The Museum of Fragile Things

In edgewise

2009-01-22T18:19:00.001-08:00

I have started a blog of stolen words: Jeff Howe's Bibliomancy Blog.

This is too please and annoy Aishwarya, and to satisfy the requirement that I have a blog. Remind me to read the fine print next time.

Noughts & Crosses

2008-03-05T14:42:00.000-08:00

(Crossposted here)

I was caught up in a hurricane, with all the noise and madness whirling around me until my head was about to explode.
“Stop it! Just stop it!”
Nothing.
“STOP IT! YOU’RE ALL BEHAVING LIKE ANIMALS!” I shouted so hard my throat immediately began to hurt. “WORSE THAN ANIMALS – LIKE BLANKERS!”
The sounds of the crowd slowly died away. “Just look at you,” I continued. “Stop it.” I glanced down at Callum. He was staring at me, the strangest expression on his face.
Callum, don’t look at me like that. I didn’t mean you. I’d never mean you. It was just for the others, to get them to stop, to get them to help. I’d never mean you…

I’ve just finished reading Malorie Blackman’s marvellous Noughts and Crosses (and the novella An Eye for An Eye included in this edition) and I was blown away. This is by far the most complex treatment of race in a YA novel that I’ve ever come across. It is in many ways a fictionalized history of the Civil Rights movement (in Britain? I’m more familiar with the American movement so I associated it with that but Blackman is British), but with the colours reversed – the “Crosses” (capitalised throughout), the race in power, are black; the “noughts” (no capitals here) are white. Plus it’s dealing with present day issues of race and power as well – like language and education and economics.

“D’you know what they call a nought with all the money in the world?” I asked.
Rob and Gordy shook their heads.
“A blanker,” I told them.

Blackman says she chose the title because Noughts and Crosses is “...one of those games that nobody ever plays after childhood, because nobody ever wins”. I love this, and it makes a lot of sense in the context of the book. Blackman’s characters so often seem stuck – the racial divides that they’re trying to overcome are so deeply embedded that they’re checkmated at every step.

Lots of Big Issues are tackled – the involvement of the male members of the McGregor family in a violent liberation organisation* makes the family home the site of a number of arguments about what makes a terrorist, violent rebellion, means versus ends, freedom fighters versus terrorists (familiar, but far more interesting than in the CBSE modern Indian history textbooks), while somewhere in the background is a Martin Luther King/Gandhian figure who wishes to bring about change through peaceful means. Interracial relationships. Abortion (my thoughts on the book’s treatment of it would take up another post, so maybe later.)

Ultimately though, Blackman’s biggest achievement is in her portrayal of the numerous seemingly minor things that go into racial constructions. Possibly my favourite moment in the book is when Persephone (whose name is of course significant) notices the conspicuous plaster on Shania’s head and realizes that even bandages are designed based on the assumption of “Cross” skin. Beauty constructs are built up around Cross superiority. So is religion. History books celebrate Cross contributions to history. In one chapter a list of great Cross scientists and pioneers is given, and Blackman’s note at the end of the book tells us that these were real people, African-American innovators whose names have been written out of history. And it all comes back to that huge overturning of assumptions right at the beginning of it all because the Crosses are black and the noughts are white. I’d once quoted Ursula LeGuin on the political importance she attached to not making most of her Earthsea characters white, and I see something very similar here.

Also, there’s a lovely little bit at the end where Callum daydreams about a society where the whites instead of the Crosses were in charge. “…no more discrimination, no more prejudice, a fair police force, an equal justice system, equality of education, equality of life, a level playing field…”

I’m amazed that this book hasn’t caught on more in India. It was published in 2001 and it’s pretty big in the UK, and books that achieve that level of popularity abroad generally get here eventually. But I’ve only seen this in one Indian bookshop (where I bought it) and no one seems to have heard of it. If you do get a hold of it, avoid reading it in public – I completely humiliated myself by sniffling all over it while on a plane seated between two staid men in suits. Had I been at home I would have bawled.

*I’m not sure what to think of the gendering here. Later in the book we do have a pretty kickass female freedom fighter, but a) she’s also hot b) she dies.

Letters to a Young Asshole

2007-09-15T20:27:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I started to read Ranier Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet but I quickly set it aside because I found it boring and trite. I attribute this reaction to the well-documented fact that I have no soul. Given the childish delight I take in word-replacement memes, I thought it would be funny to write a book called Letters to a Young Asshole:

No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to be an asshole; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to be an asshole. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I be an asshole? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

Goodness knows plenty of people seem to do this already.

What I've been reading

2007-09-10T08:32:00.001-07:00

The Back cover:

The Best-Laid Plans

Jenna McCue wants a baby and she wants Spencer Smith to be the father...or rather the donor. Jenna assures the renowned adventurer and avowed bachelor she needs nothing from him - just his sperm. Spencer agrees, but on one condition: he "donates" the old-fashioned way.

When Jenna doesn't conceive as planned, she and Spencer must try - and try- again. And by the time Jenna is expecting, she's fallen hopelessly in love. But telling Spencer she's pregnant will mean never seeing him again. That's part of the deal. Or is it?

HP5

2007-07-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is by far the best movie of the series so far.
CAPSLOCK! Harry is present for most of OotP the book, and the movie does a great job of portraying his anger and loneliness.There are shots of him on his own throughout the movie (starting with the playground scene right at the beginning), and his edgy, nervous snapping at everyone (including dumbledore) makes his emotional state very clear.

You can't pack the longest book of the series so far into a two hour movie without cutting out large chunks of the story. The movie dealt with these cuts well, taking out a few minor characters and scenes. Making Cho Chang the betrayer of the D.A instead of Marietta was a good idea, as was Neville's discovery of the Room of Requirement.Some of the cuts were puzzling, though. Those of us who really, really want to know what will happen in book seven have been watching the movies for clues - since Rowling approves of these scripts, facts events relevant to the plot cannot be removed, and certain minor details that we might have missed in the book may be more visible in the movie. Yet things that seemed like they could have mattered (Sirius' Christmas present to Harry, the veil of death, the pensieve, Harry's time in Grimmauld place) are either glossed over or left out altogether. Kreacher the house elf is included, but his role in Sirius' death and his connection with the Malfoys are bafflingly left out. And what the next two films with do with Snape I cannot imagine - none of the speculation about whose side he's on has even entered the movies so far and the next director will have to establish him as a former death eater/spy before he can introduce any of the new information about him that book six contains.

Individual performances are really strong - Staunton's Umbridge is creepier by far than the book version and Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood is just right. Emma Thompson is wonderful in the scene where Umbridge fires her, and Rupert Grint is just getting better with every movie in the series. Helena Bonham Carter's Bellatrix is even madder than book-Bellatrix, but it works.Oldman's Sirius is just about right too, and Tena as Tonks got very little screen time, but I enjoyed the little we saw of her.

I expected more of Ginny Weasley though,by this point in the books she actually has a character. Here she has barely any lines and spends large chunks of the movie looking wistfully at Harry, though she is shown to be a powerful witch. Emma Watson has never convinced me, despite the Grawp scene. And what was with Kingsley Shacklebolt's clothes? The books tell us he's black, yes, but whoever designed the costumes seems to have equated this with "not English".

The symbols used in the movie were mostly brilliant, bringing out the essence of a lot of its ideas despite the necessary cuts. The huge poster of Fudge in the Ministry of Magic, the paper bird burnt by Umbridge that marks the beginning of her time at Hogwarts and the minor avalanche of educational decrees that heralds her end there.

And yet the movie falters at the end. The love-and-friendship message has been made clear throughout, is it really necessary to tell Voldemort that he will never know love and is worthy of pity is just silly and cringeworthy.

All is forgiven, however, because of the change in Sirius Black's last words. It was cruel and clever and quite the stroke ofgenius. Applause occurs.

At the risk of repeating myself

2007-07-10T10:51:00.001-07:00

This has appeared elsewhere in a very slightly different form. But for some reason it feels at home here too, with the FF and all. My dad would have made a great Marvel character.

I had a strange, on-again, off-again relationship with my dad, due to the circumstances of my upbringing. He had just turned 17 when I was born, and my mom 19, and they were neither financially nor emotionally prepared for it (let's just say it was not a planned pregnancy nor marriage). So when I was somewhere around six weeks old, I was more or less packed off to live with his parents, and he joined the Army, that being the sort of thing one could do without a high school diploma back then. Or now, really.

Well, that marriage only lasted a few years (surprise!), and he went on to remarry a few more times, have a few more kids (when my wife and I went to the geneticist before our son was conceived, we ran out of paper trying to fit my immediate family in), and eventually settle down with the right woman...about nine years ago. In the intervening decades, I lived under the same roof as him once, when he had moved back to Missouri from California and needed a couple of months to build up a security deposit for an apartment.

Before that had happened, I had forgotten and rediscovered that the people I was living with were not my birth parents, but even during the years in which I wasn't sure exactly who he was, I was always glad to see him. I wasn't sure why, but I was. Partly it was due to the fact that he always had stories to tell, some of which were true, which were like candy to this particular child. Motorcycling cross-country and the like. It seemed that he lived an ever so slightly risky life, but not a truly dangerous one, and he enjoyed telling me about (some of) the aspects of it.

I found pot in his and his third wife's kitchen cabinet once. She told me it was oregano.

In retrospect, it was I suppose much like being a sailor's child must have been in times past, when one's father made appearances as the tides and itineraries allowed, and the time spent was full of foreign ports and exotic locales, with very little occasion for the everyday things "normal" relationships are built on to creep in before they were gone again.

It stayed like that until relatively recently, when he settled down and I settled down and we got some chances to talk in a more unhurried fashion. By that point I had my own tales to share, not so full of adventure perhaps, but tales nonetheless, and he could respect that. As I came to respect him. He overcame the loss of two infant children, and his faith, and his sobriety, and emerged from it sober, faithful (in his own way) and still a father, as best as he could manage, to the children he had left strewn in his path.

There are worse things that can be said about a man.

I also respected how he arranged the last months of his life. Knowing that some in the family would have been freaked out by his choice to not do chemo after his diagnosis, he appeared to waffle on the subject just long enough to make the question well and truly moot. I suspected this (we think enough alike for me to recognize strategic dithering) and didn't push the issue, even as I scouted around for research projects he might be eligible for. So he got six months and change where he felt he was in control of his life, instead of, as he saw it, the chance--not a sure thing--at a bit more time in which that wouldn't really be the case. I would have supported him if he wanted to extend his life, but I also know that there was little more important to the man than a sense that he was in control of his life. Maybe the years where that wasn't necessarily the case cemented that in him.

He wanted to die at home, in his own bed, with people he knew and loved near him. He got his wish Saturday morning. Only in the last 36 hours did he become unresponsive, although the drifting away had started a week prior. Given how colon cancer works, it could have been a lot worse. I saw him last Sunday and said what I needed to say, much of which could be summed up in "I have no complaints." And it was true. In a way the best decision he ever made on my behalf was 45 years ago, when he gave me to his parents to raise. Had he and my mom tried to raise me, I can only imagine how I would feel about him now, because I can't imagine how bad it would have been. But all the signs were there, and I guess he knew his own limits. For which I thanked him.

I think one of the reasons I waited so long to have my own child was because of how I came to be. But, curiously enough, I also find that I'm perhaps more conscious of how lucky I am to have the moments with my son that I do, because I know my father didn't get them with me. He never had another boy, not one that lived. So sometimes I feel as if I'm playing with mine on his behalf too.

He didn't want a funeral. Tomorrow his wife, up from Tennessee, will be at his sister's house, with his parents (the ones who raised me), his other sister, and me, to receive condolences. In a few weeks I'll go down to Tennessee and watch while his ashes are scattered from a plane (he was a pilot, which shouldn't be a shock). I'll promise his wife (I can't call her my stepmom, really, but she's a lovely woman) that we'll come back, that she can see my son grow up, and it will all be true.

And I'll miss someone who wasn't really around that much.

Fantastic Four

2007-06-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

As one of those literary types who also enjoys and admires comic books, I was pleased and excited when the first Fantastic Four movie came out, and went to see it on its opening weekend. Sadly, Fantastic Four was by far the most disappointing superhero movie I've ever seen. Many critics cited plenty of legitimate problems with the movie, such as the generally weak acting and the plot that goes nowhere (the characters spend half the movie just hanging around the Baxter Building for crying out loud!) but I think the real failure of Fantastic Four was the way it utterly betrayed its source material.

I do not demand that film adaptations of books or comics be 100% faithful to their sources; I understand that movies are a different medium with a broader audience and that it's reasonable to expect changes. But in this case the filmmakers cut the heart and soul right out of the Royal Family of the Marvel universe.

Here's the key to the Fantastic Four: they are not really superheroes. At least they are not superheroes in the ordinary sense. They don't solve crimes. They don't patrol rooftops at night, foiling bank robberies and muggings. Sure, if Galactus tries to eat the planet they'll fight him off, but that sort of thing isn't where their real interests lie. The Fantastic Four are a family. And, what's more, they are adventurers and explorers! Led by the endlessly inquisitive Reed Richards, they are constantly seeking new knowledge and new experiences, for the good of science and humanity. No one understood this better than John Byrne, who worked on the title, writing and illustrating, for six years (issues 232-293). It was during this period, for instance, that the Fantastic Four made their unforgettable journey into the Negative Zone. One story involves them encountering an enormous spacecraft, many tens of thousands of years old, in which thousands of beings sleep in cryogenic preservation, guarded by a handful of custodians. These few search endlessly for a new world for their people, passing the responsibility on to their children for generation after generation, floating alone in space. How the Fantastic Four respond to this situation, and the way the story develops towards its terrible climactic revelation and sublime denouement, resembles nothing quite so closely as the classic stories from the Golden Age of science fiction.

In contrast, the protagonists of the Fantastic Four movie seem like aimless idiots. Reed Richards, whose boundless enthusiasm for scientific enquiry should be infectious and endearing, becomes onscreen nothing more than a feckless nerd with an implausibly attractive girlfriend. The characters dawdle around, dismally incurious about their amazing experience and newfound capabilities, before trundling on dutifully to the inevitable fight with Dr. Doom. Here we leave the Golden Age of science fiction behind, for the modern blockbuster sci-fi formula, where characters travel to strange and amazing worlds but, once there, can't think of anything better to do than run around shooting at one another.

What made the original Fantastic Four special is that they were more than just another gang of square-jawed dipshits in tights, punching each other through brick walls. The first film forgot this - or never knew it in the first place. Although there is a chance that Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is better, I seriously doubt it. This is one superhero movie I think I'll be sitting out.

on "the boy in the striped pyjamas"

2006-05-22T06:21:00.000-07:00

I tried describing John Boyne's The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (spoilers in link) to a friend as we sat on Carter Road, watching the scads of kids that passed us by on dear little unsteady legs, shooting us bold and curious glances. We talked a bit about how much we like kids - why is it impossible, as an adult, to say that without irony? - and he talked about unstudied body language and how interesting it might be to do a drama workshop - he does some theatre (but is unfortunately not the delectable Rehaan Engineer) - with children.

What makes us treat children like a different species? The more I think about it, the more it seems that we objectify this vital component of human society almost indiscriminately. What makes us treat them the way we do? Anxiety, I suppose. And the fact that we have very short memories. It irritated me as I was reading "The Boy...," this constant but near-inescapable tendency to talk down to children, hoping to simplify things.

But I'm not about to start on the question of how to write a good children's book, or a good book about children for adults to read. I guess I'll never know, as my childhood was spent in a glut of Enid Blyton stories, Tinkle comics and other generally unworthy literature. As for "The Boy," the necessity of John Boyne's 'talking-down,' more unwieldy and overt than other masters of the patronising tone (see Tolkien) was, in a literary sense, difficult to deal with. And that was hardly the only thing difficult to stomach.

- some, inevitable sort of spoilers ahead -

This book is a fable about a nine-year-old whose father is transferred to a lonely outback of something that may or may not be the 'countryside'. Nothing moves or grows outside young Bruno's house. But if he peers outside his bedroom window, he can see, at some distance, a fence. One day, in his desire to be an Explorer, he sets off to walk down to the fence. And on the other side he meets another nine year old called Schmuel, the boy who wears striped pyjamas.

For those to whom the setting of this fable is immediately apparent (and note: I thought the dust jacket was an extremely powerful and striking cover), there may come the feeling that something is lost because of our foreknowledge. Yet the book is not about our discovery of the truth of the fence and tiny, sad-eyed Schmuel. It is about Bruno's journey into the heart of the matter with all the directness and affection of a child. Bruno is Everychild, in a sense. He lives in the midst of insane evil and horror and manages to retain his innocence throughout, and what protects him, I think, is one of those few characteristics universally applicable to children: self-involvement. His growing acquaintance with the realities of Schmuel's world are offset by his own preoccupations with the people at home, the obstructions, the anxieties, and the hunger of his own little cocoon.

But is it moving? Is it complex? Does it relentlessly, almost starkly, pursue the tragedy of innocence, or parochialism, or whatever you choose to read it as? Yes, yes, of course it does. The Bruno in the book is not a boy in a journey of self-realisation. He never grows up. He never sees the whole picture. Even the adults in the book seem to have no chance at redemption in spite of Bruno (and Schmuel)'s last journey. That is the tragedy. There is no pity, and no poetry.

As a caution, the inevitable feeling of being manipulated will occur in the reading of this story, regardless of whether you believe Bruno's world is the sort to which fiction cannot do justice, or the easy presumption that the facts will not be questioned irks you.

Summer holiday book update

2006-05-04T13:22:00.000-07:00

The holidays started on the 25th, and it's so good to be reading regularly again! The book-a-day thing hasn't happened, but books deserve more than that anyway.

So far I have read:

Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
Already wrote about this on both blogs...see previous post.

Robert Holdstock - Mythago Wood
This was a reread of a book that impressed me very much a few years ago. I liked it a lot this time too. D is being all wonderful and ordered the sequel thingy (Lavondyss) online for me. I think this book needs a separate post, so I'll do that next week.

Ursula LeGuin - The Earthsea Quartet
I didn't read these when I should have. As a child I think I would have loved them. As an adult, while I think the stories and ideas are brilliant (and some of the writing's really good) it often feels abrupt, like she's trying to pack too much story into a child-sized book. But. Well. Tis good.

Julian Barnes - Before She Met Me
Terribly amusing. There was much joy at Jai's mass wank line (yes I must insist on naming it after him) and the protagonist's disgust with one of his wife's former lovers who gave her Peake's Gormenghast. Personally, I would've dumped the wife and located this Gormenghast-giver; he is obviously someone I'd much rather be in a relationship with.

Tomorrow I am off to Darjeeling with the parents for a week of tea drinking and reading. I'm taking Sandor Marai's Embers, Joseph Campbell's Primitive Mythology, Nagarkar's Ravan and Eddie, and (rereads) Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and Ripley Bogle by Robert McLiam Wilson, two of my favourite books.

See you next weekend.

Tigana

2006-04-26T23:25:00.000-07:00

Exams are over, which means that real books can be read again. My last exam was on the 25th, and I started Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana the same evening. I had very high expectations for this book. It's been recommended on the livejournal FantasyWithBite community before, and Agata has been nagging me about reading it for months. Shikha read half of it before she left for Singapore, and she seemed pretty impressed as well.

Which is why I was a little let down when I read the prologue. All very pretty and moving, but it was just another attempt at 'high fantasy', and I couldn't see why they would make such a fuss over it. Then the real story started and things got a lot better.

Eight of the nine provinces of the Peninsula of the Palm have been conquered by two rival wizards locked in a power struggle for the ninth. One of them, Brandin of Ygrath, will not leave the peninsula as it was here that his son Stevan died, killed by prince Valentin of Tigana. Rage and grief caused Brandin to destroy Tigana, scattering its people and (worst of all) stripping the world of the memory of it.

Twenty years later a group of revolutionaries set out to destroy both tyrants and restore Tigana's name. Tigana is about revolution and war and pain and doing what's right and taking responsibility for the people who are hurt in the process. The characters can be judgemental, too sure of themselves, sometimes fanatical, but they're very real. There's no fluffiness, no absolute goodness, but people who have been affected and damaged by the events of the past. There are those who think they're safer and more free under the tyrants, there are those so embittered by years of exile that they'll curse their children.

...which makes this sound like any good fantasy book really. Perhaps. It has sone silly sex scenes as well as the typical *groan* fantasy names. But it is lovely and gripping and it allows for real grief. I stayed up late so I could finish it, and when I did I cried.

More reviews here. Highly recommended.

Case for Webcomics: Exhibit 1

2006-04-13T13:57:00.000-07:00

The original comic here, from Cat and Girl.

Nothing to be done

2006-02-25T12:16:00.000-08:00

From here

Of elegant females and pigs in the house

2006-02-25T11:33:00.000-08:00

Having finally watched the movie version of Pride and Prejudice, I have come to the conclusion that Austen is impossible to ruin. That said, the movie was strangely...wrong.
Matthew McFayden's an attractive man, but to ask any actor to step into the role that Colin Firth played in the BBC adaptation is just cruel. Not because Firth was brilliant (though he was very good), but because he defined the role for so many people. I've never met any straight woman who wasn't at least partially in love with him at that point. McFayden has a lovely deep voice that somehow doesn't sound like it belongs to him. He also has a habit of gawking when Elizabeth is being particularly charming. This makes him look a little like an English football player. (Yes, I adore English football players but they're not exactly known for their aristocratic demeanour, are they?)
Keira's a very pretty girl and a decent actress, but she doesn't work as Lizzie for me. The face perhaps, but the skinniness and the wild hair are just not what I'd imagined. Ah well. She plays her part reasonably well, which is all one could really expect of her.
Rosamund Pike doesn't have that big of a role, but she suits it well.
The guy who played Bingley...good grief, what were they thinking? 5,000 a year and the man can't afford a comb? He looks like the simpering assistant of a mad scientist.
Wickham was better...though he had the kind of weakness about his face that Orlando Bloom has. Not my type.

The scenery is lovely - though a lot of the Derbyshire shots reminded me more of Bronte than Austen.

Some things seemed terribly inaccurate to me. Surely Bingley wouldn't just barge into Jane's bedroom when the'd just met? Surely the Bennets weren't so poor as to have a pig in the household? Etc.

I think the only real problem I have with the movie is its seeming inability to trust Austen. Charlotte's marriage to Mr. Collins and its various pros and cons are brought out in the book without the need for a melodramatic scene in which she cries about how scared she is and how she hates being a burden on her parents. Mr Collins' proposal to Elizabeth is one of the most sublimely funny scenes in all of literature, but what the movie gives us is Elizabeth running away chased by a flock of geese and her mother. The subsequent scenes by the lake ("I won't marry him! You can't make me!") made my friend clutch my arm and whisper "ohmygod. It's a Bengali soap opera!". I am yet to see a Bengali soap opera so am unable to comment on the truth of this statement.

I love how the scenes the audience laughed most at were the ones that use the original dialogue. I realise there are people in the world who don't really like Austen (cretins, the lot of them!) but whether you throw Keira Knightley or Aishwarya Rai into the picture, whereever her dialogue is featured the sheer brilliance of her shines through.

headstones ahoy

2006-02-20T23:39:00.000-08:00

Quite apart from the high number of deaths in GRR Martin's fantasy series, those books are as huge as stone grave markers. Remain forewarned, gentle readers: beyond the Wall, there are spoilers.

---

At some point of time last weekend - the third such of my life I have spent with GRR Martin's A Song Of Ice and Fire - I did not think these books would ever, ever get over. It was annoying. Whatever gave him the idea that having thousands of PoV characters and each of their chapters ending in a cliffhanger would sustain interest over three thousand pages? All through A Game of Thrones, I sat chewing my nails. Halfway through A Clash of Kings, my mind started wandering. It's taken me over two weeks to make any headway with A Storm of Swords because I just can't be bothered.

Having said that, I did finish them. And I am going to read whatever he throws out next. I am intrigued, in spite of the fact that too much plot is no plot at all. It's a bit like reading intricate historical documents of cause before effect before cause before effect. Martin sacrifices the traditional trope of the battle between good and evil to something exterior to the story's bare bones and more central to the reading itself: perception and reality. It's standard fantasy elements put me off. I have come to realise that I do not like dragons or cold dementorish wights. But as all my friends - Martin fanboys to a man - said, the characters keep you going. Wearying as it is to turn a page and see that a chapter in Character A's PoV has been cut off just as something exciting is about to happen, it's difficult to let go once you've begun.

Before I finished the first book, I thought Martin's habit of turning his characters a million shades of grey would never stand him in good stead. The books are all about one long power struggle over Westeros, after all, and power has to have a purpose, which none of these people discernibly have. But its exciting to be challenged in your perceptions as a reader, to see why the Aragorn types shouldn't always win, or why its okay, sometimes, to be a reckless, amoral, incestuous oathbreaker. Martin's strength doesn't lie in worldbuilding - he seems to be depending on straight lines and medieval-English history for the most part. He has some great writing: battle scenes are clearly his forte, as one would expect of any epic fantasy writer, and I thought the Eyrie - a mountain fortress that is treacherously difficult to get in and out of - was conceptualised extremely well.

But his people are what really drive his piece, and he puts them through the wringer, alright. Talking over the books, a friend mentioned that what she loved about them was how a character's strengths could turn so easily into his weaknesses, which is true. I was especially struck by the rise and fall of Eddard Stark, the aforementioned Aragorn figure, in the space of a single book: his unyielding sense of honour that makes him the best man for a tough job at the start of the book is what finally drives him and the kingdom he guards under. There is Cersei Lannister, scheming and beatiful (and, I must admit, one of my favourites), who seems to hold all the cards in her hand, but finds plan after plan backfiring upon her as she underestimates her enemies. And there is the puzzling, brittle Stannis Baratheon, who is simultaneously a king and a pawn.

There are some books, like The Great Gatsby, that you can read and talk about and love, and excuse of all its attitudes towards sex and women by stating, simply, that it is not a feminist novel. I've been trying to decide if that can be said of Ice and Fire. It's a medieval world, its a hard life, women are treated much the way they are in feudal societies everywhere. There's really not much space to break gender stereotypes, and I'll say it for Martin, he doesn't try too hard. There's the Cersei, the evil bitch, the forbearing maternal Catelyn Stark, the tomboyish Arya, the crazy Jocastan Lysa, the irritating-as-hell exotic princess Daenerys (talk about stupid magical names!) and so on. Still, they don't all put me off dinner. I love Catelyn, who is proving rather tough to kill, and I can't wait to see what becomes of Brienne the Maid, a mannish, innocent knight-wannabe who is currently providing a foil to one of the book's central figures, Jaime 'shit-for-honour' Lannister.

I was a Stark supporter at the end of the first book, but the next two have put me firmly in the court of the Lannisters. Honour and righteousness is all very well, but this isn't Tolkien. It's almost Carrollian: remain interesting, or have your head cut off. I can't see Arya or Sansa survive the series, although I would like to see Sansa Stark get a pair of balls and rule the world with Tyrion, who, predictably, I love almost as much as I do Jaime. Other favourites include Davos Seaworth and the likely hero of the series, the somewhat less-than-Aragornian Jon Snow.

The good thing, however, is that there's a lot further to go before we get to the end. And never before have I meant the following words so intensely: anything could happen.

Some predictions:

- Jon Snow and Daenerys meet, make love and tiny dragonwolf babies.
- Cersei meets a sticky end. Jaime has something to do with it.
- I hate to say this because its so damned obvious, but: Jaime and Brienne. Do something.
- Bran becomes something.
- Stannis wins the Iron Throne.
- But Tyrion becomes the Supreme Ruler of the Universe. Because Tyrion rocks beyond belief.

..because we all love Wendy Cope. Right?

2006-02-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

Reading Berryman's Dream Songs at the Writers' Retreat

Wendy went a-swimming. It was dreadful.
One small boy careless under her did surface
and did butt her on the chin.
Of space to swim was hardly any,
fearful shoutings, bodies from the springboard
splash when jumping in.

Why no school? cried agey Wendy
to herself, not loud. Why little beggars
swimming into me on Friday afternoon?
Why not in cage, learn tables?
Out and dress and buy bananas.
Yogurt? No. Need spoon.

Once more to Hawthornden through Scottish fog.
Back up to poet's lair and sit on bed.
Is you bored, Bones, all by youzeself
wif read and write and bein' deep?
Not for a moment.
Now, a little sleep.

____________________

Somehow this always reminds me of June. I think it's the combination of Berryman and swimming.

Narnia. (Spoiler warning? No, I expect you to have read the book)

2006-02-12T09:29:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how I feel about the new Narnia movie. It got a lot of things wrong, certainly. I suppose the war scenes were necessary for a number of reasons, but it felt weird having them there. Also, they seemed to be trying to make it into an epic - I think the association of Tolkien and Lewis makes people think Narnia is somehow grander than it really is. It's closer to the fable than the epic form and doesn't really need sweeping landscape shots, battle scenes in slow motion or exciting man-vs-beast psychological struggles on a frozen (though rapidly melting) river. It also does not need hot pouty-lipped Susan contributing almost as much to male guilt as Emma Watson, though I enjoyed that particular addition.

But there's a lot the movie gets very very right. Edmund is actually given a reason to be angry with his family, and it's far more visible than in the book. Most of the casting is perfect. (Does anyone know who plays adult-Edmund? I'm too lazy to check, and he's rather attractive.)
Aslan's death is beautifully done. He has to be brought down completely, made scared and humiliated, that's the only way the glory of the religious analogy will really be felt. This was probably the only point where I was really drawn into the story.

Narnia isn't brilliant, at least not consistently. But there are moments when it blazes through, and even if I don't agree with the Christin subtext I think it's beautiful and I can't imagine Narnia without it.

A Song of Ice and Fire

2006-01-20T12:05:00.000-08:00

Addendum: This is very like A Song of Ice and Fire, where everyone is calling people names they don't like and people are killing everyone for the slight. This is like performance criticism.

Edit: Putting this on top of Sups' addition to my review. Never call me 'Ash' again, or I will have to kill you. And that would make me sad.
- Aishwarya

Putting this on top of Ash's review as it is small and quick: I just happen to be one hundred pages into the first book in the series, A Game of Thrones and cannot put it down. Things that would be major irritants for me in the normal run of things - violet-eyed princesses, people wearing clothes that bring out their colour, and stupid women - are just whizzing by because Martin's world is so complex and tangled, and his writing good enough, to make me want to keep reading, to believe that there are reasons for all this. House Stark are definitely the heroes of this story. let's see if GRRM is one, too. Further updates coming up in a separate post.

-- roswitha.

A couple of years ago I asked a friend to get me one of the books in this series because I'd heard George R. R. Martin was really good. He got me the second book, A Clash of Kings. The fourth book, A Feast For Crows was published a few months ago, but I haven't seen it available anywhere yet. However, I did find the third book, A Storm of Swords, in Midland, Aurobindo Place. I finished it yesterday, so I thought I'd ramble on about it here for a while. Please note that my understanding of the story is slightly limited because I haven't read the first book.

Martin isn't particularly original - this is nothing more than conventional fantasy. But it's good, solid writing within its genre. With the death of Robert Baratheon, various contenders come forward to assert their claims to the Iron Throne. Robert's wife Cersei is trying to protect the right of her son Joffrey Baratheon to the throne. Robert's younger brothers (Stannis and Renly) both try to seize power, Robb Stark, king in the North, also steps forward (I'm not sure why this is - I can't see that he has any logical claim) and Daenerys Targaryen, exiled daughter of the previous king Aerys, is on her way back home.
This makes for lots of politics. Anyone who has ever discussed fantasy or science fiction with me must know by now that I love politics in fantasy. Here it works really well with shifting alliances, unforseeable motives, and general unpredictability. I've given up trying to predict who will finally end up in power, though I'd like it to be Stannis Baratheon, he's rather fascinating. Martin seems to enjoy randomly killing off his characters, which is great fun. You never know who's going to go next. (Amazon reviews for the latest book complain of too many new characters. I'm not surprised - he's killed most of the old ones.)
There are the conventional elements of fantasy too - dragons, a bit of magic, and the direwolves (I love the direwolves.) Also, the embarrassingly addictive descriptions of clothes which I'd usually associate with Robert Jordan. I wonder if Martin realises this. He gets away with it though, simply by being a better writer.

I think the only real problem with the series is that there's far too much going on. I can't figure out where people are, most of the time, and I would have thought I'd read enough fantasy to be good at that.

Still. It's solid, it's entertaining, and it's worth a read.

minor thoughts on persuasion and jane austen

2006-01-09T03:20:00.000-08:00

I’ve read, or attempted to read, all her work now, except Northanger Abbey and have hemmed and hawed for years over whether I really like her (P and P was so funny) or don’t (but Emma was so insufferable) or if she is really just historical, academic fluff, interesting from a cultural point of view. Certainly different from George Eliot and the Brontes.

In my third ever Literature class in college, our teacher divided us up into groups and asked us to point out to her some ideas that Austen shared with her poet contemporaries, Wordsworth and Coleridge. So we all dove into our Features of Romanticism bullet-point sheet and racked our brains to come up with stuff about long walks among hedges and so on and so forth, and my professor just rolled her eyes at the end of it ‘Fools!’ said she, or something like, ‘Austen isn’t a Romantic at all.’ Which was a great relief.

Not that I’m a die-hard fan of the Romantics, but I think that in Persuasion Austen just outdoes herself with regard to the individuality of her characters. I like Elizabeth Bennett because she speaks her mind, but I love Anne Elliott because she knows her own mind, at least through the course of the novel, and Austen narrates the story of how she got to her moral and intellectual and emotional independence with a tenderness that is a far cry from her youthful lack of compassion for anyone in Pride and Prejudice. Anne has a conversation with Captain Harville towards the end that positively fills the modern feminist heart to capacity with joy: she politely rubbishes all Captain Harville's thoughts about literature handing down the traditional notions of womanly inconstancy and lack of intelligence. Anne has thought about the fact that women have never had the chance to tell stories, and when Wentworth, the man of her dreams, proclaims undying love for her a few short minutes after she makes this observation, you know you have a winning couple. It's enough to make you hop about on one leg in glee.

I’ve never really liked any of Austen’s male protagonists before. But the best thing about the narrative that leads up to this thrilling moment is that throughout the story, I didn’t resent Captain Wentworth at all. It’s easy to be distracted by Darcy’s tallness and darkness and taciturnity, sure, but in the end all her other heroes turn out to be patronising wankers, getting what they want because of authorial indulgence, a conquering of woman if there ever was one. But here is a man who suffers and wins out and makes mistakes and has a mind of his own and would probably offer his wife oral sex. GUH. I’m really not sure what’s up with Austen’s undue affection for the Navy – it’s not even like she makes sailor-boys kiss or anything – but it’s really very tolerable compared with her earlier tendency to crush on men with ten thou a year and an entitlement complex the size of Africa.

Bella Bathurst - Special

2005-12-30T09:18:00.000-08:00

This is my first post on this blog. So please be gentle.

It's a review of Bella Bathurst's 2002 book, Special.

Summary:

A group of adolescent schoolgirls, accompanied by two teachers, are in the Forest of Dean to have an 'activity break' between the end of their exams and the end of term. Drink, drugs, sex, hate and anorexia are the order of the day.

Review:

I have a very fickle mind, and I get bored with things very easily. Reading has been my OTJ (One True Joy) ever since I clapped eyes on the immortal words 'A is for Apple', but I do sometimes get bored of reading too. And at such times, I need a book that is a revelation, that gets me excited about reading again. A book that is, as Stephen King might put it, boss. And as you might have guessed, this is one of those books.

Special is an honest, brutal, disturbing, and at the same time perfectly-pitched, story of teenage angst, and it is one of those books that actually manage to make sense of it. Angst no longer seems an indulgence. Special reminds us why it happens, how it happens. And along the road it deals with sexuality, self-obsession, self-loathing, lapses in logic, lost virginities, intimacy and self-destructive behaviour – all the expected clichés.

The basic focus is on three girls, Jules, the outgoing 'average' one, Hen, the withdrawn one, Ali, the loner, and a fourth girl, Caz, the 'perfect' one, who wanders in the background for the whole book before coming into focus at the end. Each one has problems. Some are big, some aren't, but they exist, and Bathurst analyses them wonderfully, almost tenderly, before letting us make up our minds about them.

But the best things about the book are the little things which might be (very mistakenly) easily ignored. The first of these is the writing. Bathurst's writing is my favourite kind of writing – extremely readable, but rich in unusual description and detail which actually makes up the meat of the book without in any way drawing away from the characters. Her skills of pointing out idiosyncratic truths are developed to an almost frightening extent, with every observation ringing true. The second is the manner in which the pace has been built – moving from one character to another smoothly, without being chaotic, and while retaining the individual tensions of each character. These tensions are such that I found myself turning the pages with trembling hands in a way I hadn't done since around ten years ago when I was a horror junkie.

I do have a few grouses against the book, some fairly objective, and some personal. The ending, in particular, strikes me as overdramatic, and, more important, needlessly overdramatic. Apart from that, my personal complaint is that the book is cynical and depressing. I can't bring myself to believe that the teenage world has become so ... gruesome. I can live with the fact that the happier (and therefore less interesting) characters aren't dealt with, but I feel that they should at least be implied. This book, if intended to serve as a microcosm, should have included those characters. But if you personally feel that this isn't a flaw, feel free to forget this paragraph.

In conclusion, you have to read this book. You might not agree with it, but it has a point, and it makes it beautifully. It is, indeed, special. (Okay, I promised myself I would not say that, but sometimes you can't help it.)

Comfort

2005-12-27T08:48:00.000-08:00

I didn't have the greatest Christmas...especially since we had relatives over. I tend to resent anyone outside the immediate family butting in. Yesterday and today I made it up to myself with nice long 'comfort sessions'.

So I watched the entire Pride and Prejudice BBC series and then read a Georgette Heyer novel and three Asterixes.

Pride and Prejudice is brilliant, and I love the BBC adaptation. Jennifer Ehle's so wonderfully Lizzielike that it's easy to forget that she isn't that pretty. Colin Firth is...*breathes heavily* just perfect.
The English department in college decided to screen this last year (in two sessions, no one was going to stay five hours after college) and the effect it had on people was rather unnerving. There's something very disturbing about being in a roomful of sexually aroused young girls who make animal noises at intervals. The Firth bath scene was greeted with the loudest response. I did not show my appreciation in so crass a manner. I whimpered quietly to myself.
I still haven't seen the most recent version of P&P, or the Laurence Olivier version. I think (blasphemy!) Keira Knightley looks the part better than Jennifer Ehle. But if the spirit of the book is 'light and bright and sparkling', the BBC adaptation captures it perfectly.

Georgette Heyer is one of the only authors my mother and I can both read (another is Agatha Christie). I don't know if there's some deep rooted feminine need for books about feisty, beautiful girls (of the upper class, please) falling in love with rich, dark men. But we certainly seem to like them. I do, anyway. And when they're accompanied by descriptions of regency dinners, horses and snuffboxes, they're made even better. Georgette Heyer's books may not have more *substance* than your average Mills & Boon (though it's nice that her heroines don't have unidimensional characters. And she's less mushy) but they're delightful anyway.

Asterix needs a seperate entry.

The above forms of entertainment must be combined with tea and pakoras, coffee, chikki, and occasionally chicken soup. There must be a quilt and lots of pillows, a big old sweatshirt, and a Leonard Cohen greatest hits CD playing in the background. Merry Christmas, everyone. :)

The Manticore's Secret

2005-12-22T08:20:00.000-08:00

I promised myself I wouldn't read this book till the 23rd - there was far too much to do. Which is why I felt rather naughty reading it on sunday.

I have very little to say really. Except that it's even better than the last. Go buy now.

Polly Toynbee on Narnia

2005-12-13T06:01:00.000-08:00

On an intellectual level, it's easy for me to agree with this article. But on an emotional level...it's Narnia. How could I ever not love Narnia?

Thanks, Uma. :)

And since I mention Peake so often...

2005-12-06T08:48:00.000-08:00

"As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip
through one’s fingers and slide into oblivion, the
startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of
the imagination, before they whip away on the endless
current and are lost for ever in oblivion’s black ocean.”

On a first reading of Iron Council

2005-12-03T11:23:00.000-08:00

The first time I even heard of China Miéville was on TORC, where someone reccoed Perdido Street Station with more enthusiasm than I'm used to. So I was vaguely on the lookout for it, and found it in April 2004 in Teksons. I might not have bought it even then, but there was a blurb by Neil Gaiman on the cover, and (turning to the acknowledgements page) a nod of gratitude to Mervyn Peake. I had to buy it.
Perdido was a brilliant book - very strong and very painful, at the end. I loved the detail that went into the history and geography of Bas-Lag, the politics, and (most of all, for some reason) the Ribs. Here was the potential for something as vast as Tolkien, as lush as Peake and as real as..well...reality. Because even if bug-headed womden and walking cactii aren't a part of our real life, politics, multiculturalism, drugs, alienation, corruption etc are.

The Scar was obtained from the library and finished in one, long sunday session (which was technically partly a monday session, since I finished at some obscene hour). I liked it more than Perdido. There's something about novels which include travel (especially travel by sea) that makes me want to fly up and look down upon them from some ridiculous height. Too many movies, perhaps.
Plus, The Scar had Uther Doul, one of the best characters I've read in ages. And a linguist/librarian/frigid bitch for heroine? Perfect. The Scar was just magnificent...everything about it was big and operatic. Giant creatures from other dimensions, giant cities made of ships, big manly men, all on the sea, which is just about the vastest canvas on Earth.

Which is why I was so eager to read Iron Council. It's also why I'm slightly disappointed with it.
There's nothing wrong with this book. New Crobuzon in a time of turmoil (but then, have we ever seen it in any other way?) is interesting, but the war with Tesh isn't really that exciting. It's a really good story, but somehow it isn't as engaging as the previous books. Perhaps it's a matter of expecting too much - I was blown away by the first two, this one I only enjoyed. It could be just me. Iron Council did win the Arthur C Clarke award, judged by minds far greater than my own.

But you know, just when I find myself forced to admit that this isn't his best:

Bastard, Cutter thought, tearing up, trying to speak. Bastard to say that to me. You know what you are to me. Bastard. He felt his chest hollow, felt as if he were falling inside, as if his very fucking innards were straining for Judah.
'Love you Judah,' he said. He looked away. 'Love you. Do what I can.' I love you so much, Judah. I'd die for you. He wept without sob or sound, furious at it, trying to wipe it away.

My literature student side is tugging frantically at my sleeve, telling me how this is cliché and repetitive and seeks to distance itself from what it really is with the use of swearing. My person-reading-book side is touched. It's simple, but for some reason I find it astonishingly beautiful.

Pemberley

2005-11-27T07:39:00.001-08:00

When I saw Pemberley by Emma Tennant in the library on Friday, I decided to pick it up out of curiosity. I mean, how bad could it be, right? Huge, huge, unforgivable mistake.
I’ve always loved Pride and Prejudice, and after studying it last year I love it more. It’s light and funny and refined and ironic and just a delight to read. A sequel would be fun – just to see a possible alternative “what happens next”.

Well for a start, the timelines are all screwed up. Within a year of Lizzie and Darcy’s marriage, Mr. Bennett is dead, Jane has had one child and is well on the way to a second, and the Wickhams are multiplying like bunnies – four children so far. How, we do not know, especially since the end of P&P seemed to indicate years of Mr. Bennett visiting Pemberley.

Lizzie feels terrible at not having provided her husband with an heir in (gasp!) a whole year. Lady Catherine turns up with a cousin of Darcy’s who is the heir to the estate, should Lizzie fail to produce one. All the characters of the original book show up at Pemberley for Christmas, Lizzie and Darcy have marital troubles (Lizzie lies awake at night, waiting for him to come to her. Oh the tragedy! Does anyone happen to have a violin on them?). Lizzie abandons Darcy, suspecting him of having fathered a child with another woman.
In the final chapter (a whole four pages long) Tennant seems to have got bored, and wraps up the whole story. The illegitimate child is Bingley’s, Darcy is a good man, Jane nearly dies, Lizzie falls down stairs, Lizzie loses consciousness, Lizzie gains consciousness, Lizzie is pregnant, they all live happily ever after. Awful.
Tennant’s language is vaguely Austen-esque, but it’s hard to imagine Austen writing so much sex-stuff. And she doesn’t have Austen’s sense of humour. Read only if you’re the kind of sadomasochist who liked Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett.

Goblet of Fire

2005-11-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

It seems...disjointed. Like they'd picked all the important scenes and just filmed them, with no kind of transition between them. But the individual scenes are done brilliantly.

I'm not much of a purist about Harry Potter, so I don't particularly mind the omissions. Dobby and Winky are annoying anyway, and while the Quidditch world cup is infinitely cool it's hard to see that it added much to the story. But it really is a pity so much of the Crouch background had to be cut.

The dark mark at the world cup - brilliant. This could easily have been mishandled and made comical, but it turned out as creepy as necessary. The maze, despite the loss of the fun creatures, was really well done. Snape was interesting...in the background and not speaking. I think they're building him up for the massive role he plays in the later movies. The yule ball was decent, I liked the Wyrd Sisters, naturally. The graveyard scene, though, that was stunning. Fiennes is brilliant, the setting is chilling, and Cedric's death wasn't dwelt on unnecessarily.(Until they got back, and that scene was one of the most painful to watch.)

Casting has been surprisingly good. I continue to be stunned by the brilliance of Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman. Gambon..um. Not really, no. From time to time his Dumbledore seems to slip into an american accent, which is quite baffling. (Speaking of accents, Cho's was so thick that the family next to me kept asking each other what she was saying.)I like Grint - not so much Radcliffe. Emma Watson is going to be stunning when she grows up. Certainly the prettiest girl in the movie - Fleur, Cho and Ginny are all tolerable but nothing special. Both Crouches are perfect. Cedric's a bit too much of a prettyboy, but Krum...Krum is big and military and muscley and thuggish and *drools* I like Krum.

There are no genuinely cringeworthy moments, quite a feat, really. I am suitably impressed. I'd rank it just slightly below Azkaban, which I loved. Good movie.

Screaming down from heaven

2005-11-15T05:15:00.000-08:00

I was sixteen, and I'd never met anyone like Craig. He knew more, had read more, was smarter and nicer and funnier and harsher than anyone. And Craig liked Jeff Buckley, who I'd never heard, he thought Buckley was brilliant and he had to be right because of the sheer Craigness of him. But I was sixteen, and I could be wrong, and I didn't want to be wrong and not like Jeff and have to tell Craig I didn't like him. So even when he tried to direct me to the official website to force me to listen to "Lover, you should've come over", I didn't.

Eventually I gave in, and found myself at the site listening to Mojo Pin. I was...bored. The beginning was long and dreary. And it was about love, and everyone's written a love song, right? (I'd blame this on the fact that I was sixteen too, but I know sixteen year olds who have great taste)

At some point I decided to read the lyrics instead. I'm not sure what it says about me that my greatest loves musically started with the lyrics. But I think I learnt that certain things got written about because they were universal, that the love song will always exist because everyone who discovers the feeling feels it so intensely that they just have to write about it. Jeff made it sound fresh and exciting and beautiful.
I found Grace in a shop I didn't expect to have it. I don't think I've been that excited over an album in years. I could probably rhapsodise over each individual song, but that would bore everyone. I will say, though, that Dream Brother is gorgeous, and must be sung by June at her college thingy.

I'll never forgive myself for not having discovered him before he died. How could I, though, I was far too young.

I'm a bit early, but happy birthday Jeff.

Thud! - Terry Pratchett

2005-11-03T06:19:00.000-08:00

I'm trying not to be too fangirly here. I really want to squeal and say this is the greatest book ever. It probably isn't.

SPOILERS! Don't read.

So what's wrong with this book? Well. I don't like Sally. She's just not interesting. You could get away with her character if you stuck it in one of the Rincewind books or one of the standalone books that aren't about any established set of characters (Small Gods, Soul Music, Pyramids, etc) but the Watch books have some of the most brilliant, carefully developed characters in the series, you can't just shove Sally in with Angua and Cheery and Vimes and Carrot. Is she there solely to make Angua jealous? Or for the rather erotic shower scene and references to mud wrestling with Angua? (because lesbianism had to come in somewhere and Angua/Cheery just wouldn't be that hot. Though he already *dealt* with it in Monstrous Regiment)
Also, Vimes agrees to have a vampire in the Watch far too easily. At first I was able to overlook this - He knows his prejudice is illogical, and we know from Jingo how hard he tries to avoid prejudice and just be a good person. But I got the feeling this was one prejudice he was determined to cling to. He doesn't.

The vampire/werewolf thing? Even in The Fifth Elephant it's not that pronounced.

However. Baby Sam! 'Where's My Cow?'! This is quite possibly one of the most touching portrayals of fatherhood I've ever read. The scenes where he's trying to get home on time and the entire Watch helps him made me melt.And the Where's My ow shouty scene near the end.

Also, little touchs of character developement which simply do not exist in the earlier books. Colon's suggestion that a robbery was done by a troll is actually rather impressive (or I have descended to Colonesque levels of idiocy). Detritus' paternal feelings towards Brick. Detritus' maturity in handling the situation when Bunny cleans out the stables for the trolls.

Oh, and I loved Tawnee. It's rather comforting to think that the only reason one is asked out by pathetic men is that the others are too intimidated. Except, of course, that one is not a six ft tall stripper with a perfect body. *sigh*. The thought of Nobby getting some is...disturbing, but it's at least relatively safe from fanfic writers.

It's getting harder and better to read Discworld books, what with issues coming in. Things like Vimes' grudging acceptance of technology are comforting in their familiarity, but Dwarf fundamentalism, gang wars, racism, etc are disturbing for the same reason. I often pick up one of the earlier books in the series for *light* reading, as opposed to serious, makesyouthink literature. I can no longer do that. And I love it. I love that he hasn't let the lightness of the earlier books restrict the potential of the later ones. Thud! is funny and silly, but it's also deeply worrying, and I think that is a major achievement. It's hard for me to be objective about Pratchett, but I'd certainly rank Thud! among the best books of this year.

Neil Gaiman - Anansi Boys

2005-10-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

If I lived under a rock and had never heard of Neil Gaiman, the caption “God is dead. Meet the kids.” would still have tempted me to pick up Anansi Boys. As a fan, it was never really in doubt.

Anansi in African/West Indian folklore is a bit f a prankster, occupying a role similar to that of Loki in the Norse tradition (or even Brer Rabbit). He’s associated with spiders and storytelling – the spider’s web has always been a metaphor for the well-crafted tale. Gaiman fans will have already encountered Anansi in American Gods, but as a relatively minor character. In Anansi Boys he plays a much greater role – surprising, since he’s dead throughout.

Anyway, Anansi Boys is the story of Anansi’s son Fat Charlie, who discovers at his father’s funeral that not only is he the son of a God, but he has a brother (Spider) who he never knew about. Spider pays Charlie a visit and successfully ruins his life to the point that Charlie turns to a group of eccentric voodoo practitioners to get rid of him. In the process, he makes a bargain he is really, really going to regret.
Oh, and the police are after him for embezzlement.

This book is considerably lighter than American Gods, more *grown up* than Stardust, and far better than Neverwhere; and probably a good introduction to Gaiman’s work for those who haven’t yet read him. His prose in the scenes at the Beginning of the World is gorgeous, though the imagery itself isn’t that original. However, some of his best scenes are the lightest ones – Charlie’s aeroplane related woes and his nightclub debut.

Gaiman seems to like giving dead women important roles. Here, luckily, she’s a rather attractive ghost, instead of the rapidly decaying corpse we saw in American Gods. This actually says a lot about the difference in the mood of the two books. I’m not sure which I like better. I certainly had more fun reading this one.

My copy of the book includes lots of fun stuff like an interview with Gaiman (though people who read his journal won’t learn anything new) and proof of how terrible his handwriting is. All very endearing, of course, the man is adorable. Look at the picture on the inside of the front cover (or on the back of the book if you’re rich and got the hard cover version), and you’ll probably end up buying it simply because you want to add to the man’s (probably considerable) fortune.

melancholia, mon cher

2005-10-17T20:15:00.000-07:00

I looked at the director and thought of the countless directors and playwrights and actors and stage designers who had sat at mine and Christiane's kitchen table, had stood under our shower, had slept in our beds; I thought of their voices on our answering machine, their night-time banging on our door, the smashed glasses and unread letters; I thought that there was always something that wasn't quite enough, and this time, too, something wouldn't be enough; I thought of you, of the frost flowers, of the smell of smoke; I thought we're not enough either.

The stories in 'The Summerhouse, Later (A Book About the Moment Before Happiness)', by German author Judith Hermann & translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo, are about nothing being enough, are in fact about ennui. Very pomo, yes, but in a very good way. The time in which they are set is usually winter; this has partly to do with the place, Berlin, but winter carries over into the silence and space and sparsity of the prose style. I for one am a dedicated champion of purple (or at least purpley) prose, finding entire novels built on staccato sentences that often hammer significance too rudely in with devices such as repetition irritatingly mannered. But here the form is the short story - and I have to say that Judith Hermann, (not to be confused with the similarly named author of 'Trauma and Recovery'), with her clipped sentences and variations thereof, succeeds in making her content inextricable from her style. There are touches of humour, of the sort that make terrible sense and that you find yourself laughing hollowly at.

I keep returning, especially, to 'Bali Woman' and 'The Red Coral Bracelet'. The passage I quoted at the beginning is from the former. I keep returning to them because they are almost frightening in their evocation of disappointment and futility. The absences in this book are not those that have been left behind, but those that are, and out of which something is bound to come, something positive, but what? The book's subtitle suggests happiness, but here, too, is uncertainty. Whatever it is that happens before the moment of happiness is at once depressing and more real than the moment itself, which is illusive and found only in retrospect. All of Hermann's exquisite, cool details are necessary beyond the fact of their having to be so because of the very genre: they are the story on the surface, and the absences between the lines are the essence we gather from it.

To be overwhelmed by history, or to create one's own; the rage-red of an ancestor's coral bracelet, or the melancholy grey of a life being lived. Faced with these choices, Hermann's protagonist in the first story, 'The Red Coral Bracelet', eventually takes action, and her choice is the more difficult one. But that makes nothing easier.

Someday I think I'd like to read, as a matter of curiosity, a book about the moment after happiness. I don't know if it's already been written, or who has written it. In the meantime I'll be looking for Hermann's second book, which I hear is called 'Nothing But Ghosts'. Now that can't possibly be flufflit...

kablooie for a cold

2005-10-13T02:48:00.000-07:00

It’s mildly surprising to me even after twenty-one odd years of unexpected events that chemistry can be so dastardly. Take two perfectly nasty burny things like hydrogen and oxygen and what do you get? Water. I am reminded of this valuable life lesson upon having concocted a drink of hot water, lemon and honey to nurse a cold so evil that it even being called a violator of its own female relatives cannot encompass its villainy. On their own, lemon and honey are perfectly nice things. In a mix, they taste like the last breath.

Hyderabad was bombed last night. Most of us immigrants to the city are too poor or too lazy to own a TV, and none of the familiar newspapers are in print today thanks to yesterday’s public holiday. This added to the scare caused by yesterday’s Deccan Chronicle, (a paper that keeps delivering itself to my doorstep even though we’re paying for The Hindu, honest!) which carried a front-page article about possible bomb hazards to Americans in the city, which affected me and the flatmates in a rather direct fashion, since some of the Americans in the city happen to employ us.

One of the flatmates who arrived back from dinner a little late noticed that all the <i>haleem</i> shops were shut by ten p.m., something unheard of around our area. Hyderabad generally seems to go to bed early but Ramzan, until yesterday, has meant long and busy evenings for the Muslim restaurants we know. From where did this city learn to be so cautious?

current musix: handsome boy modeling school - rock and roll (could never hip-hop like this) part two. BEST SONG EVAR.

perver-city

2005-10-12T05:49:00.000-07:00

Totally sick Renaissance tragedians! England hath need of thee at this hour.

At least, Aishwarya and I think so.

(18:03:27) aishwarya: I'm thinking. The image of stagnation and rot in hamlet and the duchess of malfi..
(18:04:04) aishwarya: are they an element common in revenge plays, or is this a coincidence?
(18:04:23) supriya: i dunno, dude
(18:04:39) supriya: what image, exactly? is it a single metaphor or like part of the framework?
(18:04:44) supriya: all i can remember about revenge tragedies is BLOOD
(18:04:49) supriya: ZOMBIES MUST HAVE BLOOD
(18:04:52) aishwarya: they're there throughout.
(18:05:03) supriya: YUMMY WARM RED BLOOD SLURP SLURP
(18:05:11) supriya: ZOMBIEEEEEEEEEE.
(18:05:19) supriya: ME HIERONIMO. YOU JANE?
(18:05:22) aishwarya: I mean, malfi the court is supposed to be stagnant and scary and ...you scare me!
(18:05:29) supriya: yeah, i know. :D
(18:05:44) aishwarya: and "something is rotten in the state of denmark"
(18:06:13) supriya: yeah. but that's how tragedy generally starts out, right? i mean, you take a bad situation for a good man (or woman) and then watch him wallow
(18:06:27) aishwarya: true, true
(18:06:33) aishwarya: I haven't read hamlet in years
(18:06:35) aishwarya: I need to.
(18:06:39) supriya: i haven't read hamlet at all
(18:06:44) supriya: i really should.
(18:06:56) aishwarya: *nods*
(18:06:59) aishwarya: tis the best
(18:07:59) supriya: macbeth: NO. I AM BEST.
(18:08:07) aishwarya: =-O
(18:08:23) supriya: macbeth: … please? let me be best? or my wife'll make me kill hamlet. and i won't like that.
(18:08:34) aishwarya: LOL
(18:09:07) supriya: othello: i'll kill him anyway. i'm JELUSZZZZZZ.
(18:09:34) supriya: king lear: yes, yes, alright. but does he love me best? more than aaaaany other daddy in the world?
(18:09:40) supriya: lear: *licks lips *
(18:10:05) aishwarya: elizabethan audience:wtf?
(18:10:08) supriya: lear: come on. come to daddy.
(18:10:54) aishwarya: webster:oi! I'm the one that writes incest!
(18:11:27) supriya: will shakespeare: suck it up, johnny, i was doing this when you were eating rats in the green room of the rose.
(18:11:44) supriya: will shakespeare: * goes back to reading tom stoppard to plagiarise for his next masterpiece*

Going Postal

2005-10-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

(The Thud! review will happen after I receive it from the boy. It will take a while.Growl.)
So while the entire Discworld fandom is talking about Thud!, I finally find Going Postal in paperback, and squee over that instead.

Firstly, I tend not to be as fond of the stand alone stories. I mean, with the Watch, the witches, (though not so much with the wizards) character has been built up over the books till the point where it has reached incredible levels of complexity. The stand alone books - Small Gods, Pyramids, The Truth, Monstrous Regiment, etc...they are all good books, but you never get *that* close.

(spoilers!)

The story here is almost a classic movie. Reformed criminal, outwardly frigid, chainsmoking heroine who turns out to be nice, rich and evil villain, honest men in corrupt system.

Moist is ...likeable. Not particularly complex, by Pratchett's standards, but a good character. Cute, too. I think I liked Adora better.Women with nicknames like "Killer"/"Spike" make me very happy.

Anyway - basic story. Moist van Lipwig has been sentenced to death,but is offered an alternative - a job in the Ankh Morpork Post Office. Except the post office is run down, old, full of undelivered mail, and staffed by two people, neither of them very sane. Plus the post office has to compete with the Clacks, and the man in control of the Clacks, Reacher Gilt, is EVIL.

Anyway. Stuff. I love books that talk about the power of words, especially the written word. So I loved the post office. It's interesting though...in MR there were those scenes with the spirit of the Duchess.Here, it's the spirit of the letters. I don't recall him having done something like this before these books.

Also the Clacks fascinate me. I mean, the parallels they have with...well...now, the idea of a method of increasing efficiency and making information available to 'the masses', and in MR you see how this actually helps swing Public Opinion. And here you have the other side of it - that letters are so much better than Clacks messages (or emails ...see, D? Mr. Pratchett understands...:-P)

Look, it's past 3 am. I'm allowed to write like this after 3 am, right?

Horrible Histories

2005-10-06T07:14:00.000-07:00

History is one of the things I'm quite good at. (No, we will not bring up my board marks here. *frown*) I like subjects that deal with people and what they do and why they do it. Fascinating stuff.
I suck at remembering dates. What I am good at is remembering silly little anecdotes from history. And really random facts.

When I was about six or seven I discovered the Horrible Histories series by Terry Deary. These books had ridiculous titles like The Rotten Romans, The Awesome Egyptians, The Vicious Vikings, etc. They were full of little cartoon versions of events, fake diary entries, even recipes. Pure joy.

I actually learnt a lot from those books. When we moved back here, though the only history the system seemed interested in teaching me was Indian, (I did Indian history three times over. The first two times were actually fun) I kept up with my world history through all the Horrible Histories books I could find. They affected me - a couple of months ago in an English history class (they have to teach us English history now, so we can contextualise our English lit.) I inserted limericks from The Terrible Tudors into friends' notes. Why not? We're old enough now that we don't need them as aids to memory, but isn't it fun when you're discussing the Tudors with someone (if you're the kind of person who discusses the Tudors with people of course) and you can suddenly stand up and say
Bloody Mary, they say, was quite mad.
And the nastiest habit she had
was for Protestant burning
seems she had a yearning
to kill even more than her dad.
...and get stared at? (People tend to edge away from me a lot)

Yesterday I was in the children's section of a bookshop and found The Groovy Greeks. When we studied the Greek Tragic playwrights, why did no one tell me Aeschylus died when he was hit by a falling turtle? (...and this leads me to a Pratchett post, which I promise will be my next one) I demand ridiculous bits of information like these!

I have a friend who is always buying good children's literature, saying that even if she's too old for it now, at least when she has children they'll grow up right. I don't intend to have kids - hell, I'm buying them for me.

The Simoqin Prophecies

2005-09-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

Studying English literature does not help me to read. Now, I love this subject. I really do. But sometimes I get really, really sick of reading. This tends to shock people who have known me for years; I’m the poster girl for You Can’t Get Sick Of Reading.
I can’t let myself stop reading altogether though, so when I’m in one of these moods I normally pick up a Discworld book.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to read The Simoqin Prophecies by Samit Basu instead. I’d been meaning to read this for ages, ever since reading the review in the Outlook (what was it – a couple of years ago?)
I don’t think I’ve had this much fun with a book in a long time. Basu plays with practically every known fantasy cliché, starting with “in a hole in the ground there lived…” (The Tolkien references are everywhere) all the way through to “Luke, I am your father.” It’s very similar to the earlier Discworld books (back in the days when they were just funny, before Discworld had started to belong to itself). In fact, there’s a lot of Pratchett in this; but then, it’s hard to tell whether someone is alluding to Pratchett or simply to the same things he alludes to. But Kol certainly felt rather Morporkian, and the Chief Civilian like Girl!Vetinari.
And…did I imagine the Sword of Truth influence because I’m pathetic and actually bought Wizard’s First Rule on sale a couple of years ago? Because Dahn Gem’s name certainly sounds familiar, as is his..er..relationship with the “hero”.
While I had a lot of fun recognising references, I wouldn’t be being so complimentary about the book if that was all there was to it. When writing a spoof, there’s always a risk that more time is spent on being funny than on the characters and plot. That doesn’t happen here. Asvin is pleasantly annoying. Kirin is one of the most endearing anti-heroes I’ve encountered…and ends up doing the most heroic thing possible at the end of the story. Maya’s a little silly, but that’s really the point, isn’t it? The Silver Dagger disappointed me a little at the end…I would have liked someone who could be played by dishevelled Viggo Mortensen. But no, that’s my hormones talking. And the story ends on as complex a note as you could wish - I’m guessing (hoping, certainly) that the next book will feature quite a few political power games.
Basu’s fantasy allows the underdog his defence, which is rather unusual in classical fantasy. Tolkien would never have shown us the Eldar treating men like shit. And he seems fine with Gondor giving the Mark to Eorl, against the wishes of its old inhabitants. Here, the greatest sin the asurs seem to have committed is that of not being pretty, and there’s a recognition of this.

I’m not sure what I expect from the next book in the series. More politics, yes. The obvious, soap opera story should have Maya find out about Kirin and run disillusioned into Asvin’s arms. But me, I’m thinking power games, socialism, the weaker races fight back! Fun fun fun. Only a couple of months now, I can’t wait!

Two hairy midgets and a songwriter.

2005-09-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

It probably says a lot about me that I remembered this morning that it was Bilbo and Frodo Baggins' birthday.
June later informed me that it was Nick Cave's birthday too. My mind is having a hard time associating Nick Cave with hobbits. All kinds of unwanted and infinitely creepy images are being formed. Eek.

It's hard for me to talk about Tolkien, in some ways. I discovered The Hobbit when I was six or seven, and Lord of the Rings at ten. The Silmarillion at fourteen. Joined TORC at fifteen. Am still a member. People I met there have entered my real life and become some of the most important things in it. I have all the qualifications of the Tolkien fan. I have debated on the relative merits and demerits of John Howe and Alan Moore as Tolkien artists. I have most of the History of Middle Earth books. I engaged in passionate purist vs revisionist arguments before the movies were released.
And ironically, it has been my Tolkien fandom which has led me to the people who first led me away from Tolkien. Sometime in late 2001 I moved away from Tolkien to other stuff. Beckett. Joyce. I must have been the most insuffereable kid alive at that point.
And then there was Gormenghast. This is not the right entry to talk about Peake, but Gormenghast stunned me - this was the book I wanted to have written. I never felt that way for LOTR. I almost resented LOTR for dragging fantasy in the direction it did.

Yet it's hard to escape Tolkien. I stopped the frequent rereading of the trilogy, but I still go back sometimes. I tire of his occasional old-boys-clubness and sometimes find him rather pompous. I'd rather be reading Leaf by Niggle, Smith of Wootton Major, Farmer Giles, or The Hobbit than The Lord of the Rings...some of his loveliest prose is when he isn't taking himself too seriously. But I still go back.
.

Sax myle and more it is of length

2005-09-08T08:54:00.000-07:00

I have always had a complicated relationship with C.S Lewis. I think I started reading the Chronicles of Narnia when I was about six. It was at a cousin's house (my cousins were all male and playing with them was not much fun till I learned to love football) - he had The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and it looked great (I had just read The Hobbit and found out that fantasy was a marvellous thing)So I read it that afternoon in a couple of hours, sitting between the back of the sofa and the window. And then I found that my school library had them. The next few months were spent in reading and rereading them. I loved Narnia.

Somehow, the religious allusions in Narnia escaped me for years. I'm not sure what this says about me as a literature student, but maybe I was just a very trusting young child. When I found out, it didn't particularly bother me. The school I was in had a lot to do with my religion (the parents did not interfere) and while allegedly Christian it didn't really go into the nastier (to me) bits of the faith. Basically, there was this book with some fun stories, and there was this loving God, and that was it. I didn't really have to believe in Christianity, as long as I believed in God that was enough.
As I grew older and grew away from religion, I still admired his version of it. The Screwtape Letters was sheer delight ("She's the sort of woman who lives for others. You can tell the others by their hunted expressions").
Till We Have Faces (picked up secondhand in good condition but with drawings in purple crayon at random places) was awe inspiring. That was a version of religion I could respect, if not follow. How can we meet them face to face till we have faces? Till We Have Faces was Real religion, blood spilled in dark places.
The Cosmic Trilogy I read in the wrong order completely. I read Perelandra (the second book) when I was about ten, at a guesthouse in Panchgani the same week I read The Lord Of The Rings. I found That Hideous Strength (the third) in the school library. That book was issued more times that year than in the previous ten put together. Once by Shikha, who I forced to read it, but the rest of the time by me. Then I found Out of the Silent Planet (book one) at the BCL - in the children's section, which was closed to us adult type readers, (They also had McEwan's The Child in Time and Joyce's Portrait... there. Why? I don't know.) But I found the series in a three-in-one book with one of the roadside booksellers in Saket. And there was much rejoicing.
Out of the Silent Planet is a comparitively light book to read, worth it for the gorgeous descriptions, the imagination, and the Sorns (also seen in Alan Moore's LX2). Perelandra has loads of vaguely Christian discussion relating to the Fall. It's good for the arguments. That Hideous Strength is a masterpiece. The theology is not so hityouoverthehead as Perelandra's, and it's a subtler, scarier novel with a resurrected Merlin bought in for good measure.
For a couple of years now, I've been angry with Lewis. For what he says about Eve in Paradise Lost. For what he does to Susan. For all kinds of things, based on a larger issue which was that an author I had allowed to affect me so deeply honestly believed that I was going to hell. And I felt betrayed, because he'd gone and created something for me to love, and had then made not-applicable to me because I wasn't a good little Christian child. I even felt offended from a racial point of view - the God that the brown skinned Narnians believed in was sadly deceiving them, while the white Narnians were completely enlightened. There's even a bit in OOTSP where he makes a positive reference to the White Man's Burden.
The problem is, though, I cannot stop loving the man. I feel a kind of exasperated tolerance for the more ridiculous of his views, but he's still one of the greatest writers I know of. I remember lines from his work now, books I haven't read for years. He and Tolkien are like two old fashioned father types, for me. (In the immortal words of June - you love him even though he thinks fags go to hell, women belong in kitchen and george bush is a fantastic dude. or any indian equivalent of that. that was an example, i doubt tolkien would like dubya.)
So no, I don't like his religious beliefs. Or the fact that he felt he had to beat my six year old self over the head with them. Why do I respect him? Because we had a lovely theological argument in class today about the Fall, and I came home and too out Perelandra because a teacher had asked to borrow it. And I sat all afternoon and finished Out of the Silent Planet and am halfway through Perelandra and they're gorgeous.

Read Neil Gaiman on Lewis here

Elizabeth Kostova - The Historian

2005-08-06T07:53:00.000-07:00

Everyone’s writing historical thrillers, it seems. This is the only one I’ve read which actually contains elements of the supernatural though.
Forgive me for not comparing this to the Da Vinci Code, which I haven’t read.

I have rather a weak stomach when it comes to horror or the supernatural. As a result I stayed up till 3 reading the book, with my back to the wall, and casting nervous glances at my window. A fact: Vlad himself is not nearly as frightening as that librarian.

Anyway. The story. A sixteen-year-old girl finds a mysterious book and a bundle of letters in her father’s library. When confronted, he begins to tell her the story of how he and her mother tried to discover the tomb of Dracula. Much of the narrative unfolds through letters – her father’s friend and advisor wrote the details of his search in letter form in the 1930s, and the father himself completes his narrative in letters when he has to hurry away.
It’s really rather good. Character is allowed to develop, despite the fact that most of the characters in question are known to us only through other people’s letters. Kustova has picked on one of my favourite periods in history (the “fall” of Constantinople) and she writes it well. She doesn’t talk down to the reader and assume s/he is ignorant, nor does she act as if she expects them to know everything, and throw too much information at them (a la Foucault’s Pendulum). Paul and Helen are both extremely intelligent (Helen’s a genius, apparently) but they don’t know everything, and we see them learning with us.

The book moves at a lovely, leisurely pace, with some gorgeous descriptive passages. Jabberwock's right to hope for a travel book from her. Her descriptions of Eastern Europe (a place I’ve never seen but would love to) and Istanbul (my spiritual home) are extremely beautiful.

But the ending. *sigh* No, it wasn’t awful, but it was rather a disappointment. The confrontation with Dracula is a little cheesy, and there’s far too much Happily-ever-after-ing. The long dead mother isn’t really dead; ‘Master James’ gets his revenge, and Vlad’s a little heap of dust. And then the forced “…but now he’s back” feel right at the end, like a generic horror movie preparing itself for a sequel. Not enough to spoil the book, but enough to make it less than perfect.

Of Clock-filled crocodiles and the reccos of fleas

2005-07-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

With this week being as hectic as it has been, I’m amazed I had time to read anything that wasn’t college related. But I did, I read The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith.
I liked it. Not too heavy, funny, touching, etc. Most of my reading is centred in Europe (yes, I’m very ashamed of this) so it feels refreshing to be reading something from somewhere else. Even if the author is English.

There’s the thing though. If I was reading this as an authentic account of life in Botswana, I’d probably be better off with a book by an author who was actually from the country. Luckily, all I’m really in it for is entertainment. And it’s charming.

“Charming”. It has always annoyed me the way books about Asian, African and South American countries are written in this charming, simple, childish style, somewhat akin to magical realism when you read it. (Though magical realism is not particularly simple or ‘childish’.) Try using that style on a book about the streets of London. (Hmm. That would make a pretty good book) Maybe I’m hyper sensitive, but it always seems patronising to me. With this book, though, I didn’t feel that. It was like he knew it was irritating, and was purposely mocking the style. Was he? I’m not smart enough to know.

But yes. It was a great read. I will read the other books in the series. And a big thankyou to Jai for the rec. (And no, the mention of Fleas in the title does not refer to him, but a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers who also liked this book)

The new Potter - squeal! - and spoilers.

2005-07-15T23:43:00.000-07:00

I have only ever owned one of the HP books (A hardback copy of The Goblet of Fire that was rather mistreated) and had decided not to buy any till the whole series was out and I could get a boxed set or something. Then on tuesday I was outside the Corner Bookstore at Eatopia and saw the "Book now, get 20% off" poster. I'm weak.
So I'm on my way to collect my copy of the book - Supriya and I will be doing a sort of interactive review in this post. Feel free to jump in.:)

--

Two powercuts later, I'm here to interact. And say what? Should this review have spoilers? Does it even matter when, after having read the book, the two things that preyed on everyone's mind these last two weeks - who the half-blood prince is, and who dies - are actually not the two biggest surprises or, indeed, the two most important things about the book?

To keep things general in a cursory verdict, before the details: Harry Potter has expanded. The first few chapters are marvellous proof of the fact. It's not that plot and characterisation develop wholly new aspects so much as what we could sense as subtext, the stories that JKR refrained from telling to complete the picture, are being filled in now. Consequently, growth.

-- Supriya.

---

It's been two days since I read the book, and I've calmed down.

squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

Perhaps not.

First - I'm having these glorious images of a Tony Blair cameo in the movie version of this book.

Second - Spinners End = Best Chapter Ever. The fox! (Tolkien?) "Cissy"! Snape and Wormtail living together! SnapeSnapeSnapeSnapeSnape!

Anyway. What I liked about this is the amount of background information that has finally been given us. Voldemort's story is the major thing, but there's also little things, like Dumbledore's explanation of how underage magic is controlled in wizarding families (this has been worrying me since book 2).
What bothers me a little is how completely new concepts and characters are introduced - Scrimgeour, horcruxes, etc...when something plays a significant role in a Rowling book (Minister of Magic and the only means of defeating Voldemort - that's about as significant as it gets) they've always been introduced in a relatively innocent role a couple of books earlier.
Anyway, let the predictions for the next book (and squeeing over this one) begin!

-Aishwarya
--

I think I'm calm too, except when I think of Snape and Dumbledore and have a little readgasm all over again.

My biggest grouse with this book is how well-adjusted everyone suddenly seems to be after the befuddled, massive, emotional train-wreck of OotP. This is, of course, because Harry’s talked himself into growing up over the holidays. He communicates better, obeys orders and, as if to make up for his pig-headedness throughout book 5, actually reports everything important - and many things not - to Ron, Hermione and/or a teacher. At some point I was almost about to pine for the fucked-up brat that I’d learnt to live with.

Almost.

Because, dude. New and improved Harry? Throws old whiner Harry way out of the field. You might miss his emotional upheavals and how easily he can be hurt by the world, but it’s very likely you won’t. He’s still vulnerable, but he’s no longer insecure. This is a series that is no longer dithering and stalling and hemming and hawing; it’s going places, and fast. Naturally, it may trip up on those little details like factual consistency and, oh, polite punctuation. But surely one has learnt not to expect those.

Given that, it’s surprising how heavily JKR lays on the new locations and information and points of view in the first quarter of the book. Or not; this is no expansion of plot. It’s subtext becoming text. So you have explanations for the Ministry’s liaison with the Muggle world in the first chapter and then, you have. Slytherins. Lots and lots of yummy, sharp, two-faced, and – hold your breath – three-dimensional Slytherins. Yes, I mean Draco. Everyone expected it, everyone predicted it. And JKR did it, thankfully. Chapter Two was already being touted as The Best Chapter Ever in certain circles on the morning of the 16th, and in terms of how much it gave to the reader, I might be inclined to agree. There was Bella-Narcissa-Severus tenshun, ‘nuff said. Actually: There was Bella-Narcissa-Severus tenshun and also, JKR cannot infodump subtly, ‘nuff said.

More things I didn’t like: Wayyyy too much yayl0veomg! at the end, not so well-constructed. I don’t think writing romance is one of her strong points, and I can understand her choppiness; romance is not really so much of a priority when, you know, everyone’s fighting a war, no matter what Mrs Weasley says, and it’s a delicate balance between exploring relationships and creating 300 extra pages to an already big-ass book.

As for the 'ships themselves: I don’t mind Bill/Fleur and - here I lose all literary credibility but – I actually don’t mind Remus/Tonks, but to pile it on so heavily in the last chapter did not work for me. Ron/Hermione is so much subtext it’s all but text, and I actually think she’s handling that better than most, although it did drag a lot and there were times when the Ron/Lavender farce got a bit too unfunny for me. Harry/Ginny was good, courtesy bitchy!strong!Ginny, although it was rather abruptly sketched out – did JKR not want to spend too much time on it, or did she just assume that no one really needed to have it built up?

I also liked Ginny because she was one of the few women in this book not sniffling, whining, or losing sleep over boyfriends. Well, there’s always Minerva McGonagall. If you want.

I also suppose it was tough for her to bring in new magics and theories, but I wanted more. The horcrux aspect was simplistic, but then what about HP’s magic isn’t? And it clicked, which was good. The Inferi – zombies, basically – didn’t matter much.

And, to state the obvious: Tolkien would totally kick JKR’s ass in a Dead-Marshes-writing-contest.

Back to the characters: what goes for Harry goes for Dumbledore too. After being the grim puppeteer of OotP, Albus reprises his role as superhero, Christ-figure and the guy with all the best lines. It’s not so much of a surprise, since the earlier books have put him in the super-mentor humourdaddy position before, and he has a history of power. This, then, is good!Albus raised to the power of ten; flawed but ultimately self-aware, and a hero every step of the way. His last scenes in the book may not be the best fantasy ever written, but if anyone has cared a whit for anything over the course of these books, they will care for the implications of what he does, what he means, in them.

As for Snape, what can I say? If everything else in this book has been about fulfilling expectations, then Snape has indeed been about JKR exceeding them. Always one of her best-written characters, Snape is now the one who has escaped the confines of good and evil as the books know them. I can’t read him as a traitor, but if he was – it really wouldn’t matter. His killing of Dumbledore and last fight with Harry prove that he has been doing all along is what is necessary, and the final outcome of his calculations will only decide whether it has been necessary for him alone, or for the side he’s on. And yet, there’s little coldness to him. He’s still the touchy, grumpy, jealous, nasty fuck he’s always been. The series has done some growing up in this book, but Snape has become its George Eliot: one of the few things that actually exists for grown-ups.

Voldemort. Ah, Voldie. I missed seeing him in this book. Oh, he was around constantly as Tom Riddle, which I confess was one of the things that I most anticipated about HBP, and we did get to find out more about his wizarding family, which I was very satisfied with, on the whole. I’d have hoped for him not to be such a maniac/sociopath as a child, but I’m not complaining; madman he is and will remain. The Hitler parallels grow that much more obvious, I think. I really enjoyed his presence in the book, even if he wasn’t quite the subtle tortured villain I was hoping for. Thumbs-up for gapfilling.

Draco, as for Draco. Well, his story arc went the way it was expected to go, in a ridiculously overdone “we love the sound of our own exposition before we kill each other” Draco-Dumbledore scene, and. Well. Thank heavens there was no miraculous redemption. I like my snivelling Draco, tall and pale and burdened though he may have grown. (Incidentally, so much about this book was fanfic. There was Sirius’ will, lots of Slytherin machination, and there was tall and pale Draco who cries secretly. I’m like, hahahahahaha.)

As a general first half of the stuff to come in book seven, I’m rather chuffed. I miss the spontaneity and structural tightness of the early books – and CoS, to which this is a parallel, has always been my favourite – but then, so does everyone. We cope.

She may still be laying on her ‘all you need is love’ moral a bit thickly, but the grey area between good and evil is coming out into the open, and that has made all the difference. That is what makes Book Seven worth waiting for, and wait I, at least, will.

-- Supriya.

the master - colm tóibín

2005-07-14T10:32:00.000-07:00

" The Master" was last year's Booker favourite, and having finally read it, I know I'd have chosen it over the eventual winner, another book featuring Henry James (in a lesser capacity) myself. In a competition where each book seems to be chosen primarily for its display of style and writerly skill - and were that the only crtierion, Cloud Atlas would be really tough to beat - it stands to reason that, when each work is some form of tour de force in its own right, an overall measure comes into play, that takes into account things like, oh, how the book makes you feel, perhaps; or how far the writer's succeeded in accomplishing what he set out to do. In both cases, I'd grant my vote to "The Master." (I'm talking like these were the only three books in the running - does anyone even remember the names of the other two?) Both this book and "The Line of Beauty" are intensely psychological, self-absorbed books, but it is Tóibín who infuses his story with a rarer and more profound quality than Hollinghurst's authorial intelligence: authorial compassion.

In "The Master," Tóibín recreates some of James' own heavily elliptical, allusive style by constructing his story as a bunch of disconnected episodes set between 1895 and 1901. James' play has failed miserably in London, against his expectations, and, deeply mortified, he retreats further into himself. The next four years him will bring him more success; a slew of brilliant novels, a house of his own, and a headlong tumble into TS Eliot's deadly April cocktail of memory and desire.

As the novel walks us backwards and forwards through cities in which James has spent his life observing people, making friends, developing relationships but never seeing them through, it manages to create a subtle but accurate impact on the reader as the private life of the man who wrote Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove. Tóibín manages to create a psychological verisimilitude without ever focussing too sharply on the painful details of James' sexual crises (reviewer's note: yay!), his failure to save his friends from death and decay, and his social obligations. The moments of palpable dramatic tension (a young Henry sharing a bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes, his scattering of Constance Woolson's clothes in the ocean) are balanced by clear, calm reflective ones. You can only marvel at the lightness of touch it takes to create those, to make them sober and dark without being clumsy and heavy-handed. The Master is as much of a biography as Finding Neverland was a biopic; it's job is to pull threads from its subject's life together to fashion a plot out of mere story, and the gentle, meandering way in which connections are established and reinforced is both original and poignant.

If I was forced to pick a flaw in the tapestry, it'd be the sudden, inexplicable introduction of the subject of the occult (Henry's brother William and his wife were known for their interest in it) which isn't adequately resolved. But then, as James' work itself shows time and again, there's not much about the human condition that is.

Tóibín is no James, and I think he knows it: his language and basic tropes are all simple enough. James, after all, was not a character out of his own books, but a human being who wrote extraordinarily complex stories. In setting out to portray that man, Tóibín accomplishes an elegant, quiet novel that might just inspire a reader to read more of him - and more of James.

The Moon Riders - Theresa Tomlinson

2005-07-10T22:30:00.000-07:00

Been wanting to review this for a while. It's supposedly a book for *young adults*, in that the print is large-ish and there's no explicit sex. Other than that, I can't help thinking it was written for an audience far more mature than last year's movie Troy.
Is this historically accurate? I haven't a clue. It's fiction...whether it is based on reaonably reliable sources I cann't be sure; I'm not really an expert on this period of history. It is set in the years leading up to the Trojan War. The protagonist, Myrina, belongs to a nomadic tribe whose members are expert horse breeders and horse riders. At the age of fourteen she meets and befriends Cassandra of Troy when her father sells some horses to king Priam. Around the same time, she also joins the Moon Riders (the Amazons). Cassandra runs away with the Moon Riders, and so the Amazon women are dragged into the Trojan war.
Tomlinson doesn't give you much detail about the later stages of the war. Cassandra has a few uncomfortable dreams about a huge horse, but that's about it - she prefers to concentrate on the siege (the years that were left out of the movie so that Achilles could stay young and pretty) and assumes her readers will know what came next. That's rather a compliment when you're young - to know that an author actually credits you with being well informed. Though Tomlinson is English, and if I remember right we did the Greeks in third or fourth year.
Characterisation starts off rather simple - the story is told mostly from Myrina's perspective and a fourteen year old sees things differently from a twenty-something year old. As Myrina matures, so does the novel. Fourteen year old Myrina sees Paris as spoilt and annoying. Adult Myrina sees a weak, guilty man, very deeply in love.*
Achilles and his men kill most of Myrina's tribe, she wants to kills him, but he is still shown as an honourable man in battle. Helen is in love, but also retains her instincts of self-preservation, and is not portrayed as a bitch for doing so.
And she doesn't spare you the violence/sadness. People are dying all over the place.

I would have liked to read this about seven or eight years ago. Reading a book as an adult means you judge it by adult standards, which is a bit unfair. Though I think I prefer *childrens* books anyway. This made me cry, which proves it's certainly very effective.

*Again, compare this to Paris in Troy. Was the character written that one-dimensional deliberately, or was it the magic of Orlando Bloom?

Batman Begins

2005-06-21T22:33:00.000-07:00

Nice try.
Yes, really. Nolan really did make an effort to go back to the *real* Batman of the comics. He watched Bladerunner a lot, apparently, and the effect is certainly visible. But it's just not good enough. Gotham is dark, but not quite chilling, Christian Bale's attractive, but not quite right, Batman's a little strange but not as mental (well yes, I love the man, but he's mental!) as he needs to be.
Katie Holmes is pretty, but she's just a non-entity...she isn't noticeable at all. Does this woman have a personality in real life? I'm curious.
And oh, look. It's Qui gon.

It's the year of the gritty SF movie...and this is a joke, but I will now imagine Jennifer Aniston with a bug head for the rest of the day.

Summertime Blues

2005-06-18T01:42:00.000-07:00

Summertime Blues

Well, I went to my congressman
He sent me back a note
It said, "I''d like to help you, hon
But you're too young to vote"

I don't know about other people, but I always believed this song to be written by the Who, after I saw them perform this at Woodstock( the movie/ I'm not old enough to have been at this most wonderful of concerts in person).

Their electrifying, drug-fuelled performance, their equipment-smashing madness, a white-jumpsuit wearing Pete Townshend windmilling and leaping about the stage, Keith Moon's insane drum-rolls- everything was perfect in the movie, if not in real life:
It has, strangely, sometimes been described as their worst gig ever, involving Pete bashing his guitar on a man's head for interrupting their set. Luckily, I never got to see this happen which is why it seems near flawless to me, to this day.

And then I found out that this song, the song that I thought gave Woodstock more flavour than it is given credit for, the song that so perfectly described the repression felt by the youth of the time, the bleakness of work and the betrayal by their government at Vietnam that Woodstock through one long summer of peace and music was to cure, was written by Eddie Cochran and Jerry Caphart to be performed by Ed Cochran, in 1958, nearly a decade before I had believed it to be written.

Now, this in no way diminished my respect for the performance that made this song so famous. They transformed this song into something altogether wild and full of the madness that was the Who, which makes it very hard for me not to associate this song with them.

However, this did greatly increase my respect for Ed Cochran, who to someone born in the late 80s, seemed more an Elvis sound-alike than a good songwriter and performer. I could just as well have labelled the Byrds, the Monkees, the Beach Boys etc. nothing but lesser-quality facsimilies of the Beatles, which though partly correct appearance-wise, is not all that their music was. People borrowed music techniques all the time- heck, even the Beatles weren't always a hundred percent original. But the remarkability of the lyrics, their twisting even the slightest thing they borrowed to something no one else was capable of, is mostly why it isn't seen as a corruption and the borrowing generally considered too inconsequential to be of note.

Orhan Pamuk - My Name Is Red

2005-06-17T23:52:00.000-07:00

Pamuk wants to write a historicised (should that be an historicised?) debate on the western vs eastern concepts of art. So he writes a murder mystery.
Comparisons with The Name of The Rose are inevitable, of course. Both are mysteries which frequently lapse/rise into philosophical debate. Both are historical novels. However, Eco’s book has the edge over Pamuk’s, simply because the mystery is a lot more interesting. William and Adso have an amusing Holmes and Watson feel to them. TNOTR has clues, suspects, and enough of a convoluted murder plot to draw the reader in. It’s like religion + Agatha Christie. Pamuk gives us three suspects (Olive, Butterfly and Stork), no clues, and not enough time spent on the suspects for us to care. It makes little difference to the reader to know which one’s the murderer. My reaction was something like “He did it? Oh, okay.”
Leaving aside the main plot, however,(and you can do that with this book, the murder plot is merely a means to an end) this is actually rather a lovely book. The debate on art is good – while debating the use of the western perspectivist technique, Pamuk adopts it, letting the characters tell their own stories in their own voices. People are telling their stories, not knowing what the others are saying/doing. Rather like the minaturists working on Enishte's book. Yet the argument for traditional art is made as well. I don’t want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.
The subplots are far more absorbing than the murder. While Shekure and Black’s relationship is really rather boring, Shekure herself (and her relationship with her sons) is interesting. The puritanical preacher Nusret Hoja and his followers provide an important background story throughout, affecting the main plot in minor but significant ways. The storyteller in the coffeehouse is magnificent.
The ending though, the hint that the author is Shekure’s son Orhan and that he may have lied to make the story better, that didn’t work for me. It’s a little too cutesy, and it’s been done far too many times before.
This sounds harsh. It really is worth reading (and owning) and I did love it. No, really.

Incredibly spoilerful review of Star Wars Ep III

2005-05-20T21:20:00.000-07:00

First of all - I didn't know we HAD that many fans in Delhi. They cheered and applauded at the opening credit thingy and the scrolling yellow wordy bit. They also, for some reason, cheered at Padme's pregnancy. Applauding her fertility, presumably.
er.

So yes, I was surrounded by screaming fans, and most of the time that was a really good thing.

ROTS is far, far better than either of the prequels. The effects are stunning. The dialogue is slightly better than the last two (though Padme/anakin scenes are still rather cringeworthy). The acting is mostly better...Natalie Portman didn't impress me much, but Hayden got better. What really sets ROTS apart from TPM and AOTC is the fact that you actually care about the characters. Anakin's transition to the dark side was painful at times, as was Obi-wan's feeling of betrayal that Anakin had not carried out the prophecy. And some of the strongest scenes in the movie are done without the characters spewing 'dramatic' dialogue - Anakin and Padme sitting silently looking out of the window, Vader entering the Jedi temple with an army, the younglings scene, and the masking of Darth Vader. The betrayal of the Jedi, shown for each individual, is pretty heartbreaking. Padme gets the best line in the movie, as she watches Palpitane turn the republic into an empire.

Yes, the movie had its silly bits. General Grievous is just annoying, and walks like the smaller, brown dinosaur in Dinosaur Comics. Obi Wan on a giant lizard is really rather silly, but it doesn't jar. As usual, C3PO and R2D2 provide comic relief, R2 is especially brilliant (I'd never noticed before how much he sounds like a teletubby).

I think what I really appreciated about the film was that it wasn't all black and white. The original trilogy was, and that was good. But most of those who were children when they saw the originals are all grown up now, and presumably have learnt that it's not that simple. Some of the Jedi actions are dubious, and there is good in Vader. And the movie sets things up for his redemption brilliantly, I need to watch the original trilogy again. It'll have more depth now.

Best quote:
So, this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause..-Padme

Worst quote:
I'm weak! Don't kill me! - Palpitane/Darth Sidious.

Art!

2005-05-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

I bring ye...art!

I bought this at Dilli Haat because it's gorgeous and weird and snakeful.

I'm wondering though...I'm seeing a lot of Madhubani-ish stalls at Dilli Haat lately, and that's odd. And the college book and stationery shop has spiral bound notebooks with madhubani covers. I don't remember the last time art in its framed form was in fashion.
So is Madhubani the latest trend? Am I *gasp* cool?

on kingdom of heaven

2005-05-12T11:25:00.000-07:00

{hello, i'm the other friendly co-poster.}

A Jerusalem where everyone speaks the language of self-satisfied libertarianism is no Jerusalem. Where are the Jews, for one? Lost beneath the swirling two-dimensionality of Scott’s execution. The protagonist's utilitarian philosophy – save the people, leave the stones - fails to succeed, fails to broker more than a temporary peace and a feeble wonder in the minds of the audience.

Something is rotten in the kingdom of conscience. Wolfgang Petersen tried and failed to comment on the Iraq War with Troy, his utterly boybandish interpretation of the Iliad. Oliver Stone was certainly not smoking the right stuff when he drew his suicidally ludicrous parallel between Alexander and George Bush. Scott attempts to remedy this, it is true, and his message – that religion and history are not greater than human life – is a good and valuable thing in itself. But the sense of unease is pervasive. The ham-handed self-importance of it all clangs and clatters when, as the film itself states in an unbearably pompous epilogue, peace in the kingdom of heaven remains elusive a thousand years later. Kingdom isn’t even preaching to the choir; it’s rehashing the tunes and force-feeding it back to them.

Not in a wildly interesting fashion, even.

A Beginning

2005-05-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

I read. Quite a lot. I also occasionally watch movies. And go to exhibitions. And buy/crave art. I want to talk about these things. You will listen/read. Hah.