The Fifty Year Sword, by Mark Danielewski

Meh.

I LOVED House of Leaves, but I can't quite bring myself to read Only Revolutions, because it looks like it's a lot of effort without much pay-off. The Fifty Year Sword seemed promising though - a creepy story, not too difficult. And I will give it credit, it's not - I read it in an hour. But it's also not that great. This is unfortunate, because I think Danielewski has the potential to be a fantastic writer. His prose is strangely magnetic and really sucks you in. And the "effects" he's interested in are sometimes quite effective - particularly the arrangement of words on the page. But other ones seem pretty gratuitous. In this book, for instance, we are told at the beginning that there are five different speakers, and that who is actually talking will be indicated by the color of quotation marks. So for starters, the colors are quite similar. Secondarily, the voices aren't that different. Thirdly, it arguably doesn't really matter, because they seem to all be talking at once and producing something awfully similar to a monologue, so who cares. I find myself wishing he would just write a good story and spend less time with the conceptual stuff, but then again, sometimes the conceptual stuff is kind of neat. The fact that most of this story is only on the left hand side of the page does have some kind of effect in this book. I can't explain it, but it  does generate some sort of mental state in you as you read. The illustrations, unfortunately, are not especially effective, and seem rather shabby, and the red thread that binds that book is just...silly.

Essentially, you have an extremely talented writer relating a pretty stock and cliche tale, and loading it with a bunch of "special effects," very few of which actually add to the story. It's a pity, really. Danielewski seems capable of so much better.

Queen of Montreuil

I have made it a sort of informal rule that whenever an opportunity arises to see an Icelandic film, I seize it. Especially if the description is somewhat bizarre. Because in my experience, Icelandic films are fantastic and weird and actually, they are just like their descriptions, it's just that they are so off-beat and quirky that they can't really be described, except it extremely basic plot points which do not do justice to the whole. Queen of Montreuil is indeed about a French woman who returns to Montreuil to grieve over her husband's death, and then somewhat randomly an Icelandic woman and her son arrive, and also a sea lion. It won't make any more sense to add that the Icelandic woman is returning from Jamaica, where another son of hers lives, or that she befriends a construction worker. Nothing is really going to give you any sense of what this movie is like, except to say that it's funny and sweet and just overall great. The plot, inasmuch as there is one, is subtle and understated, allowing information to emerge gradually, except when its fantastically improbable in a delightfully absurd sort of way.
Just go see it, if you can.

Pow! by Mo Yan

I have been neglecting this blog so hard. I'm sorry blog. Neglect has a way of being cumulative, where you get this unfortunate inertia built up, so I'm going to try and make some baby steps into posting more regularly again. Part of this involves deciding that a short crappy post is better than no post at all. But apologies in advance if these are short and crappy.

I picked up Pow! while in the States because my mom was interested in reading it. She and I generally get around to reading the Nobel Prize winners (you know, you kinda gotta), but this one was a little intimidating, on account of being so long. Once I started reading though, I was hooked. It's a totally bizarre book, and definitely not for everyone, but I found it totally engrossing. For all its weirdness, there's also something profoundly familiar about the emotions being depicted, making the book incredibly moving, even though the plot is totally out there. While I thought the comparison to Gombrowicz (made on the dust jacket) was apt, this book packed much more of a punch emotionally, perhaps because it eschewed narcissistic forrays into meta-fiction.

The novel follows a scene of storytelling - a guy telling a monk about his life. Interspersed with the narration are these weird, dream-like sequences where totally random things happen. The guy's story is itself pretty strange; when he is a young boy, his parents split up (his father runs away with another woman), and his mother is strict and miserly. Our hero's biggest gripe is that he doesn't get to eat meat - he loves meat. As the novel progresses, he comes to see himself as a kind of meat-whisperer - he has a special relationship with it, understands it in ways others can't, etc. His love for it occasionally leads the book into the grotesque - parts of the story are definitely not for the squeamish - but there's also something kind of cute about it.

Overall, it's definitely a book you need to be in the right mood for, but if you are, it's really something.

Chike and the River, by Chinua Achebe

On the occasion of his passing, it seemed appropriate to pay homage to Achebe by reading something he wrote. Of his works, I've actually only ever read Things Fall Apart and his deservedly famous take-down of Conrad (I don't entirely agree with it, but I do think it's a must-read), but I've heard his other books are really great. So I read Chike and the River, which is quite short - I got through it in half an hour. It's meant to be a children's story (and was recently re-released by Anchor Books with beautiful illustrations), but it's quite pleasurable for adults as well.

Chike is an eleven year old boy who moves away from his small village to his uncle's house in a bugger city by the Niger river. He is told that it's possible to cross the river by ferry boat, and he dreams of doing so. The book is basically the story of his attempts to make it happen, and all the adventures he has along the way. The seeming simplicity of the work conceals some of its underlying elegance - it's chock-full of subtle touches that warm my analytic cockles. I particularly appreciated, for instance, a moment when Chike relates a saying he's heard, but adds his own spin on it - a lovely example of oral tradition getting modernized, and also a nice way of sort of integrating local story telling traditions into this bigger form. And of course, Chike's wanderings give you a bit of a glimpse into the society he comes from, without coming across as blatant touristic-type writing. The book isn't obviously addressed to a Western audience or made to seem like a display of local culture (some of the words get footnotes with explanations, but they most seem to be the Britishisms, rather than, for instance, the pidgin, or even the word pidgin, which is interesting). It's a sweet story about a little boy who wants to ride a ferry boat. If you have kids, get them a copy. If you don't, maybe get yourself one =-)

New look

I know. I hate it. I just noticed that my blog was apparently switched over to some hideous new template. I restored the black background, but it seems that all the nice stuff I had in the sidebar is just gone. Thanks, blogger.

Edit: I managed to restore the Ad Free Blog banner, which is quite important to me, and a little plug for free rice (apparently their banners have gotten a lot uglier - now a bunch of them say Rice up! which is just SO obnoxious). The rest, we'll just have to live without, my friends. 

Bhaji on the Beach

I picked this one up somewhat randomly at my local video rental (aka, the school library) - it's the same director (Gurinder Chadha) as made Bend it Like Beckham, which I love, and looked to be a similarly rollicking comedy about South Asians living in England. And it is, but it's marred by a bit more earnestness. A large group of women is going on a day trip to the sea shore. Each of them becomes emblematic of a set of Issues confronting Indian women living in Britain; whether it is how to maintain tradition, how to adapt to a new culture, racism, inter-racial dating, children out of wedlock, divorce, etc. They aren't flat characters, fortunately, but it does make the movie rather insistently about Social Problems. It illuminates them effectively, and it is overall a pretty poignant set of stories. But you don't end up feeling like wow! What a great movie!

Actually, at the end I felt a bit heart-sick. While the film does try to end on a cheerful note, it climaxes with this terrifying scene of domestic abuse that reveals the persistent sexism that still imprisons many women in this culture, and while this one case seems to resolve itself, you know that you're seeing a real problem that continues to affect many women even today. And it fills you - or at least me - with both grief and rage.

Overall, it's a pleasant and competent film (I think I felt the same way about Bride and Prejudice, one of her later films), but definitely doesn't live up to Beckham. I certainly wouldn't mind watching more of her movies though - imdb has a nice long list of them, most of which I've never heard of!

Tenth of December, by George Saunders

I had never heard of this book until Mimi Smartypants, whose blog I read semi-regularly, mentioned it and said it is a rare case of a book that absolutely lives up to the hype.* I looked it up and ended up buying the e-book, because it seemed interesting. Next thing I know, I'm seeing references to it everywhere. So why not, I plunged in.

 And I was completely blown away. From the very first story, just wow. These stories are so weird and funny and insightful, I had a hard time putting the book down. It absolutely sucked me in. Not only are the events described the perfect combination of the everyday and the wacky (in one story, for instance, you gradually become aware that this semi-mundane tale of a guy winning the lottery is set in some unspecified future), but the narrative voices are both familiar and strange, exceptionally well realized. I found myself caring fiercely about the characters and sympathizing with them even when they were being sort of awful. It was kind of amazing.

Buy this book. It is phenomenal.

*In the same entry, she also recommended this GQ article about Burning Man, which I also really enjoyed.

Sculptor's Daughter, by Tove Jansson

I have made a project of gradually reading all of Tove Jansson's novels for adults, although I've apparently only blogged about one of them.*  A lot of these stories (a full 2/3 of them) are in Winter's Tales. But I think this collection of works is somewhat more coherent than that one. There's more of a unified perspective. The book is meant to be a memoir of sorts, but I don't think that's the way to approach it - it's really more of a collection of stories, or even fragments.

They are interesting stories, in that they are very much from a (precocious) child's point of view - which makes them both marvelous and somewhat incoherent. A paratactic structure without much in the way of causation or logical connection (this happened and then this and then this), and sometimes, words that get used just because the narrator likes them, not because of their meaning; like a child imitating adult speech. "Explosion is a beautiful word and a very big one. Later I learned others, the kind you can whisper only when you're alone. Inexorable. Ornamentation. Profile. Catastrophic. Electrical. District Nurse." (21) It's a strange world that she evokes, but a wonderful one. You definitely can see how that same mind created the Moomin universe

*If you are curious, my favorites are Fair Play, and Summer Book.  I think Summer Book is probably the better entry point into her novels, but Fair Play is just amazing.