Currently physically on my bedtable:
Lloyd Alexander, The Illyrian Adventure
Eh. Vesper is impulsive and egotistical, like Eilonwy, but she is less realistic
than that character from a fictional fantastic setting.
990331
Susan Cooper, The
Boggart and the Monster
I pulled the two Coopers off the C shelf looking for Christopher Paul Curtis.
I read the first but nonetheless continued to read the second. Serious
reality avoidance this week.
990330
Elizabeth Enright, Thimble
Summer
Delightful. Enright writes the kind of childhood everyone should have, about
readers growing up in the country with loving families.
990330
Susan Cooper, The
Boggart
This I read out of loyalty to Over Sea, Under Stone. The computer lingo
is the sort of thing that's going to be as laughable in two years as prices.
Remember how upset the children are when the Cat in the Hat ruins their father's
ten-dollar shoes? And then in Thimble Summer Garnet and her friend sigh
over $12 evening dresses.
And ahaha, let's make a Scottish joke: The only Scottish-born Canadian is named
William Walker.
Elizabeth George Speare, The
Sign of the Beaver
Not as good as The Light in the Forest to communicate about
the same idea.
990328
Christopher Paul Curtis, The
Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963
From its title I expected this to be non-fiction. It is not, but the author
gives a simple, age-appropriate history in the epilogue. It's quite funny in
parts, like when Kenny, the fourth-grade protagonist, wants a friend to join
his play with his plastic dinosaurs, so they alternate being the Nazi Dinosaurs.
Also a grandmother's warning about a whirlpool is misunderstood, through accent
and age, to be a Wool Pooh, and an older brother frightens his two younger siblings
with tales of Winnie's evil twin brother. The part actually in Birmingham was
shorter than I expected but frightening.
990327
Paula Fox, Western
Wind
The first I've read of her since The Slave Dancer, but this wasn't her
Newbery Honor book. It reminded me of Cynthia Voigt's Tree by Leaf--name
me other books set on islands off the Maine coast that Stephen King didn't write?
I thought this was quite good. The protagonist is reasonably sullen but not
so obviously painted as a bad seed as children's protagonists often are to teach
them a lesson. The grandmother is a real person whose first love is not, lo
and behold, grandmothering (also reminiscent of Cynthia Voigt), and she paints!
I have a soft spot for grandmothers who paint, especially when they're called
"gran" instead of "grandma," an alien sound to me.
The title is from the same poem as Madeleine L'Engle's first published book,
The Small Rain.
990326
Lynne Reilly Banks, The
Indian in the Cupboard
From the staid title, but more particularly from its being made into a movie,
I had no expectation about this book. I only read it because it is one of the
NEA's 100. Its being British surprised me. I'd like to find out if anyone has
ever really been named Gillon, Adiel, or Omri; and if it's a private joke would
someone tell me?
990325
Patricia Reilly Giff, Lily's
Crossing
Okay so far, although I don't yet see what's Newbery Honorable about it. Now,
on page 92, a girl in Rockaway (Brooklyn), New York, in July, sees in the night
sky the stars of Orion's belt. Colorado is two degrees south of New York and
I grew up in Connecticut, so I don't think I've forgotten the summer constellations.
Have I?
Lots of Lilys in children's lit lately. Lily's Crossing and Purple Plastic Purse,
the younger sister in The Giver. Another obvious one.
990325
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Black
and
Blue Magic
Goofy. Not her best work but early enough to be forgiven. I have more trouble
forgiving her much weaker more recent efforts.
990324
Sharon Creech, Walk
Two Moons
Wonderful. Deserving of the Newbery. Fresh description, an ear for language,
no smarmy dialect. A fault of the framing device is that few 13-year-olds can
narrate, unrehearsed, such a personal tale with impeccable timing. As a regular
first-person narrative, it would have worked because it's a device we're used
to; as a framing technique, telling her grandparents didn't seem credible. That's
a fault I'll allow it.
990324
Alice Kaplan, French
Lessons
Both French Lessons and Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones
focus on the phrase "Be Here Now."
990322
Julia Barret, Presumption
and The
Third Sister
I was warned, I ignored the cautions, I am disgusted with myself and the books, and I have been reprimanded. Any questions?
Natalie Goldberg, Writing
Down the Bones
I need to own this for my reference shelf.
James Joyce, Dubliners
A Modern Library edition whose pages stick offers sentences even more interesting
than Joyce intended. From"An Encounter":
"All the branches of the tall trees which lined the wall were gay with some
biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid
streets where the families of the fishermen live."
Cormac McCarthy, Cities
of the Plain
"The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one."
Reread: various Brontës and Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice
The Brontës I picked up the last Sunday in our old place, when I napped and watched "Jane Eyre" instead of packed. Later in the week, to cleanse my brain of Brontë, I reread Pride and Prejudice for the nth time. This was the one book in my backpack when we moved. My backpack and the shallow carton that I made into an ark for my stuffed animals were the only two things I kept near Blake's cage during the chaos, never to be lost or molested.
Reread: Marge Piercy, Small
Changes
Cathleen Schine's The Evolution of Jane
is not the first book I identified with. In my recent book rearranging, I picked
up Small Changes.
I try not to reread Marge Piercy; when I do it's usually Woman on
the Edge of Time so I can feel superior to it. It's didactic with its ludicrous
solution to sexism (remove all the power of birth from women and give it to
machines (nicer than those in Brave New World, anyway), in exchange for
no power for anyone). Reproduction is outside the body; with chemicals, either
sex can nurse; with bisexuality, anyone can love anyone. In this case, what
need be there for two physical sexes? Why, in an environmentally aware society,
should there be so much chemical and mechanical intervention in a natural process
and so much deliberate dissimilarity between humans and other animals?
Small Changes I do not disdain quite so roundly. Didacticism still but
not so bald and iron-fisted. I read it weeks after I broke up with someone,
some weeks fewer after I realized I regretted breaking up with him. Marginalia
in select chapters overwhelms the printed text. Last night I reread not only
the chapters but the marginalia also. The latter I had avoided, for guilt's
sake, for a long time. Rereading my own comments last night, I realized if I
had avoided my annotations for guilt's sake, also guilt had prompted the original
notes. Whom I had considered a villain was a villain, but the character I'd
considered a hero had nothing in common with my own situation.
This novel is as dated as Woman on the Edge of Time, but since it is
set in specific years, its politics and philosophies are merely out of date,
not poorly formulated and irrational.
Those are the only two Marge Piercy novels I own. I've also read Braided
Lives and Vida, both of which I enjoyed but remember little from,
since I only read them once. Braided Lives had good feminist points and
participants' tales of abortion before Roe v. Wade. I have never read
her poetry, nor heard it since I opted to hear Sarah Weddington one night when
both spoke in my corner of Connecticut.
Douglas Coupland,
Life After God
Doesn't hold a candle to Shampoo Planet or Microserfs, my favorites thus far (with only Girlfriend in a Coma to go, I think), perhaps I shield myself so fastidiously from ideas of religion. The final pages startled me, though: an epiphany after which I would suddenly Believe something seemed almost logical.
Douglas Coupland, Shampoo
Planet
I know it sounds unlikely, but Coupland describes thing the way Louis de Bernières does in Corelli's Mandolin. The latter has a chapter entitled How like a woman is a mandolin and he plays a song that sounds the way her hands look knitting. In Shampoo Planet: "In my ears I hear a noise and this noise is the sound of the color of the sun" (p. 269), and in San Francisco the houses are the color of children's laughter.
"Okay then, stamps. There are maybe a hundred of these tiny countries around the planet which earn like eight-seven percent of their gross national product selling postage stamps to preteens of the industrialized nations. No gimmick is too extreme in order to snare the teen market-stamps with holographic cartoon characters on laserized gold foils which sing when rubbed. Stamps with one-eight-hundred numbers. Any gimmick at all.
"So I, of course, collected stamps and neatly mounted them in my album, building equity while learning geography and fun facts like which countries export feldspar and barley. But part of the fun of collecting stamps was traveling places in my head. I considered my collection an inventory of all the places I'd like to visit but would probably never have the chance to-places too far away, too expensive-whatever-places I'd only ever visit with my stamp album.
"There was this one country, some unfortunate Arab emirate with no oil, which put out a series of stamps with perfume. I bought them from the H.E. Harris Stamp company of Boston for sixty-nine cents. And the perfume from these stamps promptly permeated my entire album, giving it a previously missing olfactory element-a smell all its own, like the way a salmon's river has its own unique smell; the way your own house has its own smell.
"And so the point of this story is that when I first met you at the photocopy machine, sure we talked like a telethon and everything, but the perfume you were wearing then-that perfume was the smell of my stamp album, the smell of countries I always wanted to visit but never thought I'd be able to. It was like you had the world inside you." (p. 278)" 'There was this group of blind people, with white canes and everything-a CNIB tour or something-and they heard us coming, and they heard us coming, and they motioned for us to stop, and we did. They handed Mark a camera. They asked Mark to take their picture.'
" 'Blind people?'
" 'Exactly. But the strange thing was, they still believed in sight. In pictures. I'm thinking that's not a bad attitude.'" (p.338)"This was back when we were all young enough that our daily experiences were converting from dreams into memories-permanent memories." (p. 343)
A.S. Byatt, The
Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
You've got to love--or at least I find irresistibly lovable--anyone
who can integrate the Clerk's Tale, Yeats, Turkish poetry, Arabic legend, and
various other references and asides, seamlessly into a story. Furthermore, the
title story in the collection is undeniably autobiographical, and I do love
those hints. Novels packed with referents--bring 'em on. Apparently this is
the 20th century canonical ideal, the novel dependent upon other fiction: how
can anyone understand Thomas Pynchon--or Douglas Coupland--without a wide literary
background?
990215
One of the rare cases in which the movie far surpasses the book. The movie
"Paper
Moon" features bits from the first third or so of the novel. Tatum
O'Neal is much more credible than the novel's Addie Pray. The last two thirds
or so read like episodes from Auntie Mame: disconnected, not leading
to any whole, but unlike Auntie Mame, lacking even its puerile humor.
One good line that's not in the movie: "Let's ramify 'em, honey."
This reminds me of the last line in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels: "Then
let's go get 'em."
990210
Jane Smiley, A
Thousand Acres
I figure I missed a lot having read King Lear only once and nine years ago. The Goneril character narrated it, which means the novel gives a much more sympathetic view of Goneril and Regan than Lear. The fool, not Lear, is blinded. I don't know Lear well enough to figure out who Jess is. Also I don't know what happens in Lear after he fails to get his kingdom back, but if the play ends with that failure, then that explains why this novel becomes weak and indeed nigh stupid after the trial.
It had its moments, several of them:
"It was rare to see Rose intoxicated but reassuring in a way….She saw
me looking around and said, 'You should see the kitchen cabinets. I wiped all
the
jars with soapy water and put down new shelf paper. Edged in black for widows.
The funeral home has a concession. Shelf paper, drawer liners, inflatable
sweater
hangers, dusters made from raven's feathers, everything for the housewife-widow.'
"'I don't believe you.'
" 'Oh Ginny, you're so literal-minded." Aha!
(p. 296 )
Larry is senile and raving, obviously. Rose says, "Ten to one this is an act." (p.321) This is BJWL.
"Rose was smiling.
"Caroline's face as red and angry.
"One thing was surely true about going to court. It had marvelously divided
us from each other and our old lives. There could be no reconciliation now."
(p. 326)
990208
Rereads: A.S. Byatt, Possession
and Norton Juster, The
Phantom Tollbooth
Louis de Bernières, Corelli's
Mandolin
I regret that it took me a whole week to finish this; a lot of days I only read on the bus. Beautiful. Magnificent. I love the particular points of view.
The bulk of Amazon's readers' reviews mutter about a disappointing ending, and I'm in two minds about it. The more hopeful one believes happiness and love are always possible--I have been exclaiming about one element as if it's the most romantic gift of love ever--and the cynical other tells me I should've been more careful and not skimmed the reviews before I read it. But I did; I followed Beth's link when she mentioned it.
I don't need closure in my fiction and I don't think closure indicates inferior writing. Lack of closure is an element that supposedly frustrates the unsophisticated reader and happy endings are sometimes sneered upon by elitists. For instance, I was warned that The Crying of Lot 49 had no closure. Maybe it wasn't supposed to because it's Pynchon and therefore required to be Difficult and Unsatisfying. But it did have closure: Oedipa would find out what she wanted to know, even if the writing ends before the reader finds it out. Closure doesn't mean a book is simple, anyway: One Hundred Years of Solitude is the most marvelously closed novel I know. That's my argument for the satisfying ending not degrading the work as a whole.
Then, contradicting myself as usual, I can argue against the ending--that it happened I didn't find nearly as contrived as why it took so long. One of my favorite books is The Shell Seekers, and I'd stand up in a panel of Salman Rushdie and Jorge Luis Borges scholars and unashamedly proclaim my love of this novel, which is the best story I've ever read and not at all literary. It has not a Happily Ever After ending but a life goes on and all is well kind of ending. Compare and contrast this to a travesty I discovered channel-hopping one Sunday, when I saw Angela Lansbury on a sloping road in a seaside town turning to someone calling the name "Penelope?" and she turns around and asks, "Richard?" and I knew, in my horrified, immediately channel-hopping away from what I could not bear to see, that a Made For TV movie had been made of The Shell Seekers and Changed to Suit a Sunday Night Audience, who seek and expect and tolerate only happy endings. The ending of Corelli's Mandolin reminded of that, which is my fault.
Whether good or bad, lazily contrived or deliberate, the ending is only 20 or so pages. The rest of the novel is lyrical: "'I'm wondering,' he said one day, 'what a piece of music would be like if it sounded the way your fingers look.'" . And having to look up words like corybantic and wondering what the paradox of Buritan's ass is. And chapters like "How like a Woman is a Mandolin." And Pelagia's inability to remain hostile to man who permitted a pine marten to sleep in his hat.
Lliteras, The
Thieves of Golgotha
Overall, a poorly executed treatment of an excellent idea. Grendel, Mansfield Revisited, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," and Wide Sargasso Sea each tell a known story from a different point of view, and I love novels that use this idea. This flopped. I now know a lot more about the physiological process of crucifixion than I did before, but about the one thief's redemption and the other's closed heart I know little.
J.M. Coetzee, From
the Heart of the Country
Electra. Fay Weldon's Remember Me. Probably others, but I'm only on page 7. And the book's been renamed, or Amazon has a different translation: my copy calls itself From the Heart of the Country and Amazon has In the Heart of the Country. Coetzee ties a handkerchief around your eyes and spins you around and I haven't gotten close to the tail of the donkey yet.
J.M. Coetzee, Life
and Times of Michael K
I have not read all of The Trial or any of The Castle and I don't think watching "Kafka" is as much instruction in Kafka as I need to understand the parallels Coetzee draws. Michael doesn't metamorphosize into anything either, just into himself.
What is the English of the Dutch or Afrikaans 'n boer maak 'n plan? All I can think of is
"And small foweles maken melodye
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,"
because of course the vowels and liaisons are right. Take that, Great Vowel Shift! and that! and that!
"Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. I was an allegory--speaking at the highest level--of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it." (p. 166)
I need guidance with Coetzee as much as I do for Nabokov, at least Pale
Fire. Is Michael's harelip just thrown in, or what? The protagonist of Of
Human Bondage is clubfooted, which affects him as a child but which seems
never to bother him after he grows up. So its point was…?
Coetzee masterfully adapts his style to the matter at hand. Michael reads
very different from Foe, and just the very beginning of From the Heart
of the Country reads different from the other two.
980112
Jane Smiley, Moo
Three pages into Moo and I can tell I will like it. So far it has evoked
DeLillo's White Noise and whoever's The Big U, which being such
disparate novels must bode well for this one.
980108
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