August 22, 2007
Big Book of the Berenstain Bears
So I’ve been giving some thought to the types of books I read as an adolescent, but what about the books from even earlier? The picture books? Once again I wish I could tout some high-falutin lit cred from way back in the day, but what I come up with is almost just nonsense. Bookish poppycock, oh, but GOOD bookish poppycock. I loved Amelia Bedelia, Jillian Jiggs, Miss Rumphius (who was not nonsense). Etc. etc. But most of all I did love The Berenstain Bears.
And so I was excited about the re-issue of Big Book of the Berenstain Bears by Stan and Jan Berenstain, and by the chance to go back in time and remember why I liked these books so much. This book is actually five books in one, in which the Bears have a new baby (she appears while Brother and Papa are in the woodshed), get a sitter (nicer than she seems), are afraid of the dark (solution=nightlight), go to the doctor (won’t hurt a bit), and clean their room. A little preachy (life is better when you keep your closet tidy), and not so fashionable in terms of gender roles, but still these are nice little stories. Perhaps they are more suitable for application to real life than flights of the imagination, but this big book would strike me as sensible to have around in the event of children, and five in one is good value to boot.
So where did my fierce love of this series stem from? Upon careful consideration of this compendium, I have managed to trace my attraction back to the Berenstain Bears’ tree house. Marvelously pink with chimneys and windows in the boughs, I wanted to live in a house just like it. I think I also used to be fascinated by the way the Berenstain Bears kept popping up in Dr. Seuss easy-reads, thus existing in multiple literary dimensions. That Brother Bear was never identified by name in the Dr. Seuss books only added to his allure, and made him much more cool and mysterious than might be suggested by the stories in which he collects birds’ nests, or peels down to his underpants for a booster shot.
August 19, 2007
Wonderful…
Now rereading Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which I remember nothing about. I read it the first time, according to the inside cover, beginning October 8 2001, and finished that October 27 with a note on blank page at the back, “Wonderful…”. Let’s hope it lives up to my previous reception. And that I read it a bit quicker than I did the first time around, as there are so many books I’ve got scheduled to be read before summer is over. Also now reading the latest Walrus which is proving interesting, though The Future of Reading was less interesting than I wanted it to be.
Earlier today I was happy to be reading a little interview with Margaret Drabble (via Maud Newton). “The biggest fate of all is your marriage partner. It’s extraordinary that you should happen to be at such a party or such a university or even on such a bus ride and meet the man that you’re going to marry, for better or worse. I find these accidental conjunctions that turn the plot of your life fascinating.”
News on the homefront: we’ve just cut into our first homegrown watermelon, and we’ve got a Japanese houseguest arriving on Wednesday.
August 19, 2007
In another space
“We were brought up to believe that stories have meanings and that meanings have stories and that journeys have ends. We were brought up to believe that there would be an ending, that there would be completion. For each and every life, for each and every organism. But we now know that that’s not true. It was true, once, but it’s true no longer. We have passed the point in time and in history where that truth applies. The universe has shed the teleological fallacy. So now we have to work out what can take place. We have to tell and shape our stories in another space, in another concept of space.” –from Margaret Drabble’s The Sea Lady
August 19, 2007
On commerical fiction
Once again, I won’t be naming names, as I believe no Google search should take a reader to a review by one who was never meant to read that writer in the first place. Howevert I didn’t start off with a bias. I wanted to read the latest novel by JP because if she’s that popular surely the book would be enjoyable in a summery way, and because I’d read this profile in The Guardian and it intrigued me. I am also very interested in what lies within the massive gulf between fictions popular and literary, and as this latest novel addresses much of the same material as Lionel Shriver’s incredible We Need to Talk About Kevin, I thought here we have a fabulous case study.
In the Guardian profile, JP reports, “I tell my publicist not to send me the New York Times, which if they do write about me only do so in order to be snide. But the best revenge is when I end up top of their bestseller list. Which happens all the time.” (Incidentally I found it amusing that she notes that she is more prolific than Joyce Carol Oates.) I don’t want to be snide at all, but the fact was (and this rarely happens to me) I couldn’t read this book. I tried, I failed, I skimmed to the end and found that I’d called it from the first chapter, and that the big twist at the end was laughably ridiculous.
On top of not naming names, I also believe that those who don’t finish books have no business reviewing them (hello amazon), so I won’t. But I will provide some speculation in regards to that gulf between fictions I noted above. It was interesting that my aborted read of JP’s latest was followed by Digging to America by Anne Tyler. Tyler is literary, but unpretentiously so, and so I imagine her work is easily marketed as commercial, which makes for some effective comparison. Craft: that we are told in the first chapter of the JP book that a character is not what she seems, that nobody knows what lies inside her, while Tyler actually shows us this through multiple perspectives. Character development: that JP’s characters are all basically good albeit with tragic flaws, except the absolute baddie who dies anyway so no matter, whereas some of Anne Tyler’s characters are absolutely rotten, and even the good ones are rotten in parts. Finally: that JP’s story is all situation, a “what-if” but the story never goes beyond that. Could this be the crux then, bad popular fiction at its baddest? That life there seems to be lived entirely on the platform of situation, and nobody ever seems to get off it?
August 19, 2007
Digging to America by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler’s novel Digging to America begins with two American families waiting at the airport for their adopted baby daughters to arrive from Korea. Brad and Bitsy, the Donaldson’s, have come with an entourage of extended family, a shock of camera flashes, balloons, excitement and an inevitable camcorder. The Iranian-American Yasdans, on the other hand, are more subdued: Sami, Ziba, and Sami’s mother Maryam are waiting patiently off to the side. “The girls” arrive, and the two families become acquainted, and entangled throughout the following years due to this unique history they now have in common.
This is how the story begins, but not what this story is about. Which is where the mastery creeps in, I suppose, in good writing. The international adoption is a given, the relationship between two very different families becomes a fact, and the story is about ordinary life with all that in the background. The story is not the situation, but rather how people react and interact accordingly. Tyler explores family friendships, and how different family values seem to so often constitute a threat. How, in a country as new as America and with unconventions such as international adoption and immigration, does a family manage to find or create traditions which suit them? What do blood ties really mean? this explored through scenes of exasperating family gatherings, the families’ fierce love for their daughters, or Bitsy’s father who, before losing his wife to cancer, is momentarily surprised to realize that he could not give her his bone marrow. That they’d shared no blood meant less than nothing to him.
This book was a pleasure for a summer’s day, actually the span within which I read it. Well written, joyfully storied, alternatively happy and sad, though it wasn’t perfect. What are the odds of ever making characters called “Brad and Bitsy” three-dimensional? And yet Tyler goes some lengths towards doing this, with multiple points of view which make clear the distance between a person’s actual self and how they are perceived from the outside. Each of Tyler’s characters come with foibles which render them heartbreakingly real, and thus how they react in their lives reads as true.
August 19, 2007
If you want your local bookstore to prosper…
A word of advice: if you want your local bookstore to prosper, a good tip might be to give me a gift certificate for it. I regard gift certificates as licence to spend twice as much as usual (naturally– one wouldn’t want to look cheap). I was fortunate to receive a gift from Nicholas Hoare recently, and so yesterday we made a journey out of walking there and back. (I like long long walks. I regard them as licence to eat cake en-route.)
When we arrived at the bookstore, Stuart settled down on a couch with a book of interest to wait out my selection process. (Which is to say that Stuart has come a long way since our trip to Paris’s Shakespeare and Company in April 2003 which was the scene of our very first fight.) And I chose very carefully: I am deeply interested in reading Arlington Park and A Celibate Season, but neither was in stock. However I found eight others, and then narrowed the pile to five, and then three.
What won out in the end were Claire Massud’s first novel When the World Was Steady, Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. Each of these writers have wowed me with their more recent works, and I am excited to be venturing into their back catalogues for more.
August 16, 2007
The Raw Shark Lady
An interview with Steven Hall up at Baby Got Books. And yes indeed it is funny to be reading Drabble’s The Sea Lady post The Raw Shark Texts. Two books with very little in common except fish and unconventional narrative structure, but how they inform each other just based on their proximity. I am rereading The Sea Lady because I read it too quickly the first time, so excited was I by a Drabble yet unread. I’m paying much more attention this time around, and loving it just as much.
August 15, 2007
In the underwater realm
“…though in the underwater realm nothing seems impossible, and some of the strangest things are true.” –Margaret Drabble in her acknowledgements to The Sea Lady
August 15, 2007
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
I don’t claim to have a sure grasp on Steven Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts. If I did claim such a thing, you’d probably know I was lying, or just stupid, and even the Raw Shark Texts discussion forums make clear that straight answers are not close at hand.
Steven Hall’s first novel exists as a conundrum, a puzzle and a maze. Eric Sanderson wakes up prone on a living room floor, devoid of memory, and the only clue offered out of this predicament is a letter he wrote before, signed “The First Eric Sanderson”. This latest Eric Sanderson therefore must follow subsequent clues and put pieces together to recover his identity. Such a neat little premise is complicated, however, by the fact that Eric’s conciousness has been attacked by a “conceptual shark” and that Eric remains under threat.
A conceptual shark? Constructed of the words and ideas it feeds upon, this shark is the concept of a shark quite similar to the shark you now see in your mind as a consequence of the words and ideas I’ve just given you. And so not entirely farfetched after all. Hall’s novel stands as metaphor for what language and ideas can do, the power of books. Notes Eric Sanderson, “it was possible to create a maze from stacked, written-on paper. Bizarre, unlikely, stupidly time-consuming and dangerous, but, yet, possible.” Which, with his novel, Hall has demonstrated.
Of course in addition to the metaphor, this book’s literal function is essential. The Raw Shark Texts is an adventure. When Eric Sanderson makes the preceding remark, he is in fact crawling through an underworld maze actually constructed of stacked telephone directories. Under threat from his conceptual shark and with the clues from the First Eric Sanderson, Eric has descended into this world of “unspace”, in which he can be relatively safe from his predator. He teams up with a girl called Scout who has her own motives for involvement, and together they’re looking for a way to defeat the shark and save themselves.
There is something, albeit undeniably clever, of the “look ma, no hands!” variety about this book. Steven Hall seems intent on demonstrating the innumerable powers a book is capable of, employing typefaces, codes, images, and even a flipbook. In lesser hands this postmodern extravaganza might have been rendered quite hollow, narratively speaking. But no, Hall is not so cheap. The best trick of all is his story: Eric Sanderson’s entire plight is the result of errors made in a fury of loss after the death of his girlfriend Clio. And that Hall’s conceptual people, his conceptual love, that this stack of written-on paper so managed to break my heart and have me longing for appropriate resolution is a testament to Steven Hall’s skill as a writer. It serves to underline his entire thesis: that a book really is a most powerful thing.
August 14, 2007
Counting the steps to the door of your heart
There was an instant during “Distant Sun” where the whole world was perfect, and we were swaying, singing. The lullaby that is “Don’t Dream It’s Over”. Their new songs sounded just as good as the ones I know best, and I had to shut my eyes a few times. Crowded House was amazing, and I don’t think I ever appreciated what a live show could truly be. What an absolutely beautiful night.
Coming up is my review of The Raw Shark Texts, and it’s fortunate that I’ve had some time to attempt to get my head around it. Also a review of The Big Book of The Berenstain Bears. Find out what it is to be continuing the aquatic theme with a reread of Margaret Drabble’s The Sea Lady.
Short stories here in The Guardian. As one who gave up on The Bible at the part where Noah’s son finds him drunk and naked, the arguments for and against its readability hold interest for me. “Firstly, there’s the simple point that if the Bible really were the word of God, you’d think that He would be able to make it more interesting”. Jeffrey Eugenides on Middlesex in its second life.
“Do you climb into space?”
