Carlos
When I started Twilight, I anticipated really disliking it. I had seen the movie, which had some nice cinematography but was rather dull, and had read other people's reviews of how terrible the writing in the original novel was but was still curious enough to give it a shot. Perhaps it was just low expectations, but I ended up enjoying it more than I expected.
If you've been paying attention to popular culture for any length of time, you're already familiar with the premise, plot, character, etc. so I'm going to skip directly into commenting on the story.
To start, the writing isn't that bad. I won't claim that Meyer is a great author or that it isn't a bit clunky at times, but it's worth keeping in mind that it's being told from the point of view of a seventeen-year-old girl with a fondness for early Gothic and romantic literature. I thought the writing fit the strange mix of banal, awkward and overheated that you'd expect from a girl like Bella. It could be argued that those elements above represent not Bella's limitations but Meyer's, but I can't see why not to give the author the benefit of the doubt.
I think the interesting mix of Gothic and realistic elements actually works pretty well a good deal of the time. It seems perhaps a rather simple formula, filtering overheated teenage emotions through the overheated emotions of the Gothic tale, which helps highlight how bewildering and overpowering emotions can be, especially for adolescents. It is possible that Meyer stumbled into some of these elements. Perhaps the idea of the story starting off when the virginal heroine moves from her sunlit world into a gloomy place connected with her own past wasn't intentionally borrowing from older Gothic tales, but again I feel the author deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Additionally, this makes what might be interpreted as absurd elements a little more understandable. The interest that every boy in Forks shows towards Bella isn't just a Mary-Sueism, it's the fact that only in this gloomy world is she capable of becoming an adult. Her clumsiness, so over the top as to be absurd, suggests the struggle to come to terms with her own adult self, both physically and emotionally.
The novel is not without it's flaws, though I think some of these are pretty typical of the paranormal romance genre. The book seems to fall most flat when it tries to go dark. As a threat, James seemed almost laughably bland, and Edward's tale of his brief time hunting humans leaves so little impression that it's no surpirse it was cut from the movie. The book is particularly unconvincing when trying to suggest the threatening aspect of vampirism. Vampirism comes off as pretty awesome, so that when by the end Bella is being asked to be turned into a vampire, it's difficult to understand Edward's resistance.
This is especially odd since Edward generally seems to come off as incredibly smug about how awesome he is. And while it's understandable that someone over a hundred years old and possessed of tremendous abilities would come to feel pretty superior, it seemed to me that all those years didn't seem to have taught Edward much in the way of maturity, so he ends up coming off as an entitled, self-satisfied jerk quite a bit. (A bit of an esoteric note here, but I wondered if it was a coincidence that Isabella, Bella's full name, is the name of the young sister in Wuthering Heights who, much to her own tragedy, falls in love with bad boy Heathcliff.)
So, while not great literature, I'd say Meyer is a worthy successor to Ann Radcliffe.
While I really liked Wang Chao's Playing for Thrills, I found Please Don't Call me Human mostly dull and difficult to get through. This may be just a case of it not really being intended for me. Human has a strong satirical element, especially as concerns China's loss of the 2000 Olympics, and I suspect if I had a deeper appreciation of Chinese culture and history, more of the humor would have rung true.
The plot, what there is of it, involves a private group calling themselves the Mobilization Committee (MobCom) organized around redeeming China's international reputation by proving that China has the toughest fighter in the world. To that end, they recruit a young man, who happens to be the son of one of the members of the Boxer Rebellion, and put him through all sorts of routines and diets in order to make him the ultimate fighter.
Despite the interesting premise, it mostly felt like a lot of strange stuff happening with little reason, the characters are mostly caricatures, and there's never a sense of anything really being at stake. It did have its moments, but overall I think it was not really intended for a non-Chinese audience.
I have to admit that I cheated a bit by skipping the second essay on tennis. I'd say I tried, but that's not exactly true. I read about three pages and then realized that life is too short to spend it reading essays on a sport that I neither play nor watch. Overall, amusing, though not really as funny or as insightful as I'd hoped.
Two of the better pieces involve DFW commenting on an event where he clearly does not belong (one is the IL State Fair, the other a seven-day stint on a cruise ship), which were amusing in a this-is-a-quintessential-Harper's article sort of way. Perhaps there's something infectious about DFW's sort of academic navel-gazing which made me sort of self-conscious about my own narrow life/world views, and then a sort of mental claustrophobia sets in, which kind of limits some of the potential enjoyment.
There was a David Lynch piece, which I thought was quite good. (Although it did reveal that DFW was, at the time of its writing, a little clueless about Robert Rodriguez, which is a little odd since it's not like Rodriguez was that complex a director to start with.) A couple of other pieces, one about authorial intent and whether authors are really dead (in a lit crit sense) and one about literary responses to television, were just kind of blah. The first was a review of a book I was not familiar with and so didn't really stand well on its own. The second just felt dated, as if it documented an inconsequential cultural conflict that had long been superseded.
I guess, overall, I felt like there was a lot of talent and intelligence on display in these essays, but aside for a few moments, they just left me feeling cold–sort of, why should I care?
As a fan of horror fiction, I'm interested in the question of why people read horror. After all, why seek out fictional cruelties when the world is so full of real ones. Horror authors themselves, from Stephen King to Thomas Ligotti, have provided interesting answers, but Cavallaro's book provides a very interesting perspective. The Gothic Vision shows how works of dark fantasy allow us to contemplate and even accept the dark facets of our lives and our own beings that we do not tend to acknowledge in our “daytime” vocabulary. If you're interested in horror and the Gothic not just as sources of dark amusement but of philosophical insight, I would highly recommend this book.
A fascinating collection of short pieces, ranging from mysterious autobiographical moments (but are they in fact real?) to some lucid and penetrating essays on the short story. Piglia stands on the shoulders of those two giants, Borges and Arlt, from which he ventures even farther into the secret nexus of fiction and life. Some pieces demand to be read slowly or repeatedly to truly absorb the intoxicating brilliance of Piglia's vision.
The book contains one short novel, a novella, and three short stories, revolving around the city of Veniss. Reminiscent of Harrison's Viriconium in the way the portrayal of the city changes so much, while some elements reappear from story to story. Not quite as memorable as Vandermeer's Ambergris, but an interesting blend of dystopian science fiction and dark fantasy elements.
A well-written, provocative and yet ultimately not entirely convincing account of the displacement of the Platonist worldview and its re-emergence in the form of popular entertainment. Nelson clearly sees Western culture through the lens of a dialectic of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, and she both predicts and welcomes the return of Platonism into the mainstream. Yet there are gaps in here, moments where the analysis seems superficial, eliding over contradictions, so that I sometimes wondering if Nelson is not herself making the mistake of conflating imagine with believe. It was interesting to read this book shortly after finishing Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, since there is quite a bit of overlap, and Ligotti too seems to foretell a crisis of philosophical materialism, though with quite different conclusions.
The books have lost a little of their impact since I read them back in high school, but the first three are still classics of comedy science-fiction. The last two novels (and the short story Young Zaphod Plays it Safe) have their moments, but I started to get the sense Adams was sort of tired of writing them by this point. I think what sets these apart from those authors (Christopher Moore, Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde, etc.) is that beyond the real sense of the absurdity of existence, the foibles of humanity and how most of us are trying to do the best we can in this crazy, mixed-up galaxy.
Ligotti's first story in his first collection is “The Frolic,” features a serial killer who seems to have supernatural abilities. Yet, in contrast to most psychopaths, real-world and fictional, he has no sense of grandiosity but an awareness of his own insignificance. Conspiracy reminds me of that story, in that Ligotti sets out to slay every illusion that one might hold about life, about mankind, about the universe, yet seems to realize the futility of this mission. A fascinating work of disillusionment.
An interesting book in that it can be considered either an episodic novel or a series of linked short stories, tells the typical Derlethian story of Great Old Ones trying to bust out of their confinement and the human beings who struggle to defeat them. Although the theme is heroic, the stories could use a little more action and less exposition. It's also hard not to compare Derleth's fictions to those of Lovecraft he so closely models on, and Derleth's suffer in the process.
One criticism I often heard of Danielewski's debut novel, House of Leaves, is that it seemed like there was a good horror story at the center but that it was undercut by all the postmodern wankery going on with footnotes, typefaces, formatting, etc. I count myself a House of Leaves apologist and thought that it was a rather weak argument. However, I now find myself in a similar position. Only Revolutions is an epic poem (or more accurately two epic poems) about Sam and Hailey, two seemingly ageless teenagers, and their wild adventures. The style is experimental, feeling perhaps like some cross between Finnegan's Wake and Ginsberg's Howl, but once I got into it, I found it quite moving, if sometimes a little opaque. I also like the fact that the book is written so that from one direction you get Sam's poem and if you flip it over and start reading, you get Hailey's poem. But much of the other elements, such as the sidebars of cryptic historical events or the colored o's just felt too much, distracting from an already challenging poetic tale.
I had found the first volume sort of hit and miss and was hoping that the second would preserve the strengths while avoiding some of the pitfalls of the first. While it is more consistent, it's still sort of weak and made me realize how difficult it can be to translate from one medium to another, especially when dealing with such an odd, singular vision such as that of Thomas Ligotti.
I've found that Ligotti's best stories have such a powerful sense of language that after reading one, I'll have a phrase or a whole sentence bouncing around in my head for a while. To transfer these stories successfully into a visual medium would probably require a visual imagination equally as twisted and powerful as Ligotti's literary imagination. Sadly, none of these pieces reflect such an achievement.
Of the stories adapted, “Gas Station Carnivals,” which is the first of the four, is easily my favorite. The story centers largely around a story that one character tells about weird little carnivals located adjacent to gas stations, which his family would come across on road trips. Among the attractions was a sideshow which would sometimes feature a sinister figure called The Showman, who never shows his face to the audience. From this little bit of reminiscence, the story spins off into a strongly Kafka-esque sense of paranoia. The visuals are adequate though not spectacular, and the choice to fully reveal The Showman, while an arguably defensible choice, reveals the pitfalls of this sort of adaptation. Also, the illustrator, perhaps because he was aware of the importance of language, has chosen to highlight important terms in the dialogue, which makes the whole thing feel like the world's strangest Mark Trail comic.
The next story is “The Clown Puppet,” is a weaker story than Gas Station Carnivals. The story is of a man who has experienced occasional visitations from a clown puppet, a literal puppet that will suddenly appear in his presence and mostly just proceed to creep him out. These experiences have turned him into something of a drifter, and so as the story begins he finds himself behind the counter of a little drugstore after closing hours. The clown puppet shows up, but the events of that evening deviate somewhat from his previous experiences. Because it is a lesser story, one would imagine there's a little more the illustrator can do, yet it also means the story is even more strongly dependent on the language. The art pushes more towards the surreal, with a certain washed-out look which emphasizes the artificial lights of its nighttime setting. However, it doesn't really compensate for the weaker story.
The third story is “The Chymist” from Ligotti's debut collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I confess I've never thought this was a great story. Ligotti does have a talent for a unique sort of psychopath who despite a certain awful glamour also happens to be completely aware of his own insignificance in the universe, a combination of malevolence and lucidity I find chilling. In this story, the psychopath is also the narrator, which means instead of seeing the story from the point of view of someone we might identify from we see it through someone completely repellent, which makes it less able to get under my skin. The narrator is an actual chemist who works for a pharmaceutical company, and the story involves his picking up a prostitute in a bar, going back to her place and him giving her a drug with certain (literally) nightmarish effects. It's not a great story, and the art doesn't help. At some points, it does sort of evoke the peculiar take on urban decay that is a prominent Ligottian theme, but the figure of the chemist himself, whether in his leisure-suit wearing regular day self or in his mad scientist alter ego, is just a bit too cartoony. A better artistic representation might have made this unlikable character a little more interesting, but the cartoony approach just makes him even less interesting.
The final story is “The Sect of the Idiot,” a story about a man who moves to a new city, an older city which he finds almost transcendent in its age and decay. One night he has a dream about certain strange, inhuman figures gathered in a room. During the course of the dream, he comes to realize that not only do these figures somehow control reality but that they are themselves in turn controlled by even more powerful, more inhuman beings. This story is also from Songs of a Dead Dreamer and the original, while pleasant enough, never struck me as one of his stronger pieces. The adaptation is interesting, though as with “Mr. Locrian's Asylum” in the first volume, I got the sense that the story had been trimmed a little too much, so that much of the sense of atmosphere was lost. Aside from saying that I liked the way the figures in the room reflected the story's strongly Lovecraftian element, I thought the art decent but not strong enough to compensate for the abridgment of the text.
Overall, I'd say only “The Chymist” is a disappointment, though perhaps it was unrealistic to hope an interesting approach would redeem a lesser story. The other stories, while never really elevating the original material or perhaps even living up to it, are enjoyable though not quite a match for the originals.
I was already aware of the consensus that “Titus Alone” was widely considered a severe let-down after the first two Gormenghast books, so my expectations were low to begin with. However, despite the obvious shift from those earlier works, Peake's talent, his love of language, his creativity and his knack for unique characters still shine through, so that while a little tricky at first, I soon found myself enraptured in the story just as I had with the previous novels.
It is hard to leave Gormenghast behind, both for Titus as well as the reader, and at first the feeling of reading a Titus novel set outside the realm of Gormenghast is a disorienting one. Peake doesn't make it any easier by setting the rest of Titus' adventures not in our own world (Wouldn't that be something, Gormenghast like some Gothic Shangri-la, a mythical kingdom lost to time and cartography?) but in a strange dystopian realm with a mix of old and futuristic technologies. Here he meets up with people who have never heard of Gormenghast and believe Titus to be mad. Though Titus finds new friends in this strange land, he also finds sinister enemies with he must contend. Though arguably not the ideal end to the series, especially since the ending leaves things open ended, it was still good to follow Titus' adventures for a little bit longer.
Would it be strange to wish that this book had been written by [a:Irene Nemirovsky 5772020 Irene Nemirovsky http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]? I'm not saying that Nemirovsky should have written of life under the Soviets or that I wish this book had her more subtle touch. I wouldn't change a word of it, but swapping Nemirovsky's name for [a:Ayn Rand 432 Ayn Rand http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1168729178p2/432.jpg]'s would make this a better book. (Also, lose any introduction or afterword.)I realize this sounds like a strange notion, but when you pick up a Nemirovsky book, you know that whatever it's flaws, the main goal is to tell a story about flawed human beings coping with the vicissitudes of life. “We the Living” begins in 1922 with the return of the Argounova family to Petrograd after the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917. The action principally follows Kira, the oldest daughter, who is eighteen at the beginning of the story, but as the novel proceeds it expands to include members of Kira's extended family, as well as her friends. So we get a view of the horrors of Soviet Russia from several views, including that of young party members. One of these, a man named Andrei, who is a member of the secret police and a hero of the revolution, falls madly in love with Kira. However, she herself has already fallen in love with Leo, the son of an aristocrat.Rand is a powerful witness to the criminality of the Soviets: their corruption, their arbitrary use of power, their lack of principles. The powers-that-be talk about liberating the people, but instead they starve them, brutalize them and force them to volunteer hours to hold on to menial jobs, while corrupt party officials game the system for their own good and flaunt their ill-gotten riches. Though the dialog is sometimes clunky, Rand's writing is very evocative, conveying the destitution of the regime, the way it crushes some and corrupts others. Perhaps most heartbreaking is the plight of men such as Andrei and Stepan Timoshenko, men who fought against the injustice of the Czars only to be betrayed by the new regime.If Nemirovsky's name were on the title page, this would be a tale of the way that a brutal system damages people, and in Kira, we would see the odd girl whose reaction to the Soviets is flawed and off-kilter because she is just a human being reacting to a terrible situation. In truth Kira, like Gutierrez' Juan Moreira, is a character whose thoughts and actions I did not always agree with, yet whose willingness to stick to her ideals, even if it means death, makes her admirable.Yet, because this is a Rand novel, Kira is not just a flawed human being, but Rand's stand-in. Her off-kilter philosophy is meant to be the lesson of the book, and this is where the book's major flaw lies. “We the Living” presents us something peculiar, a novel in which the narrator is trustworthy but the author is not. Rand is a great witness of the life under the Soviets, but her interpretation of things (as reflected by Kira) leaves a lot to be desired.For Kira/Rand's view is not that the Soviets are an elite using power only to serve themselves while millions toil for little, but is that they scorn men like Leo, whose lives are more meaningful than those of ordinary men. This is perplexing, since it's never clear what makes Leo so great, except that he's handsome, haughty and selfish.If this were a “Brave New World”-style dystopia, where the contentment of the many bought at the cost of the creative or the different, this would be a reasonable objection. However, it's so clear that talk of the proletariat is just window dressing for a self-serving regime, that Kira's inability to see this makes her seem sort of clueless.Even worse, when Andrei once asks her, “Don't you know that we can't sacrifice millions for the sake of the few?” her response is not that this is precisely what the Soviets are doing are that you cannot bring about justice through injustice, but the following rant:What are your masses but millions of dull, shriveled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains?So, this should be a brilliant and powerful novel, did it not stop so often to remind me that it was in service to Rand's agenda, her idea of the proper places of the aristocracy and the rabble, the warped views of her stand-in.Rand meant this book as being not just about Russia or Communism, but about totalitarianism. However, the book falls short compared to Orwell's 1984, which sees to the true dark heart of dictatorship in which power is not a means but an end.
This may seem like an odd thing to say about a horror writer, especially someone as boundary-pushing as Barker was (in his debut), but I think Clive Barker's Books of Blood sort of hit a sweet spot. They're shocking and bloody without descending into hackwork. They've got plenty of interesting characters yet never seem to drag. They're smart and creative without becoming pretentiously clever. I wouldn't say he gets it right all the time (see “The New Murders in the Rue Morgue” in volume 2), but since good horror is actually rather hard to write, his batting average on this series is phenomenal.
Sforza's tales take place in the intersection of the Gothic and the personal. Old houses in his hometown of Victoria (Entre Rios) are haunted by the spirits of those people who lived and died within their walls, some of whom the narrator knew personally when he was a child, others who are only second-hand stories, shading into urban legends. There's a subtle shading to these spirits, not quite true phantoms, though perhaps not exclusively artifacts of memory. In some ways reminiscent of Mujica Lainez' Aqui Vivieron, De Casas y Misterios tells the story of a place through the people who lived there and the dwellings in the which they lived out those brief lives.
I started the audiobook of Lolita one day at the gym while “Jersey Shore” played on one of the big TVs in the cardio section, and found myself thinking there was some sort of irony there, listening to Jeremy Irons' silky tones narrate a tale of a man whose behavior goes past the bounds of decency while images of people engaging in more banal forms of debauchery played in front of me. This is all a round about way of expressing my own trepidation when I began Lolita, the first-person account of one man's criminal relationship with a 12-year-old girl. Yet, Lolita is less about the narrator's crimes than about his own mental derangement. The spirit of Poe hangs over the novel, from the beginning when we learn that Humbert Humbert (our narrator) mourns for a childhood love named Annabel Leigh, and I found myself thinking much of The Tell-Tale Heart. Nabokov takes all of the sickness, literary style, rationalization and guilt of that short tale and stretches it out into a strange, haunting aria of obsession and memory, with a healthy dose of black comedy. Yet he does not let us completely off the hook, and we often see through Humbert's narration, though he is blind to it, the terrible impact of his actions. It's the sort of novel that lingers long after the last page, like a vivid dream whose images continue to haunt long after wakefulness has returned.
Juan Jose de Soiza Reilly was an Uruguayan/Argentine journalist and author from the first half the twentieth century, whose work influenced follow journalist/author Roberto Arlt. I'd never heard of him until recently, so I suspect this anthology is in part to make sure he does not fall completely into obscurity. The book collects an interesting variety of pieces, most of it fiction, though a few essays (on being a journalist or various aspects of the Argentine art world) are included. The stories include some portrayals of the life of the hard-knock life in Buenos Aires, a short novel about the moral failings of the upper class, a satire on journalism, and a couple of peculiar stories with elements of science fiction (including the title story). Most of it was pretty engaging, though perhaps less so than Arlt, except for the novel, which felt as if it didn't really go anywhere. I rather liked the science fiction stories and would probably pick up an anthology containing more of those kinds of stories.
Perplexing, mysterious, hypnotic. Playing for Thrills is the story of Fang Yan, a down-and-out gambler who finds himself accused of a decade-old murder. In trying to establish an alibi, Yan discovers that there is a gap of seven days for which he cannot account. His investigation leads him to some dubious characters, but as he begins to investigate that missing week, he runs into more mysteries. Who is the mysterious woman he allegedly spent the week with? What role did the man in the striped shirt play? Identities shift and become confused. Recalling film noir, the fiction of Roberto Arlt and the movie Memento, Playing for Thrills is a strange story of one man's attempt to uncover a past, yet frustrates both protagonist and reader in the way the facts to be uncovered become clearer yet less helpful the deeper one goes.
The Seven Madmen is the sort of work that never seems to lose its impact. Even 80 years after its original publication, there's something uniquely unsettling about Arlt's account of one man's involvement in a bizarre criminal conspiracy. The man in question, Remo Erdosain, finds himself in trouble at the beginning of the novel. His bosses at The Sugar Company have figured out that he has been embezzling, and give him a day to return the money he has robbed. To make things worse, when he gets home, he learns his wife is leaving him for another man.
Desperate, he seeks out the help of a man who goes under the moniker of The Astrologer, a strange figure obsessed with criminal conspiracies and the overthrow of the established order. He is soon drawn into the Astrologer's strange plan, in which are involved several other strange characters, including Hafner, a math professor turned pimp whom people call “The Melancholy Ruffian,” an army Major and the Gold Seeker.
I remember the first time I read it, I found it sort of disappointing, perhaps because it ends so abruptly with a “To be continued...” This time around, I found myself drawn more into its unique and nightmarish character. Of particular note is The Astrologer, which has struck me as one of the most intriguing characters in literature, up there with Ahab or Heathcliff. With his fascination for political philosophies, his deep cynicism and his strange schemes, he seems like a foreshadowing of the rise of men like Hitler, Stalin or bin-Ladin. The whole conspiracy he heads strikes similar strange tones, with each participant seeming to have their own strange scheme at play as well.
Arlt's description of the city is wonderfully evocative, and he draws heavily on the smells of the city as well as a pervading sense of darkness. It struck me as having interesting parallels with film noir, in which shadows are part of the atmosphere of moral decay.
An interesting collection of stories which captures little moments of an ambiguous nature packed with a hidden emotional charge. A husband and wife's differing perceptions of a draft of cold air underscore the tensions in their relationship, a young boy makes a strange wish upon seeing the ghost of his grandmother, two brothers wait for the dawn and visitors that may never arrive. Quiet yet unsettling moments, the stories leave fairly strong impressions despite a general lack of action.
As the introduction describes it, the avant-garde period in Chinese fiction was relatively short, with most of the production between the years 1987 and 1989. The avant-garde fiction was marked by a turn from politically focused literature towards a more experimental, literature-for-literature's approach. Most of the stories in this collection have an element of ambiguity and uncertainty, a calling into question of the very nature of narrative. The first two stories, both from Ge Fei, are investigations, the first (“Remembering Mr. Wu You”) a murder mystery, the second (“Green Yellow”) a historical investigation, which only become more puzzling the farther the searcher enters into them.
One other element running through many stories is violence, sometimes quite savage in nature. Yu Hua's “1986” tells of a man obsessed by the violence of China's ancient past and broken by the violence of its recent past, and his reenactment of that same violence. Bei Cun's “The Big Drugstore” spins its tale of an herbalist's shop into nightmarish dimensions. Su Tong's fiction resembles Ge Fei's in its irresolvable mysteries, but in “The Brothers Shu” also gives us a boy giving rein to his savage side.
The collection finishes off with a handful of stories that evoke the modern crafter of labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges. Sun Ganlu's “I Am a Young Drunkard” makes allusion to the “blind Argentinean” before going on to tell of the narrator's encounter with an old poet, a tale quite poetic in itself. Ma Yuan's “A Wandering Spirit” begins with an epigraph from Borges, then proceeds to a twisting narrative where truths collide.