Tell me what you've read
Narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan
After the Shute debacle, I did reserve Smilla. I read Høeg's The Borderliners this fall and quite liked its narrative technique. Here the reader's style suits the technique well; she sounds like the spoken parts of Laurie Anderson songs. Also I recently bought (22 February 1997) The History of Danish Dreams. Høeg has a way of describing in a few sentences a situation or thing that you think is a digression, but in one sentence more he brings the tangent back to the story at hand with a marvelous metaphor. Smilla describes testing equipment against Greenland's weather, equipment meant to last a lifetime. After three months, the durable substance can be destroyed with fingernails. This is what happens to Greenlanders' Greenlandic after time in Danish schools.
Also I have just read Susanna Kaysen's Far Afield, which takes
place in the Faroe Islands. This archipelago, like Greenland, belongs to
Denmark; Denmark seems to ignore them both. I want to ask my Danish friend
Ulla about the situation with Denmark's territorial possessions.
February and March 1997
I was in the Koelbel Library (Arapahoe County) looking for a new audio book and not being hopeful about my chances. I could do something daring like reserve Smilla's Sense of Snow, which I know Castlewood has, or The Eagle and the Raven, but up to now I've just trusted to luck. Anyway, there I browsed, snooping at other people's choices and thus falling into conversation with a fellow, snooped-at patron. She recommended A Town Like Alice.
When I began it I thought the whole thing was going to be about prisoners of war. I knew Shute had based this novel on fact and therefore it would perhaps be instructive, like The Diary of Anne Frank or Blue Highways. And the jacket matter mentioned a party of 800 women dying down to fewer than 40. I am not much of a horror-mongerer but that's the sort of story I expected: courage and survival. Well. As I write this I am only on the sixth tape of nine, but the actual period the protagonist spends as a quasi-POW has been over for three tapes now. The jacket matter misrepresented the case, I think. What atrocities there were did strike me. A party of 32 women and children died down 17 as they were shunted from one Japanese-occupied Malaysian town to another. But they marched only every other day--what of the Long March, and the Trail of Tears, and Napoleon's retreat from Moscow?--and a lot of their distress at the start resulted from their clinging to being so very British when going native might have saved some lives. Going native, dressing and eating and doctoring and finally farming like the Malayans among whom they lived, saved the 17 who did survive.
But I confess I might not be so unfeeling had I not come across not one but two mentions of the book on two Libertarian/Objectivist bibliographies on the WWW. I could listen to Ralph Reed, ol' Damien Omen himself, longer than I could an Objectivist in full-throated cry. (Not to mention that one site claimed Pride and Prejudice and the other A Wrinkle in Time as Objectivist? Piss me off.)
Anyway, reading this actually has done me some good, by the by. My next research excursion will be about POW conditions in SE Asia in World War II. Somebody's got to remember that the protagonist's brother died building the Burma-Siam railway; she seems to have forgotten (maybe because he hadn't her constitution; Rand had no sympathy for the physically weak. Or the physiognomically dark. But I digress). Plus I shall read George Orwell's Road to Burma sooner rather than later.
But overall this is a poorly-written bad novel (yes, there are
bad novels that are well-written). It is genre-adventure, I guess, sensationalist,
with unfocused tangents serving only to titillate, whose narrative structure
(letters written home) collapses continually. It is needlessly bigoted,
not only against antagonistic Japanese ("nips") but also against
neutral Australian aborigines, called "boons." February 1997
I think I'm a new John Irving fan. I read A Prayer for Owen Meany in 1995 and loved it, but I thought that was an anomaly--of his. Somehow negative memories of The World According to Garp shadowed my opinion of Irving even despite A Prayer for Owen Meany. No more. I drive along listening to this and laughing out loud. January and February 1997
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Last modified 20 November 1997
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