
...............
"But the Kingdom," said Christ, "the Kingdom will come!"

"No," said the angel, "there will be no Kingdom in this world. You were right about that as well."
"I never denied the Kingdom!"

"You did. When you described the church, you spoke as if the Kingdom would not come about without it. And you were right."

"No, no! I said that if God wanted to, he could bring the Kingdom about just by lifting a finger."

"But God does not want to. God wants the church to be an image of the Kingdom. Perfection does not belong here; we can only have an image of perfection. Jesus, in his purity, is asking too much of people. We know they're not perfect, as he wishes them to be; we have to adjust ourselves to what they are. You see, the true Kingdom would blind human beings like the sun, but they need an image of it all the same." (pp. 170-71)

God and his minions don't think humans are capable of transcending themselves, in other words, and so playing on their weaknesses rather than playing to their strengths is the way to go. It's cynical and cruel and Christ believes in his brother but he is also horribly compelled to do his literary duty as "the word of God." Christ appears to be rather talented in his literary stylings and here we have Christianity going strong 2,000 years later, all because of him...

Jesus, on the other hand, he likes to keep it real. He says what he thinks. If you're talking mush, he'll call you on it. But the fact is, he's not the son of God. God doesn't listen to him, doesn't talk to him and, he finally realizes, doesn't really give a flying f*** about him or anyone else, for as we already know, God just wants his gilt-plated bauble on earth to be established ASAP to keep people quiet. In the meantime, the only person who loves the world as it is is Jesus:

"...you made this world, and it's lovely, every inch of it. When I think of the things I've loved I find myself choking with happiness, or maybe with sorrow, I don't know; and every one of them has been something in this world that you made. If anyone can smell frying fish on an evening by the lake, or feel a cool breeze on a hot day, or see a little animal trying to run around and tumbling over and getting up again, or kiss a pair of soft and willing lips, if anyone can feel those things and still maintain they're nothing but crude imperfect copies of something much better in another world, they are slandering you, Lord..." (p. 193)

I love that Jesus is a bit of a hippy and not at all asexual. But this speech isn't really in keeping with his preaching and being a jerk to his family. It could be that Pullman's just showing how you can be a messed up human and a spiritual giant at the same time, in spite of what those cynical angels say for their cynical Boss. Or, it could be that Pullman didn't write a very good book.

I wanted to like this book; after His Dark Materials, I want to like everything Pullman writes but so far, I've liked much less than I've disliked and I'm afraid that The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ has made the "dislike" pile that much bigger. I fancy the idea of this book, in part because I'm always in favour of retelling old stories in a new way. And Pullman (or his publisher) really wants you to know that this is a story, for on the back cover of the book it tells us that this is precisely what this is.

Given the hullabaloo Pullman continues to stir up over what he's apparently saying about God in His Dark Materials, it might be fair to remind people that he's not a biblical scholar, but rather a fiction writer. However, having read the book, I find myself wondering if this back cover reminder was needed because it's not a very good story, in Pullman's hands. The writing is literate and grammatical but in no way magical; further, the characters seem entirely flat, and their motives uninteresting. Maybe the worst thing about this book, though, is that it reads to me, overall, like the stunted love child of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and an essay geared towards simultaneously taunting Christians and exonerating Pullman for being unfairly accused of doing so.

There's one passage in particular that gives rise to the latter half of that unflattering simile above. The angelcrat has come to visit Christ later, after he has abandoned his identity and started over somewhere else. Christ complains about the new ritual of the Communion, eating the body and blood of Christ, because it was not something he intended in his writings. The angel blithely tells him it's his own fault for being too subtle, and "People will leap to the most lurid meaning they can find, even if it's one the author never intended" (p. 240). This seems like a rather extreme response to a relatively minor complaint, especially given that the institutionalization of his brother's values is going very smoothly indeed, and precisely because of how Christ inserted all that truth into the history.

What I find fascinating about this statement is that it seems to indicate that the re-writing of history is not the problem at all, but rather readers' inability to process it properly. In which case, the cynical view of the angel was right - things need to be dumbed down for people to get what authors mean. And given that The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is pretty much completely lacking in either the wonder (Jesus) or the subtle intelligence (Christ) of Pullman's best work, neither character or point of view is validated - and nothing else is either, because as a story, this book just isn't good. I may never read Pullman again, not because this book is atrocious, because it's nowhere near that - but because it's mediocre, and mediocre is the only word I have to describe everything Pullman's written since The Amber Spyglass. Sigh.

It is not the job of the novelist to tell us how to read, or why

Ladies and gentlemen: Gustave Flaubert. I read Madame Bovary about 10 years ago and didn't enjoy it much; not because I thought Emma Bovary was a "slut" or something, as I've heard so many early 20-something members of the earnestocracy call her since. No, I just didn't think it was a very engaging book. Flaubert (and/or his translator) failed in the case of Emma Bovary and her very real plight to make me give even one tiny bit of a damn, either emotional or mental, about her, never mind any other character in the novel.

I'm sorry to say that, older and hopefully more mature as I am, I've found myself to be equally uninterested in every character of Flaubert's A Sentimental Education. Published in 1869 after Flaubert spent 5 years working on it, this novel is apparently one of the most influential of the 19th century, and was adored by George Sand, Emile Zola, and Henry James. I haven't read Sand yet, but I really disliked the one Zola novel I've read so far; as for Henry James, everything and anything is forgiven in someone who could write like that. If I weren't doing my French Literature Project, I would have taken Zola's approbation of Flaubert's book as a warning not to read it.

A Sentimental Education tells the story of one Frédéric Moreau, a young man from the provinces come to Paris to study and make his name and fortune. He's got some talent, but he's not brilliant; he's charming but prone to make social blunders which others nonetheless forgive him for. He's not stupid but he is remarkably flighty and shallow and generally unlikeable - and yet, his fortune ultimately comes to lie in the way of making advantage "alliances" with women with power and money. Mind, he always holds a flame for one Madame Arnoux, who does eventually fall for him, but won't ultimately go there.

First of all, all these women who either love or want Moreau - why? I never once got a sense of what could possibly be attracting any of them to him. And this is not a simple case of taste - Flaubert completely fails to indicate where the attraction might lie. One thing I really loved about Dangerous Liaisons was that while most of Choderlos de Laclos's characters were essentially despicable, his writing was sophisticated enough to make them incredibly compelling as well. There's nothing I hate more than a boring villain or cad, and I'm sorry to say that I Flaubert writes nothing else in A Sentimental Education.

Besides penning a tale peopled by the incredibly dull, Flaubert also fails to make the historical context in which he set his tale - the 1848 revolution and creation of the French Second Republic - seem anything but a dry exercise in listing historical details. I haven't read many historical novels - or, more likely, I haven't engaged with them enough as such - but having recently read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, I have a sense of what a really good author can do with history, and Flaubert doesn't do it. History itself can come to seem so real as to have a pulse and a heartbeat, or it can seem so real as to cause claustrophobia - but not, I'm sorry to say, in A Sentimental Education.

In the end, this novel read to me like an intellectual exercise rather than as art; in my view, art should savour somewhat of the mystical if only in the execution (Henry James!). That Flaubert had an intellectual agenda in mind when writing this novel seems pretty clear both from the book itself and from translator Douglass Parmée's introduction to this edition. Parmée begins his intro with a series of aphorisms of Flaubert's describing both what he wanted this novel to do and how people ought to read it. I think it's Flaubert's instructions on how to read A Sentimental Education that caused me the most irritation, however: "Don't read A Sentimental Education like children, for diversion, nor for instruction, like ambitious persons; no, read it in order to live."

Eh? Every single character in this novel is either an idiot, a dullard, fatally spineless, or as selfish as a spoiled child - how are we supposed to use such things in our daily living? And how are we supposed to use it to live without taking it as instruction anyway? It is not the job of the novelist to tell his or her readers how to read, or why - and it's a doomed effort anyway. The thing about committed readers is that we will have our own experiences of each book we read, and I'm surprised when authors so completely fail to remember that. It makes me want to punch Flaubert (and maybe Harold Bloom) in the neck a little.

Now, I know it's too late to say this and be believable, but I will nonetheless try: in spite of the above, I didn't hate this novel. I didn't like it much, no, but there were substantial chunks of time in which I found myself reading a pretty good novel rather than a badly executed pamphlet, and those were enjoyable, engaging, and thought-provoking times. In spite of such  moments, however, I doubt I'll make time for Flaubert in the future - such moments were too much the exception.

To redeem my experience of 19th-century literature, I've already launched myself into the second of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels, Phineas Finn - and so far, so good. But now, I'm off for Sunday brunch in the sunshine with friends.

Bram Stoker is henceforth banished from my reading list

Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm is not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it’s pretty damned close. If I had to quickly come up with ten bitter adjectives to describe this book, I could. Don't believe me? Here you go:

• Atrocious
• Absurd
• Disorganized
• Ridiculous
• Incomplete
• Overlong
• Boring
• Laughable
• Enraging
• Pathetic

There. That took me 10 seconds.

I enjoyed Dracula, and so thought another novel of Stoker’s would be a safe bet. Wrong. Wrong. This novel is a total failure, both as a novel generally and as a horror tale specifically.

Structurally, it is a total mess, with more threads than I can count having been dropped. The characters are flat and uninteresting, and their motives, when revealed, make no sense in the context of what’s happening. And almost every opportunity for convincing horror is annihilated because of Stoker’s frequent decision to present scary happenings not directly but through dry and interminable conversations between Adam and Sir Nathanial.

When we are presented directly with supposedly terrifying moments, they’re too stupid to be borne, with people dying from staring contests and villains being defeated by young ladies who know how to vogue. Also, there is the destruction of primeval white worms through…the purchasing of real estate, which is also a very sound business investment for a young man.

My god, I can’t believe how awful this novel is! I stopped after every chapter and banged my head. Well, not every chapter, because if it’s unremitting awfulness had been apparent before I was a third to halfway through, I would have dropped this bitch like it was a plague-ridden baby-child with an ugly mug and a squall emanating from it like a Siamese cat in heat.

The novel did begin badly, but in a truly awesome and kind of hilarious way. For example, here is Stoker engaging in some subtle foreshadowing:

She was clad in some kind of soft white stuff, which clung close to her form, showing to the full every movement of her sinuous figure. She was tall and exceedingly thin. Her eyes appeared to be weak, for she wore large spectacles which seemed to be of green glass. Certainly in the centre they had the effect of making her naturally piercing eyes of a vivid green. She wore a close-fitting cap of some fine fur of dazzling white. Coiled round her white throat was a large necklace of emeralds, whose profusion of colour quite outshone the green of her spectacles – even when the sun shone on them. Her voice was very peculiar, very low and sweet, and so soft that the dominant note was of sibilation. Her hands, too, were peculiar – long, flexible, white, with a strange movement as of waving gently to and fro. (pp. 22-23)

But this sort of deliciously kitchy moment turned out to be very rare and the shiteous aspects described above represent the true order of things. Also, there were so many horribly racist comments dropped that this novel makes Kipling look like an equal rights advocate, there was enough fear and disgust at female sexuality to fuel a Freudian’s entire career, and then there was the gigantic kite flying from Castor Regis – because, you know, madmen with mesmeric skills like also to fly gigantic kites from the tops of their castle for no good reason.

In answer to your unspoken question: yes, I did, in fact punch this book hard, several times in succession, after finishing reading it.

I am now on to Yukio Mishima's Forbidden Colors which, if it turns out to be terrible as well, will at least do so in grand, ambitious, and raging style!

It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane

W.G. Sebald's Vertigo begins and ends with authors other than Sebald. In the first section entitled Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet, we're told something of the story of this character and how he decides to become the best writer who's ever lived. Beyle is, of course, better known to the world simply as Stendhal.

How Stendhal becomes the literary lion we know him as now is, however, not really explored in this first section of Sebald's novel. Rather, what we read about is how fragile he is, how utter destruction - emotional and mental - is always dogging his footsteps. This constantly threatened annihilation is both the result of his commitment to writing and the only thing that keeps it at bay; and this is the thread that runs throughout Vertigo as a whole, as Sebald tells the story of his own (or his closely related narrator's) writing, as well as Kafka's; it is also the story of a number of briefly introduced readers who are all just barely hanging on to their connections to the rest of the world via reading at the same time that reading is their only refuge therefrom.

I would say "spoiler alert!" here except Vertigo isn't so much about what happens as how; but you've been warned, just in case
What, then, to make of the book not only concluding with Pepys's diary entry on the Great Fire of London but also of the narrator's seamless transition from describing reading the book to describing the events of the fire as though there himself? And it's not even "himself", for it is a collective "we" that is described as observing the aftermath of the famous city's famous conflagration.

To go from creating portraits of the most solitary of human beings and characters to concluding with a collective noun in the midst of great destruction was startling. I'm no doubt over-simplifying quite horribly, but it's as though Sebald (or his narrator - I have no idea, really, how closely allied they are) imagines true human community being possible, not in the face of disaster, but only in reading about disaster. Such community is, in other words, an almost entirely imagined one, one that leaves each of us as solitary and grasping at sanity as ever before.

This is a heavy, somber book. I wasn't enjoying it near its beginning but I quickly changed my mind and think, in the end, I may have enjoyed Vertigo more for being structurally loose and subject to constant change (of perspective, time period, etc). Having also really enjoyed The Emigrants, I will certainly read all of Sebald's works eventually.

While scouring the interwebs for a shot of the book's cover, I found a website devoted almost entirely to Sebald, which you can check out here. It's written and curated by someone with literary and art history training - which could not be more perfect for Sebald. I highly recommend this site.

Slut in the kitchen, chef in the bedroom

Friends, you've really been depriving yourself if you haven't been reading the London Review of Books classifieds all these years. Self-deprecation, irony, and desperation have never been so attractive; indeed, if these ads are any indication, my long-held but hitherto secret hunch has proven true and I may, therefore, now reveal it to you: everyone in England is so inherently hilarious that I would marry them all, sight unseen. The LRB personals are online here; unfortunately, the site hasn't been updated in a while. Not sure what the status of the print version is.

In the meantime, the editor of the LRB classifieds has put together a bookish collection of some of the best ads posted over the years, called "They Call Me Naughty Lola": Personal Ads from the London Review of Books. Unless you hate hilarity, wit, and good grammar, you'll love this book. I recommend reading it out loud with someone you like (or who, at least, has a good reading voice); this is what hubby and I did, up until the last section anyway, when things had to be accelerated so the book could be returned to the library on time.

Some samples to whet your appetite (and to alleviate your shock over my post title):

Slut in the kitchen, chef in the bedroom. Woman with mixed priorities (37) seeks man who can toss a good salad. (!!!! Okay, maybe the shock just increased. Heh.)

I've divorced better men than you. And worn more expensive shoes than these. So don't think placing this ad is the biggest comedown I've ever had to make. Sensitive F, 34.

It takes a real man to wear a dress. It take a revolutionary to wear those shoes with that blusher.

I am not afraid to say what I feel. At this moment in time I feel anger, giddiness, and the urge to dress like a bear and forage for berries at motorway hedgerows. Man, 38.

And my favourite:

Allele, anatta, arrear, arrere, bedded, bettee, breere, caccap, ceesse, cobbob, cocoon, deesse, dolool, doodad, effere, emmele, emmene, ennean, essede, feyffe, gaggee, giggit, googol, gregge, hammam, hummum, hubbub, jettee, kokoon, lessee, lesses, mammal, mammee, mossoo, mutuum, nerrer, ossous, pazazz, pepper, perree, pippin, powwow, reeder, reefer, reeffe, refeff, retree, seasse, secess, seesen, sensse, sessle, settee, sissoo, tattee, tattoo, tedded, teerer, teeter, teethe, terrer, testee, tethee, tetter, tittee, treete, unnung, veerer, weeded, zaara. Six-letter words with one occurrence of one letter, two occurrences of another letter and three occurrences of another letter. By Christ, I need a woman. I'm 41, but if you've got a pulse, cable TV and a smoothie-maker you'll do.

Ah, love.

I clearly have nothing to say about this book except "Yay!" so let this post be both a directive as well as a lesson to you: Eating well can be much kinkier than you think. Also, the Brits are probably not as sexually repressed as you are; unless you're a Brit, in which case, have I just created a Mobius strip of dubious hilarity? And finally, because I can't count, and for no good reason except that spring really seems to have arrived, a little Chaucer (Parliament of Fowls) for you:

Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast this wintres wedres overshake,
And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!

Offended on Camus's behalf

I knew that whatever poor sucker of a book followed up David Copperfield was likely going to be a disappointment, but Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island greatly exceeded my expectations in this regard. God lord, I loathed this book by the end! I didn't loathe it at first; at first, I thought it quite promising but it turns out that extremely wordy and fairly repetitive cleverness parading as profound genius pretty quickly loses its appeal for me. Who'd a thunk it?

Houellebecq has been and continues to be praised to the stars for this novel; some people who don't read enough have even compared him to Albert Camus. I feel offended enough to roll over in my grave, which I don't have yet, on Camus's behalf! The nerve of some literary critics who want to appear well-read and thoughtful by invoking the names of properly classic authors but who can't discriminate between the likes of Houellebecq and Camus, or Dan Brown and Umberto Eco, or any such obscenely paired writers that strike your fancy in a gorge-raising sort of way.

The Possibility of an Island has been marketed as a modern-day dystopia, and that's why I read it. I love dystopias. Or at least I have in the past; lately (and by lately, I refer to this novel and The Road), I have been much, much less than impressed.

See, the thing about dystopias is that they work because they're scary, and they're scary because the futuristic hell they portray isn't so unthinkable in the here and now; indeed, it should be seen to be the natural culmination of the here and now, i.e., terrifyingly inevitable. Houellebecq clearly understood the formula for writing such books as created and perfected by Orwell, Wyndham, Zamyatin, and Huxley but...

But. He takes too long to reveal what the scary future looks like, what with the primary narrator's story alternating with two of his future clones' stories. I've nothing against the slow reveal but this is much too slow; it's rather like a 4-hour striptease, by someone who's not so sexy under their clothes after all, and isn't even a very good dancer. You see, the writing was fine but in no way stellar; the plotting was fine, but also in no way compelling.

And anyway, this book is much less about a horrifying dystopic future than it is about how cults form and attract people; it's also about western culture's increasing obsessions with maintaining youth and beauty at all costs. It's not that these topics aren't timely and compelling, but that I just don't think Houellebecq does anything new or interesting with them.

The cult thing especially. The Possibility of an Island reminded me a fair bit of Kenzaburo Oe's Somersault, which I found disappointing for being all about cults but not, ultimately, either illuminating anything about cult psychology or making them appealing. The Possibility of an Island similarly failed in these regards, but somehow more so. I was just so bored. Oh wait, sometimes I was irritated too; you see, the narrator of Houellebecq's novel is a clone (ha, get the joke? Eh!) of any number of sex-obssessed, sexist, boring, misanthropic, self-absorbed narrators from novels writen by Roth or Richler in the 70s. Don't get me wrong, I love protagonists who happen also to be jerks - but only if they're either original or funny in their jerkiness, and Daniel1 doesn't have either going for him.

For the airing of the grievances aspect of Festivus, I think this blog fulfills that obligation. Tomorrow, some feats of strength, including bench-pressing my 20+-pound Jeoffy-cat. Also, I'm going to begin a good book, dammit. I don't know what it is yet, but dammit, it's going to be good! Happy holidays, all youse guys out in the etherwebs!

What ho! Shakespeare!

As you know, I've been trying to think of ways to inject some pizazz into Bookphilia and my feelings about it. I'm afraid none of my ideas are looking very well in the cold light of day, which I guess leaves me with two immediate options: stop blogging, or, keep writing reviews as I know how to (and hope that the romance will reignite all on its lonesome). For today, at least, I suppose my simply being here and showing you a picture of a P.G. Wodehouse book means I'm going for the latter option.

In my experience so far, P.G. Wodehouse's books are quite predictable and all pretty similar; the characters get switched up a bit and the hairy situations are somewhat altered but really, they're all the same. I have no problem with this and obviously, neither does the rest of the reading world, for all his books are being re-printed in purdy new soft covers.

Wodehouse's novels are fun and generally reliable and forgettable; I can't even remember the details of my favourite Wodehouse novel, Leave it to Psmith. But hey, if it's good enough for Shakespeare, it's good enough for me (and our man Pelham Grenville) - because really, all Wodehouse's books, in spirit for sure and also often in detail, are modern renditions of Shakespearean Comedies. Engagements arranged in record time, engagements broken, engagements remade and broken and remade, confused identities, young people running about in the green world well beyond the reach of the city, youth's conflict with the oldsters/parent figures, and the ultimate triumph of youth - all Shakespeare AND all Wodehouse. Wodehouse has no shame about his literary lineage, for he loves to drop little snippets from Shakespeare's oeuvre - who loved his intertextual references too. Wodehouse is like the meta-Shakespeare of 300 and change years later.

Obviously, such an analogy can only go so far; while Shakespeare's Comedies ARE all remarkably similar, he still had a great deal more breadth than Wodehouse, who did not pen tragedies or histories, or most interestingly, "problem" novels defying genre and the readerly expectations surrounding it. But this doesn't mean Wodehouse's Comedies aren't interesting. One of the things I find fascinating about them is how much more deeply than Shakespeare he thrusts his characters into the proverbial forest removed from the real world. Contemporary politics are barely gestured towards, if at all (e.g., in The Code of the Woosters, Roderick Spode is a rather intimidating fascist dictator in the making, but when crushed up against the meditative and ever firing brain of Jeeves, he has no chance there, in the country - and more importantly, his political ties and proclivities in no way affect the major plot points). The insularity of the English country mansion and its environs become inviolable to all negative forces save those of parent figures' in direct conflict with young people's desires.

The one way in which Wodehouse does not maintain his fairly consistent generic homage to Shakespeare, however, is in relation to the issue of class. In Shakespeare's Comedies, class distinctions are allowed to break down and be toyed with in the forest - although they will, of course, be re-established directly prior to the characters' re-entry into the "real" world. A great deal of Wodehousian Comedy relies on the strict maintenance of those class distinctions throughout whatever chaos ensues. With Shakespeare, the temporary disintegration of class is a true fantasy in the non-literary sense of the world - in Renaissance England, to what class one belonged was very clearly marked by the clothes worn. Indeed, that Renaissance actors, low rent by anyone's standards, could dress themselves as kings on the stage caused a fair bit of anxiety - for external markers were the only markers of social position (and therefore power) that were universally understood.

So, I wonder, was Wodehouse simply not enamoured of that particular aspect of his mentor's Comedic style, or is the sharp delineation of class in Wodehouse's novels itself the fantasy? Is the thing to be yearned for, in a Europe shaken by wars, the rise of a strong union culture, and an increasing influx of immigrants, not more social diversity but less? Given Wodehouse's political affiliations during World War II, that's a rather disquieting hypothesis. (It's also disquieting that I say this, given how many years I spent trying to teach my students to avoid engaging in biography criticism!) Or, are Wodehouse's novels simply a gentle send-up of the old guard who would imagine that larger cultural changes would leave their country (estates) entirely untouched in every way? Or, even more basically, is Wodehouse just having a simple laugh at those who would imagine that youth won't triumph over age?

I don't know the answers to these questions. I do know, having just come up for air and looked around with blinky eyes and racing heart, that I've apparently just written, not a review of The Code of the Woosters (which I very much enjoyed), but rather a hasty and un-researched lecture geared towards a first year English course - if anyone taught Wodehouse to first years, which I can't say I've ever heard of. Having not taught uni courses in 3 years now, I find what I've just done confusing. And perhaps more, not less evidence, of the fact that I don't know what kind of relationship I want there to be between the books I read and how and what I write about them. Sigh.

The best sort of YA book is not really for YAs

That I have read Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels is a testament to the power of the interwebs, friends - specifically to the power of the book blog, for if it weren't for Raych's post on this book I would not have read it. If it weren't for the interwebs and my bookstore, I don't think any very recently published tomes would penetrate my consciousness these days (except for The Time Traveller's Wife, which 50 people a week ask me for; no one's yet asked me for Tender Morsels, the fools). I just want to dive into a pool filled not with water but with novels penned by a variety of Victorians, P.G. Wodehouse, and Ellis Peters and drown in bookish happiness.

What I'm saying is, Tender Morsels is a little bit of a departure from what I'm craving at this particular moment but it's exactly what I wanted when I found myself disappointed by that half-arsed Philip Pullman book a little ways back. Lanagan's book abounds in magic and inexplicable happenings, and the writing is really damned good in a capital-s Story sort of way, and like all the best YA novels out there, it isn't what many parents would consider suitable for YAs. It is fully of nasties and terrors and sex good, confusing, and very, very bad - and I absolutely loved it.

Reading books like this makes me feel a desperate sort of pain about my own inability to write creatively anymore. I want to write books like this, more than I can say. But every time I come up with a halfway good idea, I kill it to death by immediately analyzing it as though I were still a literary critic. I do this much against my will and can only hope that as more time passes, I'll be able to shed that aspect of my grad school life as well.

Back to Tender Morsels. It's a retelling of Snow White and Rose Red, a fairy tale I read repeatedly as a child, as it was in my favourite books, the 2-volume set of The World's Best Loved Fairy Tales. Like the original story, Tender Morsels includes the angry little dwarf with the beard and love of gold, as well as the bear who wins the hearts of the beautiful sisters. But the sort of suppressed sexuality barely hinted at in the original is in Lanagan's book explored with a great deal of confidence (and sometimes rather grisly relish) for the book begins and ends with gang rape and there's a whole bunch of alternately compelling and disturbing looks at human-animal sex in between.

If you're disturbed by the notion of human-animal sex being compelling, just make yourself feel better by thinking of this book as saying something allegorically about the limits of human civilization and what lies beneath the surface. I'm sure this book, and most other fairy tales, function primarily at the level of the allegorical, but Tender Morsels is so good - and so uncomfortably so at points - precisely because it keeps the allegorical so earthly and literally immediate.

PS-Raych not only reviewed Tender Morsels, but also interviewed Lanagan - check it out here.

PPS-I've had a number of ideas for reviewing books without writing book reviews but in the cold light of day they're none of them very good; indeed, some are downright embarrassing. I'll keep my thinking cap on and see if I can come up with some better ideas. Or maybe in the meantime, I'll magically go back to loving my blog just as it is.

An interlude which was neither all that I'd hoped for nor more

I'm enjoying Marguerite de Navarre's The Heptameron but I confess I needed a little break from all that courtly love; every story discusses the most beautiful and virtuous woman in the world, or the most gallant and honourable man in the world, but it's never the same man or the same woman. I know such excessive and straight-faced used of the superlatives is standard to the genre but it was wearing on me just a little bit, so I had to walk away and let everyone cool down, lest someone say or do something we'd all regret.

As a break, I wanted a good fantasy novel that might be geared more towards the YAs than the adults. I kind of wanted books I'd already read - like A Swiftly Tilting Planet or Gryphon's Eyrie - but I didn't want to reread. I wanted a book that would give me a reading experience like those books gave me back in the day (and in subsequent rereads). In quest of such a book I betook myself to the library and basically couldn't find anything that looked promising in the way I wanted, so I picked up the only non-Victorian-esque Philip Pullman book I haven't yet read - because what could be more reliable than a Philip Pullman book?

Oh right. If only I'd remembered that I didn't like that Victorian-esque book, The Ruby in the Smoke, so much, and actually, except for the His Dark Materials trilogy and Clockwork and I Was a Rat!, I generally haven't been so impressed. I've actually loved about half of what I've read of Pullman's stuff. The other half, meh. It's just hard to remember the "meh" moments when I remember His Dark Materials, which is just so bloody good!!!! It's hard to believe Pullman could write anything except pure awesomeness except that now that I think of it, he did write some pure not-awesomeness. Like those two mini-additions to His Dark Materials and The Ruby in the Smoke and Count Karlstein and The Firework-maker's Daughter. Sigh.

Sadly, The Scarecrow and His Servant is one of those efforts of Mr. P.'s which I must relegate to the not-awesome pile. It was okay. It had moments. But it didn't blow me away at all with its magic and mystery and imagination, and that's what I wanted. It was fast; took me about a total of 2.5 hours to read. And if I had sprogs of my own or little relatives to read to, I would likely include this one in Reading Time, if only because Pullman never freaks me out with his weird ideologies (even though there was some consumption of someone's head!! (which, to be fair, was made of turnip)) and his writing is always very good. But I would probably also secretly hope that it wouldn't be the book they wanted me to re-read to them every night for a year.

Anyway, you can be sure that I'll be reading The Book of Dust whenever it's released. But you can also be sure that I'm becoming increasingly skeptical about the consistency of our man's genius. Which makes me feel like I did when I found out Santa Claus wasn't real. I kind of knew because I'd begun to recognize my mother's handwriting on those gifties; but a little more genius-ish use of the smoke and mirrors could have delayed the trauma. So come on, Phil, pull out the smoke and mirrors one more time! Show us some more good Moses tricks!!! PLEASE.

Splendid young things in a young world

Kevin told me two things a while back: one, that I must read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio; and two, that he'd cut me if I didn't love it. Well, I've read it. Also, I've mostly loved it, although not with complete abandon. Now, I'm going into the bookish equivalent of the witness protection program.

Seriously, I think Winesburg, Ohio is a very special book, and not in that super slow but really sweet and likes to hug a lot kind of way. It's a set of interlocking stories about small-town Ohio at the beginning of the 20th century; one character, George Willard, features in every story, generally as the unwitting but curious listener of the other characters' tales.

The writing of Winesburg, Ohio is really amazing, in a quiet, lonely sort of way. It's really a book that is to be savoured and the good bits (of which there is an abundance) re-read repeatedly. I could quote about half the book if I wanted to give you a sense of such moments, but here's a paragraph from "Departure", one of my favourite stories in the collection:

In the darkness, they played like two splendid young things in a young world. Once, running swiftly forward, Helen tripped George and he fell. He squirmed and shouted. Shaking with laughter, he rolled down the hill. Helen ran after him. For just a moment she stopped in the darkness. There is no way of knowing what woman's thoughts went through her mind but, when the bottom of the hill was reached and she came up to the boy, she took his arm and walked beside him in a dignified silence. For some reason they could not have explained they had both got from their silent evening together what they needed. Man or boy, woman or girl, they had for a moment taken hold of the thing that makes the mature life of men and women in the modern world possible. (p. 200)

Just lovely. But my favourite story, by far, was "Hands" which tells the story of a former teacher exiled to Winesburg after being wrongly accused of molesting his male students. This story is worth reading both on its own and as part of the larger narrative of Winesburg, Ohio. It's one of the most perfect short stories I've ever read. And I've read a lot of Frank O'Connor, so that's saying a lot.

What I love about this book is how beautiful Anderson makes his characters seem in their fragility, and naivety, and desperation. It is not a happy book, yet its characters have these unbelievable moments of transcendent, almost divine clarity.

My only disappointment with this book is that I didn't find the stories to be consistently breath-taking; "Hands" and "Departure" stand out as exceptional but I feel a book like this relies on every tale being equally compelling, even as they address very different individuals suffering their very different and private pains. And I will admit that even as I continued to be struck by those deceptively simple but just gorgeous passages that appear everywhere in the book, there were some stories in the middle to end that I already can't quite distinguish in my memory.

So, for me, this isn't a perfect, earth-jangling kind of book. But it's a damned fine book, a unique book, a book that I am incredibly pleased to have read. And you should read it too. Or Kevin will find you.

The death-throes of virtue

It seems that I'm really pretty much over the stress and horror of grad school generally and my dissertation specifically for I've just read AND enjoyed an epistolary novel. (My dissertation was all about letters, and previous attempts at reading epistolary fiction have inspired hyperventilation and self-loathing.) Woot, I say! The literary world is my figurative oyster again.

Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons was suggested to me by Amateur Reader when I lamented the lack of naughtiness in Abbe Prevost's Manon Lescaut, and Dangerous Liaisons certainly made up for the former's lack of promiscuity and cruelty. Laclos's novel focuses primarily on the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, their complicated relationship with one another, and their diabolical manipulations of their greener companions. There was Sex!, Intrigue!, and Death! and it was a damned good read.

Laclos was rather cagey about whether or not he believed Dangerous Liaisons ought to be an enjoyable read; he seemed clearer, however, that it should be an edifying read:

The usefulness of the work, which will be perhaps even more disputed, seems to me to be easier to establish. It seems to me at least that it is doing a service to society to unveil the strategies used by the immoral to corrupt the moral and I believe these letters will make an effective contribution to this end. (p. 6)

It's hard to know whether or not Laclos really intended this novel to inspire moral contemplation; after all, many other epistolary novelists of the 18th century made similar claims - so often, in fact, that these claims seems rather more calculated to create readerly goodwill, like the humility topos attached to so many works of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, than to actually function as reading instruction. Richardson's Pamela is supposed to be the pinnacle of epistolary moral didacticism, after all, but it's one of the kinkiest novels out there!

The thing about epistolary fiction is that it can make claims to represent reality in a way other, more distant, narrative forms cannot, for letters are meant to reveal the innermost workings of the characters, unfiltered through the lenses of either delicacy or censorship. And indeed, titillation ought to be a primary keyword in any search for Dangerous Liaisons. The Marquise de Merteuil, as sort of adopted older sister to the extremely naive Cecile, describes in a letter to the Vicomte how she "consoles" the 15 year old over one of her various adolescent heartbreaks:

You would not credit how beautiful she is in her grief! I guarantee that if she were trying to be charming she would often be in tears. This time it was not a ploy...At first I was very struck by this new allurement which I had not previously encountered and which I was very glad to observe, and I only offered consolation in a clumsy fashion, which made her feel worse rather than better. And thus I brought her to a point where she really did seem to be suffocating. She was no longer weeping, and for a moment I feared she might have convulsions. I advised her to go to bed and she acquiesced. I took on the role of lady's maid. She had not yet begun to dress and soon her fine hair fell down over her shoulders and bosom, which were entirely uncovered. I kissed her. She let herself go into my arms and her tears once more began to flow effortlessly. My God, how beautiful! Ah, if Magdalene was like that, she must have been much more dangerous as penitent than sinner!

When my grief-stricken beauty was in her bed I set myself to consoling her in good faith. I reassured her first of all on that subject of the convent. I instilled in her the hope of seeing Danceny secretly. 'If only he were here,' I said, sitting on the bed; then elaborating on that theme, I led her by one distraction or another to forget her suffering entirely. (p. 133)

Phew! Hot! Cecile is corrupted and dishevelled fairly easily (and frequently) at the adept hands of the Marquise and the Vicomte, who are using her as a pawn in an elaborate revenge scheme against others who've slighted them. The Vicomte is also responsible for the fall of Madame de Tourvel, a lady whom everyone rightly sees as the epitome of virtue. Madame de Tourvel's seduction is prolonged, cruel, and sexy in a degrading sort of way and titillation is even more so the primary keyword.

However, Laclos ultimately does fulfill his promise of making Dangerous Liaisons into a moral treatise as well as a novel, for the Marquise, the Vicomte, and Madame de Tourvel are all punished in ways that just scream DIVINE JUSTICE. Yet, for all the tidiness surrounding these characters' ends in the book, Cecile's and Danceny's positions (they being the original young, innocent lovers who their elders work so very hard to corrupt) are much more ambiguous. Cecile ends up in a convent but only because she chooses to and it's suggested that her motives are not religious. As well, Danceny, having killed someone (!!), is allowed to go unpunished because he does the delicate thing in making sure everyone's letters end up in the hands of someone who won't use them to cause more scandal. And yet, there's this novel...

This is what I find so fascinating about epistolary fiction - so often the moral work it claims to be intended to do is overwhelmed by the base and rather shabby pleasure it provides in offering a close look into the sordid details of humans rather more interesting and morally complicated than we generally are.

The Sarazens head without New-gate: A catalogue of the ways in which I've been avoiding working today

This was supposed to be a post about Ueda Akinari's Tales of Moonlight and Rain, which I'll discuss very briefly and unsatisfactorily below. I just don't have a book review in me right now, at least not about a book that's more explanatory footnote than text. But more of that anon. Right now, I'm going to discuss what a slack bastard I'm being here in bookstoreland.

I do this not to perpetuate the stereotype that all book-sellers do all day is read - because while that would be astoundingly f***ing heavenly, we don't. Most days, I don't get to read for more than an hour in total, and I make a point of doing so because I don't get an actual lunch break.

How I've Been Wasting Time Today:
The day began with me coming back from my lovely coffee and read in the park this morning to find a crazy woman sitting on the front steps of the shop. I circled around, went to the grocery store, hoping she'd be gone when I returned. But no, she was waiting to be let in. I know she was crazy because she was yelling at herself over some slight, perceived or actual.

She stopped yelling in the store; in fact, the self-talking ended entirely to be replaced by her coughing her TB lungs up all over the books in the fashion section, then the drama section, then the bargain section...while I followed her about tidying up. So, maybe this wasn't a big waste of time but I should have been cataloguing some of the eleventy million books currently sitting on the floor of our back room.

Also:
- I've spent a lot of time staring off into space.

- I've been listening to Iron & Wine's fabu album The Shepherd's Dog and wishing I could sing out loud along with it, especially to "Flightless Bird, American Mouth".

- I've been playing Lexulous on the Facebook, which I suck at.

- I've been reading other people's blogs.

- I've been looking out the window and weeping inside because I can't go outside and frolic.

- And I've been eyeballing the gigantic stack of doubles I like to think I'll someday read but which I have no desire for at the moment.

I should be finishing Suite Francaise, if I'm not going to work much, as I have only 30 pages left. But see, I need a bio break and I haven't had one yet today, and it's hard to concentrate when your bladder is about to explode. Long stretches between being able to go pee pee is one of the occupational hazards of working alone in a bookstore. I know, TMI. Forgive me.

Today, I've also tried and failed to write a blog post solely about Tales of Moonlight and Rain, which is a tiny tome of late 18th-century stories by Ueda Akinari. Apparently it's the best damned example of the Japanese literature of the supernatural that ever existed. That may be true but I was so overwhelmed by the copious introducing and footnoting both of the book as a whole and of each of the 9 tales that I don't think I can give much of an opinion on its quality. It was all very distracting.

There were really great moments in these tales, but I found myself wishing that someone had published a version for people who don't care how well-read and given to making literary allusions Akinari was. The problem is, I can't look away from footnotes, like some people can't look away from a train wreck; the mind is willing but the flesh is weak.

Also, yeah, I wrote a catalogue of how I've been wasting time today. This is not a banner day at Bookphilia.com. But it's not a banner day in the life of the Shea either; I'm sleepy and would sell my soul right now, not for the ability to play a mean guitar or for 24 years of unlimited knowledge, but for a comfy hammock in the shade between two trees overlooking a lake. While laying in said dream hammock, I would lazily be perusing the fattest, most Dickensian novel in the world. I believe in the devil but he doesn't believe in me, apparently, because I'm not getting any offers here. Sigh.

But next time, I promise that the Sarazens head will be a happy, joyous, gushy love-fest. Because I think that's what y'all really wanted when you said you wanted to hear about life as a book-seller.

Don't believe the hype

Friends, if the word on the internets were to be believed (well, the narrow corners that I haunt anyway), Javier Marias's A Heart So White is the most super-fantastic novel that's ever been written, ever.

Maybe it is and I'm just a Philistine but I thought it was walking the edge of being really very bad. I admired parts of this book - in particular, the scene in which Juan, the narrator, meets his wife, Luisa. Both are working interpreters and both are present at a meeting between two major international politicians who can't speak one another's language; in this meeting, Juan is the interpreter and Luisa is the "net", the other interpreter who makes sure Juan is accurately conveying what each politician is saying.

He doesn't; he makes things up, things outrageously unconnected to what they actually say, and the politicians, as a result, begin to say truly interesting things to each other. What makes this scene so compelling is Juan's double perspective - he's both totally engaged in the conversation he's manipulating his uni-lingual victims into having and at the same time entirely aware of Luisa's body language, which is enticingly complicated, as she allows this manipulation to proceed.

Unfortunately, I found nothing else in A Heart So White half so compelling. Indeed, this book was, for the most part, just a slog for me as I continually found myself asking what the point of the narrator's experiences and extremely long and repetitive musings were.

Ostensibly about Juan's slow discovery (through the intercessions of others) of what happened to his father's first two wives, this was actually only really addressed at the very beginning and the very end of the novel. What happens in between I found alternately boring and irritating - and also almost entirely unconnected. To make matters worse, the ultimate revelation of Ranz's marriages previous to his marriage to Juan's mother, was entirely anti-climactic. I was neither shocked nor horrified, nor, it must be said, at all interested anymore.

And to answer your unspoken question, I kept reading just because of that one fantastic scene described above; I was hoping for one more flash of brilliance. But this scene was too good in the end; it simply doesn't belong in the wasteland that is A Heart So White. It must be evidence of chaos theory. If this book can't be considered a good reading experience, at least it can be seen as a good example of science at its most interesting. SCIENCE!!!!

That Coetzee is a tricky one

It's been a number of years since I've read any of J.M. Coetzee's work, in large part because I found Disgrace to be such a traumatizing read (as I was warned it would be, and which warning I ignored). Disgrace was upsetting purely because of the subject matter, which I'm not interested in talking about even now; what made it more difficult to deal with, perhaps ironically, is just how phenomenal the writing was. Coetzee is truly a master of his craft, I can't deny that, even if I've found all his characters in my past reading of his works to be either loathsome or unspeakably pathetic, and neither in ways I could take any real pleasure in.

But pleasure isn't really what I think Coetzee wants his readers to experience even if in spite of all else, we do and must take pleasure in how simultaneously beautiful and coldly concise his language is. So, when Mr. Kevin demanded that I read Coetzee's latest, Diary of a Bad Year, I was hesitant. But as he has a black belt in Cormac McCarthy, I was afraid to say no.

In fact, I was interested to revisit Coetzee now that I'm older. I don't think he's really an author for the young and before Kevin made the suggestion, I'd started to become vaguely interested in discovering whether or not I could engage more with, or at least better respect, what Coetzee does. It seems I could, for I enjoyed Diary of a Bad Year extremely - but it was more than enjoyment, for that's more often a predominantly emotional experience for me. Reading this book was also a deeply satisfying cerebral experience.

The novel's unique structure - three narratives running almost, but not quite, simultaneously from 2 characters' points of view - was absolutely engaging and probably would not have worked in the hands of a less capable writer. The writing was absolutely stunning and to my surprise, it was the main character's essays on various topics (for inclusion in a book called Strong Opinions) that most appealed to me - mostly because they were so lucid and compelling, unlike most essays I've been accustomed to reading. Finally, the story, which while very simple, was likewise engaging.

What's fascinating to me about Diary of a Bad Year is that, Coetzee's characters are no less despicable than usual, but somehow I wasn't bothered by this. In fact, I was actually relieved that he didn't sugar-coat anyone's motives for the reader, even as he allowed them to try to sugar-coat things for themselves. Given that all the narratives were first person, that distinction is quite a feat.

What I also found compelling about this novel, but which I've found irritating about Coetzee's work in the past, is how slippery he is; where he stands in relation to his artistic creation is really quite ambiguous. It's a position that's growing on me. Early in Diary of a Bad Year, the main character, J.C., argues, in one of his essays ("On Al Qaida"), that the incompetent and paranoid prosecutors of many post-9-11 suspected terrorists learned the very basis of their convoluted and logically suspect techniques, the so-called skills that got them hired and promoted, in university humanities courses:

Where did the prosecutors learn to think in such a way? The answer: in literature classes in the United States of the 1980s and 1990s, where they were taught that in criticism suspiciousness is the chief virtue, that the critic must accept nothing whatsoever at face value. From their exposure to literary theory these not-very-bright graduates of the academy of the humanities in its postmodernist phase bore away a set of analytical instruments which they obscurely sensed could be useful outside the classroom, and an intuition that the ability to argue that nothing is as it seems to be might get you places. (p. 33)

Oy vey, it wasn't intuition - as humanities departments have become increasingly squeezed by budget cuts and the need to compete with other disciplines boasting more applied (read, applicable to a so-called pragmatic reality) forms of research, they've actively encouraged students to consider the myriad ways a humanities degree is useful beyond the study itself. I've been on both the receiving and professing ends of such talks because gawd knows, an education can no longer be justified for its own sake. Sigh.

It would seem as though J.C. (or Coetzee) is lamenting Western culture's move away from a more appreciative, less deconstructive (or destructive), approach to the study of literature, etc - and yet, the very structure of this novel, the three characters and their complicated uses and desires for each other, make pure appreciation or something constructive much more difficult approaches to take with this novel than with something like, something like a Dickens or Eliot novel.

It would seem that Coetzee sets up a particular problem with reading that has arguably helped to create deeper cultural problems in how humans relate to one another, and then creates a novel that invites specifically that kind of reading, and THEN implicitly challenges us to see if we can resist the siren song and all our reading training, formal and informal, and approach this novel differently! I love it, but I'm not sure I'm capable of meeting this challenge.

I am really pleased that this book was pointed out to me, for I would not have sought it out. Thanks again to Mr. Kevin.

This is also the last book I'll be reading for J. Kaye's Support Your Local Library Challenge. When I joined the challenge, I recall that participants were to choose how many books they wanted to do; I chose 20, which I later regretted a little - you know how allergic I am to either commitment or planning. I've since revisited the site, and the instructions were to do either 12, 25, or 50. I will certainly continue to borrow library books, I can't help it really, but I'm not going to be counting them anymore as this is #12.

Hilarious kinky

My bro Roger asked me a long time ago to indicate, when blogging about a book, where I'd discovered the book and/or author. Unfortunately, this is something I've generally forgotten to do, maybe in part because it's not usually an interesting story: the majority of my reads are based on others' suggestions.

But Yan Lianke's Serve the People! is an excitingly successful product of what I will henceforth term Library Roulette: i.e., I was browsing in the gorgeous Lillian H. Smith branch of the Toronto Public Library and saw this. I noted I hadn't heard of either book or author and that I liked the cover. I didn't do a page 40 test. I didn't do a page 1 test either. I didn't read the back cover. The front of the copy I read didn't loudly proclaim that Serve the People! is "BANNED IN CHINA". I simply picked it up and checked it out and then I finally read it.

Yuri warned me that it's a dangerous world and I shouldn't engage with just any book, but my promiscuous experimentation has paid off this time. (NOTE: Yuri and I both realize that my gun metaphor and his skank metaphor are not compatible, but we stick by their unlikely marriage here.) Serve the People! is as funny as its effusive and sufficiently bribed back cover copy says it is. Set in the late '60s in Mao's China, this novel tells the story of Wu Dawang, a soldier in the People's Army, and his love affair with the Division Commander's wife, Liu Lian.

They imagine they're the most counterrevolutionary people in the world by 1) engaging in frequent and kinky adulterous sex together, 2) desecrating in various ways and ultimately smashing all the Mao paraphernalia in Liu's house (punishable by death!), and 3) repeating 1) here because 2) turns them on so much. All told, Liu and Wu have a really pretty excellent two months together before Liu's husband is due to return from the army business elsewhere that's allowed them to be alone so much.

In fact, their love, which they take very seriously, is laughable in part because of how seriously they take it but more because they're being manipulated like puppets by the Division Commander from afar. (And maybe Liu; it wasn't clear to me if she was complicit at all, and if so, how much.)

Serve the People! is a good, funny story with a drop of mean. Its writing and translating were also good. As well, I liked the way the narrator kept interjecting to confidentially confer with me about the little drama we were watching our erstwhile and green lovers enact:

...matters had now swung from the deadly serious to the unimaginably ridiculous - to a level of absurdity beyond Wu Dawang's own comprehension, but still artistically consistent with the fantastical parameters of our story. (p. 87)

The book constantly vacillates between the "deadly serious" and the "unimaginably ridiculous", so much so that ultimately they can't be considered singly. Yan's narrative world is both pathetic and beautiful, silly and profound - perhaps this is the the ultimate in realism, even when Yan is calling attention to the constructedness of his narrative.

In case I haven't said so: I really enjoyed this book. Thus fortified, I now dive back into Henry James - 106 pages and 10 days to go.

If you're in Parry Sound and need good reads...

I have a fair bit of catching up to do so this post is going to be crammed full and displaying all the characteristics of a split personality. Besides telling you about bookstore heaven and hell in Parry Sound, ON, I need to briefly discuss a few books I've recently read...and one which I've abandoned.

Last weekend, I went up north for some sweet cottage r&r. Parry Sound (pop. approx. 6000) has two bookstores (that I saw anyway). One is awesome and one terrifies me. The good news first.

Bearly Used Books is on the main street (of which I can't currently remember the name) and it is just what you'd expect and hope a small town used bookstore to be: low prices and a lot of fiction. For my tastes, it didn't have nearly enough literature but I did pick up a few Ellis Peters books there. Also, the owner was super nice and the place was packed.

My friend Jason, who I was with, bought a Grisham novel and I laughed at him a lot. But he repaid me at the end of the weekend by laughing at me for reading at a normal human pace, when he'd expected me to read 39 books in my brief stay at cottage heaven central. What can I say? Sometimes deck chairs can be too comfortable, and spontaneous napping is both required and irresistible.

Parry Sound Books is the town's purveyor of new books and I didn't like it. It's not that it didn't have some books that I would read, it's that it felt like the Stepford wife of bookstores. It felt very sterile and controlled, like a hotel gift shop (and I would know, having had the misfortune of working in one.)

While working at said shitty job (it was in Halifax), I read a book on sale there that I can't recall the name of. It was about press gangs in Halifax and in it there was a description of someone being flogged which made me nauseous and pale. The boss thought that would be bad for business and so ordered that employees could no longer read the books on sale there. You will be terribly surprised to hear that I quit that job completely sans notice and guilt.

Anyway, about Parry Sound Books. It had a great location and pretty good decor but the atmosphere was icky because it was so obviously geared towards the cottage/tourist crowd and everywhere there were cheap do-hickies that kids of tourists like. I'm sure if I lived in Parry Sound, I'd just learn to love the place, but as one of the tourists it was ostensibly geared towards, I wanted to run away crying.

Luckily, Parry Sound also has a really nice library, which is surprisingly big given the number of people who actually live there. And the coolest thing about the Parry Sound Public Library is that the kids' section has a gigantic boat right in the middle of it, a boat filled with books. Yaaar, that be my kind of boat! (I was trying to look terrified and on the verge of shipwreck in this photo but by the time Angela snapped the shutter, I just looked really drunk. Le sigh.)

The other place to buy books in the Parry Sound vicinity is to go to the eleventy thousand yard sales that take place every single Saturday. We went to all of them and I got a cartload of goodies for the bookstore and a few for myself. We did so much driving that day between yard sale events that I managed to read the entirety of the incredibly lengthy and dense Esio Trot, by Roald Dahl.

Esio Trot's a particularly strange one, I think. It's got the usual pleasing Dahl whimsy but it's about a guy who tricks his neighbour into marrying him by kidnapping her turtle and replacing it with increasingly larger turtles, all after he gives her a made up magical spell to help him grow. Er, what? This is creepy on several levels. Perhaps it's a big seller at Parry Sound Books, eh?

I also began a silly vampire book on the bus up to the cottage and finished it at the cottage: part two in Barb & J.C. Hendee's Noble Dead saga, Thief of Lives. As you may recall, I read the first book, Dhampir, at a rather low mental point but it was enjoyable so I figured I'd keep going with the series.

Thief of Lives was good but not as compelling as Dhampir. But maybe Dhampir wasn't good and I was just much more desperately in need of escape when I read that one? I don't know. I was irked by certain plot choices in this one. I wondered if I should bother with the third one, but suspect I'll eventually get to it, the next time I need some silly fun.

Also, I took Pride and Prejudice and Zombies back to the library unread because I found the first few pages too gimmicky to bear; so I had to find another library book, stat! and this was it.

I also began a famous classic of SF while kicking back in the clean air of northernish Ontario (and which I finished a few days ago): Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz. This was an extremely enjoyable novel. I think had I read it when I was a teenager it would be in my top 10 of all time. As it is, I respect it highly as a post-apocalyptic nightmare that had a lot of disturbing relevance to its time (published 1959) and was a great story AND was well written.

I think what I loved best about this novel was Miller, Jr.'s examination of how relics become sacred...based as these processes so often are on complete misunderstanding. I thought it was a fascinating look at the ways humans use the past and why it's so important to us, even as we imagine we're evolving and leaving it behind.

And finally...the book that I've closed the cover on. I'm feeling disappointed in myself for this one but it can't be helped. As I mentioned last week, I think, I was going to be reading Charlotte Bronte's Villette in order to participate in Rohan's summer discussion thereof over at The Valve.

That won't be happening and here's why: I read the first 8 chapters as per the schedule and then on Tuesday, I went to The Valve and read the comments already there and tried to say something coherent myself and then went back later...and started to freak out. Because even though it's not school, it felt like school and I couldn't deal. It's too soon. But not only can I not participate in this event, I can't even read the book, dammit, for after freaking out upon reading the comments, I freaked out again when I tried to go back to the book! :( Sad times.

But I'm going to try to do the optimistic thing in response to this backsliding: my plan is to finish my Henry James short stories by my birthday, which was 3 weeks from yesterday!!! It's more than possible as I have only 210 pages left - but then it's been more than possible for months now. So, friends, I'm going to need your help. Send me pep talks to help me put the Henry James to bed! I'll post updates on my progress that will look like this:

HENRY JAMES - T MINUS 210 PAGES and 20 DAYS!!!