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November 10
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"Stranger, go tell the Spartans we died here obedient to their commands."
— Inscription at Thermopylae
Linger not, stranger. Shed ...
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July 09
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July 01
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Adam
read and liked
Lia's
review of Man Bites Dog:
"This novel was both thoroughly enjoyable and somewhat disappointing.
Backstory: I discovered Adam Ford when I was about fourteen. He wrote these short and sweet free verse poems that I loved (see Not Quite the Man for the Job). He also ma...more
This novel was both thoroughly enjoyable and somewhat disappointing.
Backstory: I discovered Adam Ford when I was about fourteen. He wrote these short and sweet free verse poems that I loved (see Not Quite the Man for the Job). He also makes zines and comics and edits Going Down Swinging and generally does a lot of stuff to support the local grassroots lit community. I loved that, too; loved that he used to live with Alicia Sometimes (another stalwart of the Melbourne poetry scene, she hosts the spoken word show on RRR among other things), loved that they wrote poems about each other and Fitzroy and trams. About my world, or the world I wanted to be part of and I think sort of did, for a while at least. I loved that though they seemed to be professional writers they were kind of fannish, except for the fandom of Melbourne. But I always had a sneaking suspicion that the fandom factor played a bit part in my love for such writing -- my bias towards their subject matter tilted my judgement to exaggerated favour.
And that's one of my main problems with this book. The protagonist, Steven, has just finished a BA (at Melbourne Uni) and becomes a postie (around North Fitzroy). His friends make zines (which they sell at Polyester and Sticky) and have picnics (at Collingwood Children's Farm) and go for bike rides (along Merri Creek). They even have dinner at the Moroccan Soup Bar. It's all very familiar. And, of course, that's not Ford's fault -- it's his city too and it makes perfect sense that he should write about it. But it makes me a little suspicious, as though my affection is being bought too easily.
The main plot, a farcical mystery about a dead dog, is really quite funny, though at times I (like the protagonist) forgot about it entirely. The subplot about Steven working out his life (or perhaps that's really the main plot) is fine, and readily believable, if somewhat predictable. But it feels like perhaps it's drawn too closely from life (well, inner-city mid-20s hipster life). All the characters are likeable, and the story is sweet and funny, and stylistically it's very natural, but it just doesn't seem all that inventive. Easy to like, sure. But maybe just because it's colloquial, not only in language but idea. I wanted something more daring.
There's a suggestion that Ford is aware of this, though. In one scene, Steven is at a picnic where Emma's friends are dismissing The Secret Life of Us as just another soap, but one that tries to lure them in with all the paraphernalia of their demographic. For me this scene makes me go "Oh, okay, I get what you're doing".
Hipsters always dig the meta.
(less)
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Adam
gave  to:
The Power That Preserves (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, #3)
by
Stephen R. Donaldson
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my rating:
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recommended for: fantasy geeks
read in February, 2009
Adam said:
"So given that I had the entire trilogy-in-one-volume edition in my hand, when I finished book two I ran headlong straight into book three, propelled by the unfinished business of book two and the page-turning prose of Mr. Donaldson.
This v...more
So given that I had the entire trilogy-in-one-volume edition in my hand, when I finished book two I ran headlong straight into book three, propelled by the unfinished business of book two and the page-turning prose of Mr. Donaldson.
This volume is a bit more muted compared to the previous two volumes, I suppose in some ways that indicates how beaten and close to defeat the forces of good are - there's no majestic war or glorious battle here, just a desperate struggle to defend a stronghold that seems doomed to fall, and a series of futile guerilla-style skirmishes before the final confrontation and the last-minute victory via philosophical deconstruciton of the villain's motives (sort of).
This time round, none of the magic of the land comes to cure Covenant's leprosy and he is left pretty much in exactly the same condition that he experiences in the real world. On top of this he has no strong, honourable or capable friends to protect him. It's just him and his vulnerabilities, and the stakes are higher than ever. Once again Donaldson has reversed the fantasy tropes, having our hero get weaker and more pathetic and less in tune with the fantasy world he is supposed to be the saviour of, at the same time as having his foe become stronger and more potent.
Like I said in my reviews of the earlier books, you really do get the feeling that the good guys could genuinely lose this one - the trajectory for our heroes is downwards from the start, and it feels like Donaldson is so hell-bent on proving something with his inversion of high fantasy that he really could - out of perversity, or just because he's got something to prove - end it all badly.
He doesn't, though, and maybe that's actually his point. Because after everything is lost - friends, family, even hope - our hero still finds something to hold onto: a sense of self, a refusal to capitulate, a stubbornness. And it's that which allows him to win out in the end.
In some ways this is the least satisfying of the three books because of this final victory, even though it's not a textbook fantasy happy-ever-after ending. It's pleasing to see Thomas Covenant survive, because by this point I had gotten fond enough of him to want him to stick around. But you know? Perverse as it might sound, it would have been interesting to see the good guys lose.
Problem is that's NEVER a satisfying ending, which might be why Donaldson didn't go that way. But in doing so - for whatever reason - the last few chapters of the book are perilously close to the fantasy tropes that Donaldson messes with elsewhere.
Maybe that's why it feels a bit flat in comparison. But really, I can't see what else he could have done but let the good guys win. I was happy enough with the conclusion, but not inspired enough to pick up the next trilogy for a re-read (though that might have had something to do with the time-suck factor of re-reading these books and my unwillingness to endure another three books' worth of it).(less)
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June 29
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Adam
read and liked
Choupette's
review of Collected Poems: 1970-1998:
"I suffer from that common Australian ailment - I feel like my culture is being marginalised. Like there is relatively little in the way of good art, good dance, good theatre, good music, good food, whatever, that happens here, and if it is, it is cri...more
I suffer from that common Australian ailment - I feel like my culture is being marginalised. Like there is relatively little in the way of good art, good dance, good theatre, good music, good food, whatever, that happens here, and if it is, it is criminally undervalued. Undervalued by the rest of the world, sure, but more worryingly, by Australians themselves. The cultural cringe is alive and well. (This is of course a huge generalisation.) In any case, for many years I have carefully scrutinised every piece of Australian literature that has passed before my eyes, looking for a writer, any writer, who writes for the Australia I know.
The Australia I know is not represented by the I-love-the-sunburnt-country school, or the I-hate-the-sunburnt-country school, or the directionless-existentialist-angst-and-anomie school, or the sentimental-but-loveable school, or the suburbia-bashing school, or the nationalist school, or the suffering-of-indigenous-peoples school, or the depressive-rural-setting school, or the grumpy-racist-conservative-misogynist-Vietnam-vets school, or the pissed-up-ocker school.
All of these 'schools' are of course valid and often excellent representations of modern Australia; but they are not representative of my Australia, the one I experience every day. They are interesting to read, and it is comforting to see the places and things that I know rendered seriously and well in words. But it is not me.
I have never encountered any author who seems to speak for me and the people I know. These people are young, multicultural, well-educated, trendy, smart, concerned. They are also staid, safe, a little conservative, in general not adventurous, thinkers not doers. They are arrogant, overconfident and spoiled - for choice and for opportunities. Few of them seem to be motivated by anything outside of their own small existences. They live life in our little transparent boxes, sipping lattes while they look out and make sarcastic/ironic/cutting/intelligent comments on the things that go by the windows of their Brunswick Street cafes. They think Sydney Road is 'quaint'. They pretend to know what they're talking about when faced with Salvador Dali. We have potential, but it remains to be seen if anything good will come of us.
John Forbes' poetry is the first, and only, thing I've read that goes some way towards articulating Australia as I know it. He is smart, ironic, unashamed, hilarious. And also, undervalued. I'd never heard of him - I only read this because it was on the English syllabus. (Many of the English academics at Melbourne Uni, incidentally, are British - they know our literature better than we do.) He is at once a Howard Arkley and a John Romeril. He writes with energy and emotion. He writes on politics, life and love. His imagery is spectacular, his form perfection. Non-Australians probably won't 'get' him. This, my friends, is a great Australian poet.
I want to choose a poem to reproduce here, but it's so hard. They are all so good, so full of brilliant little asides, fantastic images, throwaway lines. This one is great, but it doesn't have the exuberance of Rrose Selavy, the quiet beauty of love poem, the acerbic political commentary of Bicentennial Poem, or the fantastic description of Bob Hawke's hair in another poem I can't remember the name of. I wanted to choose The Corrosive Littoral, which is brilliant, but it's a lot longer and I don't know what the deal is with copyright and I feel better if I don't copy such a large amount. So, I choose Melbourne, which is not flattering to us Melburnians, but has a nice quip about the weather.
Melbourne
after Max Jacob
The incessant trams are the colour of the skin
after a course of suntan pills and your opinions
have to change a lot, like the weather but more
deliberately; where fashion is argued for, is
true love like two speech balloons that merge,
even before the attached figures have met?
At least your blinding headaches will modulate to a
slow wastage of the self, as your drugged &
artificial suntan fades. Then a voice you've never
heard before--your own--will say: 'Be a caricature,
John, and not a cartoon, if you want to lose
your nostalgia for the sensual, glaring sun!'(less)
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Adam
read and liked
Martine's
review of Cloud Atlas:
"Cloud Atlas was the most challenging book I read in 2006. It was also the most rewarding. A bravura literary performance if ever I saw one, Cloud Atlas weaves together six vastly different stories which are all, in a way, about story-telling. We star...more
Cloud Atlas was the most challenging book I read in 2006. It was also the most rewarding. A bravura literary performance if ever I saw one, Cloud Atlas weaves together six vastly different stories which are all, in a way, about story-telling. We start reading the journal of a nineteenth-century traveller, then move on to an English snob's letters from 1930s Belgium, a 1970s California thriller, a contemporary horror film of sorts and two tales from a dystopian future, one of which is written in a somewhat-hard-to-decipher phonetic dialect. Each of these stories is completely different. Mitchell has a fabulous command of language which enables him effortlessly to switch personae and change perspectives. The result is an impressive mix of styles and genres, full of stimulating ideas on human nature and, well, lots of other things. At first, none of the six stories seems to have a proper ending (one of them even ends mid-sentence!), which is disappointing as you don't want to leave the characters just when you've become emotionally attached to them. However, once you've reached the end of story No. 6, you realise why the previous stories didn't have endings -- because Mitchell takes you back to the characters he left earlier, to show you where they fit into the magnificent tapestry he has woven, to close the circle he has begun drawing. He also subtly shows you how the stories are interconnected. It's fun picking up on these clues, though puzzling is not what the book is all about.
Now the above probably sounds like a lot of literary gimmickry, and it is. Yet the stunning thing about the book is not how well Mitchell blends genres (although he does so extremely well), but how engaging it is on an emotional level. I deeply cared for some of the characters and really, really wanted to find out how their stories ended. So there you have it -- a stylistic, intellectually stimulating tour de force which is also, somehow, a page turner. Definitely one to cherish.(less)
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Adam
gave  to:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Paperback)
by
Junot Díaz
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my rating:
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read in June, 2009
Adam said:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Our eponymous hero is a big fat nerd of the worst kind, all Tolkien and role-playing and superheroes and space opera. This makes him the most extreme kind of outsider as he grows up in the Dominican community of New York City, the only Dominican who can never EVER get laid, which is a big thing since sex is - according to this book - such a large part of the Dominican identity. Oscar's virginity, sexual frustration and his puppydog heart are as embedded in his personality as the geeky stuff.
We also get a lot of Oscar's family's backstory, specifically his Ma and his Sister's brushes with the dark heart of the Dominican Republic. This part of the book touches on what our narrator - Oscar's sometime housemate and Oscar's sister's sometime boyfriend (when he's not dumped for fucking around) - refers to as the family curse. These parts of the book are Life Under A Third World Dictator 101 as our narrator gives us his potted from-the-hip jargon-spattered history of the Dominican Republic under Dictator Rafael Trujillo: dangerous, capricious and with a tendency to come abruptly to a violent halt.
There's a thesis running through the story that Oscar's family are cursed, which is intended to explain the violent deaths of Oscar's grandparents, the near-fatal beating of his mother, the death of his sister's Dominican boyfriend, and Oscar's own untimely demise. But it's not convincing enough a thesis. There's no denying the above tragedies, but in each case - save perhaps his sister's boyfriend's death - the violence that comes down on these people is patently avoidable if only they had made different, less headstrong choices. To me it felt like this was not a moral tale about living under a curse, but - given that most of the beatings & murders &c are a consequence of the victims' romantic intentions - instead it feels like a story about people who deliberately allow shit to come down on them because they think it somehow validates their love.
Problems with this book's cohesion arise when Diaz tries to merge the two cultures he's spent so long immersing us in, by having Oscar visit the DR in the book's final chapters, only to fall in love with a corrupt cop's ex-hooker girlfriend. Up until this point the stories of Oscar's loserhood and his family's "curse" have not intersected at all in any real sense, and they don't really do so after this point, either. Most of the nerdy stuff gets dropped in favour of the seamy, sexy, risky, violent DR side of things, which begs the question, if Oscar was going to end up like this, why did Diaz spend so damn much time building up and going on and on about Oscar's nerdliness? I mean, apart from it would be fun to write that kind of thing?
I think in the end what you've got here is two things: a detailed portrait of the worst geek you could ever imagine; and a detailed personal history of a dark and dangerous country. When I finished the last page I found myself thinking that The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao would have been a much more engaging story if Oscar hadn't been in it. His mother, his great aunt and his sister - even our hapless narrator - are all much more convincing and well-fleshed-out characters than Mr. Wao himself.
And that's the other thing. Diaz tries so hard to make Oscar the ultimate nerd by namedropping everything from Kirby to Tolkien and saddling him with every trope of nerdy loserdom imaginable, from teaching himself to read and write in fantasy languages to being fat and repulsive to every woman on the face of the planet. In the end it's too much, and Oscar becomes just another geeky caricature, difficult to distinguish from The Comic Shop Guy in The Simpsons. This begs the question in the reader's mind: if the nerd stuff is turned up to eleven and beyond, so much that it becomes more fiction than truth, then how much of the other aspects of the novel - especially the portrayal of the DR - is also just a hurricane of cliché?
You know, having said all that, I actually really liked this book. All of these structural flaws are things that come after the reading, once you've sat down to reflect and digest. But during the reading of this book I was entranced, overwhelmed, entertained and amused in the best way. This is a first novel, after all. It's expected that there will be some structural flaws, but even so those flaws do nothing to dissuade me that Mr. Diaz is an amazingly talented author - I'm looking forward very much to seeing what he puts out next.(less)
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June 17
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Adam
gave to:
The Illearth War (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, #2)
by
Stephen R. Donaldson
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my rating:
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read in February, 2009
Adam said:
"Okay, so I DID get sucked back into this trilogy, but mainly because when we went for a holiday in Skenes Creek, the single-volume hardback of the trilogy was just sitting there on the bookshelf and I thought hell why not? And that's how I lost 80% o...more
Okay, so I DID get sucked back into this trilogy, but mainly because when we went for a holiday in Skenes Creek, the single-volume hardback of the trilogy was just sitting there on the bookshelf and I thought hell why not? And that's how I lost 80% of my week down the beach.
In the second volume our (anti-)hero finds himself drawn back against his will to The Land as the unwilling last hope in the desperate battle against Lord Foul and his army. But he's still convinced it's all a delusion, a manifestation of his self-hatred and fervent desires for a life without leprosy, so he pretty much stands by while lots of terrible stuff happens to all the nice people who only really want him to help them out.
It gets a bit more complicated as he starts making deals with his own subconscious to assuage the guilt he feels because of his inaction, but then of course in true angsty Donaldson style, this only triggers even more guilt and self-hatred.
I did a bit of reading of criticism about these books before starting this volume, and it was interesting to bring the interpretations they offered to this reading. I think the biggest theme Donaldson addresses here is the question of whether pacifism or inaction or passive resistance or whatever you want to call it is effective in situations where the people you're opposing are willing to bring the violence down on your head regardless.
There's some pretty horrific stuff going on - the good guys lose a lot of battles and are subjected to some graphically described slaughter, particularly the scenes where the entire population of the city of giants is murdered one by one by a demon who has possessed a young giant. The way the giants are murdered is intense - the demon passes his hand right into their heads, clenches his fist and bursts their skulls from the inside. Full on.
Apparently Donaldson was using his hero's inactive, nonviolent stance to consider the effectiveness and validity of the protest movement in the USA during the Vietnam war, and I can see how that could work.
It's a series that's open to a lot of intellectual interpretation, not only because of the above, but also because our hero, rather than being a physically active warrior type, tends to sit back and intellectually grapple with the morality and logic of the fantastic situations he's faced with, and then tries to find a solution that way. His intellectual revelations are often what drives the narratives direction, in the same way that a physical victory in "traditional" fantasy does.
So yeah. A good read, even though it's a bit purple (but that seems to work with the subject at hand) with lots of meaty stuff to chew on with your brain-teeth.(less)
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June 16
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Adam
gave  to:
Of Women and Their Elegance (Hardcover)
by
Norman Mailer
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my rating:
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read in May, 2009
Adam said:
"I'm a bit poorly read when it comes to Hollywood, so I don't know how much of this fictional biography of Marilyn is fictional and how much is biography. It feels very fictional, written as it is from her own perspective, though having said that Mail...more
I'm a bit poorly read when it comes to Hollywood, so I don't know how much of this fictional biography of Marilyn is fictional and how much is biography. It feels very fictional, written as it is from her own perspective, though having said that Mailer does clear things up quite extensively in his afterword.
It's a great read though. Mailer made me love this fictional Marilyn, made me want to watch more of her films - it's been years since I've seen one, and made me want to read a good biography as well. Anyone got any recommendations?
The text is accompanied by photos of Marilyn and other actresses in a kind of random way. Interrupted would be a better description if they weren't such great photos. I mean, they do interrupt the flow of text, but they're welcome interruptions for their beauty.
Flipping through some of the other goodreads reviews here, it seems there was a bit more subtext to the creation of this book than I was aware of, but that's my Hollywood naive coming through. Reading it as a naif, it was a sweet, dark, enjoyable tragedy of a story.(less)
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