The Social Network / Skippy Dies

Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer Ken Levine has an interesting blog in which he writes about, among other things, the script-writing process. He also does reviews of television shows (which are interesting because sometimes he’ll talk about how HE would have solved a specific writing problem) and movies.  Recently Ken Levine reviewed The Social Network.  The story of the creation of Facebook, written by Aaron Sorkin, Levine loved the screenplay and said:

SOCIAL NETWORK was absolutely brilliant! And the star was the screenplay. Sorkin somehow managed to take a complicated completely non-visual subject, mix it with dense legal issues, present characters who are all basically unlikable, and somehow create a spellbinding movie. The screenplay is adapted from Ben Mezrich’s novel THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES. Good luck to the guy who has to follow this and write the formation of Twitter movie.

At the time I read this blog post I had not yet seen the film so it never occurred to me to read the comments.   Apparently, a commenter named Tarasha commented that she didn’t like the portrayal of women in the film and thinks Aaron Sorkin failed the women in his script and she was surprised because Sorkin created such great women characters in his other works, especially The West Wing.  To the surprise of everyone, including Ken Levine, Aaron Sorkin showed up in the comments to respond to the criticism.  You can click through to read his whole response but here’s part of it:

More generally, I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren't the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80's. They're very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren't women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)

And this very disturbing attitude toward women isn't just confined to the guys who can't get dates.

He then explains more and finishes with this:

I wish I could go door to door and make this explanation/apology to any woman offended by the things you've pointed out but obviously that's unrealistic so I thought the least I could do was speak directly to you.

I had the opportunity to see The Social Network last night.   Truthfully, I wasn’t as blown away by the screenplay as Ken Levine was, I thought it dragged in places.  But I did find it amazing that Sorkin could make the act of writing computer code not boring.  But I buy Sorkin’s explanation of what he was trying to do and why he wrote the women’s characters the way he did.  Maybe that is because I feel that I know Aaron Sorkin’s work and I’ve seen him create many strong women characters but I really think that the point he was trying to make was very clear. 

I’m not going to judge whether this is an accurate depiction of the people portrayed in the film (no, not even Larry Summers), I would judge it only as a work of fiction.  The picture Sorkin paints is not pretty.  Yes, all the characters do treat women as sex objects/stupid groupies. And as he points out in his comment, no one holds a gun to these women’s heads and forces them to act the way they do or put up with the way they are treated.  Clearly not all women would put up with this, a point that Sorkin makes very clear in the opening scene.   He does have the lawyer of Eduardo (Zuckerberg’s former best friend) be a women and her character is strong but undeveloped.  There is also a young woman lawyer on Zuckerberg’s legal team but I found it annoying that he had her say to him at the end “You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.”   I have news for her - whether a person is an asshole at his core is irrelevant in situations in which he is ACTING like an asshole. (But then Sorkin also had this character announce at one point that she was only a second year associate sitting in and observing, only to change that story at the end when she announces that she’s an “expert” at voir dire.  uh huh. After two years.   Hard to take that character seriously at that point. ) 

All of this made me think of a novel I read last month:  Skippy Dies by Paul Murray.   I wasn’t going to blog about it because I didn’t really like it, but I have been thinking about it off and on since I finished it.  It is the story of a group of prep school boys in Dublin and their teachers.  Just as some women find the portrayal of the women inThe Social Network disturbing, the portrayal of women in this novel is disturbing.  Although perhaps not as blatant as in The Social Network, all the women characters in Skippy Dies are stereotypes and they are all seen through the eyes of the boys/men. 

The males in the story all react to the females as if the females were aliens from another planet.  And while I understand that many boys going through puberty fear girls (and the possible rejection from them) while at the same time being drawn to them by their hormones, and while I understand that this feeling may not go away completely for grown men, it is really hard to read a novel in which all girls/women are seen through the eyes of boys and boylike men.  Even when the girls are occasionally given the point of view, they don’t seem very real.   And I asked myself as I was reading this – is this novel sexist?  And I kept stopping myself from answering “yes” because I always wondered if (or maybe hoped that) the author was trying to make a point that treating the female sex like this is silly.   The ending is somewhat ambiguous on this front.  If the author was good intentioned, then he failed to make his point.  If he wasn’t trying to make that point, the novel was sexist. 

As I read that novel I kept thinking how interesting it was that many women were upset by Christos Tsolkias’ The Slap and thought it was misogynistic but there didn’t seem to be the same reaction to Skippy Dies. I seldom call any work misogynistic, I think that term is thrown around too often and overuse makes a term lose meaning.  But I have no problem talking about sexism and sexist portrayals.  I didn’t think The Slap was sexist but I did, without a doubt, think there were sexist (even, in the case of one character, misogynistic) characters in that novel.  It never occurred to me to think the author was necessarily sexist or that the novel was intended to be sexist.  Why?  Because there were many complicated female characters in the novel many of whom were justifiably appalled at the various levels of sexism exhibited by some of the male characters.  As a novelist, Tsolkias’ took care that his female characters were not stereotypes although all of the characters in the novel were types.

And yet there was heated debate over The Slap and not for Skippy Dies which contains no female characters that seem more than caricatures.   Why?  Maybe the point of Skippy Dies was more apparent to other readers than to me.  Or maybe it is a problem with the readers.  I often encounter other readers who judge novels by whether they “like” the characters or not. .  I won’t tell other people how to read books, but in my opinion, just because characters in a novel are sexist doesn’t make the novel a sexist novel. It makes it a novel with difficult characters.  And just because the characters in a novel are basically good and childlike doesn’t mean that the novel isn’t sexist. 

I had almost put the question of Skippy Dies behind me when I went to see The Social Network.  And as I watched the characterization of women in this film I found myself asking the same question.  Why is Sorkin creating a universe where all college aged women are perceived as sex objects and most act like stupid groupies?  Is he trying to make a point?  And, if so, what point is he trying to make?  And is his point about the women or is it about the men?  Unlike Skippy Dies, I found his point pretty easy to follow.

Unlike the woman lawyer at the end though, I did think that Mark Zuckerberg (the character) was an absolute jerk.

What I Read Over the Summer

This summer I gave myself a break from blogging about books, I only wrote about ones that I felt like writing about. But I read quite a few books and since I partly use this blog to keep track of what I read I thought I’d share my list.

I never did pick up a new mystery series but I did catch up on a few ongoing series that I’ve been reading over the years. Elizabeth George’s new Inspector Lynley novel, This Body of Death, came out and I read it in June. When I first started reading this series, years ago, I was indifferent to it. But now I’m completely caught up in the story of the people, mostly Havers who is simultaneously endearing and annoying. Then I caught up with the last two Steven Saylor mysteries: The Judgment of Caesar and The Triumph of Caesar. At least, I think they are the latest two in his series. For some reason, I have trouble keeping track of that series. I liked both of them and the second one didn’t end with the assassination of Caesar so I was surprised. They were all very fun. I also listened to the audiobook version of Laura Lippman’s novel What the Dead Know. It was different than her Tess Monaghan mysteries but I did like it.

Speaking of audio books, I started listening to Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles last year during my trip up to Minnesota. Then I got sick and never finished. So I started listening again on my way up to Minnesota this year, but it brought back too many memories of being sick. So I stopped. But I did finish it in September. Maybe because I took such a long break in the middle of it, I thought it was only ok. The author’s ongoing one way dialog with American Airlines was very funny at times but I found I didn’t really care much what happened to him. And the sections in which he was translating a Polish novel just put me to sleep.

I read The Angels Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafron and I enjoyed it but found it harder to suspend disbelief than I did with his earlier novel, The Shadow of the Wind. Also, I read the first novel a few years ago so it took me a while to figure out that this second novel ties in with the first. I understand there will be a third and I figure at that point I’ll have to go back and re-read all three.

I finally read The Help, by Kathryn Stocket, after practically the whole universe told me I had to. It was an easy read but I found it completely unbelievable that the black maids in the story would have told their story to that white woman. It isn’t that I didn’t enjoy the book, but I wonder what all the fuss was about. Of course it seemed designed for women’s book club reading.

On vacation I caught up with a few books that people lent me a long time ago. First, The Girls from Ames: The Story of Women and a 40 Year Friendship, by Jeffrey Zaslo. This group of high school friends were about my age and most of the novel I was fairly sure they wouldn’t have given me the time of day in high school. It was an interesting project but I was glad to leave them behind. The Water Horse by Julia Grigson (which AndiF lent me last year) gave me a whole different look at Florence Nightengale, not to mention the Crimean War. I was disappointed that the story just .. ended, though. The heroine finds her man and … the end. I also read The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which was lent to me two years ago during my Harry Potter phase. At last I can return it.

One of the novels I enjoyed most this summer (and would have written about if I hadn’t read it in Minnesota where I have no internet connection) was Jonathan Safron Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. At times it was “laugh out loud” funny and yet the story at the center of the novel is very sad, as all holocaust stories are sad. Creating the stumbling English in the letters of Alex, a young Ukranian with a basic grasp of English and access to a Thesaurus is a tour de force for Safron Foer. It must have been very rigid to do, as Alex would have said. I know that Safron Foer gets picked on a lot by some critics and I really don’t know why. Based on this novel and his Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close I would read anything he wrote. Well, that’s not true. I have no interest in reading his latest paeon to vegetarianism. But I probably would read any novel he published.

I read it just after reading The Zookeepers Wife by Diane Ackerman which is the true story of zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski who sheltered Polish Jews in the empty Warsaw Zoo during World War II. When I picked it up I thought it was a novel but was pleased to discover it was a true story and one that I’d never heard.

I unintentionally spent some time with France this summer. First I read Edith Wharton’s Fighting France: From Dunkirk to Belport, I like books about World War I but this series of essays that were published in magazines during the war seemed mostly like propaganda to me. Then I read My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme, which was wonderful. And I read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary. I had avoided reading this one because I thought it was yet another novel marketed at women’s book clubs, but I was surprised by how much I liked it.

I finished off the summer with Fool by Christopher Moore which is King Lear re-told as only Christopher Moore can. Not quite as humorous as his re-telling of the life of Jesus in Lamb, but quite entertaining.

Oh, and I did read Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky as I said I would. Not quite as thought provoking as Here Comes Everybody but maybe that is because I heard his talks so many times before the book was released that I basically knew what was going to be in it.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell

I must confess that this is the first David Mitchell novel I’ve ever read and I picked it up, not because it was a David Mitchell novel, but because it was historical fiction and had received good reviews and was now on the Booker longlist.  I like good historical fiction. 

On the other hand I’ve never really been much interested in historical fiction about Japan.  I never could get into Shogun back in the day.  So I was a little apprehensive.  I shouldn’t have been.   It became clear as the novel progressed that Mitchell’s intent was not to create for the reader the Japan of 1800 in detail but to give the reader little glimpses of Japan such as one of the rare visitors of Japan in 1800 would have seen.  Japan was a closed society, visitors were discouraged and the study of Japanese society or even its language was not allowed.  The few visitors who were allowed to visit were closely watched and could not fully interpret what they saw.  As a reader, that is how we experience much of the Japan that we see in this novel.

This novel is not, then about Japan in 1800.  And even though much of the action takes place among members of the Dutch East India Company, it is also not a novel that is principally intended to tell us what it was like to be a member of that company.  Through long months out of the year, the men stationed in Japan did nothing but maintain a Dutch presence.  It is not, in fact, a traditional historical novel.  It doesn’t have a traditional love story.  It doesn’t have a traditional ending.

I think Mitchell was more interested in exploring an idea than in telling a story.  I think Mitchell was exploring the concept of imprisonment.  And while he explores it he tells a pretty good story.  

Jacob de Zoet is a clerk with the Dutch East Indies Company.  He has joined the company for a limited five year stint with the intention of making his fortune so that he can return home and marry Anna, the woman he is in love with.  He hopes to have freedom of movement within the Company by being indispensible to the new chief of the Japanese trading post whose stated desire is to root out the corruption of the previous post administrator.  De Zoet cleans up the records and identifies the wrongdoings, which makes him no friends at the post, but his honesty becomes a liability when the head of the post himself wants to engage in shenanigans.  And so rather than be allowed to return to Java (Jakarta) de Zoet is left behind in Japan as a lower clerk. 

But he is not truly in Japan, he is on the man-made island of Dejima which is walled and has only two entrances:  the sea gate that is opened only when a Dutch ship is in port and the land gate that gives access to the city of Nagasaki over a bridge.  It is, essentially, a large but fairly comfortable prison for the men who live there throughout the year.  A Dutch vessel arrives only once a year if they are lucky.  If they are unlucky it is lost at sea and multiple years can go by with no contact with Europe.   No European is allowed across the bridge to Nagasaki without the permission of the Japanese who are deeply suspicious of the foreigners.  No escape from the island is possible because the  Europeans could not blend into the Japanese population.  The Dutch do not think of themselves as prisoners but they have limited freedom of movement and they are subject to roll calls by their Japanese watchers.

The men on Dejima have, however, varying levels of freedom.  The company doctor, Doctor Marinus, is the most free.  He has no desire to return to Europe.  He has botanical studies that he is interested in and he has allies in Nagasaki through whom he is able to travel more regularly to and fro from the Japanese mainland.  The least free are the slaves of the Dutch traders.  They have no freedom of movement.  In one chapter Mitchell gives us the story from the point of view of a slave who makes clear to us that the Dutch may be able to control his body but they cannot control his thoughts.  Some of the other men are not slaves but are there because they were “pressed” onto ships and sent east, so they are little better than the slaves who were captured from their homeland.   All of the men (except Doctor Marinus) dream of leaving Dejima and returning to their own homes and the people they love.

De Zoet makes friends with one of the Japanese/Dutch interpreters who has access to Dejima, Ogawa Uzeiman, who is interested in European culture.  Japan is a closed society.  It does not welcome foreigners and it does not allow any of its people to leave Japan, not even to study.  Uzeiman would have liked to have travelled and brought back information that would be useful for Japan, but he is not allowed.  There is “no precedent”.  In that sense, the entire Island of Japan can be seen as a prison.

Jacob De Zoet also makes the acquaintance of one Japanese woman, Miss Aibagawa, a midwife and the daughter of a Samurai, who is very intelligent but whose face was badly scarred as a child.  In the opening chapter of the book, Miss Aibagawa unexpectedly saves the life of the newborn child of the highest official in Nagasaki and he is so grateful that she is granted her wish to join the group of Japanese men who are studying on Dejima with Doctor Marinus.  This unexpected freedom of movement does not last, however, and soon Miss Aibagawa is sent against her will to a cloistered nunnery attached to a monastery where she is to live for 20 years.  De Zoet, who has come to believe he is in love with her, believes he will never see her again.  Uzeiman, who is in love with her but who has been forced to marry someone else, is distraught at her absence and a key part of the novel is his breaking with all traditions in an attempt to break her out.

There are prisons within prisons in this novel both literally (the monastery within Japan) and figuratively (the marriage of Ogawa and his wife) and some prisoners are more free than others (Doctor Marinus and the slaves come to mind but also Miss Aibagawa and the other “nuns” are treated differently).  And all of the characters are limited by their literal limited ability to communicate due to the language difference.  But as the slave on Dejima knows, real freedom is the freedom of the mind.

Not much of the action of the novel takes place on the Japanese mainland and sometimes when the scene shifts to Nagasaki we see it through the uncomprehending eyes of the European men who are allowed to visit.  In only a few scenes are we allowed a glimpse of Nagasaki through the eyes of Japanese characters and Mitchell doesn’t waste a lot of time in those scenes with superfluous description.  He moves the plot along.  There is one large section of the novel that takes place in the Japanese monastery but Mitchell’s point is clearly not to paint an accurate picture of a Japanese monastery for us since this one turns out to be an aberration that horrifies even the Japanese who discover its secrets.

How each of these characters deal with the limits on their freedom is the principal stuff of the novel.  It is very well written and I seldom found my attention flagging. When the land gate that separates Dejima from Nagasaki is closed at the end of Part One and the “well oiled bolt” slides home we are aware of the fact that de Zoet is now imprisoned on the island but we are also aware that Miss Aibagawa is locked out.  She has been trying to get onto the island because she believes that being imprisoned as the concubine of Jacob de Zoet would be better than being imprisoned in the Monastery. But she is not allowed to choose her prison.  Later, though, Miss Aibagawa is in a position to escape from the Monastery but turns back at the last minute because she will not abandon a friend.  Jacob de Zoet could, at one point, escape his life on Dejima by going along with the plan of an English Sea Captain but doing so would endanger the life of one of the other men on Dejima and so de Zoet refuses. 

In general I enjoyed this novel.  I have no idea, however, if the picture I got of Japan is at all accurate and I did not feel compelled, when I was finished, to do any research about that.  Late in the novel, Japan is referred to as The Land of the Thousand Autumns and the name of the novel became clearer to me.  The Japan that I was seeing was the Japan of Jacob de Zoet, not the Japan of the Japanese.  In terms of historical accuracy, I will point out that at one point a character states that the American sea captain has told him that Indians were “being cleared west of Louisiana” and he thought he might go take part.  I only point out that in 1799 no Indians were being cleared anywhere “west” of Louisiana by any Americans and the Louisiana purchase wasn’t even a gleam in Thomas Jefferson’s eye yet.  

But that’s a minor flaw.  The main flaw with the novel, in my opinion, was that the ending was anticlimactic.  But perhaps that was intended.  When a man is released from long years in prison and returns home, he often just wants to pick up the pieces of his life and return to “normalcy”.  That makes sense.  It just doesn’t make for a good end of a novel.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

My first thought on finishing The Slap was:  “This is going to be a popular book club book but a terrible choice as a book club book, and both for the same reason.”

The premise of The Slap is very simple and is set out in the first chapter.  Hector and Aisha, an Australian couple in their early forties with two children, are having a barbeque. Hector is Greek-Australian and Aisha is Indian-Australian.   It is their one big party of the year where they pay back all the hospitality of their family and friends and they invite lots of people who don’t know each other well and all of their children.  There is a lot of food.  The guests are diverse.  They invite Aisha’s friend Anouk, a childless unmarried Jewish woman who wants to quit her job as a television writer and write a novel.  They invite Aisha and Anouk’s friend Rosie, a former surfer party girl who now lives with her alcoholic, going nowhere husband Gary and their four year old child Hugo who Rosie is still breast-feeding.   To say that Hugo is undisciplined is an understatement.  Also invited are Hector’s Greek immigrant parents, Manolis and Koula, as well as Hector’s cousin Harry with his wife Sandi and son Rocco.  At some point Hugo throws (another) temper tantrum while swinging around a cricket bat in the direction of Rocco and Harry slaps him. Rosie is furious, files a police report and brings charges against the slapper.  Everyone in the novel has an opinion about the slap and Rosie’s reaction.

The reason that this will be popular with book clubs is that people who never bother to read the assigned book can show up and participate.  As long as they know the above premise they can participate in the discussion.  Everyone in the reading group will inevitably express their opinion about the slap and the prosecution and that will inevitably lead to long discussions about upbringing (their own and their children’s and other people’s children’s). Someone who has read the book will say “oh you’re just like [fill in the name of a character].”  This won’t be one of those gatherings where the book is talked about for ten minutes – I predict that the discussion will go on for hours. Arguments will ensue.  Some of them might be vehement.  Friendships could be at stake.   But in the end the book club group will pat itself on the back and say “look!  we talked about the book all night!”

And that is why it will be a terrible book club book.  Because no one will really be talking about the book, they will be talking about themselves.  So, really, why bother to read the book?   The host could just distribute the above as a hypothetical and discussion could ensue. 

But.   Anyway.

This isn’t a great book but it is a good book.  Tsiolkas creates a set of very believable characters.  They are complex.  Tsiolkas isn’t interested in black and white characters, he goes for the shades of gray.  His characters are dislikeable but no one is really evil although some are worse than others. It is interesting how he achieves the shade of gray.  The novel is divided into eight chapters each of which is told from the point of view of one of the people at the party.  The first chapter is told from the point of view of Hector, the host, and it details the events of the party.  The other chapters are not intended to give us the other characters’ alternate views of what happened.  Everyone agrees about what happened.  Harry, Hector’s cousin, slapped Hugo, the son of Rosie who is one of Aisha’s best friends.  Life goes on, including all the repurcussions from the incident, but the narrative constantly shifts viewpoint. Those who are fans of Maeve Binchy will recognize this structure  but Binchy never created such dislikeable characters.

And they are dislikeable not necessarily because of what they do as much as for how they are.  Here is where Tsiolkas is superb; he is omniscient with the character from whose viewpoint we are seeing the narrative and he shows us the secret thoughts of the character.  But he doesn’t tell us those secret thoughts in an aside.  He creates dueling dialogs.  There is the dialog in the head of the character, what the character wants to say, and there is the actual dialog, what the character actually says.  We see the rage and the exasperation and the ugliness that is hidden behind the veneer of what polite society expects. Thus, in the chapter called “Harry” we see the continuing narrative from the point of view of Harry and we are omniscient with respect to Harry’s thoughts but nobody else’s.   Here, Hector is talking to Harry about what happened.

Harry’s fists were clenched.  He felt the heat of the sun, the stretch of the sky, they were heavy weights descending onto him.  There was a hammer at his chest.  He felt his cousin’s hand on his shoulder.  he shrugged it off.

‘Harry, listen to me.  You’re a good man.  You don’t deserve this.’

‘But?’

‘But you shouldn’t have hit him.’

He wanted to cry.  Take back that moment, fix that moment, change that moment, so that he had never hit that child.  That fucking cunt of a child, that fucking animal of a child.  Panagia, he whispered to his God, I want that child dead.  He was back on the sand, the warm sun on the back of his neck.  He could hear Rocco’s laugh.  Rocco brought him back as he always did.

‘Okay.  Sure.  I’ll go and apologise to them.  Can you organize it?’

But it is not only what the various characters think about Hugo that is hidden by the social veneer.  It is the racial tensions and the sexual tensions and the socio-economic tensions that are also hidden.  Eventually this gap is unsustainable and characters begin to blurt out what they really feel.  Part of this novel is about how people hide their true selves.   People who like to read about likeable people shouldn’t read this novel.  People who are shocked by the above language shouldn’t read this novel.  There is no redemption for any of the characters in this novel. On the other hand, each character is driven by his or her own demons that are revealed to the reader slowly and they make the characters seem very real.  I felt that I had met people like this in real life.  They weren’t people I necessarily liked or wanted to spend time around, but they were real. 

Tsiolkas creates enough of a plot to make the reader keep turning the page but the plot is not the driving force. The court case is, in fact, resolved long before the end of the novel.  This is a character driven novel, and a study of Australian society.  Tsiolkas is, obviously, Greek and he does a very good job in creating the Greek community of Hector’s family and their friends.  One chapter is told from the point of view of Hector’s father Manolis and I felt that an entire novel could have been built around him.  The way that immigrants deal with a culture that surrounds them but that they aren’t quite embracing, the reality of aging and death, the exasperation with the younger generation, Tsolkias captures it all in that chapter.

This is an Australian novel and is some ways it seems very Australian but in others it transcends place.  Five of the eight chapters are from the point of view of characters who either are immigrants or the children of immigrants.  Hector and his family, including his father Manolis and his cousin Harry, are part of the Greek immigrant community.  Aisha is from an Indian immigrant family.  Connie, a teenager who works in Aisha’s office, was born in England.   The non-immigrant Australians are mostly minorities.  Anouk is Jewish.   Connie’s friend Richie is a gay teenager.  Hector’s friend Bilal is an aborigine who has converted to Islam, making him a double minority.  Rosie and Gary are among the few white Australians in the novel, and they are also at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, living just above the poverty level.  Gary is an alcoholic and Rosie is the daughter of an alcoholic who will not leave Gary.  If this were America, they would be overtly called white trash.  And yet Rosie, Aisha and Anouk are friends from their teens and at the beginning of the novel, at least, they still maintain the illusion that they have things in common and they care about what happens to each other. 

This novel is a reminder that Australia is as much of a “melting pot” as other parts of the world and, just as in our part of the world, the melting pot doesn’t really melt anything it mostly just results in a stew.

And that’s really what this novel is about.  Not the slap of a child, but the tensions of a multicultural, multi-ethnic world.  It is about the pull of family and the pull of friendship.   It is about the stress of being old and the stress of being young.   It is about transcending or not transcending your own upbringing.    It is about what makes a marriage happy (or at least tolerable).  It is about the importance or lack of importance of children in your life. 

And that is only scratching the surface.

It is not an entirely successful novel.  Some of the female characters seem to react to men not in the way that women react to men but in the way that men react to women (very visually).    Hector and Harry seem far more obsessed with their own bodies (diet and exercise) than most 40-something heterosexual men that I know.  I think the author meant to end the novel on a positive note with Connie and Richie and their friends looking forward to the future, but watching a teenager partying with his graduating highschool friends using parentally sanctioned drugs and hearing him declare it was the “best day of” his life didn’t really do it for me.  Probably the greatest flaw was that, although Tsiolkas tries to explain it,  I truly didn’t understand why Rosie was letting her child grow up to be so dislikeable.  (I give credit to Tsoilkas that he is able to portray Hugo as an absolute brat but also show that the blame for that is not his but his parents. The next time I’m tempted to slap a child in Starbucks I’ll instead imagine slapping his mother or father.) 

Finally, this book will probably offend people who are easily offended by bad language and obnoxious characters.    But anyone who has plowed through the writings of The Great White Men of the 20th century will not find this novel hard going. 

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

I’m back from vacationing in the cool climes of the Great North Woods, which felt even better this year than usual after the very hot summer we have had.  I saw no bears in hammocks.  I saw no bears at all, actually.  In fact, I haven’t seen a bear in a few years.  Which is a shame.  Now it is back to reality and back to the ungodly heat.

With temperatures topping 100 degrees here in the Midwest, I went to my favorite local independent bookseller to stock up on a few paperbacks that would entertain me while stuck inside in the air conditioning.   One thing I’ve discovered about summer is that publishers think readers are looking for fluff beach reads during the summer months but that’s not what I want in the summer.  I’m in Missouri – we don’t have a beach.  We have pools but they are surrounded by concrete and are hot when the temperatures are hot. 

When I’m stuck inside I want to feel like I’m reading something worthwhile.  So after conversations about the vampire craze in novels and about satirical novels and how I sometimes don’t get them when they are set in New York, she picked up a yellow paperback and said “The Anthologist is out in paperback.  I learned more about poetry while  reading this novel than I think I learned in any poetry class”  I thought, that’s the one.   And it was.

Written in the first person in a conversational style it isn’t a difficult read and yet it is packed through with discussions about poetry and meter.  In a way it reminded me of a book version of a Christopher Guest mockumentary.  We follow the principal character, Paul Chowder, around as he procrastinates and provides us with a running commentary on his life and his thoughts about poetry, especially the difference between free verse and “rhyming” poetry.  Paul, a poet who writes free verse, is in love with rhyming poetry and has finished compiling an anthology of such poetry.  But now he is procrastinating about writing the introduction to the anthology.  His girlfriend, Roz, has moved out and he wanders around thinking about poetry, Roz,the conference he is going to in Switzerland, the mouse in his kitchen, and whatever else pops into his mind. 

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought.  There is lots left in the world to read.

For days I had a dissatisfied feeling.  I couldn’t focus.  I was nervous about Switzerland.  I’m going to be in a panel discussion there on “The Meters of Love”, with Renee Parker Task, who’s a hotshot among young formalists.  Just the kind of thing I’m bad at.  Being empanelled.  All yesterday afternoon I thought about timed backups, and search results, and mermaids, and women wearing clothes, and women not wearing clothes, and I felt unlyrical. And then I got in bed and I read a short biography of Nathalia Crane in an old textbook, and I read a poem by Sara Teasdale, and I thought about turtles. And then in the back of Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume I, I wrote, “Suddenly there is lots to read.” I also wrote:  “Mary Oliver is saving my life.”

One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you’re at a beginning. If I open a biography, or a memoir, or a novel, when I open it in the middle, which is what I usually do, I’m really in the middle. What I want is to be as much as possible at the beginning.  And that’s what poetry gives me.  Many many beginnings. That feeling of setting forth.

This isn’t a long novel, only about 240 wide spaced pages, and I flew through it in one sitting.  But I might go back and read it again because it is just crammed with good things to think about.

The Scent of Rain and Lightening by Nancy Pickard

I guess I should disclose right off the top that I know Nancy Pickard.  I’ve known her online for a number of years and met her, live-and-in-person, once.  She’s a delightful person and if she ever comes to a bookstore near you, you should go talk to her.  

It feels like we’ve been waiting forever for her new novel, The Scent of Rain and Lightening, to come out.  Her last novel, The Virgin of Small Plains, was set in Kansas and was terrific. She was upfront that this new novel would also be set in Kansas, her home state.

The women in one of my reading groups kept asking me, last year, if I’d seen anything about when her new novel would be coming out.  I got so tired of them asking that I took a year’s sabbatical from the group to get away from the questions. 

OK, I’m kidding about the reason for the sabbatical. But not about them asking.

Finally, this month it was released and … I discovered that my little local independent bookstore didn’t yet have it.  Oh sure, I could have headed over to Barnes and Noble and bought it but I like to support my independent bookstore and they said they could order it and get it in within a couple of days so I agreed to wait.

In the intervening days, it stormed here.  I mean it really stormed.  One of those whopper electrical storms that lights up the sky like a war zone with thunder that shakes you out of bed and enough water to wash away any unprotected, too dry, top soil.  Two local buildings suffered fire damage from being hit by lightening.  It was perfect.  It was the perfect setup for this novel.  I finally picked it up a couple of weekends ago and spent the rainy afternoon reading it straight through.

Set in the middle of Kansas, on a ranch and in the nearby small town, weather permeates the novel.   I’m not from Kansas but any Midwesterner knows what Midwestern heat means: 

It was four-thirty and hotter than ever, although there was a forecast of rain for tomorrow. It was so hot in the truck that Hugh-Jay drove with his work gloves on the steering wheel to keep from burning his hands. It was too hot for the air conditioning to kick in before they reached town, so he had the windows rolled down while the AC worked its way up to tepid.

Oh yeah, I can relate to that kind of heat.  And every Midwesterner can smell the rain coming.   There’s nothing better than watching a storm roll in (as long as there are no tornadoes with it).  One of my favorite moments in the novel takes place at the ranch house when a storm is coming and little Jody is terrified of it.  Her uncle Clay tells her he’ll take care of it, strides out of the house and shoots a gun at it.

“I killed it, “ he said with dead seriousness, looking into Jody’s eyes.

She hiccuped one more time.  “Really?”

“Really.  Watch, if you want to see it go away.”

As if he took the result for granted, Chase walked back into the kitchen.

Within half an hour the storm blew southeast, away from them.

A little while later the sky over the ranch was a perfect cloudless blue.

“How did you know?” his mother asked him later.

“I called the weather service.”

It’s a great moment.  I liked Uncle Clay although I also thought he was a pretty good suspect for murdering little Jody’s parents.  I also suspected Uncle Bobby and Jody’s Grandpa and a whole bunch of other characters.  Yes, this is a novel about a murder.  Someone went to jail for it but, throughout the novel, questions abound. The story opens in the present time, when Jody is grown up and learns that the Governor is commuting the sentence of the man convicted of murdering her father.  Then the novel goes back in time twenty years, to the mid-1980’s, to tell the story of what happened the night of the murder. At least what happened as far as anyone knew.  Jody’s mother disappeared on the same night and has not been seen since; she is also assumed dead. Is she dead?  Was she murdered?  Or did she have something to do with the murder?   I won’t tell you but I will tell you that it involved a storm.   A Big Storm. 

The novel also deals with how the town dealt with the repercussions from the event in the intervening years.  And the reader, knowing that the murder sentence was commuted, is looking for clues as to whether the wrong man was convicted and, if so, who really did it.

Back when I was in Law School I took a seminar called Law and Literature in which we read fiction that contained legal issues and discussed them.  This would be a good novel for that seminar.  The man who is convicted of the murder of Jody’s father is not a good person. As one of the townspeople tells the grownup Jody,  he didn’t think that Billy Crosby committed the murder but “Billy Crosby was an absolute right man to put in prison.”   Under the rules of evidence, being a bad person and committing prior bad acts isn’t (or shouldn’t be) evidence that you committed this bad act.  Evidence of prior bad acts is generally not admissible to show that a person acted similarly in the case before the court but it may be admissible to show motive, plan, intent, lack of mistake or, in federal court, to impeach a witness's credibility.  In this case, everyone knew that Billy Crosby was bad news.  Everyone assumed that he did it.  The family assumed that he did it.  But did he really do it?  And should he have gone to jail just because he was a bad man who might not have done this crime?

I won’t give away the end.  I will say that I enjoyed this book.  I read it straight through in one afternoon.  I didn’t think the ending was predictable.  The only thing I might have wished different was not having a more than 100 page leap back into the past: that frustrated me a little bit.  I kept wanting to return to the present and maybe find out the past in little dribbles rather than having it handed to me on one large platter.  But that’s a minor quibble.   I can’t wait for the next novel set in Kansas.  It almost makes me want to visit the state.   Almost.

A North Woods Break

I just spent a few days in Northern Wisconsin at a family event.  When I got sick last week I almost stayed home but, fortunately, by Friday I felt well enough to risk the four airline flights (2 up and 2 back).   I’m feeling better and so far haven’t had any ill effects from flying except for one ear that’s still a little clogged (even using ear planes). 

In transit I read Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture.   This came out in 2008, a couple of years after The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell, and it reminded me a lot of that novel.  Both are set in the present day and take place partly in asylums where women have been incarcerated for “social” disorders as well as for true insanity.  There are a lot of flashbacks. I love Esme Lennox, I liked The Secret Scripture.  Barry had to work a little too hard to make all of his threads come together at the end for me to love it.  Also, Esme Lennox is the story of women, The Secret Scripture is also the story of Doctor Grene who is treating the 100 year old Roseanne McNulty as well as the story of Mrs. McNulty.   I think the story of women worked slightly better.   But that isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy The Secret Scripture.  

Here’s some pics from the trip:

This was the view from my bedroom window of Lake Minoqua.   The place we stayed at was lovely but, despite the photo, it was right on the main highway so there was a constant sound of traffic.  I’m used to the North Woods being quieter.

Yes, it was Wisconsin so giant Paul Bunyans and Blue Oxes were expected.

We only got out on the lake for about an hour, just enough time to get a quick tour of the boat houses.  This is the oldest boat house on the lake.  It was built in the late 1800’s by the Adler family of Adler Planetarium in Chicago fame.   Yes the photo’s a little cockeyed – the boat was rocking.

This is a view of Boulder Lake, where the event I was going to on Saturday Night was held.  

We had assigned tables and to learn our table we picked up a rock with our name on it and on the reverse was our table number.  Quite clever.

It was nice to get away.  It’s nice to be back.  Although not to 90 degree weather.

I Missed Persephone Reading Week #2

At the beginning of May two book bloggers, Verity and Claire, hosted the Second Persephone Reading Week in which readers were supposed to read at least one book published by Persephone Books.  As luck would have it, I happened to have a Persephone Book on hand:  The Homemaker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher.  My sister had ordered a few books off of the Persephone Books web site and had lent this one to me.   She had also managed to fit in a visit to the actual Persephone Books Store when she was in England a few weeks ago where she bought a few more books.  Time got away from me and I didn’t finish the book until a week after the Reading Week ended.  Next year I’ll have to plan better.

If you’ve never heard of Persephone Books here’s what they are about:

Persephone prints mainly neglected fiction and non-fiction by women, for women and about women. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and who would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial. The books are guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget. We sell mainly through mail order, through selected shops and we have our own shops.

When I picked up The Homemaker I had never heard of Dorothy Canfield Fisher, which seems strange now that I know she was a best selling American author of the early 20’th Century. Perhaps if I had children, I would have heard of the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children’s Book Award, which is voted on by students.  But I hadn’t. Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the ten most influential women in the United States.  She was a vocal advocate of the Montessori style of teaching. She published eleven novels between 1907 and 1939.  Her 1921 novel, The Brimming Cup, was the second best-selling novel of the year behind Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street. 

The Homemaker was published in 1924 and is the story of the Knapp Family who live in an average town in America.  It is the sort of town that has one department store and everyone knows everyone else. Mr. Knapp works at the store in the bookkeeping department where he is unhappy in his job and not very good at it.  He is much more interested poetry and literature.  He probably should have been a college teacher but it is too late for that.  Mrs. Knapp stays at home to keep house and bring up the children.  She is the model wife: her house is always clean, her children are well behaved.  She volunteers for community activities and is admired for her organizational skills.   She gives the world the impression of having a perfect family.  She never criticizes her husband in front of the children. And yet she is unhappy. Mrs. Knapp bring joyless perfection to all of her tasks and she suffers from severe eczema that will not clear up.  The two older children, Helen and Henry, live in fear of doing anything that is not perfect – Henry has stomach problems that are certainly brought on by his nervousness.  The youngest child, Stephen, is engaged in a battle of wills with his mother and the only reason she is likely to win is because she is bigger than he is.    

One day a catastrophic event occurs (it isn’t completely clear from the novel if it happened intentionally or not but it certainly was catastrophic), the type of occurrence that should have pushed the family over the edge.  But, instead, it forces Mrs. Knapp out of the house in search of a job and leaves Mr. Knapp home to tend the house and children.  And instead of being a catastrophe, the event turns out to be the turning point that allows everyone in the family to begin to live a happier life.   The tension comes when all the characters realize that this better life could be taken away from them by societal expectations.

This would be a perfect book club book because all the themes are still relevant plus it would be fun to try to figure out how people in the 1920’s would have viewed it.   The subjects can be somewhat controversial. I’ve found it difficult, in the past, to have reasonable conversations with some people about the risk that a parent simply would not like one of their own children.  Love them, maybe;  like them, maybe not.   Mrs. Knapp thinks about this;

A profound depression came upon her.  These were the moments in a mother’s life about which nobody ever warned, you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence, the fine books and speakers who had so much to say about the sacredness of maternity.  They never told you that there were moments of arid clear sight when you saw helplessly that your children would never measure up to your standard, never would be really close to you, because they were not your kind of human beings, because they were not your children, but merely other human beings for whom you were responsible.  How solitary it made you feel!

One of the things that Fisher captures perfectly is the terrible powerlessness that children have over their own lives.   She uses a simple situation to illustrate it – the youngest child, Stephen, is very attached to his Teddy Bear.  He fears that his mother is going to wash his Teddy Bear and ruin it (he has seen the result of washing on another Teddy Bear).   This causes him to act up in ways that no one understands.  His moods are black and there is talk that maybe he is just a child who is going to grow up to be bad.  At last, more than half way in the novel, he is able to confess this fear to his father, Lester.   And Lester, when he suddenly sees Stephen’s point of view, is shaken by a moment of enlightenment:

What was terrifying to Lester was the thought that the conception of trying to understand Stephen’s point of view had been as remote from their minds as the existence of the fourth dimension.

And even now that the violent shock of this little scene with Stephen had put the conception into his brain, how under the sun could you ever find out what was felt by a child who shut himself up so blackly in his stronghold of repellent silence. 

Why had Stephen so shut himself up?

The question was as new to Lester as a question of the cause of the law of gravity.  It had never occurred to him that perhaps Stephen had not been born that way.

The style of this novel is old fashioned, filled with “gee” and “swell” and words out of 1930’s black and white movies.  Sentences start with “Say …”.  But the themes of this novel are still issues today.  Who is the better person in a couple to stay home with children?  What if both parents work, how do you find someone to take care of your children who won’t harm them physically or mentally?  Why is there a stigma if it is the man who takes care of the home and the children?

Although the language is old fashioned, Fisher’s use of words is clever.  For instance when the busybody next door, Mrs. Anderson, warns Mr. Knapp that Stephen needs an iron hand and a spanking:

To illustrate her point she now addressed Stephen’s listening, stubborn back in a reproving tone of virtue, “Stephen, you mustn’t kick your blocks like that.  It’s naughty to.”

Stephen instantly kicked them harder than ever and continued to present a provocatively rebellious back to the visitor.

Mrs. Anderson turned to his father with the gratified look traditionally ascribed to the Teutonic warlords when they forced Serbia into a corner.

And sometimes it is easy to forget that Fisher is writing a story that took place 100 years ago.   For instance, the local department store is as worried by competition from the mail-order houses as today’s stores are worried by competition from the internet.   And Lester Knapp is turned off by the gross commercialization of the day in which the desire is to sell people (mostly women) things that they don’t need. 

I really enjoyed this little novel.  It is the first Persephone Book that I’ve ever read and it was a good one to start with.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

I finished Simon Mawer’s Booker Prize nominated novel The Glass Room a few weeks ago and I’ve been debating whether I wanted to write about it. I had pretty much decided not to but then I read Danielle’s review over at A Work in Progress.  That got me thinking about it again.

This is a novel about a house.  Although the characters in the novel are fictional, the house is based on a real house:  the Tugendhat House, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in Brno, the Czech Republic.  Here it is:

When Mies van der Rohe left Europe in the 1930’s he settled in Chicago.  Mies van der Rohe buildings, and buildings “in the style of” Mies van der Rohe, punctuate the skylines of cities here in the Midwest.  I’ve always found them cold and, truthfully, ugly.  So the idea of reading a novel set in a Mies van der Rohe designed building was not largely appealing to me.  On the other hand, I was reading my way through the Booker Prize nominees and this was one of them.  And it was, after all, a novel, which meant the house would only be a setting.

How wrong I was.  The house was the main character of this novel.

I’ve tried to decide if my dislike of Mies van der Rohe architecture caused me to not be engaged in this novel or if it was simply difficult for me to identify with a house as a main character.  In Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, the house was certainly a character.  But the human characters who interacted with it were established at the beginning of the novel and didn’t change throughout the novel.  It was the story of the interaction between specific characters and between them and the house. 

This is the story of the house.  The original owners, who designed and built it, appear to be the main characters for a while.  Even after they are forced to abandon the house at the start of the war, we follow them to Switzerland.  Mawer then interweaves their story with the story of what is happening to the house they left behind.  But then they realize they must leave Europe and go to America (they are very wealthy so this isn’t as impossible as it was for others) and we lose them as characters.  We do not see them past their train journey through occupied France. We do not see their trip to Cuba.  We do not see them settle in New England.  We do not meet them again until years later.  In the meantime the story of the house goes on.  But the people who occupy the house are not particularly likeable. And the house is never used as a home again.   That just didn’t work for me because I didn’t really care about the house.

Where Mawer excelled however was in describing the loving design of the house and the hopes and dreams that were poured into it.  The relationship between the couple, Leisel and Viktor, who commissioned the house and the architect who designed it is rendered very well.  It is Viktor, a wealthy Czech industrialist, who is committed to the idea of building a modern home but it is his wife Leisel, the child of a traditional, wealthy Czech family who gets caught up in the idea.  When Viktor waivers it is Leisel who insists that they will build their dream.  It is Leisel who ends up working closely with the architect and their relationship is a true meeting of minds and is fully believable.  As I read this portion I thought that Nancy Horan, the author of Loving Frank, would have written a better novel if she had been able to capture the same relationship between Mamah and Frank Lloyd Wright. 

The other thing Mawer was successful with was giving me an idea of the hopefulness of modern architecture. I’ve never thought of modern architecture as hopeful.  I’ve always thought it was somewhat depressing.  All those big spaces to be filled, all that hard glass and those stone floors and walls, all those big windows that give you no privacy.  Modern architecture seemed to me to be a metaphor for the hard, cold, impersonal 20th century.

But this house is a building full of hope.  Czechoslovakia was, in the 1920’s, a new country.  Cobbled together out of parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was a new country, full of hope.  After the carnage of World War I, it is a time of peace and calm.

Space light, glass; some spare furniture; windows looking out on a garden; a sweep of shining floor, travertine, perhaps; white and ivory and the gleam of chrome. The elements moved, evolved, transformed, metamorphosed in the way that they do in dreams, changing shape and form and yet, to the dreamer, remaining what they always were: der Glasraum, der Glastraum, a single letter change metamorphosing one into the other, the Glass Space becoming the Glass Dream, a dream that went with the spirit of the brand new country in which they found themselves, a state in which being Czech or German or Jew would not matter, in which democracy would prevail and art and science would combine to bring happiness to all people.

And as Hitler rises in Germany, the people ignore the danger.  And the house? 

The Glass Room remained indifferent, of course.  Plain, balanced, perfect; indifferent. Architecture should have no politics, Rainer von Abt said.  A building just is. Below it, lapping up to the foot of the garden, were the rough tides of those political years, while the Landauer House stood beached on the shore above the tidemark like a relic of a more perfect golden age.

But the house is taken by the Reich and used in the performance of it’s pseudo-science.  It’s purpose is converted and perverted.  It never regains it’s original luster.  It is never used as a home again.  At best it will be a museum.  

While I can’t really recommend this novel as a novel, I do think there were parts that were worth reading. Others, perhaps, would have less of a problem than I did with the house as main character.  But I just couldn’t get past it. 

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño Week 10

This post is really about Weeks 8, 9 and 10  in the Group Read of Robert Bolaño’s novel 2666 because I took my birthday hiatus and didn’t post about it the last two weeks.  This is unfortunate because I’ve pretty much lost my thoughts for week 8 and 9, at least as separate thoughts. 

But here goes:

1.  It is also unfortunate that I haven’t been posting because this section, The Part About the Crimes, has been my favorite section so far even though … nothing has happened.  I think that by telling the story as a chronological summary of the women who died and the status of the investigation Bolaño creates a sense of narrative flow, even though there really is none.  Reading this, I still have no sense if this novel has a narrative or not.  In other words, at the end will I be able to see a beginning, a middle and an end to some story (maybe not the story I even think I might be reading)?  I have no idea what to expect. 

2.  This false sense of narrative flow seems appropriate for this section.  The police of Santa Teresa are not solving the crimes, they don’t seem to be working very hard to solve the crimes and yet they give the impression of moving forward with investigations.

3.  Bolaño created a compelling character in Klaus Haas.  Not a likeable character (not remotely a likeable character) but a character that compels me to read on and find out more about him.  The fact that he is mostly unmoved by the violence in the prison around him makes him a dangerous character, one who certainly could have committed the murders.  On the other hand, the murders have continued since Haas was imprisoned and so he either isn’t the murderer or isn’t the only murderer. 

4.  In other parts of this novel Bolaño creates characters who are aware of the murders but don’t really focus on them, in this part he has characters who are aware of the drug trade but don’t really focus on it.  Certainly the serial killing might not be by anyone connected with the drug trade, but you would think the police would look into it.  They don’t.   And the little hints that have been thrown that the top police are connected with the drug lords might mean that Klaus Haas was set up to be put in prison for all the murders to take the heat off of whoever is doing it.   It doesn’t seem that the women are connected with the drug trade but someone connected with a drug lord might be a serial killer   A family member perhaps?  Haas certainly seemed guilty of the murder he was investigated for (although a good lawyer might have been able to raise reasonable doubt) but he almost certainly isn’t the actual serial killer.  But he makes a good fall guy to take the heat off of someone else, at least for a while.  I’m interested in the periods during which there are no killings.  Is there someone connected with a powerful person who is out of town during those times?  Or “grounded” and forced to stay inside?  Ah, but I am falling into the trap of thinking this novel is a police procedural and we will find the murderer.  It isn’t.  We might not.  In fact, right now I’d bet that we won’t.

5.  I think one of the reasons I like this part better than the others is because there are so few women in it.   Sounds odd, doesn’t it?  An entire part about the killings of hundreds of women that  doesn’t have women in it?  But the women who are killed are corpses so I don’t count them. Their stores are written in such a procedural style that I can’t think of them as characters.  The family members left behind (if they are known) have some women but we don’t get to know them; we just witness their grief from the outside.  That leaves the insane asylum doctor as the only real women character (although at the end of this week’s reading another woman has been introduced but it isn’t clear if she’ll stay in the story yet).  And the doctor is an enigma.  I continue to think that Bolaño can’t (or won’t) write women.   We never really understand them the way he tries to make us understand his male characters.  And since I find that so frustrating, I find this part, which has no women, a relief.

6.  Still a lot of questions.   Does the fact that Klaus Haas is a tall German mean he is at all connected to Archimboldi?   He is too young to be Archimboldi himself.  But we seem to have lost sight of Archimboldi since The Part About the Critics.  The Part About Amalfitano seemed to take place during a period before Archimboldi allegedly came to Santa Teresa.  It is unclear when The Part About Fate took place but there is no mention of Archimboldi.  This part takes place  before the critic’s visit to Santa Teresa.  But perhaps Klaus Haas will provide an answer to why Archimboldi came to Santa Teresa (I looked at the table of contents, the next part is The Part About Archimboldi). 

7.  Toward the end of this week’s reading we really start getting hit with what a terrible place this is for women.  The sexist jokes told by the police that go on for pages.  The history of Lalo’s family in which almost every birth was the result of rape (although the women seem completely indifferent to the rapes.  Is this because they are strong women or is this because he can’t write women?).  The statistics given my Yolanda (the new woman character) about the number of rapes in Santa Teresa.  It’s astounding.

That’s about it.

Except for a little bit of humor.  Darryl over at Infinite Zombies says we should stick with the book because it gets really good after this section is over:

I don’t remember a whole lot about the final section from when I read it a year ago, but I do remember that it was during that final part that I began to see why people thought this was a good book. Hold on for two more weeks, my friends, and things will get better. The best writing, if I remember correctly, is yet to come.

In other words, once you finish the first 636 pages it’s really great!.  

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week Seven

This week in the online read of 2666 we reached The Part About the Crimes and read the first 50ish pages.

I admit that I was not looking forward to this.  There was so much foreshadowing in the first three parts of the novel that I thought we would be seeing graphic details of the dead women.   It was like watching a movie with lots of atmospheric music; I just knew something was coming.  I usually put my hands over my eyes in those kinds of movies and watch through my fingers.  So I expected to be reading this section that way. 

I also didn’t go into this section with much momentum.  This novel just doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.  So the idea of reading graphic violence in pursuit of … nothing?   Didn’t appeal to me.

The first 50 pages wasn’t so bad.  It kept my interest.

Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich

In John Irving’s latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River, one of the characters, a writer, complains about book reviewers:

In the media, real life was more important than fiction; those elements of a novel that were, at least, based on personal experience were of more interest to the general public than those pieces of the novel-writing process that were “merely” made up.

One can imagine Louise Erdrich, making the rounds to promote her new novel Shadow Tag,  making the same complaint and saying, as Irving’s character Danny “subversively” said,

…a fiction writer’s job was imagining, truly, a whole story … because real- life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.

So let’s get one thing out of the way to begin with.  Louise Erdrich used to be married to Michael Dorris, their careers were intertwined, their marriage ended in divorce with allegations of child abuse and Dorris committed suicide.

Now let’s move on to Erdrich’s fiction.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week Six

This week the online read of 2666 finished The Part About Fate.  At this point we are finished with more than a third of this novel.  In most novels the first third is the set-up, so I suppose we should expect to move into the main part of the story now.    And, sure enough, the next section begins the part about the murdered women.

I’m not really looking forward to that.  It’s a depressing topic and I don’t really have any momentum moving into it. 

A few thoughts:

The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam

Point of view.  This novel raises questions for me about point of view; questions that I’ve never consciously asked about a novel before.  

It seems simple.  Point of view is the method by which an author shows us the world she has created; it is the “eyes” through which we see the fictional world.  In third person point of view the author is omniscient; she can tell the story in the third person as though she is a neutral observer but she knows what a character or sometimes multiple characters are thinking.  And once she tells us what a character is thinking we see the situation from that character’s point of view.

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

I saw a review in the New York Times a few months ago of a book by Jane Gardam and it sounded interesting.  I had never heard of Gardam so, while I put the book on my list, I didn’t put it at the top of the list.  I also wrote down that the book was a sequel to an earlier work of hers, a novel called Old Filth.   She probably would have stayed on my list, patiently awaiting the day she moved to the top, except that I kept running across book bloggers who were writing about her, and what they wrote was usually glowing.  So I decided I should move her higher up the list. 

Wow. 

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week 5

This week the group read moves into the third part of 2666 – The Part About Fate  -- and the venue shifts to the United States and we gain a new character.  

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant. It wasn’t really what I’d planned for myself – I’d hoped to marry into the Oxbloods and join their dynastic string empire.  But that was four days ago, before I met Jane, retrieved the Caravaggio and explored High Safron.  So instead of enjoying aspirations of Chromatic advancement,  I was wholly immersed within the digestive soup of a yateveo tree.  It was all frightfully inconvenient.

This is the first paragraph from Jasper Fforde’s new novel, the first volume of his new series.  It is slightly different than his previous two series.   This one has real people.  Granted, they are real people who live far in the future, but they are real people.  Not characters out of books or nursery rhymes or a made up society that loves books and has issues with time.   And, although they are of course fictional, they are completely made up by Fforde unlike, say, Jane Eyre and other characters from his other series.

It is unclear exactly where and when this story takes place.  At some point in the far distant past the Previous people were changed (or eliminated) because of Something That Happened.    A review I read a couple of months ago said we should imagine a world 500 years after Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  People are no longer obsessed with the thing That Happened but are simply living their changed lives.  Maybe that’s right – if Cormac McCarthy’s The Road  took place a couple of hundred years into the future.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week 4

For this coming week we were to read all of Part 2 – The Part About Amalfitano. And at last I felt that I understood this novel. At least, I think I understand this novel. I hope I understand this novel.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week 3

The assignment for this coming week was to read to page 159 which brought us to the end of “The Part About the Critics”. Thank god. I was getting really tired of the critics.

Guess what? Liz Norton ditched Pelletier and Espinoza and ended up with …. Morini. What a surprise. Not. He was the only one who treated her like a person. Why wouldn’t she prefer him even if he was wheelchair bound?

We did end up in Mexico finally. Searching for the elusive Archimboldi. We didn’t find him. Well, of course we didn’t find him. If we had found him the novel would be over.

Family Album by Penelope Lively

All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  So said Tolstoy.  In Penelope Lively’s novel, Family Album, one of the characters asserts that all families are screwed up, more or less.   The question is whether the family in this novel is more screwed up or less screwed up than average.