In 1803, Hanno Stiffeniis, a rural procurator, is ordered to the city of Konigsberg, Prussia, to solve a series of mysterious murders. It turns out that his summons has come about at the behest of Stiffeniis' former mentor, Immanuel Kant.
I read enough historical mysteries involving real-life personages to know the formula (introduce the real historical figure with far more fanfare than makes sense in context; give said historical figure a mystery that will inspire all his or her writings / actions / philosophy from that moment forth, as if there would have been no writings but for this; and if there's a young attractive sister-brother pair we're looking at an 80% chance of incest), and this adhered to it. But it also kept me genuinely interested in the solution to the mystery, which many of them don't, and the protagonist was realistically flawed without being unsympathetic. I felt that the ending piffled out, and I'm not interested in reading the sequel, but there was nothing wrong with spending a few days on this.
I also re-read two Craig Johnson mysteries this week. Hell is Empty disappointed greatly, so I wanted to remember what was good about his other books. Now I want to pack up and move to some tiny town on the Plains, at least until I consider that the combination of a giant dog who looks exactly like a wolf and a heavily armed rancher populace is not one with good potential.
...
Every February, I do (on my friends-only blog) what I call the Gratitude Project. I didn't come up with this idea, but I find it excellent: every day, post five things for which you are grateful. I do it in February because that is traditionally the hardest month for me on an emotional level, and it is good to remind myself of what is important. Last year, when the marriage was initially crumbling, my posts were very minimalist, like so:
1. Dogs
2. Tea
3. Books
4. Sobriety
5. Baths
I have more to say this year, although the same concepts show up over and over. The dogs, of course, always. Books, naturally (a few weeks ago at work I attended a meeting the topic of which was self-care for managers, and we were asked to rate our quality of life in several different areas. I gave myself a 10 in hobbies, because there are always going to be more books to read, and I have seventy-some unread books just in my house, and: in conclusion: books!). Tea and baths are always excellent, and sobriety is a massive one. But I don't feel - at least not as often - that I'm hanging onto my blessings by my fingernails, which I did this time last year. More that I'm settling cozily into them on a cold night.
Next up: Letters from Yellowstone, by Diane Smith.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
signage and weekend reading
Apologies for the absence! I have been busy staring at my sleeping dogs with helpless, overwhelming love. These things periodically happen.
So there is a church, past which I drive about once a week, and it has one of the information signs that all churches seem to have. And I have become convinced that the minister's wife is in charge of the sign, and that I am witnessing the demise of a marriage in sign form. The quote is always something about unfaithfulness or the weakness of man. Some examples from the past few months:
CONFIDENCE IN AN UNFAITHFUL MAN IS LIKE A BROKEN TOOTH AND A FOOT OUT OF JOINT
PRIDE GOETH BEFORE DESTRUCTION AND A HAUGHTY SPIRIT BEFORE A FALL
THORNS AND SNARES ARE IN THE WAY OF THE PERVERSE: HE THAT DOTH KEEP HIS SOUL SHALL BE FAR FROM THEM
And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. They are all like that, and all somehow clearly intended for just one guy, rather than a congregation at large which needs chiding.
You might think that this makes me sad, or at least causes some cringing. Instead I find it delicious, and only wish that I had had a sign set up in the front yard over the past year:
COURTESY ITSELF MUST CONVERT TO DISDAIN, IF YOU COME IN HER PRESENCE
WOULD THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUR MIND WERE CLEAR AGAIN, THAT I MIGHT WATER AN ASS AT IT
BITE ME
I am sure this would have made him more eager to come home. Also it would have been very popular with the neighbors.
The last two weeks the church sign has had something incomprehensible but clearly Tea Party-related on it, which is no fun at all. A few nights ago I drove past it, thinking, "Has the marriage improved? Did he stop his messing around? Do these crazy kids have a chance?"
I turned the corner.
AS A DOG RETURNETH TO HIS VOMIT, SO A FOOL RETURNETH TO HIS FOLLY
"Oh, DUDE, you thought she wouldn't find out, but she DID!" I said out loud, and giggled helplessly for the next five minutes.
(It is entirely possible, given the clear politics of said church, that the man referred to in all these quotes is actually the President. I like my version of the situation better. Passive-aggressive Bible quotes: the best!)
On to the reading:
This weekend I finished Mary Anne, by Daphne du Maurier. It is not her best. The first third, which sets up our heroine (real-life personage Mary Anne Clarke, the mistress of the Duke of York and du Maurier's ancestor) and the life that led her to become a duke's mistress, was quite interesting and fun. Like a PG-rated Slammerkin, almost. But the rest of the book was full of very dry politicking and confused time frames and the assumption that the reader just knows that Lord X and the Attorney-General were one and the same person in 1803 and so that connection never needs to be made explicit. I spent a lot of time thinking, "Wait, how does sleeping with Lord X give her an advantage in her trial?" And there were about six trials, which didn't help. Ultimately a disappointment. I should read Frenchman's Creek again.
Then I read Dancing with the Virgins by Stephen Booth. It's a mystery set in the Peaks District of England. Not badly done, but I didn't find any of the characters fleshed out or sympathetic, and wasn't invested in the solving of the mystery. The connection the hero feels to the standing stones where the murder was committed just comes off as him being a daydreamer while on the job, rather than anything mystical.
Next up was In Plain Sight, by C. J. Box. I do love Box's mysteries and have no shame about that. The hero is a game warden in Wyoming, and the landscape is described so wonderfully and lovingly that I always finish one of his books wanting to go there. In this installment, the matriarch of a crazy family has disappeared and there are violent aspects to the rivalry among her sons. The big reveal at the end is seriously creepy and I should have figured it out beforehand, but I didn't. I enjoyed this thoroughly and spent the rest of my Sunday re-reading the other C.J. Box books I had on hand. A solidly written mystery series, with an appealing protagonist, set in a vibrantly drawn locale, is not to be sneezed at. Many try, but few actually succeed. Box's success puts him up there with Hillerman, Peter Robinson, Rankin, and Craig Johnson, in terms of authors in whose works I get happily lost.
Oh! I also finished The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould. I did not read all of that in one sitting, by a long shot. Full disclosure: Gould and the New Yorker are bathroom reading. (I know, I am the Tea Party's nightmare: a childless single woman who admits to having bodily functions and reads elitist book reviews and evolutionary discussions. [Actually, their nightmare is a black man in power, or someone who knows what socialism actually means.]) I love Gould: he is very challenging for me, because my adventures in science and math ended after junior year of high school (except for the disaster which was Physics 1 in college), but always accessible. I mourn his death anew every time I read his work. I Have Landed is amazing, and made me cry.
Next up: Critique of Criminal Reason, by Michael Gregorio. Looks very Matthew Pearl-esque. Often those type of books disappoint, but sometimes (The Geographer's Library is what comes to mind) they pleasantly surprise me.
So there is a church, past which I drive about once a week, and it has one of the information signs that all churches seem to have. And I have become convinced that the minister's wife is in charge of the sign, and that I am witnessing the demise of a marriage in sign form. The quote is always something about unfaithfulness or the weakness of man. Some examples from the past few months:
CONFIDENCE IN AN UNFAITHFUL MAN IS LIKE A BROKEN TOOTH AND A FOOT OUT OF JOINT
PRIDE GOETH BEFORE DESTRUCTION AND A HAUGHTY SPIRIT BEFORE A FALL
THORNS AND SNARES ARE IN THE WAY OF THE PERVERSE: HE THAT DOTH KEEP HIS SOUL SHALL BE FAR FROM THEM
And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. They are all like that, and all somehow clearly intended for just one guy, rather than a congregation at large which needs chiding.
You might think that this makes me sad, or at least causes some cringing. Instead I find it delicious, and only wish that I had had a sign set up in the front yard over the past year:
COURTESY ITSELF MUST CONVERT TO DISDAIN, IF YOU COME IN HER PRESENCE
WOULD THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUR MIND WERE CLEAR AGAIN, THAT I MIGHT WATER AN ASS AT IT
BITE ME
I am sure this would have made him more eager to come home. Also it would have been very popular with the neighbors.
The last two weeks the church sign has had something incomprehensible but clearly Tea Party-related on it, which is no fun at all. A few nights ago I drove past it, thinking, "Has the marriage improved? Did he stop his messing around? Do these crazy kids have a chance?"
I turned the corner.
AS A DOG RETURNETH TO HIS VOMIT, SO A FOOL RETURNETH TO HIS FOLLY
"Oh, DUDE, you thought she wouldn't find out, but she DID!" I said out loud, and giggled helplessly for the next five minutes.
(It is entirely possible, given the clear politics of said church, that the man referred to in all these quotes is actually the President. I like my version of the situation better. Passive-aggressive Bible quotes: the best!)
On to the reading:
This weekend I finished Mary Anne, by Daphne du Maurier. It is not her best. The first third, which sets up our heroine (real-life personage Mary Anne Clarke, the mistress of the Duke of York and du Maurier's ancestor) and the life that led her to become a duke's mistress, was quite interesting and fun. Like a PG-rated Slammerkin, almost. But the rest of the book was full of very dry politicking and confused time frames and the assumption that the reader just knows that Lord X and the Attorney-General were one and the same person in 1803 and so that connection never needs to be made explicit. I spent a lot of time thinking, "Wait, how does sleeping with Lord X give her an advantage in her trial?" And there were about six trials, which didn't help. Ultimately a disappointment. I should read Frenchman's Creek again.
Then I read Dancing with the Virgins by Stephen Booth. It's a mystery set in the Peaks District of England. Not badly done, but I didn't find any of the characters fleshed out or sympathetic, and wasn't invested in the solving of the mystery. The connection the hero feels to the standing stones where the murder was committed just comes off as him being a daydreamer while on the job, rather than anything mystical.
Next up was In Plain Sight, by C. J. Box. I do love Box's mysteries and have no shame about that. The hero is a game warden in Wyoming, and the landscape is described so wonderfully and lovingly that I always finish one of his books wanting to go there. In this installment, the matriarch of a crazy family has disappeared and there are violent aspects to the rivalry among her sons. The big reveal at the end is seriously creepy and I should have figured it out beforehand, but I didn't. I enjoyed this thoroughly and spent the rest of my Sunday re-reading the other C.J. Box books I had on hand. A solidly written mystery series, with an appealing protagonist, set in a vibrantly drawn locale, is not to be sneezed at. Many try, but few actually succeed. Box's success puts him up there with Hillerman, Peter Robinson, Rankin, and Craig Johnson, in terms of authors in whose works I get happily lost.
Oh! I also finished The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould. I did not read all of that in one sitting, by a long shot. Full disclosure: Gould and the New Yorker are bathroom reading. (I know, I am the Tea Party's nightmare: a childless single woman who admits to having bodily functions and reads elitist book reviews and evolutionary discussions. [Actually, their nightmare is a black man in power, or someone who knows what socialism actually means.]) I love Gould: he is very challenging for me, because my adventures in science and math ended after junior year of high school (except for the disaster which was Physics 1 in college), but always accessible. I mourn his death anew every time I read his work. I Have Landed is amazing, and made me cry.
Next up: Critique of Criminal Reason, by Michael Gregorio. Looks very Matthew Pearl-esque. Often those type of books disappoint, but sometimes (The Geographer's Library is what comes to mind) they pleasantly surprise me.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman
Last week was rough. A lot of it was no doubt related to nervousness about seeing my surgeon on Friday.
In November I saw her for a six-month follow-up - my biopsy had to be surgical, as they could not reach the calcifications with a needle biopsy, so I had one surgery at the beginning of March and then the lumpectomy and sentinel node biopsy (two lymph nodes were removed and tested to make sure that the cancer had not become invasive) in April.
At an appointment with my medical oncologist in October, I pointed out a nodule right under the lumpectomy scar which was worrying me enormously. The area around the scar kept changing as the tissue settled, which made self-exams fairly terrifying, because every month it felt different. And of course every time I felt the lump, I would prod and poke until it was sore, and then panic because it was sore.
My oncologist said, "I'm pretty sure that's scar tissue, but I'm glad you're seeing the surgeon next month."
When I saw the surgeon, she said, "I think that's scar tissue."
I said, "Can I get a different verb?"
She said, "No, but I'm happy to see you every month to check on it."
"Yes," I said. "Let us do that."
It shrank a bit, not noticeable to me because I am paranoid, but noticeable to her, over the next few months. In the weeks before my appointment I couldn't find it at all. The surgeon could, but barely, and said that definitely means it's scar tissue.
I walked out of the office thinking, "Hey, I'm not in a totally black mood anymore! Funny, that."
I will have an MRI in March, and that will tell us far more about whether the cancer has returned or not. Nerve-wracking, but this is frankly my best-case scenario for the next ten years: screenings every six months and always having it in the back of my mind. I will take that, with much gratitude, if I am lucky enough to have it.
Anyway, this is a roundabout route to the fact that I read Batuman's book in a fairly distracted manner, and it turns out I probably shouldn't have.
This is less a book about Russian literature and more a memoir of Batuman's college and grad school years. She did end up studying Russian literature and linguistics in those years, and talks lovingly and amusingly of the authors she read, but over half the book is about her summer in Uzbekistan, in which she only talks about the country's Turkish roots (Batuman is the child of Turkish immigrants to the US). It's an amusing travelogue, but sarcastic translations of Turkish poetry is not what this book purports to be about.
Batuman also jumps around chronologically - one chapter will be about her sophomore year in college, the next about her return to grad school after two years off, and in the third we're at her first year in grad school. I found this quite confusing, and again, I wasn't reading as closely as perhaps I should have been, but the book comes across as a light memoir and I didn't like that suddenly I was expected to be deducing, from very small hints, how old Batuman was at any given moment. And this is rather important given that she encountered different authors at different times.
The last chapter was, unfortunately, almost pointless. She starts off discussing Dostoyevsky's The Demons (also translated as The Possessed) but then segues, clumsily, into a long saga of a gorgeous charismatic grad student in her social circle, and how, despite the fact that every woman in the state of California was in love with him, Elif Batuman was the only one who made it into his bed (this following the reveal that he had taken a vow of celibacy). Batuman's charming humor and refusal to take herself seriously disappear in this chapter, which reads like nothing so much as bragging / wish-fulfillment written by someone who just read The Secret History. It isn't like anything else in the book, and I hated ending with it.
The rest of the book, timeline problems aside, is smart without being pretentious, funny without being cutesy, and infectiously infatuated with Russian literature, to the extent that I am going to re-read Anna Karenina as soon as I can, and will probably pick up Eugene Onegin, in which I'd never before had any interest (I've never read any Pushkin! this could be exciting). If it weren't for that last chapter, I would have thoroughly enjoyed it, and I almost did anyway. I can recommend it. Just feel free to skip the end.
Next up: Mary Anne, by Daphne du Maurier. I am in the mood for light historical stuff.
In November I saw her for a six-month follow-up - my biopsy had to be surgical, as they could not reach the calcifications with a needle biopsy, so I had one surgery at the beginning of March and then the lumpectomy and sentinel node biopsy (two lymph nodes were removed and tested to make sure that the cancer had not become invasive) in April.
At an appointment with my medical oncologist in October, I pointed out a nodule right under the lumpectomy scar which was worrying me enormously. The area around the scar kept changing as the tissue settled, which made self-exams fairly terrifying, because every month it felt different. And of course every time I felt the lump, I would prod and poke until it was sore, and then panic because it was sore.
My oncologist said, "I'm pretty sure that's scar tissue, but I'm glad you're seeing the surgeon next month."
When I saw the surgeon, she said, "I think that's scar tissue."
I said, "Can I get a different verb?"
She said, "No, but I'm happy to see you every month to check on it."
"Yes," I said. "Let us do that."
It shrank a bit, not noticeable to me because I am paranoid, but noticeable to her, over the next few months. In the weeks before my appointment I couldn't find it at all. The surgeon could, but barely, and said that definitely means it's scar tissue.
I walked out of the office thinking, "Hey, I'm not in a totally black mood anymore! Funny, that."
I will have an MRI in March, and that will tell us far more about whether the cancer has returned or not. Nerve-wracking, but this is frankly my best-case scenario for the next ten years: screenings every six months and always having it in the back of my mind. I will take that, with much gratitude, if I am lucky enough to have it.
Anyway, this is a roundabout route to the fact that I read Batuman's book in a fairly distracted manner, and it turns out I probably shouldn't have.
This is less a book about Russian literature and more a memoir of Batuman's college and grad school years. She did end up studying Russian literature and linguistics in those years, and talks lovingly and amusingly of the authors she read, but over half the book is about her summer in Uzbekistan, in which she only talks about the country's Turkish roots (Batuman is the child of Turkish immigrants to the US). It's an amusing travelogue, but sarcastic translations of Turkish poetry is not what this book purports to be about.
Batuman also jumps around chronologically - one chapter will be about her sophomore year in college, the next about her return to grad school after two years off, and in the third we're at her first year in grad school. I found this quite confusing, and again, I wasn't reading as closely as perhaps I should have been, but the book comes across as a light memoir and I didn't like that suddenly I was expected to be deducing, from very small hints, how old Batuman was at any given moment. And this is rather important given that she encountered different authors at different times.
The last chapter was, unfortunately, almost pointless. She starts off discussing Dostoyevsky's The Demons (also translated as The Possessed) but then segues, clumsily, into a long saga of a gorgeous charismatic grad student in her social circle, and how, despite the fact that every woman in the state of California was in love with him, Elif Batuman was the only one who made it into his bed (this following the reveal that he had taken a vow of celibacy). Batuman's charming humor and refusal to take herself seriously disappear in this chapter, which reads like nothing so much as bragging / wish-fulfillment written by someone who just read The Secret History. It isn't like anything else in the book, and I hated ending with it.
The rest of the book, timeline problems aside, is smart without being pretentious, funny without being cutesy, and infectiously infatuated with Russian literature, to the extent that I am going to re-read Anna Karenina as soon as I can, and will probably pick up Eugene Onegin, in which I'd never before had any interest (I've never read any Pushkin! this could be exciting). If it weren't for that last chapter, I would have thoroughly enjoyed it, and I almost did anyway. I can recommend it. Just feel free to skip the end.
Next up: Mary Anne, by Daphne du Maurier. I am in the mood for light historical stuff.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
growing pains
So, I've been doing the divorce paperwork. And it's not fun. I'm not going to get into much more detail than that.
Sufficiently indicative is the fact that I found myself stomping around the internet looking for fights. And since I don't generally comment on other sites, this meant deliberately reading things that I knew would irritate me, and then ranting at my friends, and saying things that weren't thought through, and hurting feelings.
It's hard not to feel that it's not fair. And it's a small step from that to thinking that others have it overly fair, and are gloating or taking their relationships for granted or in some way taking something away from me. Which is precisely what I was talking about in a previous post: my adolescent belief that everything in the world is a competition. I had hoped I was outgrowing that, but I certainly know about triggers, and that nothing changes all of a heap. I can't tell you how many times I swore I'd never drink again, or how many times I vowed, "He does that one more time and we're over." Fall seven times, get up eight.
There's something demanding to be addressed here, I believe, because I'm doing stuff that doesn't help: the aforementioned hunting for irritants, not keeping to a regular eating schedule, treating every household issue as a Crisis, etc. And normally I am invested enough in keeping myself on an even keel that I am quite good about making sure that I'm not doing these things. So something's working its way up and trying to get my attention; it's not general self-destructiveness pushing me along this course.
I'm not excusing my behavior of this week - if you've talked to me in the last few days, you have almost certainly heard me say something snappy, even if it wasn't directed at you. And that isn't helping anything. Nor is the fact that I then get angry at myself for being angry.
Having formed a hyper-competent persona over the years, and being a person very reluctant to admit to any failure to begin with ("hence a blog about your divorce?" says my mother, eyebrows raised), admitting that I don't really know what I'm doing is a tough thing for me. But, let's face it, I've never done divorce paperwork before. I've never handled a house by myself before. I don't know if I'm doing any of this right. And that unsettles me so deeply that I suddenly doubt my ability to handle anything, including the emotions - anger, sadness, humiliation - with which I have previously been comfortable. They're not fun, but I acknowledge them, I know they're natural, I work through them. And none of them stand up to dog kisses.
But one little feeling of ignorance and incompetence seems to be setting off a scenario in which I'm letting my emotions turn on me, because I suddenly stopped trusting myself to handle, and honor, them.
Note to self: not magically knowing everything is not the worst thing in the world. If you did magically know everything, life would be very boring, because there would be nothing to learn. That might actually be the worst thing in the world.
Time to re-evaluate my reasons for wanting to never get anything wrong. And part of that is posting about having a juvenile, petulant, crabby week. I get the occasional impression that this blog comes off as the work of someone who is handling a terrible period in her life with inhuman grace and courage, and while I am of course uncommonly gracious and courageous, I'm also making it up as I go. I'm going to tumble, in the sense of being petulant or unpleasant company, sometimes. I feel (honestly) fortunate in that I've done the tumble-and-try-again routine enough to have faith in it.
And now I must eat a giant meal and not listen to the news.
Sufficiently indicative is the fact that I found myself stomping around the internet looking for fights. And since I don't generally comment on other sites, this meant deliberately reading things that I knew would irritate me, and then ranting at my friends, and saying things that weren't thought through, and hurting feelings.
It's hard not to feel that it's not fair. And it's a small step from that to thinking that others have it overly fair, and are gloating or taking their relationships for granted or in some way taking something away from me. Which is precisely what I was talking about in a previous post: my adolescent belief that everything in the world is a competition. I had hoped I was outgrowing that, but I certainly know about triggers, and that nothing changes all of a heap. I can't tell you how many times I swore I'd never drink again, or how many times I vowed, "He does that one more time and we're over." Fall seven times, get up eight.
There's something demanding to be addressed here, I believe, because I'm doing stuff that doesn't help: the aforementioned hunting for irritants, not keeping to a regular eating schedule, treating every household issue as a Crisis, etc. And normally I am invested enough in keeping myself on an even keel that I am quite good about making sure that I'm not doing these things. So something's working its way up and trying to get my attention; it's not general self-destructiveness pushing me along this course.
I'm not excusing my behavior of this week - if you've talked to me in the last few days, you have almost certainly heard me say something snappy, even if it wasn't directed at you. And that isn't helping anything. Nor is the fact that I then get angry at myself for being angry.
Having formed a hyper-competent persona over the years, and being a person very reluctant to admit to any failure to begin with ("hence a blog about your divorce?" says my mother, eyebrows raised), admitting that I don't really know what I'm doing is a tough thing for me. But, let's face it, I've never done divorce paperwork before. I've never handled a house by myself before. I don't know if I'm doing any of this right. And that unsettles me so deeply that I suddenly doubt my ability to handle anything, including the emotions - anger, sadness, humiliation - with which I have previously been comfortable. They're not fun, but I acknowledge them, I know they're natural, I work through them. And none of them stand up to dog kisses.
But one little feeling of ignorance and incompetence seems to be setting off a scenario in which I'm letting my emotions turn on me, because I suddenly stopped trusting myself to handle, and honor, them.
Note to self: not magically knowing everything is not the worst thing in the world. If you did magically know everything, life would be very boring, because there would be nothing to learn. That might actually be the worst thing in the world.
Time to re-evaluate my reasons for wanting to never get anything wrong. And part of that is posting about having a juvenile, petulant, crabby week. I get the occasional impression that this blog comes off as the work of someone who is handling a terrible period in her life with inhuman grace and courage, and while I am of course uncommonly gracious and courageous, I'm also making it up as I go. I'm going to tumble, in the sense of being petulant or unpleasant company, sometimes. I feel (honestly) fortunate in that I've done the tumble-and-try-again routine enough to have faith in it.
And now I must eat a giant meal and not listen to the news.
The Poe Shadow, by Matthew Pearl
A young lawyer, in 1849 Baltimore, goes pretty much crazy when Edgar Allan Poe dies under mysterious circumstances (which are historical fact), and abandons everything in a quest to find out what happened. He ends up going to Paris, dealing with two men who may have been the inspiration for Poe's Inspector Dupin, recruiting one of them, antagonizing the other, and then at around the middle of the book Napoleon-assassination schemes start popping up and the chronology becomes totally kerfuddled and I got completely, infuriatingly, lost; and genuinely did not want to pick up the book again because it was irritating me so.
So I took a break at that point, and hustled up on the Kindle the actual Dupin stories. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" scared me to death when I was little, because we owned a version of Poe's stories which had terrifying illustrations, and there was one of the orangutan (oops! spoiler alert, I guess) killing the victims that I can still see when I shut my eyes. I have a fear of orangutans which is directly attributable to that picture.
Anyway, so I had not remembered that the story itself is twenty pages of Dupin saying, "I deduced this, and that, and this, because I am brilliant. Oh, and because there was orangutan hair all over the place." What? That's not brilliant deduction! That's as if "The Speckled Band" included a shed snakeskin lying conveniently at the foot of the victim's bed. And the second story - "The Mystery of Marie Roget" - is unreadable. I didn't even attempt the third.
Then, while I was on my Kindle, I looked at the collected works of Dickens I downloaded, and saw something called "No Thoroughfare", of which I'd never heard. So I read it, and WHAT. For the most part it's very, very dull, but then there comes a part which apparently he let Wilkie Collins write: the heroine, who until this point has been a completely typical Dickens heroine - weeping, drooping, blushing, tiny feet, etc - follows her fiancé into the Alps, leads the search party when he goes missing, constructs a rope harness and has herself lowered down to the ice crevice where he has fallen, and when all the men are saying, "It is the power of love and the hand of God giving her this strength!" she responds with, "Actually, I grew up here, doofuses." And then at the end the hero decides, "Oh, she must not know that the villain is dead; it would upset her far too much!" and I'm like, "She knew the villain was the villain long before anyone else did, and she rappelled down a glacier, I think she could handle it," but no, we're back to blushing and drooping (all Dickens' heroines can safely be pictured with heads too heavy for their necks, given the amount of drooping going on). A totally bizarre story. And frankly pretty terrible.
Then I re-read some Lovecraft. And watched five episodes of Castle. And then, finally, once more unto the breach.
It didn't get any better. It didn't get worse, exactly, but I finished the book with no clue as to what had actually happened behind the scenes, or why. Such a disappointment. The first half was fine, although I itched to be able to edit it (characters suddenly have things in their hands without any explanation; someone "taps on his papers" when it's unclear whether he's sitting or standing; scene changes happen too rapidly), but the second half was just no fun at all. It's entirely possible we're supposed to think the narrator is out of his gourd, hence all the non-linear narrative and confusion, but it didn't come across that way to me.
Next up: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman.
So I took a break at that point, and hustled up on the Kindle the actual Dupin stories. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" scared me to death when I was little, because we owned a version of Poe's stories which had terrifying illustrations, and there was one of the orangutan (oops! spoiler alert, I guess) killing the victims that I can still see when I shut my eyes. I have a fear of orangutans which is directly attributable to that picture.
Anyway, so I had not remembered that the story itself is twenty pages of Dupin saying, "I deduced this, and that, and this, because I am brilliant. Oh, and because there was orangutan hair all over the place." What? That's not brilliant deduction! That's as if "The Speckled Band" included a shed snakeskin lying conveniently at the foot of the victim's bed. And the second story - "The Mystery of Marie Roget" - is unreadable. I didn't even attempt the third.
Then, while I was on my Kindle, I looked at the collected works of Dickens I downloaded, and saw something called "No Thoroughfare", of which I'd never heard. So I read it, and WHAT. For the most part it's very, very dull, but then there comes a part which apparently he let Wilkie Collins write: the heroine, who until this point has been a completely typical Dickens heroine - weeping, drooping, blushing, tiny feet, etc - follows her fiancé into the Alps, leads the search party when he goes missing, constructs a rope harness and has herself lowered down to the ice crevice where he has fallen, and when all the men are saying, "It is the power of love and the hand of God giving her this strength!" she responds with, "Actually, I grew up here, doofuses." And then at the end the hero decides, "Oh, she must not know that the villain is dead; it would upset her far too much!" and I'm like, "She knew the villain was the villain long before anyone else did, and she rappelled down a glacier, I think she could handle it," but no, we're back to blushing and drooping (all Dickens' heroines can safely be pictured with heads too heavy for their necks, given the amount of drooping going on). A totally bizarre story. And frankly pretty terrible.
Then I re-read some Lovecraft. And watched five episodes of Castle. And then, finally, once more unto the breach.
It didn't get any better. It didn't get worse, exactly, but I finished the book with no clue as to what had actually happened behind the scenes, or why. Such a disappointment. The first half was fine, although I itched to be able to edit it (characters suddenly have things in their hands without any explanation; someone "taps on his papers" when it's unclear whether he's sitting or standing; scene changes happen too rapidly), but the second half was just no fun at all. It's entirely possible we're supposed to think the narrator is out of his gourd, hence all the non-linear narrative and confusion, but it didn't come across that way to me.
Next up: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht
My mother read this a few months ago, and gave me the heads-up that Obreht is trying to cram everything she's got into one book. I definitely agree: I kept wanting to say, "Slow down, Téa; something tells me you're going to get another book contract, you don't have to say it all now."
Much of this was previously published in the New Yorker, and you can see it in the twenty-page character studies which would make perfect NewYorker fiction pieces and which Obreht's determined to include as backstory whether the character's relevance to this novel merits that much page space or not. I am fairly certain that Obreht had about twenty short pieces, some about village life, some about a girl's adolescence during war, and created a framework with which to cobble them together into a novel. I enjoy over-the-top village-grotesque backstories, so I didn't truly mind, but it meant that a) whenever a minor character was introduced I knew to get comfy and b) the blurbs about Obreht's mind-boggling plotting skills made me roll my eyes. You can see the places where the cobbling-together happened, and the parts about the war adolescence were frankly a little tiresome. The pacing isn't bad, but that's not the same thing.
The framework: a young doctor, in an unnamed Balkan country, is trying to investigate the circumstances of her grandfather's death, and remembers stories he told her from his childhood. One story describes a tiger who invaded his mountain village and was protected by a deaf-mute woman (the villagers called her, you guessed it, "the tiger's wife"). The narrator is unlikeable and the plot isn't the point; it's a showcase for Obreht's metaphor-heavy writing.
Sometimes the metaphors / similes don't work: I occasionally found myself wondering why no one, in her writing seminars, said as much (she's said she wrote most of this book while getting her MFA). Saying barnacles clung to the bottom of a rowboat "like something earned" doesn't actually make any sense. Did the barnacles earn their spot? Did the rowboat earn them? Do earned things actually cling? If it's the rowboat doing the clinging, why would it cling to (or earn in the first place) things which damage it? You see what I mean? The phrase "like something earned" is - well, can't you just hear a thousand undergrad poems ending with it? If it has nothing to offer but its own heaviness, in a context that just puzzles, it shouldn't be included in a published book. Encountering it threw me off my stride for several pages.
But then she can also whip out something like, "while the big cat lay, broad-backed and rumbling, red tongue peeling the cold out of his paws," which made me say out loud, "Ooooohh," and go into a total language swoon. Peeling the cold out of his paws. Love. It.
The comparisons to Everything is Illuminated are inevitable - Eastern European war aftermath, magical realism, ridiculously young author who is being fawned over by all NYC - and that comparison may be part of why I liked this book so much, because despite all its flaws it is better than EiI by a factor of about eighty. Take note, Safran Foer: this is how you do it.
This book made me excited not only because Obreht is wicked talented (as we say around here), but because I can see the places where she has ample room for improvement. She did cram all her stories into one novel, so it may be a while before we get another one, but I really, really hope she doesn't go the Safran Foer route and start writing stunt books because she doesn't feel she has any growing to do. This book is good. Her later stuff could be amazing.
(Be warned: bad things happen to animals in this book. Really bad things.)
Next up: The Poe Shadow, by Matthew Pearl. Pearl frequently disappoints me with the execution of his ideas, but I'm always willing to give a historical potboiler a try.
Much of this was previously published in the New Yorker, and you can see it in the twenty-page character studies which would make perfect NewYorker fiction pieces and which Obreht's determined to include as backstory whether the character's relevance to this novel merits that much page space or not. I am fairly certain that Obreht had about twenty short pieces, some about village life, some about a girl's adolescence during war, and created a framework with which to cobble them together into a novel. I enjoy over-the-top village-grotesque backstories, so I didn't truly mind, but it meant that a) whenever a minor character was introduced I knew to get comfy and b) the blurbs about Obreht's mind-boggling plotting skills made me roll my eyes. You can see the places where the cobbling-together happened, and the parts about the war adolescence were frankly a little tiresome. The pacing isn't bad, but that's not the same thing.
The framework: a young doctor, in an unnamed Balkan country, is trying to investigate the circumstances of her grandfather's death, and remembers stories he told her from his childhood. One story describes a tiger who invaded his mountain village and was protected by a deaf-mute woman (the villagers called her, you guessed it, "the tiger's wife"). The narrator is unlikeable and the plot isn't the point; it's a showcase for Obreht's metaphor-heavy writing.
Sometimes the metaphors / similes don't work: I occasionally found myself wondering why no one, in her writing seminars, said as much (she's said she wrote most of this book while getting her MFA). Saying barnacles clung to the bottom of a rowboat "like something earned" doesn't actually make any sense. Did the barnacles earn their spot? Did the rowboat earn them? Do earned things actually cling? If it's the rowboat doing the clinging, why would it cling to (or earn in the first place) things which damage it? You see what I mean? The phrase "like something earned" is - well, can't you just hear a thousand undergrad poems ending with it? If it has nothing to offer but its own heaviness, in a context that just puzzles, it shouldn't be included in a published book. Encountering it threw me off my stride for several pages.
But then she can also whip out something like, "while the big cat lay, broad-backed and rumbling, red tongue peeling the cold out of his paws," which made me say out loud, "Ooooohh," and go into a total language swoon. Peeling the cold out of his paws. Love. It.
The comparisons to Everything is Illuminated are inevitable - Eastern European war aftermath, magical realism, ridiculously young author who is being fawned over by all NYC - and that comparison may be part of why I liked this book so much, because despite all its flaws it is better than EiI by a factor of about eighty. Take note, Safran Foer: this is how you do it.
This book made me excited not only because Obreht is wicked talented (as we say around here), but because I can see the places where she has ample room for improvement. She did cram all her stories into one novel, so it may be a while before we get another one, but I really, really hope she doesn't go the Safran Foer route and start writing stunt books because she doesn't feel she has any growing to do. This book is good. Her later stuff could be amazing.
(Be warned: bad things happen to animals in this book. Really bad things.)
Next up: The Poe Shadow, by Matthew Pearl. Pearl frequently disappoints me with the execution of his ideas, but I'm always willing to give a historical potboiler a try.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
re-reads and television
Over the long holiday weekend, because temperatures were for the most part in the teens and I have no life, I spent most of my days on the couch, with the dogs, re-reading history.
The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson, is, I think, still his best. He has attempted in his following books to re-create the juxtaposition of murder / scandal with technological advancements, but it never works quite as well as it does with the World's Fair in Chicago and the murders of Dr. H.H. Holmes. A fairly disturbing read, and Larson's choice to write one scene from the point of view of a murder victim is a little jarring. He addresses that choice in the afterword, and defends it well, but it does make it seem suddenly like fiction. Other than that, what a fascinating book.
The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, by Nathaniel Philbrick, remains flawed. Philbrick is really out of his depth writing about a non-nautical piece of history, but he brings his excellent storytelling to it and provides enough maps and diagrams that the reader is able to get the sense of the battle. The book feels incomplete, as if he didn't quite know how to finish it, and I always am a bit unsatisfied when done with it. But it's very interesting nonetheless.
I flipped through A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, as well. It hasn't held up as well as I would have expected, but that may be simply because I was first assigned it in high school and I'd never read anything like it before. Now history as written from the powerless' point of view is commonplace, and how comprehensive Zinn is actually makes this book a little overwhelming. Reading it one chapter at a time is probably the best way to handle it.
I also watched "Cranford", which I cannot recommend highly enough. It is very rare that I find a show which appeals both to the part of me which loves pastoral period dramas featuring exquisite acting, and to the part of me which appreciates a good cat-being-given-a-laxative scene. I did not at all expect to be laughing as much as I was throughout. There is a dog fatality, and normally, on page or screen, dog fatalities leave me emotionally devastated and furious at the writer(s), but for this one I laughed until I couldn't breathe. It didn't hurt that the replacement pet shows up immediately and is transparently played by the same dog. Perfect.
But it's sad, too: wonderful characters die left and right, and the last episode had me crying like a baby the entire time (some of that was sentimentally happy, and all of it was utterly manipulated: I kept saying, out loud, things like, "Oh no, NOT the book of poetry, oh crap," and "Oh god, you're pulling out 'Loch Lomond', I'm DONE"). It was extraordinarily cathartic.
One quibble, though: the two female characters aspiring hopelessly for the heart of the Dashing Newcomer are portrayed rather cruelly, when as far as I could tell their only crime was daring to believe they deserved a man's love despite being (in one case) not pretty and (in the other) not young. Of course they are cheerfully paired off with other men at the end, because it is that kind of a show, but the way they are mocked rankled a bit for me.
Finally started The Tiger's Wife over breakfast today. We shall see how that goes.
The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson, is, I think, still his best. He has attempted in his following books to re-create the juxtaposition of murder / scandal with technological advancements, but it never works quite as well as it does with the World's Fair in Chicago and the murders of Dr. H.H. Holmes. A fairly disturbing read, and Larson's choice to write one scene from the point of view of a murder victim is a little jarring. He addresses that choice in the afterword, and defends it well, but it does make it seem suddenly like fiction. Other than that, what a fascinating book.
The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, by Nathaniel Philbrick, remains flawed. Philbrick is really out of his depth writing about a non-nautical piece of history, but he brings his excellent storytelling to it and provides enough maps and diagrams that the reader is able to get the sense of the battle. The book feels incomplete, as if he didn't quite know how to finish it, and I always am a bit unsatisfied when done with it. But it's very interesting nonetheless.
I flipped through A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, as well. It hasn't held up as well as I would have expected, but that may be simply because I was first assigned it in high school and I'd never read anything like it before. Now history as written from the powerless' point of view is commonplace, and how comprehensive Zinn is actually makes this book a little overwhelming. Reading it one chapter at a time is probably the best way to handle it.
I also watched "Cranford", which I cannot recommend highly enough. It is very rare that I find a show which appeals both to the part of me which loves pastoral period dramas featuring exquisite acting, and to the part of me which appreciates a good cat-being-given-a-laxative scene. I did not at all expect to be laughing as much as I was throughout. There is a dog fatality, and normally, on page or screen, dog fatalities leave me emotionally devastated and furious at the writer(s), but for this one I laughed until I couldn't breathe. It didn't hurt that the replacement pet shows up immediately and is transparently played by the same dog. Perfect.
But it's sad, too: wonderful characters die left and right, and the last episode had me crying like a baby the entire time (some of that was sentimentally happy, and all of it was utterly manipulated: I kept saying, out loud, things like, "Oh no, NOT the book of poetry, oh crap," and "Oh god, you're pulling out 'Loch Lomond', I'm DONE"). It was extraordinarily cathartic.
One quibble, though: the two female characters aspiring hopelessly for the heart of the Dashing Newcomer are portrayed rather cruelly, when as far as I could tell their only crime was daring to believe they deserved a man's love despite being (in one case) not pretty and (in the other) not young. Of course they are cheerfully paired off with other men at the end, because it is that kind of a show, but the way they are mocked rankled a bit for me.
Finally started The Tiger's Wife over breakfast today. We shall see how that goes.
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