Keely's updates

Keely's updates http://www.goodreads.com/user/updates_rss/84023 en-US Tue, 13 May 2008 14:18:30 -0700 60 Keely's updates http://www.goodreads.com/ 200 41 http://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/gr_logo.gif 24833498 Tue, 13 May 2008 14:18:30 -0700 <![CDATA[Keely voted on a quote]]> http://www.goodreads.com/

Keely added a quote:
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." — Albert Einstein

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]]> 24833155 Tue, 13 May 2008 14:14:56 -0700 <![CDATA[new update: Update]]> 24638472 Sun, 11 May 2008 11:12:41 -0700 <![CDATA[new comment from Keely]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/17663593 Keely's review of The Moonstone (Modern Library Classics)
by William Wilkie Collins

Mine's a used copy in blue with no dust jacket from a college bookstore. I'm just glad nothing was underlined. Not so lucky with my copy of 'The Sadean Woman'. ]]> 24635542 Sun, 11 May 2008 10:09:51 -0700 <![CDATA[new review from Keely]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/17663593

to: The Moonstone (Modern Library Classics)
by William Wilkie Collins
bookshelves: mystery, novel
Perhaps it is not surprising that I managed to guess the 'whom', if not the how of this prototype mystery. What may be somewhat of a surprise is that this did not make the book seem tedious, nor did it become a plodding step-by-step towards inevitability like many mysteries are.

Like The Virginian, this predecessor of a genre never seems to fall into the same traps as its innumerable followers. Indeed, with both these books, the focus itself becomes something entirely different than the obsession it inculcates in others.

Though this book certainly contains a mystery, a set of clues and twists, and a brilliant detective, the focus is not on these but on the characters themselves. Firstly, there is the fact that the book is narrated in sections by different observers and participants. Secondly, there is the fact that the chief mover of the entire series of events is never the mystery itself, but the maddening effect that the unknowns and miscommunications have on the personal relationships surrounding the events.

The characters themselves, chiefly in the case of the narrators, are such discrete and believable characters that part of the enjoyment of the book becomes an appreciation for the author's knowledge of human behavior and ability to represent wholly different mindsets without any lingering authorial voice intruding.

It is not only the psychology of the characters and their movements which are represented here, but also the little shifting falsities of how they see themselves and how they are seen by others, none of which represent a truthful opinion, but all of which flow from the way people generalize one another.

Collins succeeds greatly at the old authorial adage that one should show instead of tell, as innumerable details and observations build up to give us a more thorough view. He does have somewhat of an easier time of this due to his method, it may be noted. By using constant and somewhat unreliable narrators, he may be seem to be telling, but in truth these opinions represent more about the narrator than about those whom they cast their judgment upon.

Also like The Virginian, Collins carries with him a strong and concise voice bred of that Victorian generation for whom Austen was the venerable master. He was also, it may be noted, a close friend to Dickens.

Another pleasantry with both authors is that they retain a certain humility, such that they never seek out more lofty heights than their prose may bear up. This is the reason their stories each stand as the foundation of pulp movements, whose writers were more concerned with writing to their own ability than to reaching for far-flung achievements they might or might not be equal to.

However, while those later authors attached themselves so much to archetype and rare coincidence to produce the strenth of their work, the ealiest hands to touch the page were fueled by human emotion and character. There is some sense of stereotypical characterization in The Moonstone, but it is tempered by extending even the joke characters a surfeit of humanity.

That being said, the main joke character in this book nearly drove me down in the few chapters she stood as narrator. It was not because she was too ridiculous, not because she was annoying, nor too cliche. She was simply too accurate to a type of person I loathe to meet or to spend a free minute with; namely: the self-righteous, proselytizing old maid.

This was the curious tangent which passed between this text and 'The Screwtape Letters', which I was also reading at the time. It was especially marked in comparison to the earlier narrator, who though simple, retained a charm and a welcoming humility in his various shortcomings.

It always seems a shame to look at the first movement of a genre, be it Wister's, Collins's, or Tolkien's, as those creators who later move to take up the torch miss the point: that independant of the magic or mystery or gunfight being the main event, what keeps and impresses the reader is the emotional content, psychology, and strenth of the pure writing, itself. Collins stands in good stead with the other innovators in this: that his work is a fine novel that happens to be a mystery, and not tjhe other way 'round.

P.S. Some may point out Poe as originator of the mystery, or even point to older cases. This is an old debate, which I will not enter into, suffice it to say that Collins is the first example of a mystery novel, as Poe believed one should never write something which takes more than a sitting to read. I'm glad collins didn't feel this way, but it seems exceptionally true for Poe. ]]> 24591623 Sat, 10 May 2008 13:09:54 -0700 <![CDATA[new comment from Keely]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/19226230 Keely's review of The Road
by Cormac McCarthy

Nor old Mr. McCarthy. ]]> 24544899 Fri, 09 May 2008 16:36:01 -0700 <![CDATA[new review from Keely]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/19226230

to: The Road (Hardcover)
by Cormac McCarthy
bookshelves: fiction, novel
The text of the book is jumbled and without any lingering style. Many have pointed out where parts resemble one author or another, but the whole of the book is not a seamless blend as much as it is a reanimated corpse, sewn together from half dead parts to make a wobbling, incongruous whole.

Much of the book is written in apparent simplicity, but the degree to which the author concentrates on pointless tedium without building plot, mood, or character means that the whole text is needlessly complicated by distracting details:

"He took out the plastic bottle of water and unscrewed the cap and held it out and the boy came and took it and stood drinking. He lowered the bottle and got his breath and he sat in the road and crossed his legs and drank again. Then he handed the bottle back and the man drank and screwed the cap back on and rummaged through the pack. The ate a can of white beans, passing it between them. Then he threw the empty tin into the woods. Then they set out down the road again."

Often, these laundry lists of repetitive details will be capped by McCarthy's other most apparent stylistic touch: the incredibly awkward metaphor:

"The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child, anouncing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who doesn't know that behind him, the players have all been carried off by wolves."

or " 'it's snowing' the boy said, he looked at the sky, a single, grey flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom."

Indeed, McCarthy will sometimes pile them one atop the other, in what we must assume is an attempt at graceful or poetic language, but which never ceases to feel forced and unoriginal:

"Query: how does the never to be differ from what never was? Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp. People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn, half immolate and smoking in their clothes like failed sectarian suicides."

He will often feel the need to describe in detail how a character might scrape paint with a screwdriver, but will then add in a complex jargon term with no explanation, nor any indication that it stems from character knowledge. One might suggest he either move his thesaurus closer or further away from his desk, such that the effect of these very dense words amongst completely bare and meaningless paragraphs will be less jolting.

The metaphoric or 'poetic' language tends to be equally jarring, as in one sentence, when he describes 'dead ivy', 'dead grass' and 'dead trees' with the same descriptor, and then as if adding a punchline, declares them shrouded in a 'carbon fog'.

The main characters are equally bare. Their conversations tend to follow an invariable pattern of the father giving orders, the son saying he's scared, the father repeating the orders, the son asking if they are going to die, the father saying no, the son repeating the question, and the father repeating the answer. This will eventually be followed by a 'father/son' moment where they come to an understanding by the son asking difficult questions and the father not answering them.

Now, I won't suggest this to be a particularly unlikely or odd relationship in general, but that McCarthy does little to support how it would have psychologically developed between the two.

The boy constantly acts surprised and afraid of the world he has grown up in. One might imagine if a suburban child were thrust into this situation, the constant questions and crying would make sense, but anyone who has seen a Rwandan child with an AK-47 knows that the child would have adapted to the bleak environment better than his father.

There is also little sense of trust or understanding between them, despite the fact that they spend time entirely in one another's company and no one else's.

The entire book seems to stem from the premise that under difficult situations, human beings simply fold in on themselves and give up. The book is mostly empty of any sense of hope, or joy, or anything but bare bleakness. I might suggest that McCarthy has achieved a feat in making a world so bleak and pointless that no matter how bad things get, it never feels like an escalation, but it also seems a complete betrayal of human nature.

People always find little hopes and joys, especially in situations where they are forced into difficult and harrowing actions. The type of depressiveness McCarthy represents fits in more with a depressed teen than with those people who go through wars or natural disasters.

In fact, the book seems more and more to represent that sort of teenage obsession with bleak depressiveness as it goes on. The fact that it is utterly without levity and yet seems to take itself entirely seriously while the text ambles from meticulously described tent packing to the sun as a 'mother with a lamp' indicates an author who has come to believe he is talented to ever write disjointed crap.

I found that whenever the text made attempts at becoming more dire or poignant, the effect was so forced that it became a source of unintentional humor. It was not difficult to imagine McCarthy in black lipstick posting this story in response to his mother not letting him go to the mall until he finished his math homework.

McCarthy painted a picture entirely in black paint, and then expected that covering it in more black paint would somehow make it more profound. Hitchcock once said that you cannot tell a story by constant escalation, but must break and build, break and build. McCarthy has ignored this rule, though I am not sure if it is because it is without any sense of build, or if it is all ludicrously piled without rhyme or reason.

He seems to fail to realize what creates fear and unease. Pain and inhumanity are not in and of themselves the causes of fear. What we fear is the unknown and the surprising. We fear a revelation that there is something inside us, inside those we love, and inside the world that we cannot defeat, cannot comprehend, and cannot stop. Cannibalism and dead infants are unpleasant things, but Cormac seems to think that simply putting them there and pointing at them will somehow shock us.

Too often, he overcompensates with character reactions (usually the frantic fear of the boy) and seems to expect that the reader will automatically react along with him. Unfortunately, since the boy's psychology is so simplistic, and since he has no hope or joy, he cannot seem human to us, let alone a sympathetic character.

The author ignores a possible wealth of stimulating visual imagery and emotional content in favor of unrelated metaphors. He tries to ensconce you in a world of endless, bleak fear, but not only does he distract from his own mood with asides and lists of actions, but he fails to represent any character with enough emotional depth to ever lose anything, fear, or suffer pain.

I simply cannot see how McCarthy can expect to engage anyone with what, in the end, is a world completely sterlized of emotion or possibility. Human beings always create a possibility, a way out, even when there is none.

One might bring up the excitement of finding food, or of 'the fire', which is the father's cryptic word for why they keep going on and on. However, one may neatly replace 'the fire' with 'the plot' and see the effect McCarthy achieves.

In the end, I ask this: to a starving man, which jar is more empty, the one with crumbs of food, or the one who has never held food at all? I could perhaps appreciate a completely empty world as a writing exercise, but McCarthy is constantly trying to instill and to provoke reactions, so he cannot have been going for utter bleakness of emotion. However, all of his entreaties are shallow and scattered, and so the book never builds to anything more than the sum of its parts. This would be less problematic if those parts were more than long tedious bleakness occasionally interrupted by grotesquely self-satisfied attempts at figurative language. ]]> 24520271 Fri, 09 May 2008 11:02:07 -0700 <![CDATA[new review from Keely]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21934214 Mr Pye (Paperback)
by Mervyn Peake
bookshelves: humor, illustrated, to-read, unowned
]]> 24520163 Fri, 09 May 2008 11:00:53 -0700 <![CDATA[new review from Keely]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21934141 Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (Hardcover)
by Mervyn Peake
bookshelves: humor, illustrated, poetry, to-read, unowned
]]> 24515250 Fri, 09 May 2008 10:07:01 -0700 <![CDATA[new review from Keely]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21930383 Anansi Boys (Mass Market Paperback)
by Neil Gaiman
bookshelves: currently-reading, fantasy, humor, novel
]]> 24502738 Fri, 09 May 2008 07:43:38 -0700 <![CDATA[new comment from Keely]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21917896 Kelly's review of Faith of the Fallen (Sword of Truth, Book 6)
by Terry Goodkind

Well, I know a lot of us started reading them in our mid teens, and one's tastes start to change rapidly at that point, but there is real quality difference.

I know Goodkind has been quoted as saying he's 'not a fantasy author' but that his books are 're-inventing the novel', so he's clearly got some blindness as to his own writing quality.

Now only that, but the constant S&M fetishism he injects into his books gets less and less delicate as he goes along. We start out with lots of collars and professional torturers and move to magical enslavement by nipple removal and psychic blowjob rape.

I'm not sure if it's the fetishism itself that dropped the quality of writing and characterization, but it was clearly distracting him too much from the actual book/plot/character part of the writing.

It may also simply be that he ran out of steam at this point, as he had expressed most of the depth of his characters by this point, and since he didn't do anything to change them, there was really not much more for them to do besides narrowly miss one another and wear collars, which we'd already become tired of somewhat as his readers. ]]>