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July 04
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Jessica
read and liked
Trevor's
review of A Snowball in Hell:
"There is part of me that would like to savour a Brookmyre novel. You know, spend some time reading it and take in all of the clever bits of writing and just enjoy the twists and turns. The problem is the breathing thing – after about the fifth pa...more
There is part of me that would like to savour a Brookmyre novel. You know, spend some time reading it and take in all of the clever bits of writing and just enjoy the twists and turns. The problem is the breathing thing – after about the fifth page I realise I haven’t been quite doing enough of that breathing thing that humans tend to need to do rather frequently. That means I end up needing to read his novels (at least with the very best of them – of which this is one) fast. I need to read them as if before having boiled the kettle, jingled the tea-bag, gotten myself comfortable to turn the first page I’ve snorted a nose full of coke.
Not that I’ve actually ever used cocaine, but if what they tell me is true, I guess Brookmyre has much the same effect.
NO SPOILERS
That’s the key to this review. If you want to find out about this book I suggest you read all three of the books that this one is the last bit of – the Angelique de Xavia trilogy (at least, so far). The other two being in order: A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away and The Sacred Art of Stealing. Part of me wishes I’d re-read the pair of them before starting this one – as there were references throughout that only just ever so dimly registered – but it was not totally necessary. Anyway, I’ve already told you about my Brookmyre problem, so delaying the pleasure of reading this one by re-reading the two previous books was never going to be an option.
I love Angelique de Xavia. She appeals to the outcast in me. I think I like her more than Jack Parlabane and at least as much as that woman from All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye who must be due another book soon. And my favourite thing about her is reprised here – that she is a black Catholic Glasgow girl who is a Rangers supporter. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as they say)
When I was in high school, I must have been about twelve, I had to write a book review on a book of my choice. My chosen book was Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Niggers, which is now called And Then There Was None and in the film the poem that is central to the story became Ten Little Indians – racism against Native Americans somehow seeming less obnoxious than racism against Black Americans.
I wrote in my essay that the problem I had with Mystery Stories was that the author always keeps something back, the vital piece of information, and that is the bit of information that matters the most. My English teacher – smug bitch that she was – wrote something dismissive beside this comment, something to the effect that this, after all, is the point of a mystery story. Yes, yes, touché. But I intended something much more than my fumbling pen at the time achieved. That story was, if I can remember at all correctly (and I haven’t read it since I was twelve), written in omniscient narration. You know what I mean? The word ‘omniscient’ means ‘Knows everything’. Well, if the narrator knows everything, where is there room for any mystery? It is hard not to feel cheated by the little facts conveniently left unsaid.
We read this novel from behind the eyes of about three of the characters in turn. The fact we don’t know what is going to happen next is either because the characters themselves don’t know or because they aren’t prepared to tell us, and they are more than happy to let us know that it is none of our business when they decide not to tell us.
Best of all is that Brookmyre sets up a series of things that we know have to happen in this book. You know the sorts of things – boy must get girl, those needing to be rescued need to be rescued, good needs to prevail; all that sort of thing. But given we know all of these things must happen in no way makes the impossibility of any of them seeming to be able to happen ever at all less likely during the book. This guy knows how to plot a story. This guy grabs you by the sleave and drags you to the end of the book and doesn’t care how many door-frames and interior walls you bounce off as he quickens his pace. It is a matter of keeping up or getting hurt – so you’d better keep up. Fortunately, he is always in control.
If you ever want to write a book like this here are a few pointers I’ve picked up mostly from Mr Brookmyre. First, don’t build to a climax – splash in boots and all. You should have your audience by the throat from as early as you can, page one if you can manage it. If, in this book, you can stop reading after page 15 (I’m serious, I’ve just checked) then this book won’t appeal to you at all and you might as well stop reading. Follow the first climax with another, involving someone completely different. Make incredibly nasty things happen to your nicest characters. Give them gaols and hopes and desires and then piss all over them. Make every single character count. Every thread needs to weave into the tapestry. If you create a question in the book, make sure of two things, the question is answered in a way that your reader would not be able to guess beforehand – the answer is better than the reader would have guessed before hand. Only take your foot off the accelerator pedal to shift into a gear that allows you to add more speed.
The thing is that I knew he was going to have me twisting and turning throughout this book, I even knew where this all had to end up – but even knowing both of these things I was still guessing the whole way through and never once did I feel cheated and never once did I know where he was going to twist me.
This book is about punishing people that I normally would rejoice in seeing brought low, humiliated, and shown to be hypocrites. But Brookmyre even turns this into an interesting mirror. And not one I particularly enjoyed seeing myself looking into. Okay, okay, perhaps the slow and painful death of everyone in the Big Brother House isn’t quite the unequivocal good I had thought it might have been – and I must say that I’m more than a little annoyed at being disabused of that particular fantasy, Mr Brookmyre.
These three novels would make brilliant films – particularly my favourite, The Sacred Art of Stealing - and I’ve no idea why so little of his stuff has appeared in film. The Brits did do a TV version of Quite Ugly One Morning and did so in a way that meant they couldn’t do any of the follow up books in the series, not least by getting Parlabane into a relationship with the lesbian policewoman, rather than the heterosexual nurse in that series of books, but hey, I'm not bitter.
What can I say? I lived through it – which is more than can be said for many of the characters. This is not for the faint-hearted, nor for anyone offended by strong language or rather strong sexual content and violence. Normally, the sex and violence would be enough to put me off – but he handles this stuff so well and his plotting is so good (Hitchcock in North By North-West good) that I can forgive him anything and everything. Magic, or rather: alakazammy, stairheid rammy.
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July 03
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Jessica
read and liked
Trevor's
review of The Iliad:
"I read the Odyssey at Uni and really loved it. A romp off to parts unknown with a man who is good company from a distance. As with much of fiction, the people I am delighted to spend lots of time with on the page are not necessarily those I would w...more
I read the Odyssey at Uni and really loved it. A romp off to parts unknown with a man who is good company from a distance. As with much of fiction, the people I am delighted to spend lots of time with on the page are not necessarily those I would want to spend anytime with otherwise.
I’ve always meant to get around to reading this. I mean, this Homer guy only wrote two books and I had enjoyed the other one, so … so, a mere twenty years later (how time flies) I got around to reading this one.
The problem was that I knew exactly what this one was about. You know, this is about Helen getting taken to Troy after Paris wins her after he judges which of the goddesses is the most beautiful which pisses off the Greeks and then there’s the siege and sacking of Troy after that rather clever trick with the wooden horse. Not much point reading this one if you already know the whole damn story.
Now, you might be thinking – this guy should have put a spoiler alert at the start of this. You might also be thinking – this guy probably thinks it’s okay not to put a spoiler alert on this because everyone already knows this story. Umm, I haven’t put a spoiler alert on this because I haven’t told you anything that is actually in this story yet.
Look, I know, I’m as surprised as you are. “Bugger me with a brick”, as a friend of mine would say. The idea Homer could be allowed to get away with writing a book about something everyone knows it is about and not actually writing about any of these things is, to say the least, rather frustrating. I’m sure that in some countries there is probably even a law against this sort of thing.
It might just be me, but I would have thought that if you are going to write the FIRST epic in the Western Literary Tradition it does seem somewhat presumptuous to assume people know the back story. I know I can be naïve at times, but if first is to mean anything, surely it doesn’t really allow the writer to assume everyone already knows the back story. Instead, this book starts a mere 9 years after the war had began. There is precious little by way of explaining how we got here. And it ends the day before the final battle for Troy and before anyone seems to have come up with the idea of a wooden horse with a hollow middle.
Spoilers start more or less now – if you are worried.
A lot of this is boys’ own adventure stuff. Also a bit like the Godfather films in which they seem to have decided not to kill any two major characters in exactly the same way. Bronze swords knocking out teeth before plunging through skull with attendant buckets of blood and spraying brain matter plays, be well assured, a large part in this book. If I have any criticism at all it is that the war bits were over-long and after a while became all a bit same/same. In fact, by close to the end I was thinking I had had more than enough and was looking forward to the whole thing being over.
And then that totally unexpected end! Jesus, what a way to finish a book. I was blown away.
Achilles does not really come out of this book looking too good. I know he is meant to be a bit of a hero (the only things I knew about him before this being he had been dipped in a river as a child to protect him from harm and held by the ankles, so therefore these were his only venerable parts – and of course, none of this is actually mentioned here, though I suspect you are meant to already know). The whole book revolves around Achilles being annoyed at having his girlfriend taken from him and him spending most of the time in a petulant rage about to go home, stuck in one of his ships while all hell is breaking lose around him. Hector certainly seems the ‘better man’ in all this – even though he is a Trojan. This was something else I hadn’t expected.
The thing I really like about the Greek Gods – and the reason Plato said that the poets shouldn’t be allowed to write stories about them – is that they are just this huge dysfunctional family. Nothing they like better than getting involved in human affairs and causing infinitely more trouble than they are worth. I also like that even when they know the outcome of something – Troy will fall, for example – that doesn’t stop them remaining loyal and supporting their favourite side all the same. It is as if the West Moorabbin Under Twelves are being put up against Manchester United all stars team and the dads of the under twelves are turning up to support their kids. Everyone knows the outcome, but all the same… “Go Johnny!”
A lot of this is of more than just passing interest in the sense that it gives a fascinating (and tragically realistic) account of the horrors of warfare in the ancient world – and these horrors are many and graphic. Both sides foresee what is to happen to the women of Troy once the battle is over, for example, and this is none-too-pretty. All the same, after book after book of this I was well over these endless descriptions. But then book 24. Hector has been killed. Achilles killed him to revenge the death of his friend Patroclus, who Hector had killed and tried to quarter and feed to the dogs. Achilles is overpowered by grief for his friend and as a mark of respect slaughters 12 boys of Troy as an offering at the funeral of Patroclus (hard to express my disgust at this – not the act of a ‘hero’). He also spends days dragging Hector’s body about (ironically enough, attached to his chariot by the ankles) around the funeral site of his friend in some sort of bizarre ritual that is neither improved in report nor in deed, I think the line ran). I had never really thought about the significance of bodies after they have died in war – but psychologically, knowing (or worse, as in this case, not knowing, but assuming) what the enemy are doing to the dead body of your child, is, without question, unspeakably horrible.
To regain his son’s body and to give it a proper funeral, Priam goes to Achilles and is helped there by the gods. He kisses the hand of his son’s murderer and begs for his body so as to be able to give him a proper funeral. Like I said, a remarkably moving end to the poem.
I used to think that a good definition of a classic would be ‘a book that is rarely about what you think it is about before you read it’. As always, I was much too timid in my definition. It seems that a classic is NEVER about what you think it will be about before you read it. If they are particularly good classics, they are also not about what you think they were about while you were reading them either. This is an excellent case in point.
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Jessica
read and liked
Manny's
review of The Golden Gate:
"Completely unique book, as far as I know the only major verse novel written in English during the last 100 years. The life and loves of a bunch of 80s yuppies in Silicon Valley, told in Petrarchan sonnets. It should be a catastrophe, but in fact it's...more
Completely unique book, as far as I know the only major verse novel written in English during the last 100 years. The life and loves of a bunch of 80s yuppies in Silicon Valley, told in Petrarchan sonnets. It should be a catastrophe, but in fact it's a brilliant success - funny, romantic, tragic, witty, you name it.
"To make a start more swift than weighty
Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon
A time, say, circa 1980,
There lived a man. His name was John..."
_____________________________________________
So I was telling Bram yesterday that, as far as I was concerned, the real translation of Eugene Onegin into English was The Golden Gate. It was just a theory I made up on the spur of the moment; I know The Golden Gate very well, I read Pushkin once, and it was clear there were some commonalities. I love The Golden Gate, and translations of Pushkin have always left me cold, particularly the Nabokov one.
This afternoon, I was standing in the line at Cambridge train station, when I noticed that the person behind me was a friend who's a Professor of Russian Literature. I said I was sure she had an opinion on Nabokov's translation of Pushkin. She wasn't that keen on it; she said it was incredibly accurate, and the commentary was "brilliant", but it still left her feeling disappointed. Then, without any prompting whatsoever from me, she went on to recommend reading Vikram Seth's book, which she said was virtually a transposition to American English and 80s California. Same number of chapters, close correspondences between people and motifs, many explicit references.
Well! It's the closest I've ever got to the scene in Annie Hall, where Woody Allen suddenly produces Marshall McLuhan to support his argument. What are the odds against that happening?
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Jessica
is currently reading:
The Sweet Cheat Gone (Hardcover)
by
Marcel Proust
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
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July 02
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Jessica
read and liked
David's
review of The Cherry Orchard (Dover Thrift Editions):
"Is there anyone else besides me who would like to see a pornified version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard? (The already porn-ready title -- like O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh -- requires no alteration.) In the tweaked, penicillin-proscribed versi...more
Is there anyone else besides me who would like to see a pornified version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard? (The already porn-ready title -- like O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh -- requires no alteration.) In the tweaked, penicillin-proscribed version, a nostalgic old madam named Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya (a Nina Hartley type perhaps?) would oversee the final days of her virgin-procuring whore-manor until it finally succumbs to the economic pressures of the soulless big-box brothels opening up down the street and the revolutionary wiliness of a big-breasted young feminist in polycarbonate platform hooker heels who sabotages Ranevskaya’s exploitative sex trade by luring her longtime customers away with promises of gonzo DPs and barely legal bareback action. (In the circumscribed logic of porn, the latter qualifies as feminist because the women brandish a riding crop.) The final scene (spoiler!) has Firs, Ranevskaya’s eighty-seven-year-old butler, lingering wistfully at his mistress’s shuttered cathouse, before fucking the old-world folly right out of Ranevskaya’s starfish mouth in the cherry orchard’s burnished, autumnal light, dissected into symbolic shards of yesteryear by the shadows of the barren, cherryless branches.
The reason I suddenly had the urge to “review” The Cherry Orchard even though it’s been a while since I’ve read it, is that I found out today that there are actually some dummies out there who don’t like this play -- or any other Chekhov play! (I know! Shocking!) Any reasonably sane person not overindulging in Mezcal should realize that the only really crappy Chekhov play ever wrote was the screenplay for September, and that was written by Woody Allen doing his Ingmar Bergman impression. (It’s complicated. The only things original anymore are our methods of creative thievery.)
Chekhov referred to The Cherry Orchard as a comedy, which has caused no end of interpretive hair-pulling and hand-wringing among directors the world over because the play itself seems pretty damned melancholy. The plot, pared to its leanest essentials, focuses on an old aristocratic-type broad who foolishly clings to her past, while the world around her barrels toward some profound but, as yet, not entirely decipherable change; thus, some sort of tragedy is signaled in the collision between the woman’s delusions and the shifting pressures of reality in anachronistic, turn-of-the-century Russia.
I don’t really care what Chekhov thought about his own play... because you know what? Authors don’t get the final word on what they wrote. The actual writing must in the end speak for itself, to every reader, without the extraneous commentary of the author. I myself prefer to think that The Cherry Orchard is a comedy not in the ha-ha shading of the word, but in the bleaker sense of the author having put humankind’s fondness and follies on display for the inspection of a viewing (or reading) audience. If this is comedy, it’s the bitter, stone-faced variety wherein human weaknesses are shown, yes, with compassion but without redemption. This is the driest of dry humor -- the kind that sticks in your throat, and elsewhere, and never dares evolve into full-fledged laughter. Sure, somebody somewhere is inevitably going to say that he or she saw so-and-so’s production of The Cherry Orchard, and it was very funny when Leonid Gayev kept pantomiming billiard shots and when half-deaf Firs was badgering Gayev like a toddler and, of course, when Carlotta the governess said just about anything. Yeah, whatever. But that wasn’t really comedy; it was comic relief... because without a few interludes of lightness the autumnal mood of the play would become much too dense and self-parodic.
Ten years ago, some Greek dude released a film version of The Cherry Orchard starring Charlotte Rampling as Ranevskaya, Alan Bates as Gayev, a Gerard Butler as Yasha (listed in the opening credits as Gerald Butler). Aside from Rampling’s admirable performance, the film was a pretty inept Chekhov interpretation; it was mostly a murky-looking, hammy, and awkward attempt at capturing the beauty and subtleties of the play. But there is the wonderful moment when Rampling as Ranevskaya first returns to her old, crumbling Russian manor, and we watch the countless memories suddenly overpowering her. We completely understand (to whatever extent) her devotion to the past, but in Rampling’s flourishes and dewy-eyed theatrics we also keenly recognize her absurdity. (less)
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July 01
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Jessica
gave  to:
The Captive (Dodo Press)
by
Marcel Proust
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my rating:
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read in July, 2009
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June 30
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Jessica
is currently reading:
The Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Join the Millions Who Have Become Nonsmokers Using the Easyway Method (Hardcover)
by
Allen Carr
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
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recommended to Jessica by:
people who actually stopped smoking when they read it
has a copy to sell/swap
Jessica said:
"Training for the New York City marathon last fall didn't magically stop me from smoking, but maybe watching a beloved client die abruptly and excruciatingly of lung cancer last week will do the trick? In case that's not enough, I've got Allen Carr's ...more
Training for the New York City marathon last fall didn't magically stop me from smoking, but maybe watching a beloved client die abruptly and excruciatingly of lung cancer last week will do the trick? In case that's not enough, I've got Allen Carr's annoying self-help book to back me up!
I love fucking smoking. I love, love, love, LOVE it. Except, Allen Carr's going to tell me, I actually don't. I can't possibly love smoking because smoking's disgusting! All the loving I think I'm doing is actually just the insidious mendacity of addiction that is warping my mind and encouraging me to flood my otherwise gorgeous long-distance runner's lungs with carcinogens and emphysema and all other kinds of gnarly. I totally believe this, he's obviously right, and I know what Carr's gonna say because I've read this before. And it totally worked the first time -- but of course, quitting smoking's easy, it's the staying quit that's a drag.
I don't relate to a lot of quit smoking stuff, because my smoking occurs under pretty specific conditions. I'm not the kind of smoker who smokes every day, but nor am I really a true social smoker who has one or two on special occasions. I smoke when I drink, and when I do then I binge. I can go weeks without touching them, but once I get started, I'll smoke a pack -- sometimes more -- in a night without batting an eye. Drinking gets me every time, as do smoker friends. Also driving. Rock shows. Writing papers. Etc.... Why do I do this? Because I love smoking!!! No, Allen Carr tells me: that is not why. I do it because I'm addicted, and I tell myself all these crazy lies about cigarettes, like that they're fun and make me happy, and that I enjoy smoking them. God, but I believe that. I believe that I love them. I hope he talks me out of that.... it's a tall order!
I do feel pretty ready for Carr to convince me. I'm thirty years old, and I know smoking's gross. I've had two friends my own age undergo intensely difficult, painful battles against cancer, and i've spent these past few weeks watching a man I really cared about suffer in agony, knowing he wasn't going to get all the years he deserved, probably because of this addiction he'd had since age nine. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer about a month ago, he told me he couldn't wait to get out of the hospital so he could have a cigarette. He even laughed about it, and said that he just couldn't imagine his life without cigarettes. He did get discharged, with referrals to radiology, and I'm sure he smoked his face off once he got home.... only he didn't have much time to enjoy that because he was rushed back to the hospital right away, when it turned out the leg pain he'd been complaining of was metastasized cancer. He died just a couple brutal weeks later without getting to smoke again or even go outside for fresh air. One of the many very, very sad things about it all is that I'd watched this man successfully fight addictions to other things that are a lot more serious in terms of their immediate effects on a person's life. Smoking cigarettes doesn't make you homeless (though with NYC's $10 pack, that could change) or exacerbate mental illness (according to some sources, it can actually soothe symptoms), and cigarettes don't estrange you from family and friends and the rest of society. But in the final analysis, smoking cigarettes can obviously have a way bigger impact than any of those other substances, because terminal illness makes all the rest of that stuff completely irrelevant. Homeless people can find housing, schizophrenics can manage their psychiatric symptoms, and people who've lost touch their families can reunite with their loved ones -- I saw this guy accomplish all those things recently, after seeing him struggle so much in the past. But he didn't ever get to enjoy what he worked so hard to regain, because he died of fucking lung cancer right when he'd finally -- and heroically -- gotten his life together.
I guess it's not so shocking that as I get older, I understand all the moralistic hysteria about kids smoking way more than I used to. I'm from a generation for whom there was no mystery or obfuscation about the health risks of smoking, and I was fully aware while choking down my first Marlboro when I was twelve that this was a horrifically unhealthy and addictive substance that almost inevitably caused lethal diseases. I mean, as a little kid I was terrified of cigarettes! They spent so much time at school screaming at us about lung cancer that I was distraught for days after walking in on a parent smoking at late night, convinced I'd be orphaned by what I, in my innocence, had assumed was a cigarette....
But I digress. No, what I was going to say is that -- as we all know -- kids start smoking because they know it's bad, and kids love bad things, and they absolutely don't believe for one second that they'll ever get older, let alone die. They really just don't. It's documented fact. See, but now I've gotten on a bit in years so I'm starting to get that if I don't figure something out soon, someday I will die. The older I get, and the more people I see get really sick and/or die, it does get a lot harder to deny that it could happen to me. That.... well, it will happen to me.
Part of me thinks that's why I love smoking -- there's some adolescent nihilism there that I'm really attached to, some big "fuck you" to the horror of mortality when you light that bitch up and suck in a big drag -- GOD, I love that feeling! But what Allen Carr would say, and what he's going to remind me, is that that's total bullshit. That feeling's just some half-assed, asinine, transparently juvenile rationalization for a dull and simple addiction I've been senselessly feeding for close to two decades. Allen Carr's annoying self-help book is going to remind me that all that romance and glamour, all the emotional and intellectual pyrotechnics I associate with my smoking, are just more sophisticated versions of a drug addict's most pathetic excuses. All those reasons aren't true. I don't really love smoking.
Anyway, even if some of that stuff is true, it's way past time to stop. I'm too old for nihilism, and that's not how I want to go, in horrible pain and all fucked-up on morphine. If I want to make some statement, I should jump off a building.
This weekend I hung out with a friend of mine who just went through the unbelievably awful experience of breast cancer treatment, and she was talking about how when someone gets sick, everyone wants to blame them for it. I'm sure you've noticed this too, that whenever something bad happens to someone, other people just go nuts coming up with explanations of how the sick/murdered/hit-by-a-car person's brought the misfortune on themselves. Susan Sontag talks a lot about this in Illness as Metaphor, and one thing I thought was weird but that I also kind of liked was that she shoved "smoking" in with "unresolved grief" and "pent-up rage" as ridiculous factors that people use to blame other people for getting cancer. It's true that lung cancer is one of the last acceptably stigmatized illnesses -- people can happily pass judgment on smokers who get it in a way that they're just dying to but can't for anyone else who gets sick. And I will be DAMNED if I ultimately give any smug asshole that satisfaction! When I have a terminal illness -- and unless I have some kind of terrible accident, chances are that at some point in the future I most likely will -- I hope it'll be one people can't blame me for giving myself. Or, much more importantly, that I can't blame myself for getting. Because that's not a fun thought.
Anyway, I'm planning to read this thing by the weekend. If I can make it through the Fourth of July without smoking, that'll surely be cause for a huge celebration. And if I can't.... well, then it'll probably mean that I'll have to stop drinking.
And that, my friend, is another can of worms.(less)
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June 29
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Jessica
marked as to-read:
Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (Paperback)
by
Douglas R. Hofstadter
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
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recommended to Jessica by:
manny, i think?
Jessica said:
"I kind of can't wait to clasp my grubby hands on this book.
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