April 24, 2007
It's hard to find good music
Indeed, I successfully defended my Masters Thesis yesterday, and came home to this beautiful bouquet sent by my family. Lucky I, and luckier still for this Saturday afternoon Stuart and I are going out to celebrate the end of school in the fashion I have chosen, and it is a very special fashion. I can’t wait to tell you all about it.
Linkylink:
-Find an update over at my hobby blog Now Doing! Posted are pictures of the blanket I knit this winter, and my current patchwork project.
-I was thrilled to find out that the marvelous Saffrina Welch has started a blog. Saff is a friend of Stu’s from uni, and when she and her boyfriend Ivan came to stay with us in December, we had a brilliant time. So it will be fun to see what she gets up to online.
-Bookwise, I was happy to see that Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage has been nominated for the Orange Award for New Writers. As I expressed when I read it last March, The Lizard Cage is an extraordinary novel, and deserves so much recognition.
-I’ve never read Barbara Pym, but I feel like I ought to after having read this wonderful feature on the Barbara Pym Society Conference.
-And on an unrelated note: Kirsten Dunst is credited with saying: “I was brought up on Guns ‘N Roses, the Les Miserables soundtrack and anything my mother listened to. But it’s much harder to find great music these days.” Bless.
Still reading Happenstance very happily, though copy errors make my eyes bleed. I also picked up the new Hart House Review today and it’s absolutely beautiful. The ever-accomplished Rebecca Rosenblum took a top prize for fiction. Congratulations RR! Some poetry as well by other creative writing comrades. What a bunch.
April 17, 2007
Short Orange
Announced: the Orange shortlist. And we will be cheering for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie all the way.
April 15, 2007
We forgot my father-in-law
I love it when I’m reading and I can pinpoint the moment a book casts its spell. Suite Francaise took a little while, but at the end of page 112 when I gasped audibly with horror and surprise (laced with the slightest dash of amusement), I was hooked. I’ve just finished “Storm in June” now, and I am looking forward to the rest.
April 13, 2007
Smart books
I don’t know how to calculate the odds that going to my bookshelf and pulling down In the Skin of a Lion to check a reference on page 106 for the paper I am marking, I will open the book right to page 106 without thinking. In fact I don’t really want to know the odds, because I like the idea of some sort of a connection between my head, my hands and the text itself. This happens often at my library job where I go to retrieve a book, I know the general area, and then reading the call number I realize that my intended book is right where my hand already rests, or that it was the first book I looked at on the shelf. Sometimes books do know us better than we know ourselves.
However Rebecca Rosenblum is experiencing the opposite phenomenon today. Much concerned is she that her Jane Eyre has disappeared!
April 12, 2007
There she blows
Margaret Drabble writes with an omniscience that absolutely wows me. Rereading The Realms of Gold is like being strapped inside a rocket ship. Though the rocket permeates the depths of consciousness rather than outer space. It’s really quite a Woolfian book in many respects, which I didn’t notice when I read it first three years ago. It didn’t get a very good review in the NYTimes when it came out in 1975 though. Funny how much the criticism in that review is so similar to reviews of Drabble’s most recent book. Funny also that when I read bad reviews of Margaret Drabble’s work, I don’t ever necessarily disagree with them, but it never means I love her any less. In fact I think my love for Margaret Drabble may be unconditional. This, however, does not mean I intend to read her biography of Arnold Bennett ever.
Upcoming bookishness: Suite Francais, Kitchen, The Horseman’s Graves, and Open because The Calhoun says so.
Marking continues. 46 down. Yesterday’s treat was lunch with RR.
April 8, 2007
Woke up this morning feeling fine
Japan was in the news last week, mostly unfortunately through this murder which has been sensationalized by the red-tops in Britain. I appreciated measured responses to the hype here inThe Times. (Judging from reader comments, clearly not everyone appreciated the first article as much as I did. The venom it unleashed was sort of baffling, but then a lot of people don’t like to call racism by its name). More positively, Top Ten Books Set in Japan by Fiona Campbell who has just published Death of a Salaryman. (Incidentally, I’ve only read number 10 but plan to read Kitchen someday soon.)
Lionel Shriver happily reviews Nora Ephron. I want to read Julie Burchill’s book on Brighton. Rounding up responses to Didion on stage. This review makes me so excited to read the new McEwan. I love this: Sunday Morning Music.
Now rereading The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble, for kicks.
I’ve marked thirty essays, and as I’ve only done four and three today and yesterday, the weekend has contained some aspects of nice. Yesterday we partook in lattes over the paper in Kensington, and today we ate our delightful M&S Easter Treats from England. But otherwise, yes, not much has occurred. Life continues on hold. The notable event of the weekend continues to be that I brought a very large object into our home, oh and mustn’t forget the startling revelation (to the sound of Herman’s Hermits) that I dance like my dad.
April 7, 2007
Yolk
Busy week here at Pickle Me This. 23 essays down, and I am pretty deranged. Life is dullsville at the moment as marking is almost all. This Easter weekend will be a fairly lacklustre affair, unfortunately. And the weather is absolute garbage. Which I guess is not the worst seeing as I have to spend most of it indoors.
I went to see Lionel Shriver and Jacqueline Baker read on Wednesday. I am looking forward to reading Baker’s novel soon, and Lionel Shriver was so terribly nice and thoughtful toward those of us who approached her to get our books signed. She read with such authority, and I think she’s such a fascinating woman. She reported being interested in depictions of contentment, and how such portrayals are received as “boring”. She said she was going to making a point of reading us the “boring bits” of her novel that evening, and they were wonderful.
April 1, 2007
Chick-Lit/Lit-Fic Showdown
In this post from a couple of weeks back, I took offence at this kind of attempt to blur the chick-lit/lit fic divide. By all means chick lit deserves to thrive, but the divide is important, and essential. All lit is not created alike, said I, and when the plots of two books from different sides of the tracks are so similar, here is a chance to pinpoint what distinguishes a work of chick-lit from one of literary fiction. And I suspected the difference was language primarily, so I read both books to be sure.
The literary book was Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World, and I’m going to call the other book MVM. You can find the book’s actual title by going back to my previous post, but I don’t think it’s fair for me to identify it and slag it off for being nothing more than what it purports to be– chick-lit. Because the author of MVM makes no attempt to blur the lit divide. She publishes under an exclusively chick-lit imprint after all, and the genre seems to have been good to her.
Upon first glance MVM does bear a resemblance to The Post-Birthday World. In the first book, character G finds herself inhabiting two realities as she is unable to make the choice between marrying her boyfriend in Arizona, and pursuing her career in New York. Somehow she gets both options (through a wish upon a star, I believe), and hilarity ensues. In PBW, at the choice of to kiss another man or not to kiss, Irina’s life splits in two and the reader follows each outcome in alternating chapters. As she is unaware of her dual realities, very little hilarity ensues, and as I wrote in my review post, what we have instead is an examination of intimacy, and the sombre reality that life is generally trying no matter which way you cut it.
I think it is unfair to compare MVM to PBW, but it wasn’t my idea. And yes, my hypothesis that language is the great divide between these two novels is partially true. Partially, because that divide is a veritable grand canyon, but nonetheless. Lionel Shriver’s book is a tad overwritten in places, and I did come away with a list of fourteen words I had to look up in the dictionary afterwards. Some of them were very good: post-prandial. Whereas in MVM the author does not rely so much upon words to emphasize ideas, but rather prefers to repeat phrases, in the manner of “He’s funny. He’s really really funny.” Or preface unbelievable ideas with “Hello?”, as in “The women make brunch while the men watch sports on TV. Hello, stereotype?” Which brings me to the question marks. Character G talks in permanent unspeak. Reading her first person narrative is sort of like eavesdropping upon the soliloquy of a rambling idiot.
There aren’t a lot of metaphors in this book, but here’s one: “I close my eyes, squeezing out the annoyance like that last drop of toothpaste”. G is able to dismiss the challenges of her new life in New York with a simple “Whatever”. She uses a similar ease to deal with the fact she is now inhabiting two alternate universes, consulting wikipedia to learn a bit about “quantum mechanics (whatever the hell that is)”. She learns that there are many theories of alternate universes and therefore her own strange reality might have some precedent. She says, “You can’t rule out something just because it can’t be proven, can you? There are like a million religions and none of them can be proven!”
The PBW is quite unsentimentally full of sex, description and analysis, while MVM tends to gloss over it. I will give you a sex scene verbatim: “Afterward we go to bed and I seduce him immediately. ‘That was fun,’ he says afterward.” Those two “afterwards” and an “immediately” in two sentences give you some sort of an idea of this books pacing, and the consideration allotted to its scenes. We have such devices as “As I sat waiting for my appointment, I thought about my entire life up till now just to get my reader up to speed without having to impart these details subtly”. We learn what G’s future mother-in-law thinks about her because the woman keeps expounding on G’s flaws when G is standing just around the corner. We know the mother-in-law has bad taste because she is partial to orange. We know that characters are surprised when their jaws drop.
For the first two third of this book, I hated it, and I very nearly abandoned it except I thought maybe it got better. It didn’t, really. I did like G’s “psycho roomate” however, who was very funny, but hardly a developed character and her tricks wore thin eventually. I also liked the plot twist as G’s maid-of-honour in one reality starts dating her ex-boyfriend in the other reality, and G’s resentment bubbles into both worlds. However she only deals with this by ignoring her maid-of-honour altogether, which doesn’t exactly make for compelling fiction. Oh, and the end? Hello, spoilers ahead! In the ends G learns that you can have it all and lives happily ever after. And (presumably) loses her best-friend/maid of honour.
This next paragraph would be diatribe on how truly crap is MVM, but I think I’ve made my point. PBW took me four days to read, and inspired me to think about the nature of choices, the possibility of destiny, different kinds of love and fulfillment, and what it means to share a life. I read MVM last evening and it made me depressed that such trite can pass for lit, chick or otherwise. As I said in my previous post, readers should demand better of themselves and their books.
April 1, 2007
Long live Skegness
Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is another book I missed the point of as a teenager, and Jeanette Winterson’s celebration inspires me to read it again. Ian McEwan profiled in The Globe, and reviewed (favourably!) in The Guardian. Lionel Shriver is reviewed less favourably, and though I take the reviewer’s points about the troublesome language, I think she misses the nuances of the story. Further, this is a reviewer who disliked Shriver’s last book and seems to be unaware of the six preceding it. I don’t know if that is altogether fair. And though a subscription is required to read this article online, I did enjoy it in my print edition. How Britons don’t appreciate their “crap towns”, and a wee celebration of the British seaside. Long live Skegness.
April 1, 2007
Post-Birthday Republic
What a funny world books are, and what connections are made just by chance of choosing. I’m currently inhabiting a buzzy bliss coming off reading Carol Shields’ The Republic of Love which was just absolutely extraordinary. The buzzy bliss of actually reading it was intoxicating. This was one of the many books I first read as a teenager when I was not altogether thoughtful, and when I encounter them now I’m not quite sure what it was about books I enjoyed then, seeing as I missed the point of everything. Anyway, it was strange to read The Republic of Love on the back of The Post-Birthday World. It never occured to me how compatible they’d be, or how much Carol Shields and Lionel Shriver actually have in common. Think about it: both transplanted Americans, dealing with various labels of “women’s fiction”, and though Shields’ early career did come with some acclaim, both hit gold with their seventh novels. And The Post-Birthday World and The Republic of Love both consider those same quotidian details of intimacy and love. Women’s sexual lives feature prominently; neither author shies away from salty language. (I had forgotten how raunchy Carol Shields could get). Both writers embed their characters in careers and interests which inform the novels with a non-fictional dose of fact. The characters themselves are those “ordinary people” which Barbara Amiel figured in a 1977 review of Shields’ The Box Garden “will be the undoing of contemporary literature” (and thirty years later, I’d say undone looks pretty good). Lionel Shriver is often a difficult writer to know what to do with, but perhaps considering her in this light makes a great deal of sense.
