Category Archives: Words On Words
October 19, 2010
Apologies for the delay in broadcasting–the time got away from me. A combination of work and personal matters. In the interim though, I read a few books, including one almost-classic that I was expecting to like, but not nearly as much as I did. The happy surprises are the best ones, aren’t they? It was in my ‘to-read’ pile for a couple of months, and when I finally got to it, I burned through it in a few days. The book in question is Aldous Huxley’s not-really-biographical novel ‘Eyeless in Gaza‘, which I had picked up out of casual curiosity. Huxley, of course, is best known for his science fiction classic ‘Brave New World‘, which thousands upon thousands of high school students have read, digested, and attempted to spit back out. He’s also known for giving Jim Morrison’s band a name inadvertantly with his treatise on psychedelics, and had a reputation as a bit of a cheery mystic. (Had, because I’m not sure what kind of reputation he has these days). In any case, regardless of reputation, ‘Eyeless in Gaza‘ for me, was the best kind of novel–the kind that a reader manages to connect to and be challenged by simultaneously. It deals a lot with loss, guilt, and the frustration of trying to reconcile one’s own convictions with the realities of everyday life, and although it was written and is set between the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, it feels very current.
The main character is named Anthony Beavis, and Huxley jumps backward and forward in time while following his life, weaving a narrative that crosscuts between his Anthony’s life before and after the suicide of his best friend Brian, a tragedy that he seems to feel responsibility for, both as a personal betrayal, and as the loss of a friend who seems to represent the conscience of Anthony’s sensitive, passive but caring and thoughtful persona. The other main characters are Mary Amberly and her daughter Helen, a pair of women who Anthony orbits in a kind of romance that comes into focus as the book continues, and is clearly, increasingly doomed. There is no great external conflict, other than a man struggling to come to terms with himself, and a doomed love affair–a lot of the novel’s conflict is internal–with Anthony trying to find his place in the world, and here Huxley’s writing is fascinating, as the character’s attempt to find some kind of balance between his ideals and desires to make the world a better place, and his awareness of his own weaknesses, and those of the world around him. When I write it out like that, it sounds as though there are some similarities with J.D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye‘, and I guess there are. Although the two novels tread similar ground, the overlap is limited. Holden Caulfield is a teenager, and an equal-opportunity critic. Everyone is a bum or a phoney. Beavis, on the other hand, is an adult throughout much of Huxley’s book (which identifies the fact that soul-searching, contrary to the wishes of some, doesn’t end as soon as you get out of high school or college) and is able to rank different people and ideas in his head. Indeed, you could say that in some ways, he’s the inverse of Caulfield. Salinger’s narrator thinks everyone else is a phoney. Beavis’s problem is that he thinks he’s a phoney, and every time he tries to rectify the problem, something happens to make it worse.
There is some awkward philosophizing by characters late in the novel that almost feels like a form of exposition, trying to wrap up the book the way Huxley wanted it, but it’s more than balanced by many of the passages throughout–Huxley’s ruminations on society, his portrayal of Beavis’s grief over the death of his mother, and the wedge it drives between him and his father–his quixotic, and knowingly stupid pursuit of Mary, and her daughter Helen’s just as knowing, and frustrated attempts to navigate society in her own way. It’s a very good book, but even better than that, for me, it’s a book that stayed with me, and that I’m still turning over in my mind. The books that disappear from memory right after you close them are the ones that you can skip reading in the first place. The ones that make it all worthwhile are the ones that stay with you for years after. I think I’ll be adding this one to the list.
July 26, 2010
It’s difficult to pull yourself away from the hammock in the Summertime and lay down some thoughts, but given all of the beach reading that goes on in the season, it’s a perfect time to record some thoughts about reading that I’ve had recently.
I mentioned John Connolly’s very fun novel The Gates in my last posting, and since then, I’ve read several more books. Of special note I’d like to single out China Mieville’s twisting detective story The City & The City about a murder in a fictional city that’s part of a divided pair with a secretive and torturous history. Mieville’s prose continues to mature, but it’s still the crisp, energetic writing of someone who loves what he’s doing (that is, building imaginary worlds) and is very good at it. The distinctive geography and legal issues raised by Mieville’s setting make for some good, thought-provoking twists and turns.
I also was very struck by a novel called Almost Dead by a writer named Assaf Gavron, who I’d not heard of before (sometimes it’s good to pick books up on a whim). The front cover of the book bills it as a comedy in the vein of ‘Catch-22′, and that seems apt, if a little overly confident on how much of the book’s focus is on the jokes. Not to say it isn’t a funny book, at times, in a blackly deadpan sort of way, but it felt like a serious story when I was reading it, and the book’s final chapters are quite tense and dramatic. The story is set in Israel, and follows two narrators, each first-person, in alternating chapters. One speaks primarily in the past tense and is nicknamed ‘Croc’, a young Jewish yuppie from Tel Aviv who survives several terrorist bombings, and becomes a hapless symbol of resistance in the Israeli media. The other is Fahmi, a young Palestinian who drifts back and forth between the hospital bed where he is confined, and the past, and who increasingly, in the past that he is recounting, finds himself drawn into a collision course with Croc. Several tragedies occur that I won’t spoil, in case any of you pick up the book, but I will note that for someone like myself, who is not an expert when it comes to Israel and the West Bank, the setting and characters of this store were vividly described, and compelling. It felt like a minor miracle, but the characters were sympathetic across the board, and in contrasting Croc’s point of view with Fahmi’s, and making both individuals well-r0unded and compelling, Gavron has crafted a novel that demands to be digested thoughtfully, and lingers long after you’ve finished reading it, regardless of what one’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are.
It’s also quite notable this month that Amazon.com, the online bookseller, announced a first-ever milestone. For the first time ever, e-book sales for the Amazon Kindle surpassed hardcover sales to customers. Longtime readers will be aware that I’ve been…..suspicious of e-books in the past, to put it kindly, but I can see the writing on the wall: Clearly, this isn’t a fad. Electronic texts have reached the point where they’re as viable as paperbacks–and possibly would be as common if they were a little bit cheaper. As an interested reader, this leaves me with several questions–first of all, if I am going to get a Kindle or other E-book reader, what should I buy, and why? And secondly, what does this mean for people who make their living from books?
Bookstores have become an increasingly endangered relic over the past few years, and I imagine that, as hardcovers become more of a boutique item, that will only continue. At the same time, I’m curious as to how widespread use of kindles and other e-books is affecting how we read and how we share books. For instance, I know that if I’m sitting in a cafe scribbling in my notebook, and I look over at the next table where someone is reading a hardcover, I can make a note of the author and title, make a snap judgment about who that person is and why they’re reading that book, even perhaps strike up a conversation.
If, on the other hand, the person is reading a kindle, I’m out of the loop unless I broach the silence with a quick ‘What’re you reading on that thing? There are numerous other differences between a book that’s a physical object, of course, and a book file that’s stored on an electronic device–lending to friends, for instance. As the E-Book reaches maturity, however, I guess I’m going to have to start getting accustomed to those differences sooner, rather than later.
July 4, 2010
Last month was quite a busy one, and it seems apt to take some time this holiday weekend and start to share some of the books I’m reading during the Summer months. If you’ve been reading this space for a while, you’ll know that one of my favorite times for catching up with books I’ve been meaning to read, or trying out new authors blind.
Well, now that we’re into July, I’ve had my first pleasant surprise for the Summer of 2010. This is due to a novel called ‘The Gates‘ by John Connolly, an Irish writer whose last novel, The Book of Lost Things, I also enjoyed. The Gates is the sort of book that I would have loved to read when I was ten or so and my imagination was firing on all cylinders–it’s about a boy who has to save the world from the local coven who ‘accidentally’ open a gate to hell, while also managing to be about the Large Hadron Collider and quantum physics. The tale itself is a darkly humorous one, and the demons, for all the loving descriptions Connolly uses, are not that threatening.
The heroes of the book are a young boy named Samuel Johnson and his dog Boswell, and the story begins with them stumbling over the demonic plot while Trick – or Treating. The plot unspools from there, with Sam trying to alert others fruitlessly to the fact that his neighbors have been replaced with demons and are planning to take advantage of the LHC to ‘open the gates’ so to speak, between Hell and Earth. In other hands, this might come across as grim and epic as, say, Stephen King’s The Stand. Connolly, however, has a very light touch, and the resulting tale that he spins has more in common with something like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens.
It is, pardon the term, a family-friendly apocalypse, and one that manages to find a happy ending. The prose is light and whimsical, the chemistry between the young hero and his dog is charming, and the cover, festooned with all sorts of fangs and spikes, will definitely stand out if you take it to the beach with you. It is, in other words, just the right type of book for the season. Here’s hoping I’m as lucky with the next few novels I have stacked on the shelf to keep me company while I’m in the hammock.
Thoughts on Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes
This is a first for me—sitting down and writing a review of a book that I’ve read BECAUSE of Zaptown-a book that’s been sent to me specifically to get my thoughts on it in writing. The book in question is called ‘Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes‘ and it’s part of Praeger’s ‘Modern Filmmakers‘ series. The author is Aaron Barlow. Now, I like movies. A lot. I’ve watched my share. However, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say I’ve never really connected strongly to Quentin Tarantino. despite being of the generation that came of age in the 1990′s. My favorite film of his is probably Jackie Brown, which I sat down and rewatched after reading Barlow’s book. I have fond associations linking Reservoir Dogs to my adolescence, and I sat in a movie theater last year with my mouth hanging open at the last third of Inglourious Basterds, a movie that I may not have loved, but sure as heck admired. On the other hand, the Kill Bill films left me sort of cold, and my primary association when I think of Pulp Fiction is sitting in my friend’s living room as a teenager, wincing and trying to count the swear words, as his parents sat silently in the next room, pretending not to listen to what we were watching. Death Proof? Haven’t seen it.
I mention this because I want to be clear. While I really like reading about movies, and have nothing against Tarantino, I don’t consider myself an ‘easy audience’ in this case. The worrisome thought had crossed my mind that I might open the book, start reading, and draw a blank on what to say. This concern came back in the preface, where Barlow points out that the book itself is a work in progress, and that the focus of each individual chapter, whether Mr. Tarantino’s life itself, or the individual movies being analyzed, could support books of their own. I was concerned, imagining a book that either would be a simple summary or one that wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already think—albiet from the perspective of someone who liked Tarantino quite a bit more than I did.
Always pleased to be proven wrong, I turned to the first chapter. I’ve always thought of Tarantino as a somewhat postmodern, ironic filmmaker. Barlow—politely, gently, but firmly, asserted in the first chapter that this was a misunderstanding on my part and he was going to tell me why. So much for simple summaries. Indeed, Barlow’s starting point for his entire examination of Tarantino’s films is that Quentin is NOT postmodern at all, despite being given the label early in his career. My curiosity was piqued, it didn’t hurt that Barlow drew some parallels between one of my favorite writers, Philip K. Dick, and Tarantino as two individuals who were misunderstood for the way that they used genre trappings. Maybe I’ve been wrong about Tarantino all these years? I turned the pages, increasingly curious to see where Barlow’s argument was going.
What followed were several short chapters that are packed with information and arguments about Tarantino, and the way he’s acted as a marker of sorts in changing way audiences relate to the films that they see. Especially interesting, (although I’m not sure I was entirely convinced) is the way that Barlow examines Tarantino’s films as a series of farces, at least in the way that they deal with violence (Tragicomedy, he points out, is not the same as gratuitous exploitation). When Barlow moves on to discuss the individual films in the framework he has established, giving each a chapter, he does so in succinct, vivid terms. The tone here is strengthened by the way Barlow’s writing allows his personality to come through—he mentions early on walking out on Jaws because he found the soundtrack an overt attempt at managing his emotions, for instance, and the effect of such anecdotes is that of listening to one interesting film-lover discuss the work of another. The analysis of Reservoir Dogs, and that film’s use of music (compared with Jaws, f’rinstance) is one place where I found myself nodding my head at articulation of something I had found effective, but never really recognized, and the chapter on Inglourious Basterds where he points out (with an accurate turn of phrase, I think) that by (Spoiler!) killing Hitler, Basterds kills the genre of the ‘serious’ WWII movie.
Each of the film-centric chapters has several such points where I found myself nodding my head in agreement, or thinking about elements of Tarantino’s films in a new light. The book went by much more quickly than I expected, and when I came to the end of it, I found myself having really enjoyed Barlow’s company and more than willing to welcome him back to my bookshelf in the future. And while the text didn’t shift Tarantino to the top of my list of favorite directors, it did make me quite a bit more sympathetic to the man’s accomplishments, and curious to revisit his films from a different perspective in the future. Anyone who enjoys Tarantino’s movies and wants a greater context to place them in(which, last I checked, IS a sizable number of people) or simply would like to share in the enthusiasm of a knowledgable narrator while thinking about issues such as violence in film and how we react to it would find it well worth their time to peruse the book.
May 9, 2010
And every once in a while you read a book that is itself a fairly fast read, but leaves you thinking for a while, unsure what to say about it. A lot of the time, these are books that touch you unexpectedly in some way. Or, they may be books that you feel are a success on one level, but problematic on another. Sometimes, they’re even both. I have a soft spot for fantasy novels, a particular favorite genre of mine as a teenager. Granted, there’s a lot of terrible fantasy out there (just as there’s a lot of bad books in any genre), but I always found when fantasy worked WELL, it was like watching the writer come up with new legends. And that was pretty exciting.
One of my particularly favorite fantasy novels, as a younger person, was Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, the tale of an enchanted wood (or was it? In the Arthur C. Clarke sense, this could actually be a Science Fiction novel) and the effect it has on a dysfunctional family, on a pair of brothers and their estranged father, and the ghost of a woman they’re all chasing. It was a terrific book, and it spawned several indirect-sequels also dealing with the wood, the mythagos in it, and the stories of various people drawn into the wood.
Robert Holdstock died last year. His last novel, Avilon, was a direct sequel to Mythago Wood. Continuation of the characters and the story of that original story. A story, that, at the time, had had what I felt was a perfect ending. And on the other hand, aware that Holdstock was gone, that this was, so to speak, his last word on the subject, I opened his last book, and found that yeah, there was Steven and Guiwenneth and their children. Even Christian, not dead after all. It is a story, as Holdstock says in his introduction, about Resurrection, about life and death, and the places where we cross.
And when I realized it was a direct sequel, it suddenly became a much trickier book for me, as a reader, because I’d liked the end of Mythago Wood, so much. And Avilon takes the characters and their children to some very different places. The book unfolds slowly, but the locus of the plot is that Steven and Guiwenneth have had two children, Jack and Yssobel, who are essentially half human and half ‘mythago’, due to the influence of their mother. At the same time, Steven and Guiwenneth’s marriage life has become strained–the tension between the legend ending and life going on/another story starting? Either way, it isn’t long before Steven and Guiwenneth have become physically separated in the realm of the wood, and Jack and Yssobel take separate paths to try and reunite their family–Yssobel chasing her mother deeper into teh forest, and Jack heading to the outskirts of the wood, to try and find some solution to the problem in the Huxley family home, abandoned on the outskirts of the forest.
The story that unfolds does not provide the same sort of mythic simplicity as the end of the original novel, but it does have the force of legend and the ring of truth to it, and there is a great degree of reflection on life and death in the book’s final chapters especially. It did make me want to go back and read the rest of the Mythago cycle, and though I’m not sure I’ll have the time anytime soon, I definitely am curious to see what I make of the original book, next time I re-read it, knowing (as I now do) that the end of the story is not really the end.
