Posts Tagged: Book Review

Novel — No Comments
19
Apr 12

A Review Of Black Swan Green: Kids Are Bastards

Black Swan GreenOne of the better books I’ve read in recent years is Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. It was my first Mitchell novel and I was extremely taken by its structure, six tangentially related stories that followed one upon the other. I highly recommend it.

But I’m here to review one of his other novels that I’ve just completed, Black Swan Green. I don’t know much about Mitchell, but I did recently listen to a Fresh Air interview in which he spoke about growing up with a stutter. Seeing as how the main character of Black Swan Green is a thirteen-year-old with a stutter, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this novel is at least partially biographical.

More than just the stutter, this novel is about what it’s like being bullied as a teenager. Jason tries to navigate his way into the popular crowd at school, but never manages to get past the periphery. It gets to the point that he’s scared to go to school, he’s scared to face his parents, he’s scared to talk to anyone. He’s pretty much scared the entire novel. Even during his brief moments of happiness, it’s always apparent that he’s one stutter or misstep away from being humiliated.

Bullying is a subject that seems to be in the news a lot in the past decade, what with the Columbine murders and countless examples of persecuted teens taking their own lives. Black Swan Green gives a very bleak picture of what it’s like to be bullied, and anyone who’s ever been on either side of the bullying equation will recognize themselves in the novel. Basically, the story reminds us that kids are bastards. And so are adults.

Black Swan Green is not as satisfying as Cloud Atlas. It’s a more personal story told on a much smaller scale. It feels more open-ended. There is a conclusion, but there’s no true resolution for most of the characters. We experience one extremely difficult school year in Jason’s adolescent life. I think it will be hard for a reader not to be moved by his experience but that doesn’t make it a great novel.

Novel / Writing — No Comments
20
Dec 11

Don’t Be A Pansy

I’m reading another Murakami book, this time What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It is a memoir about…well, running.

I’m only three chapters in but I felt compelled to write my review now rather than wait till i’m finished, because I just have to write about this immediately. I was particularly struck by this quote on p. 46*:

Whenever I feel like I don’t want to run, I always ask myself the same thing: You’re able to make a living as a novelist, working at home, setting your own hours, so you don’t have to commute on a packed train or sit through boring meetings. Don’t you realize how fortunate you are? (Believe me, I do.) Compared to that, running an hour around the neighborhood is nothing, right? Whenever I picture packed trains and endless meetings, this gets me motivated all over again and I lace up my running shoes and set off without any qualms. If I can’t manage this much, I think, it’ll serve me right.

I have the same sentiment about biking in Beijing. Every time I think it might be too cold to bike, I think about the old people who have no choice but to bike every day**. So many people are out biking in subzero temperatures, and they don’t even own gloves or hats. They must be dying, especially when the wind gets up, but there they are, biking along as stoically as can be.

If these people have to bike every day, then I certainly can too, with my expensive winter coat and gloves. Don’t be a pansy. That’s my motto. Except when it comes to Disney movies. And Harry Potter trailers.

Please Note, this blog does not mean to suggest that Murakami is a pansy. You on the other hand, probably are.

*All things being relative, citing the page number is relatively useless.

** They don’t have any choice about being old either. Cold and old. Is there a worse combination? If there is, I bet it doesn’t rhyme.

Novel / Writing — No Comments
15
Sep 11

Don’t Be An Asshole, And Other Things We Learned From Japan

I’m currently reading Murakami Haruki’s novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. As regular readers of The Chaos Factory know, I’m a big fan, and his latest novel is so good I’m ready to write a review and I’m only halfway through. Read this book. Or anything else by Murakami. You won’t regret it.

This one is a modern detective noir thriller, except nothing really happens. The hero does lay at the bottom of the well for three days, reflecting on the emptiness of his life, but I don’t know if that actually qualifies as a happening. Either way, it’s more exciting than a recent M. Night Shyamalan movie of the same name.

Even if you don’t read any of his novels, please take Murakami’s advice and don’t feel sorry for yourself. There are enough assholes in the world already.

Novel / Writing — No Comments
31
May 11

#2 The Great Gatsby

Continuing our series of reviews of the top 100 novels of the last 100 years, let’s move near the top. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby checks in at number 2 on the list. This wasn’t the first time I’ve read the novel, but it might as well be. I could remember almost nothing about it from my high school days, except for a general image of some people driving in a car towards a house. If that’s all I could remember, I figured there wasn’t much to recommend the novel and all the acclaim it received from literary critics and English teachers was mostly hype.

I’m here to admit that I was wrong.*

If you haven’t read The Great Gatsby, read it now. If you haven’t read it in a while, read it again. It is one of the most amazing pieces of fiction you’ll ever hold in your hands.

What stands out about the novel is the way it captures so perfectly a key component of human nature. Gatsby is consumed by his need to rekindle the past. He can’t let go of his memory of Daisy, and this singular obsession is what drives his entire life. He’s too overwhelmed to realize that the Daisy he loves is a figment of his imagination. It is inevitable, yet still tragic, that he learns people are who they really are, not who we wish them to be.

Fitzgerald writes:

I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams–not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.

The novel is short and simple and elegant. It so artfully expresses a feeling that we have all experienced, yet makes it seem fresh and profound while familiar at the same time.

But for all that, it is the following quote that summarizes exactly why I’ve fallen in love with the novel:

“He considered for a moment. Then, with reluctance: ‘I want to get the grass cut,’ he said.

We both looked down at the grass–there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that he meant my grass.

That, dear readers, is what Mrs. Libby meant when she said in 12th grade English class, “Show, don’t tell.” One simple exchange about lawn care tells us everything we need to know about the relationship between the narrator and Jay Gatsby.

*This does not happen often. Savor it.

Please Note, If anyone wants to volunteer to cut our grass, there’s no need to stand on formality. We encourage all of our readers to help out with the chores around here.

Writing — No Comments
3
Apr 10

The Movie Comes In Cinemascope

If we live in an age that will witness the death of literature, then we will experience the extinguishing of our creative life force. Literature is a record of all that makes us human, an attentive and thorough chronicling of the human condition. Without literature, we have spectacle and entertainment. We have, as Socrates says in Gorgias, pandering.

Steinback’s East of Eden is a serious novel. It traces the history of two families in his childhood home of Salinas, California. With the biblical story of Cain and Abel as its centerpiece, the novel posits on the nature of good and evil, and our fascination with sin and redemption.

Steinback writes: “And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.”

The novel is so good, I can pretend to overlook its misogyny. Steinback wrote it after his second divorce, and his animosity and venom get directed into the monstrous character of Cathy. She is pure evil, beyond redemption. Steinback referred to her as a representative as Satan. Regrettable, but not unforgivable.

East of Eden is a novel for people that love literature, and literature for people who love life.

Please note this blog post was purchased on eBay for seven dollars and fifty seven cents.

Writing — No Comments
18
Dec 09

If You Are Like Me, You Also Think Peter Jackson’s Best Movie Is The Frighteners

tender_is_the_nightIf you are like me, the only definitive knowledge of F. Scott Fitzgerald you possess was gleaned from high school English class, where you were forced to read The Great Gatsby. You most likely remember very little about it, but fancy it qualifies as great literature because Mrs. Libby insisted.

You might have a vague notion that after he wrote this great masterpiece of American literature, Fitzgerald dropped off the map. He gets mentioned at a dinner party, and, wanting to be a part of the conversation, you chime in by mentioning after he wrote his first novel, he became so wrapped up in his new-found celebrity, he took to living beyond his means, partied himself into irrelevancy, and never wrote a decent follow-up.

Fitzgerald is the 20th century’s first one-hit wonder, you propose, quite pleased with yourself.

Also, if you are like me, you have notebooks and notebooks stored in your mother’s basement with your plans to take over the world.

It turns out that you were wrong. Fitzgerald did produce a subsequent novel, Tender Is The Night, nine years after The Great Gatsby, in 1934.

Tender Is The Night, the ill-fated love affair between two wealthy expatriates flitting between the French Riviera and Switzerland, denounces the corrosive effect of too much money. No one has a firm idea of what they are supposed to be doing in life, but they insist on behaving civilly and circulating in the proper society while they figure it out.

If you are like me, you thoroughly enjoyed reading Tender Is The Night on the train from Beijing to Kunming, and you will recommend it to anyone who likes to grapple with life issues such as self-worth and sanity. Now if you could just get through chapter one of Ulysses.

Writing — No Comments
6
Jan 09

Time Waits For No Woman


There are two schools of thought about the nature of time traveling. First, there is the Back to the Future school. Proponents of this type of time traveling believe that you must constantly guard against changing the present by meddling in the past. Of equal importance, under no circumstances must you ever allow your past and future selves to meet. The consequences will be dire.

The second school of thought is explored in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. In this form of time travel, events have already been played out. If you want to get out of jail, sometime in the future, you can time travel to the past, and steal your dad’s keys and leave them in a convenient location so they will be accessible at the appropriate time and place. And since the keys are there when you need them, you need not worry about remembering to put them there in the future. You already know that you have put them there. And, of course, meeting your future self is all in good fun.

The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, definitively falls into the latter category. It tells the love story of Henry and Clare. He is a time traveler, but rather then having a time machine at his disposal, he has a genetic disorder beyond his control, and he pops in and out of time at random. She meets him when she is six, and she grows up falling in love with him during his numerous visits. The novel is a tightly woven patchwork of moments, as Henry passes into and out of Clare’s life, and his own past and future. As he is constantly running into different versions of himself, Henry soon learns that his future has already been written, and there is nothing he can do to change it.

Fate is an important theme. Clare is likened to a sailor or soldier’s wife, a modern day Penelope, always waiting for her husband and unable to control his comings and goings. She is an educated, talented, independent minded woman, but she is faced with the same predicament shared by women through out history, forced to watch passively as events are shaped by forces beyond her control. Except in this case, Henry is equally helpless. He has no control of his time traveling. It is difficult to know who has the harder time dealing with the unpredictability. Henry is forever scared of popping out at the wrong time, never knows where he will land, and is constantly forced to steal clothes and food and flee the police or whatever over testesteroned bully takes offense at a stark naked man running around the streets of Chicago.

What Clare most struggles with, and Harry as well, is the knowledge that their fate has already been determined. If they know their own future, and are helpless to change it, do they really have free will. I can imagine in many ways their experience is similar to what it is like for a women or minority in our society, where the circumstances of your birth limit your options from the start.

Eventually Clare embraces her fate. Her love for Henry outweighs her lack of free will:

Today is not much different from all the other days. I get up at dawn, put on slacks and a sweater, brush my hair, make toast, and tea, and sit looking at the lake, wondering if he will come today. It’s not much different from the many other times he was gone, and I waited, except that this time I have instructions: this time I know Henry will come, eventually. I sometimes wonder if this readiness, the expectation, prevents the miracle from happening. But I have no choice. He is coming, and I am here.

I would not recommend reading The Time Traveler’s Wife if you consider yourself a cynical person. I think Niffenegger is very sincere and earnest in her story telling. This is no straightforward story mind you. It is complexly woven, with a lot of frank and graphic situations like miscarriages and physical abuse, and does not have a traditionally happy ending. But these situations could verge on the edge of sentimentality for some. For me, it is real. This love is real love. It is imperfect love, it is love fraught with peril, with the fear of loss and the threat of being misunderstood. But it is deep and full and strong and Henry and Clare fight for each other and even if there is something of the melodramatic in their story, a heightened reality that verges on fantasy, I can relate to it. I am a sucker for sincerity every time, especially when it is combined with a compelling story.

Lyric of the Day:

Hear silver trumpets will trill
in the Arabic streets of Seville
Oranges roll in the gutter
And you pick them up
And pull back the skin
To the red fruit within

But the flavour is…Tart
And the flavour is…Tart

Is it something you crave
And you say that you
only feel bitterness
When you know it’s a lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie

Tart
-Elvis Costello

Novel / Writing — 2 Comments
19
Dec 08

Norwegian Wood came up on random play as I was writing this, suggesting that either life is not random, or I spent a long time to finish this review


I just finished reading Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. It is not an easy book to encapsulate, nor to recommend. It is at times depressing, and at other times quite graphic.

The story revolves around Toru Watanabe, whose best friend committed suicide while they were both 17 years old. A deathly pallor hangs over everything, and each character seems to confront reality in his or her own unique way. Just like Kundera’s Immortality presents a group of characters struggling with their identity in the face of their own mortality, Norwegian Wood likewise delves into the meaning of self when faced with life in a meaningless void. The novel is gripping in the way it portrays these tortured individuals who are never entirely comfortable in their own realities, and is certainly thought provoking, but it is not an easy read.

Sanity is an issue for several of the characters. Two have been voluntarily admitted to a kind of psychiatric retreat, and they repeatedly say the only difference between the people inside and the people outside is that the people inside know that they are crazy. Indeed, Toru’s friends on the outside are just as peculiar and maladjusted to society as his friends inside, maybe even more so. Toru himself feels isolated, and has few companions at his university, and struggles with the direction his life should take. He battles deep bouts of depression, and often retreats into complete solitude. He finds no comfort in the people around him, who are continually exposed as hypocrites. The one friend he regularly spends time with has overcome hypocrisy by living live as selfishly as he can, a kind of Nietzschean superman who feels nothing but contempt for most of the people around him, and in the end is revealed to have a pointless, empty life.

The ending offers little in the way of hope either. Life is lived until death, and their is no magical plan for happiness. The only sanctuary may be to find love, but love is fleeting and tortuous and convuluted and our own need to be wanted and understood too often gets in the way of our ability to return that love.

Gripping the reciever, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the phone box. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.

It is easy to get lost when we have no idea where we are or what direction we are headed, and when the road map presented to us directs us to keep moving forward but gives us no answer as to why we should go there or what to expect when we arrive. But for Toru, and all the characters in Norwegian Wood, that is the type of journey they are on. They can only hope they have a nice cold cucumber to enjoy along the way.

Novel / Writing — 1 Comment
30
Nov 08

Waiting For The Raven King


Susanna Clarke took over ten years to write her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. So the five years I have been working on mine seem like a pittance.

It was time well spent. You can read any review and find the basic premise: England of the early nineteenth century watches as two magicians battle to revive the lost art of English magic. A cross between Jane Austen and The Lord of the Rings. A Harry Potter for adults.

It is much closer to Austen than to Tolkien. We open on the English countryside, at a meeting of the Yorkshire Society of Magicians. Except these are not practical magicians, but theoretical. The last English Magician who could actually do magic disappeared over 200 years ago. No, these magicians merely debate and squabble over what magic used to be like, back when the Raven King still ruled the north.

That is, until a gentleman from Hurtfew Abbey named Mr. Norrell, shocks all of England by proving himself capable of casting spells. He comes to London as the only practitioner of English magic, but soon gains a rival, the younger and more handsome Jonathan Strange. Together they alternately excite and horrify London society as they battle to return English magic to glory.

The comparisons to Austen are just. Two qualities especially stand out as exemplary. First, is the description. The houses, the clothes, the manners, the social hierarchy, all are explained in rich detail. A delight and a humor gives the entire affair a serious levity. The greatest effort is made to infuse a narrative history into everything. The absence of magic can only be fully appreciated when juxtaposed with all the memories of England’s glorious past. An example:

Upon the instant, bells began to toll. Now these were nothing more than the bells of St. Michael-Le-Belfrey telling the half hour, but inside the Cathedral they had an odd, far-away sound like the bells of another country. It was not at all a cheerful sound. The gentleman of the York society knew very well how bells often went with magic and in particular with the magic of those unearthly beings, faeries; they knew how, in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever. Even the Raven King–who was not a fairy, but an Englishman–had a somewhat regrettable habit of abducting men and women and taking them to live with him in his castle in the Other Lands. Now, had you and I the power to seize by magic any human being that took our fancy and the power to keep that person by our side through all eternity, and had we all the world to chuse from, then I dare say our choice might fall on someone a little more captivating than a member of the Learned Society of York Magicians, but this comforting thought did not occur to the gentlemen inside York Cathedral and several of them began to wonder how angry Dr Foxcastle’s letter had made Mr Norrell and they began to be seriously frightened.

Second, even more impressively, is the way she uses character to drive the story. These are characters in the fullest sense of the word, each with his or her own idiosyncrasies. The heroes are not trying to save the world. The villains are not out to do evil. An excessive pride afflicts every male character of a certain social standing, almost as an afterthought. Clarke wants us to know that to be a gentleman in the nineteenth century means being elevated to a place of privilege that has nothing to do with your character, and that elevated status makes it impossible to escape a heightened egotism. The main antagonist, the man with thistle down hair, is a fairy, and so his motivations and ideas about right and wrong are quite foreign to us, but nothing in his character is especially malicious. He cannot help his capriciousness any more than Mr. Norrell can help his infuriating pettiness or Strange his melancholy temper.

Casting his shadow over the whole affair is the Raven King, the long departed king of Northern England who was the greatest magician to ever live. Legends of his exploits abound. Clarke has created an entire mythos, a lattice of folk tales and memories and place names and even whole geographies that have been left behind by John Uskglass, and everyone lives in either fear or expectation of his return.

Like Don Quixote and other massive epics of their ilk, the story is filled with digressions, interludes and side stories, not to mention a copious amount of footnotes. Every character has a story to go with him or her, and every story is filled with character. She allows the story to meander over its first two thirds, as we become fully immersed in this world, and then drives it to a furious conclusion.

Every one of you should read this book.

Optimized by SEO Ultimate