Books of 2018 Part 2: 40-31
#ClassicsIShouldRead
This was very much a mixed bag for me. Like most people these days
discovering this book, I picked it up purely because of my fondness for one or
the other film adaptation (in my case, the Tarkovsky; I haven’t seen
Soderbergh’s version), so there wasn’t a huge amount of novelty to reading
this. The premise, the philosophical intrigue and the questions it raises about
the nature of consciousness and memory – they’re all explored in vivid detail
in Tarkovsky’s film and were therefore not new to me. Being a Tarkovsky film,
too, it’s not like One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest where the studio somewhat bowdlerised the source material to
make it a star vehicle: not only is it fully conscious of the questions and all
their implications but Tarkovsky shapes the content himself in order to raise
even further questions. This is still a very intriguing bit of world-building
and introspection, and the present-tense dialogues and narrative were deeply
engaging and unsettling, but where this fell down was in the long didactic
passages explaining the history of Solarian philosophy and scientific inquiry.
It’s not that they’re scant in their detail or poorly written, but rather the
intriguing part of this book is in the fantastical elements and the
inward-looking questions of humanity (such as "Am I responsible for my
unconscious? No one else is, if not
myself"), whereas the long academic explanations turn it into dry
science-fiction which doesn’t help build the world but makes incomplete
attempts to explain it. The trouble is that they’re the bulk of the prose, so whenever
it jumped back to the present predicament of the expedition it felt like a
welcome relief that didn’t last long enough.
#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed
This is a curious little book. I'm intrigued foremost by the dedication
"to my daughter, at whose Christmas table this story first came to
me" given that it's the story of an embittered old millionaire who invites
his rich friends around to dinner regularly to insult and humiliate them for
his own amusement. How would you feel if you therefore got this dedication?
What kind of Christmas party was his daughter throwing? It's a short, snappy
kind of story that may have served as some kind of allegory but it seems too
nihilistic, while the references to greed, rich vs poor, the Catholic
conceptions of a soul, are frankly too on the nose to serve any allegorical
value. What it ends up being is a slightly surreal sketch on bitterness and
regret. It has the feel of a short McEwan novel, but it doesn't deliver the
sucker punch that McEwan would (not helped by the fact that the 'big twist' is literally
the alternate title of the book – it’s like calling the second Star Wars film
"The Empire Strikes Back, or Luke Discovers the Bad Guy is his Father")
and the dialogue all reads like lessons from a clumsily written morality tale.
I feel like a more drawn-out version with greatly enhanced obliqueness in its
fable and less caricatured players could be quite an interesting meditation,
but Greene makes his point quickly, he makes it bluntly, and he also makes it
repeatedly. Curious but not that effective.
#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed #AtLeastSomewhat
This is a mostly harmless bit of fun, a foray into the world of fantasy
and fairytales where I don't spend a lot of time. Since I don't spend a lot of
time in this realm, I don't really recognise a lot of trope subversions if
they're going on here, and to my eyes it actually felt fairly conventional.
Some elements, like the querulous character of the fallen star, felt somewhat
modern, but the picaresque narrative, the kind of shallow psychology of the
characters as either good or bad (our main protagonist has one quest and that
tends to guide all his actions, although his general 'goodness' is revealed by
his flexibility in this regard), and the particular mystical elements just feel
like typical fairytale stuff. It's not to say I didn't enjoy it, but a lot of
the drama and conflict seemed quite glibly and easily dealt with and I never
really got swept up or invested enough in it, so of course it's enjoyable since
it's never particularly challenging.
#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed
I enjoy Liu's writing generally, but this is a very different kind of
book to the Trisolaris trilogy (more on part three of that trilogy to come). I
was on board for a while here, and then I just paused and asked what was really
the point of this story? It starts with an inciting incident involving the ball
lightning phenomenon, and then develops into a portrait of a man's obsession
with trying to unlock the mystery of ball lightning, how it forms and
manifests. Like Solaris, it becomes
extremely didactic at points with these extended explanations and explorations
of theories and experiments into the nature of the phenomenon, so I found it
bereft of conflict and understanding of what was really at stake here - would
the story basically end when ball lightning was understood? Was that the crux
of this story? In one sense it is, but more importantly the issue is that the
story stops becoming that of the narrator and becomes more focused on his
friend, colleague and sort of romantic interest in this book and her own
conflict with the world, which became a bit disjointed in terms of where our
sympathies lie. There are also some strange jumpy plot points where it’s
reached a point in the didactic exploration where we can't progress further through
pure theory, so suddenly something geopolitically larger happens and we're
plunged into wartime to hurry along the theory into its practical application.
I think the highlight for this is actually Liu's brief afterword where he
explains that the Trisolaris trilogy was pretty much finished when he wrote
this but published this one first as it's more traditional Chinese sci-fi (all
theory/science with no exploration of moral or philosophical ramification) and
that makes sense here. There's also a hint of this as a prequel as there's a
foreshadowing of the existence of the Trisolaran race and their observation of
Earth right at the end of this book. So I appreciated it more in that context
than I really appreciated the story itself.
#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed
I don’t think this is as engaging as Baldwin's previous efforts that
I've read. There's just a disconnected nature to a lot of the characters who
don't seem fully fleshed out. Baldwin's purpose/focus here seems to be on
exploring race relations, and so the characters all seem to be kind of
cardboard cut-outs with their distinguishing factor being their race and
gender/sexual identity. Beyond that I don't really get much depth from them, as
the depth comes from Baldwin's philosophising about them. But it also means a
lot of liberties are taken with them and with the plot. (Spoilers ahead, like
in the next sentence) For instance, when the character of Ida calls her and her
brother Rufus’ mutual acquaintance Cass, coincidentally the night after Rufus
reappears after six weeks missing, but also coincidentally the night that Rufus
kills himself. Like, why would she wait six weeks to call? And then just happen
to call the night they've seen him? It just seems unnecessarily serendipitous
by Baldwin, and could have easily been avoided by having Ida have called at
least once previously, and then the SECOND time be when he's reappeared and
then later that night kills himself. Or Cass could even have called her to
inform her they've now seen him. There's also another kind of clumsy narrative
moment late in the book, where a character who's at the mercy of an injustice
goes to another character for solace, but we only know this because 'other
character' relates the scene to somebody else. And that's fine in a normal
narrative, but multiple times in this novel we are taken inside that scene
despite it not being the narrative focus, and here we only get the
interpretation rather than the mimesis. These seem like quibbles, but the fact
is they're symptoms of a real sense of disjointedness: I feel like Baldwin set
out to write one thing and didn't have a clear plan so it ends up being a hodgepodge
of racial, gender and identity politics that tries to service a grand vision
but gets lost in all its details and unnecessary machinations. With a clearer
focal point and less left-handed character introduction and exposition, this
could have been that grander vision.
#ClassicsIShouldRead
I've encountered so much about this book without having read it. But I
felt the need to read it after reading Rebecca
(more on that later) and feeling like I needed to read the 'original' first
wife-haunted big house romance novel. And look, when you know most of the
machinations of the plot in this case, it still has some power to it. But honestly
for the most part I wasn't really engaged with this. I think it's mainly down
to the character of Jane, who feels like a fairly dull plain canvas, a safe
vessel on which to project the image you want. She's moral but not pious,
decent but not radiantly lovely, she's plain (of course), has a mind of her
own... I just didn't find her a particularly compelling companion for most of
this. When she moves to Thornfield and Rochester comes into the picture it
feels like a very different book from the earlier one telling of her childhood
and growing from unjustly rejected brat to worthy, humble servant. But the
Rochester story is really very far-fetched and fairytale-esque (in a grim dour
kind of way) so I couldn't parse the verisimilitude here. Jean Rhys did the
Bertha part of the story, I feel, more credit than it maybe deserves in her
imagined prequel Wide Sargasso Sea. I
was into this a bit more when Jane moved away from Thornfield and discovered
more about her roots: I found I was invested in her and the choices she would
make, but I honestly don't feel like I needed her childhood to understand her,
and I think the narrative would be more compelling if it were just about her
and Rochester rather than about all of her own trials and tribulations. I'm
iconoclastic for feeling that, I know, but there's some things that despite
centuries and miles and swathes of cultural separation from me they can still
cut through, and the nature of this narrative didn’t do that.
#BooksIReadForNoReason
This was kind of a middling read. On the surface it's quite populist
kind of Dickensian reading where effectively-orphaned character finds meaning,
redemption and identity through a series of unlikely coincidences. There's also
very much the Dickensian simplicity of characters either being wholly good
(including the problematic June, who starts out an antagonist but of course has
a heart of gold) or wholly bad (in this case, racist and/or violent). And for
all its kind of structural predictability, there's definitely a readable and
likeable quality to the story, which at times feels manipulative in the way it
draws us towards an uplifting conclusion even in the face of themes of racial
violence and prejudice, child abuse and suicide. I think for its easy-reading
nature, the biggest issue is that the race issue is dealt with in ultimately
childish and facile ways. There isn't a character in here who struggles with
inherent prejudice and biases and has to make a difficult decision: characters
are all either colour-blind and dismissive of differences, or they're bigoted
and unpleasant. I felt like the character of June was likely to be the conduit
for this sort of thematic exploration, being prejudiced against and suspicious
of Lily by virtue of her being white, but it turns out her initial mistrust is
based purely on personal trust issues and past history which has nothing to do
with race. Ultimately it felt a little like a "hooray for nice white
people for fixing racism, am I right, fellow white people?" kind of story
that doesn't shy away from black under-privilege or racial violence, but just
mentions it tokenistically in an outsider's celebration of community and family
values. It just feels like a friendly, sanitised read of what could have been
more weighty subject matter.
#AuthorsIShouldReadMore
People seem to go crazy over George Saunders. I read an interview with
him where he came across as a pretty sharp, but thoughtful, guy, but after
reading this I don't really get the hype around his writing. Sure there's
inventiveness in his use of language and voice, and some of the satirical
elements here are very witty and engaging, but it just didn't have much wow
factor for me. It just felt like fairly standard short story writing, and maybe
some of the satire is just too subtle for me or something but I was hoping for
more of the stories here to have more of a point. Some of them raise
interesting points but then kind of fade out rather than bringing them to a
provocative conclusion. Probably the best story here, the Semplica Girl Diaries (which I enjoyed mainly because of the
obvious thematic and stylistic resonance with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go), finishes quite abruptly as well, which is
precisely the point of it, but it just left me a little unsatisfied after
investing the time and feeling into it. I think maybe Saunders is more of a
cult of personality so maybe I need to read more of his stuff before I can pass
judgement on him or understand the buzz. There's certainly great world-building
and writing here but it feels like a lot of potential that is never finished.
#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed
This felt like a book I should have read a long time ago and that
provides context for a whole lot of other things I’ve read and seen. A piece of
journalism on the hippy movement, a cultural artifact, a day in the life of the
60s; it just brought home so many cultural references and bits of history that
I've known about for years without really understanding where they came from
(most notably of course, the idiom "drinking the kool-aid" to refer
to people going mindlessly along with what one person says). Wolfe's writing
here seems a bit more formative and unstructured than it did in his later
novels that I’ve read, but part of that is his focus here on trying to recreate
the mental experience of the long LSD parties he's describing. It's not enough
to write that Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters tripped out for two
days and did this and that; Wolfe devolves into long stream of consciousness
patterns with intrusive thoughts and disconnected sentences to give this
immersive, almost gonzo, effect. It does get a little tiresome after a while though,
since despite the varying scale and audiences of Kesey’s parties, one trip
starts to feel like the next, and Wolfe's purpose is documenting the experience
rather than extrapolate any ultimate point. While I got a far greater understanding
of Kesey, his movement and ideals, the overarching point seemed to be delivered
incidentally and possibly accidentally. The book did make me wonder what Kesey
could have done though, if he'd focussed on his writing following the success
of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
rather than focussing on expanding his mind and exploring ‘other dimensions’
with his friends. Ultimately it feels like a protracted phase of mental
masturbation, with immense hedonistic pleasure but no furtherance of personal
or societal circumstances. At the same time Wolfe pulls us into the moment and
makes it feel like a cultural revolution and a wave of people who gain a new
perspective on life and its possibilities beyond the humdrum. Obviously I'm the
epitome of the square to them on the outside looking in, but it did seem to be
more of a cult based on traditional power structures than some new utopian
society or even just 'way of being' as they may have felt (and isn't that how
any cult would see themselves). What I gained was a far more in-depth
understanding of freakout culture, and a fascinating, if longwinded, look at
the dichotomy between the countercultural acidheads and the rigid pillars of
society. It feels like a necessary read but it's in many ways just bemusing
rather than enlightening.
#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed
This ended up being a pleasingly short, easy read at a point where I
was getting worried about my ability to get a good quota of books read this
year (and yes, I failed anyway. I mean only 57 books…). Now I say easy read; of
course it's anything but. But when you're dealing with the writer of Portnoy's Complaint and Sabbath's Theater, this book is definitely
not his most obtusely-written or even his most unsettling in subject matter,
despite dealing with a polio epidemic among the youth and people’s struggle
with faith that goes along with it. In many ways this feels like a rehashing of
a lot of the themes of American Pastoral:
the central figure of Eugene "Bucky" Cantor is a similar figure to
Theodore "The Swede" from his earlier work, in being this
larger-than-life All-American hero figure, and his fall from idolized grace is
a very similar trajectory. In some ways that makes this fairly familiar
territory, and there were parts of this book that I felt drag for that reason. In
particular, there was a drag in the section of the narrative where Cantor
uproots himself from the infected area of Newark and moves to the idyllic
surrounds of Indian Hill to be with his fiancée. The bucolic surroundings just
felt on the nose, in that you know that some calamity is about to befall him,
but the descriptions of the new perfect setting didn't seem to be quite as
emphatic and contrasting as Roth made them. In the end though this is quite a
moving and affecting exploration of the nature of guilt and the profound
attrition of heroism in the face of uncontrollable forces of epidemiology,
similar to Camus' The Plague.
posted by Sean's Beard at 2:26 PM
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