Taking on the Double-Dare

Hope you have had a happy holiday - whatever you like celebrating - christmas, chanukah, kwanza, the winter solstice. Now enough singing songs, snacking, toasts, and boardgames, let's get down to the business of reading. C.B. has double-dared us to read only from the TBR pile from December 31, 2011 until April 1,

The line that separates pleasure from intimacy (Books - The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst)

I find myself not knowing what to say about The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst as I sit down with my tea, so I'll start with the title. It is based on Hogarth's writings about the ogee, the s-shaped curve - as an ideal of beauty. Nick Guest, the novel's central character describes his lover, Leo's, body as having that shape. Nick is a connoisseur of beauty in all its forms - an admirer of houses, furniture, bodies, faces. He graduates with a first from Oxford and settles into a room in the attic of his friend Toby's parent's house. Toby's father, Gerald, is a conservative MP as the Tories are making their meteoric rise to power under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s - on a cloud of power and money. Nick is supposedly working on a thesis about Henry James's novels and James seems a good subject for him - a lovely but highly intellectual take on the subject of power and beauty, and always at a remove. Everyone in this novel seems motivated only by external appearances, except for Gerald's daughter Catherine, who although she is mentally ill and doesn't know what she wants, seems to at least to want to tell the truth. I found this novel full of memorable characters and writing that is easily elegant without being showy. It creates a devastatingly critical portrait of an age of superficiality, greed, and duplicity that is hard to like. I found most of the characters infuriatingly vapid and false, and yet I had to keep reading because I cared what would happen. One the one hand it is hard not to like Nick - he is a charmer - handsome, agreeable, and when it comes to the physical beauty of things he's not merely a poseur, he is knowledgeable about their history and their craftsmanship. He is professional appreciator, and is quite skilled when fulfilling such a role. On the other hand he is a passive hanger-on with no ambition except to be around comforts and to avoid conflict in the present moment. He will say or do anything to be liked and not lose the comforts he enjoys at the lavish expense of others. I guess one could say he is quite clever, but I found him ultimately despicable, and that formed the conflict of the novel for me. Who in Nick's shoes wouldn't have a hard time saying 'no,' not necessarily to the things Nick enjoys, but to whatever would satisfy our own greed?

**SPOILER ALERT** Of course, the mighty do fall, and with them their hangers-on. So Nick's journey finally does force him to reckon with the consequences dealt to those from whom he has benefited and the novel leaves me wondering how the 90s and 00s. treated him. **ALERT OVER**

But I find myself returning to Alan Hollinghurst's title yet again, as I really had a different take on it by the novel's end. I found myself thinking of a line of beauty as a border line. A line at which the beauty of things or people for their own sake must end and attention to the use of the person or thing in its context, the consequences of associating with it, must be reckoned with. And let me be clear, I am not referring to Nick's homosexuality. I and am revolted by those who imagine AIDS as some sort of scourge for sin. Nick's sexuality (whether homo or hetero) as expressed in his second relationship in the novel with Wani Ouradi has extraordinary benefits in creature comforts, money, and Nick's pleasure in the beauty of his lover, but they come at the price of never living openly and never receiving the overt expression of his love. Nick enjoys the sex and the first class suite in Venice but never experiences intimacy which, it seems to me, is too exorbitant a price to pay.

In the experiment that identified dopamine as the neurotransmitter associated with the experience of pleasure, rats were permitted to administer themselves doses of cocaine which stimulate the production of dopamine, by the press of a lever. They famously pleasured themselves to death and that's what this book reminds me of. As much as I enjoy beauty in people and in art, delicious wine and food, or whatever, there is a line that separates enjoyment from gluttony, admiration from participation, and pleasure from intimacy and that is how I found myself thinking of the line of beauty by the novel's end.

Here's my other post on this book.

A Guest at the Party (Books - The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst)

While everyone else is working on the new Booker longlist, I'm reading an old winner, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. Starting in London in 1983, Nick Guest has just graduated with a first from Oxford. He is the classmate of Toby Feddens, son of a conservative member of Parliament, and without much money to spare, rents a garret room in the Feddens' house. Nick's father deals in antiques, but while he has had a chance to learn about and develop a taste for beautiful things, he has grown up decidedly middle class. Nick is also discovering his sexuality, and is finding that it is decidedly homosexual, with a particular attraction for a young black man named Leo. It is easy to see why Hollinghurst has given Nick the surname of Guest - he seems a young man with a foot in four counties but a home in none. He is barely out of the closet, admires the greater experience of Leo but is not yet able to live openly himself, remember this is the year when AIDS first came to general public awareness. He loves the parties given in great houses, the witty conversation, elegant food, and freely flowing drugs. Thatcher's England was an era of indulgence for those with the money to do so, and while Nick is not himself a man of means, he has managed to attach himself to a family that is very well provided for. It is in this setting that he comes of age - attempting to ingratiate himself to everyone as he figures out who he is and what he values most.

I too graduated from college in the early 80s. The Tylenol murders, liposuction, John Belushi's overdose, the breakup of Ma Bell, Charles & Di, Haley's comet, crack cocaine, the discovery of the AIDS virus. I was coming of age in Reagan's America rather than Thatcher's England, but I recognize that era in which laws were meant to provide people in certain circles and corporations of certain means the maximum of permissiveness on the one hand, while on the other the same conservatives used their power to clamp down on what they saw as overly indulgent social mores, particularly those less familiar or less comfortable for them. At the book's start, Nick is still innocent to the duplicity that surrounds him. As this is a coming of age story, I expect that will change. This seems a modern-day Jamesian novel, with an eye for details of class and society, and prose that rolls easily as the hills of the English countryside. I was drawn 100 pages in before I even looked up from reading.

Lean, complex and poetic but unfrivolous (Books - The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut)

The Good Doctor pits experienced cynicism against naive idealism. In it, Laurence Waters, newly minted M.D., is required by the South African medical establishment to do one year of community service and to distinguish himself from his peers he chooses the most out-of-the-way spot he can. He must share digs with Dr. Frank Eloff, who found the spot years earlier when running from a bad divorce. If his wife running off with his best friend hadn't hardened him, then this remote, poorly funded hospital, would have. Here, any time a patient has a serious condition, they are moved to a better equipped hospital, leaving the staff hardly anything interesting to do.

Years of my life, sour with caffeine, had been sipped away in this room. A clock on the wallk stood silent and broken, the hands fixed for ever at ten to three. The only thing that had changed here since I arrived was the dartboard on the back of the door. I had brought it up from the recreation room one Sunday, hoping to while away some hours. But there are only so many times that you can throw a dart into a board before the ideas of an aim and a target begins to lose its point.

Never mind that a zen master would surely disagree, this paragraph is exemplary of Damon Galgut's writing - unusual verb choices as you might see in a poem: years in the first sentence are sipped rather than, say, passed. And we are invited to not only see and hear the scene, as usual, but also to taste its sourness. A clock's ticking is absent, but we are aware that it could be there if the clock worked. This is a place in which time has stopped, says Galgut. The hospital is a victim of politics.

'So that's it,' Laurence said suddenly. 'The other hospital. The one where everybody goes.'

I nodded heavily. 'That's it.'

'That's where all the funding's going, the equipment , the staff, all that?'

'That's it.'

'But why?'

'Why? An accident of history. A few years ago there was a line on a map, somewhere around where we're sitting now. On one side was the homeland where everything was a token imitation. On the other side was the white dream, where all the money - '

'Yes, yes, I understand that,' he said impatiently. 'But the line on the map's gone now. So why aren't we the same as them?'

I shrugged. 'I don't know, Laurence. There isn't enough money to go round. They have to prioritize.'

Laurence's idealism begins to make the director of the hospital nervous:

'I have a feeling he was looking for a different kind of hospital,' she said. 'The set-up here - it's too low-key for someone like him.'

'I agree,' I said.

'Why don't you take him around, Frank? Show him the whole place. Let him see what he's in for. Then if he want to be transferred somewhere else, I'll see what I can do.'

'All right. No problem.'

'Of course he's welcome here. I'm not saying he isn't. The community service idea - I'm in favour. I'm all for innovation and change, you know that.'

'Oh, yes,' I said. 'I know.'

Innovation and change: it was one of her key phrases, a mantra she liked to repeat. But it was empty. Ruth Ngema would go to great lengths to avoid any innovaction of change, because who knew what might follow on?

The hospital in this book is a microcosm of its setting - South Africa - where, in the context of a post-apartheid government, life is waging a battle between idealism and cynicism every day. Thank goodness that that system is now history, but however seriously intended that change was habits, budgets, hearts and minds change more slowly. Galgut has accomplished no small feat in making a book about stasis active and interesting. The writing is at once lean and complex, it is almost poetic in word choice but unfrivolous in style. I hope to finish it today, it is a splendid read.

This link includes my other post on The Good Doctor.

All Bets Are Off (Books - The Gathering by Anne Enright)

I had my statistics midterm yesterday at 8 am and it was scary hard. I have no idea how I did but it didn't feel like I did well. It didn't matter much what came after that - a two-hour memory class, lunch with a friend, a couple of hours in the lab, and an hour-long walk home - I was too exhausted to do anything for school. So I finished The Gathering instead. This post along with this one constitute my thoughts about it. **Some spoilers follow. **



My opinion of the writing didn't change, it is luminous, but I was less interested in certain aspects of the story as the book went on. It gets into some childhood abuse issues in a way that didn't really interest me and rendered the story rather formulaic. I also found the novel's treatment of sex odd, I'm not sure I can place just how it was odd, but it was an appendage to the story while the issues of grief and family were the story. Maybe that was the narrator's relationship to sex, but somehow it made the story feel less of-a-piece. However, when it comes to grief and regret Enright is a master.

I make my way up to the top of the church and am drowned in the emotion, whether love or sadness, that floods my chest. My face sets into the mask of a woman weeping, one half pulled into a wail that the other half will not allow. There are no tears. My head twists away from whichever side of the church is more interested in my grief, only to show it to the other side. Here it is. The slow march of the remaining Hegarty's. I don't know what wound we are showing to them all, apart from the wound of family. Because, just at this moment, I find that being part of a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive.

What does not feel in the least formulaic is the way her fiction captures the oddity, the pain, the wrongness, of an important moment of being alive. A moment which follows none of the rules of TV, the formulas of picture books - it's not the way it's supposed to be but is, rather, the way it is - and she not only gets it just right, but makes art of it. I have had moments exactly like the one described above. One where I have thought - why didn't someone tell me it would be like this? Enright tells us in a paragraph, and that paragraph has the clarity and violence of Picasso's Guernica.

I thought about this, as I saw in the Shelbourne bar - that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go 'home' where I could 'have sex' with my 'husband' just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn't seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died.

That seems to me to be the gift of shock, of grief, of any kind of radical life change that most people try to avoid like the plague. It makes us question everything, all the habits we have set up for the convenience of living. We don't necessarily want to notice that our FEET are in our SHOES all day long. It can make you feel suddenly as though you are walking in scuba diving flippers. Our nervous system helps us to not notice everything and to prioritize newer things, or louder things, or more dangerous things. We also have the ability to harness what we call attention to our will. There is too much information around us at any one moment to pay attention to everything, so attention helps us prioritize and saves us cognitive resources. To choose certain of those things instead of others. We also bundle the steps we take to perform ordinary activities - walking down stairs, driving to work - in one automatic series of actions we don't even think about any more. But these heuristics, though they save us time and cognitive resources, can get us stuck. We try to get efficient about everything we do. This can keep us from asking any questions at all. From noticing our world - whether that be to appreciate it or to detest it. Emergencies help us notice everything again. The really big ones make our brain say "all bets are off," that is probably what can be so disorienting about them. Enright's book captures that state beautifully.

Writing with inevitability but without predictability (Books - The Gathering by Anne Enright)

My brother Liam loved birds and, like all boys, he loved the bones of dead animals. I have no sons myself, so when I pass any small skull or skeleton I hesitate and think of him, how he admired their intricacies. A magpie's ancient arms coming through the mess of feathers; stubby and light and clean. That is the word we use about bones: Clean.

As I sit here with my tea this morning, trying to think of what to say about Anne Enright's The Gathering, the 2007 Man Booker Prize winner, I end up with the sentence - it is an act of remembering. The reason I am finding that remarkable is because in the 100 or so pages I have read so far, the feeling that this book is a single act about a single person hasn't stopped yet. It is a song of painful memory of a woman for her brother sung from one deep single breath. The writing is exquisite. We know up front that she is trying to get at a memory of a certain event and through the rest of the book she retraces her steps. Her observations occur always as specifics, never as generalities, and as a result you are always right with her, wherever she is:

I walk to the far counter and pick up the kettle, but when I go to fill it, the cuff of my coat catches on the running tap and the sleeve fills with water. I shake out my hand, and then my arm, and when the kettle is filled and plugged in I take off my coat, pulling the wet sleeve inside out and slapping it in the air.

My mother looks at this strange scene, as if it reminds her of something. Then she starts forward to where her tablets are pooled in a saucer, on the near counter. She takes them, one after the other, with a flaccid absent-mindedness of the tongue...

The reader knows right from the beginning that this is a scene in which the narrator is going to tell her mother that her brother, Liam, is dead. It is filled with the small details that make this an experience of people living life, rather than a story created of ideas about those people. I know so much about this narrator, knowing that she would finish filling and plugging in the kettle before taking off the wet coat. The events unfold with a life-like inevitability, but never with predictability and that's what I am loving about the writing so much.

Just one more excerpt for now. The chapters remembering Liam alternate with chapters imagining the early life of the narrator's grandparents. Without saying why it is important, here is one more excerpt that doesn't seem to turn this single moment of life into writing, it rather plops it on the page, still hot and breathing.

It is Lent. Nugent has given up rashers, sausages and all kinds of offal for the duration, also strong drink. His body has been cleansed by the workings of his soul - so the smell that rises from under his shirt has something of the spring air in it, a whiff of early morning soap, the quiet ming of a day's toil. The cloth of his suit is decently worn and the collar of his shirt is decently clean, and his life stretches ahead of him decently waxing into a solid middle age.

With one small interruption - because there is nothing decent about the glint in his baby eye, looking at Ada Merriman in the foyer of the Belvedere Hotel.

The search for enlightenment, release, forgiveness (Booker Challenge - Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala)

This post along with this one constitute my thoughts about Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's 1974 Heat and Dust - Booker prize winner, and it contains a spoiler. Heat and Dust is a story of differences. The English and the Indian, the intellectual and the spiritual, the servants of the empire and the 'natives.

Yes, concluded the Major it is all very well to love and admire India - intellectually, aesthetically, he did not mention sexually but he must have been aware of that factor too - but always with a virile, measured, European feeling. One should never, he warned, allow oneself to become softened (like Indians) by an excess of feeling; because the moment that happens - the moment one exceeds one's measure - one is in danger of being dragged over to the other side.

Or of losing one's wife, I guess the book would say. Perhaps for its time this book read more profoundly than it does now. Perhaps it performed literary atonement for political sins and awarding it the Booker showed the English really meant it? I don't know. I found the story predictable, the writing style admirable but reportorial. I was interested but never moved. Perhaps it is because I saw the movie (although that was many years ago), but I was left feeling a little empty.

When Olivia, the wife of a British official, and a local Indian prince begin their relationship he asks her:

Olivia, do you also hate and despise orientals? Of course you do. And you are right, I think. Because we are very stupid people with feelings that we let others trample on and hurt to their hearts' content. English people are so lucky - they have no feelings at all.

The British characters in this book search for power, for love, for enlightenment, for their roots - with all this longing surely there is some feeling too - however disguised? Conversely, the married Indian prince toys with and seduces a stupid and idle British woman and gets her pregnant. She aborts her baby and lives in the mountains in India for the rest of her life. If the prince felts any remorse, in fact, if he felt anything at all, I was unaware of it. So I guess the finally irony is that the British made true subjects of the Indians after all.

I did find the descriptions of life in India interesting. One of the primary reasons I read is to get inside difference - whether of individuals, cultures, times, geographies, what have you. It is curious, the draw this country, of poverty, of harsh caste hierarchies, has to people seeking release from themselves. I hope to travel there one day and in the meantime will, I guess, visit through literature.

The colonizer finds herself in the world of her subjects (Book - Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is the writer of the talented group that brought us most of the films named for the other two director and producer members of the trio - Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. If you have never seen their film adaptations of A Room with a View (1985) or Howard's End (1992) they are spectacular films - I think I watch A Room with a View at least once a year. They also made Heat and Dust (1983) before they had exploded onto the international film market. I remember seeing it when it was screened at MOMA. It's based on Jhabvala's Booker winning novel of the same title and which I am reading for Dewey's Booker Challenge.

The book is a multi-layered affair in which a young English woman in the 1970s travels to India to learn more about the story of her great-grandmother Olivia, who though recently married to an Englishman whom she then joins in India, runs off with an Indian Prince. This all happened in the 1920s. Muti-layered because it combines a present-day narrative of the young woman's trip, written as diary entries, with imagined memories of Olivia's life in the 1920s that, in turn, are taken from her letters to her sister. The writing style is sparse, almost reportorial. It is very event-driven, I feel like I can see (with my 20/20 hindsight) how Jhabvala's writing suits the medium of film, where the visual details can be lingered upon, if desired. Where we can be shown rather than told. I've read about half of this short novel and much of the early action consists of Olivia's boredom with the social scene in India as a recent immigrant:

He had been in India for over twenty years and knew all there was to know about it; so did his wife. And of course so did the Crawfords. Their experience went back several generations, for they were all members of families who had served in one or other of the Indian services since before the Mutiny. Olivia had met other such old India hands and was already very much bored by them and their interminable anecdotes about things that had happened in Kabul or Multan. She kept asking herself how it was possible to lead such exciting lives - administering whole provinces, fighting border battles, advising rulers - and at the same time to remain so dull. She looked around the table - at Mrs. Crawford and Mrs. Minnies in their dowdy frocks more suitable to the English watering places to which they would one day retire than to this royal dining table; Major Minnines and Mr. Crawford, puffy and florid, with voices that droned on and on confident of being listenined to though everything they were saying was, Olivia thought, as boring as themselves.

Olivia seems to be one of those people who fancies herself an adventurer in her head, but when push comes to shove she is skittish, naive, and rather whiny. But the writing is simple and confident and there are some wonderful observations of this strange and interesting culture that was the English empire in India. So I continue.

Next day Olivia went to visit Mrs. Saunders. She took flowers, fruit, and a heart full of tender pity for her. But although Olivia's feelings towards Mrs. Saunders had changed, Mrs. Saunders herself had not. She was still the same unattractive woman lying in bed in a bleak, gloomy house. Olivia, always susceptible to atmosphere, had to struggle against a feeling of distaste. She did so hate a slovenly house, and Mrs. Saunders' house was very slovenly; so were her servants. No one bothered to put Olivia's pretty flowers in a vase - perhaps there was no vase? There wasn't much of anything, just a few pieces of ugly furniture and even those were dusty.

I do enjoy the description and yet feel it fails somehow to come to life. I can't help thinking what Dickens would have made of such a character. But now, as I'm nearing the beginning of the affair (I think) things are beginning to heat up a little. The colonizers have a policy against the tradition of a widow throwing herself on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband and fail, one day, in enforcing it. It become the subject of a lively dinner conversation in which Olivia finally drags herself out of her protective skin of judgment to enter the world in which she is living:

"...She sat for four days on a rock in the river and said that if she wasn't allowed to burn herself then she'd starve herself to death. In any case she wasn't going to be left behind. In the end Sleeman had to give way - yes he lost that round but I'll tell you something - he speaks of the old lady with respect. She wasn't a fanatic, she wasn't even very dramatic about it, she just sat there quietly and waited and said no, she wanted to go with her husband. There was something noble there," said the Major - and now he wasn't being tolerant and amused, not in the least.

"Too noble for me, I fear," said Beth Crawford - as hostess, she probably felt it was time to change the tone. "Fond as I am of you, dear man," she told her husband across the table, "I really think I could - "

"Oh I could!" cried Olivia, and with such feeling that everyone was silent and looked at her. Douglas also looked - and this time she dared raise her eyes to his: even if he was angry with her. "I'd want to. I mean, I just wouldn't want to go on living. I'd be grateful for such a custom."

Now is she just trying on that sentiment, like a teenager trying on a piercing, a radical haircut, or a new controversial opinion? Perhaps. But she thinks she means it, and rather than stand at a distance any longer from those her country colonized, she dares to step inside. Olivia is waking up to herself. This may get interesting.

Idealization as exploitation (Books - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood)

Laura herself didn't know it, of course. She had no thought of playing the doomed romantic heroine. She became that only later, in the frame of her own outcome and thus in the minds of her admirers. In the course of daily life she was frequently irritating, like anyone. Or dull. Or joyful, she could be that as well: given the right conditions, the secret of which was known only to her, she could drift off into a kind of rapture. It's her flashes of joy that are most poignant for me now.

And so in memory she rambles through her mundane activities, to the outward eye nothing very unusual - a bright-haired girl walking up a hill, intent on thoughts of her own. There are many of these lovely, pensive girls, the landscape is cluttered with them, there's one born every minutes. Most of the time nothing out of the ordinary happens to them, these girls. This and that and the other, and then they get older. But Laura has been singled out, by you, by me. In a painting she'd be gathering wildflowers, though in real life she rarely did anything of the kind. The earth-faced god crouches behind her in the forest shade. Only we can see him. Only we know he will pounce.

I've looked back over what I've set down so far, and it seems inadequate. Perhaps there is too much frivolity in it, or too many things that might be taken for frivolity. A lot of clothes, the styles and colours outmoded now, shed butterflies' wings. A lot of dinners, not always very good ones. Breakfasts, picnics, ocean voyages, costume balls, newspapers, boating on the river. Such items do not assort very well with tragedy. But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it...

Ah yes, the age old artistic conundrum - the distance between the vision and the creation. Unfortunately it is never quite bridged in The Blind Assassin because of all its fussiness with its form (see my other posts on this here and here). Atwood's toying around with meta-fiction is never quite satisfying because it doesn't seem to be necessary. She is reduced, in the end, to explaining everything that was obscured for the sake of character or the puzzle she wanted to create by playing with form. Ultimately this hopping from article, to a story within the story, to another story within that story would, one hopes, create suspense - you keep delaying the information from reaching the reader. Unfortunately the book did not succeed in doing that because I already knew what it was hiding. Or one hopes that it will reveal something critical about the story that telling it more simply would not have done. Unfortunately this book apparently fails there too because Atwood is left at the end explaining what happened.

The story is not a bad one, I did finish it after all, and it does succeed in bringing out one theme very strongly: the way women of a certain generation could be run by men, infantalized, made helpless, used as props, not allowed to exist for themselves. Atwood writes a scene in which a dinner is prepared using the original The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook by Fannie Merritt Farmer. In it was an epigraph by John Ruskin:

Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means testing an no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French and Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies - loaf givers.

My answer to that would be - what a lot of crap, but Atwood's is much cleverer.

I found it difficult to picture Helen of Troy in an apron, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her cheek dabbled with flour; and from what I knew about Circe and Medea, the only things they'd ever cooked up were magic potions, for poisoning heir apparent or changing men into pigs. As for the Queen of Sheba, I doubt she ever made so much as a piece of toast. I wondered where Mr. Ruskin got his peculiar ideas, about ladies and cookery both. Still, it was an image that must have appealed to a great many middle-class women of my grandmother's time. They were to be sedate in bearing, unapproachable, regal even, but possessed of arcane and potentially lethal recipes, and capable of inspiring the most incendiary passions in men. And on top of that, perfectly and always ladies - loaf givers. The distributors of gracious largesse.

Had any one ever taken this sort of thing seriously? My grandmother had. All you needed to do was to look at her portraits - at that cat-ate-the-canary smile, those droopy eyelids. Who did she think she was, the Queen of Sheba? Without a doubt.

This passage reminds me of some of the ridiculous myths believed about Jews (some of them still) - horns on their heads, zionist conspiracy - all products of fear because Jewish culture was unfamiliar. But those fearing them wanted it that way. Let's bar them from all opportunity of employment except a few (like money lending) and then criticize them for being money lenders. Let's keep women soft, uneducated, and helpless so that we can take care of them and then, let's call that helplessness their nature. After a few generations of seeing women as gracious loaf givers I guess you could come to believe it.

Living out the existence of someone else's idealization of you is a form of exploitation and the two sisters in this story are both the victim of it, although each succeeds in escaping it in a way. The meaning of their lives is created by that one event - it makes their lives sad and their compensations are small ones. This story is the product of that escape. And so concludes my first book for both the Chunkster Challenge and Dewey's Booker Challenge.

Fiction within a fiction within a fiction (Books - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood ) cont'd.

The upside to having been awake for several hours last night during which I would have rather been asleep is that I am half way through The Blind Assassin. In what I'm assuming is the "real story" as opposed to the fiction within the fiction (unless Atwood is going to pull a switch on me), there were two sisters - one dreamy and other-worldly, capable only of interpreting words literally, or as Atwood puts it:

She had a heightened capacity for belief. She left herself open, she entrusted herself, she gave herself over, she put herself at the mercy. A little incredulity would have been a first line of defense...

...Laura touches people. I do not.

the other sister, though just as naive, is more practical, capable of irony, and has a thing for a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. The narrator is supposedly this second sister, around 80 years old at the telling of the story. Now, even with the meta-fictional elements that I complained about in yesterday's post, that story seems to have me in its grip.

Within the fiction within a fiction there is a second fictional world, a verbally related science fiction story being woven during some tryst scenes. That story is meant to be bad and yet meant to also be meaningful to the reader. However, being poorly told, even while it's tongue is planted firmly in its cheek, I don't care about it. While I really enjoy some fantasy fiction I only enjoy it when the exposition of the world and its elements is very skillfully woven into the story telling. I am frustrated when a fantasy begins with dozens upon dozens of unfamiliar terms - names of creatures, of places, of objects - all completely new to me, all without any meaning in my vocabulary - when I read them I usually cannot keep them all straight. I start reading very slowly, trying to commit these new terms to memory, feeling I must master them in order to get the story. I usually end up feeling very frustrated. I can't string the narrative together because I can't remember what I've read because I don't know what the narrator is talking about. I usually put the book down in despair before I've reached page fifty. That's always what happens whenever I've tried to read Tolkein. I don't have the right kind of memory for it, but I also have this obsession with mastering it before I proceed. I can't leave it alone, ignore the fact that I don't get it and just read my way into the narrative, being confident it will seep in after 100 pages. So it's my problem. I get that. I do the same thing with scientific articles, I obsess over the details in the sequence they're presented and can't retain anything that follows until I feel I've mastered the terms. But it seems to me that revealing enough so that I care, but not so much that the mystery is ruined would be one of the ingredients of good writing, and in this element of The Blind Assassin Atwood does not succeed. However, I do like the primary narrative enough to deal with this obstacle by skimming the fiction within the fiction within the fiction, accepting the fact that I am retaining nothing and hoping it won't matter. It has begun to be revealed to me that elements of this fantasy world may become significant in ways I won't spoil in case you are planning to read this book. I hope I am not now going to have to go back and figure out what gnarr are and how many moons the planet Sakiel-Norn has, which, incidentally, is based on ancient Mesopotamian culture.

Atwood is, otherwise, an extraordinarily skilled writer. Creating living, breathing characters, convincingly different voices for the two sisters and their nanny/cook, creating some really funny scenes, and evoking detail in imaginative and lucid language:

I spent that night lying huddled and shivering in the vast bed of the hotel. My feet were icy, my knees drawn up, my head sideways on the pillow; in front of me the arctic waste of starched white bedsheet stretched out to infinity. I knew I could never traverse it, regain the track, get back to where it was warm; I knew I was directionless; I knew I was lost. I would be discovered here years later by some intrepid team - fallen in my tracks, one arm outflung as if grasping at straws, my features desiccated, my fingers gnawed by wolves.

Flirting with meta-fiction (Books - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood)

In the first of eights sections in the booker winning The Blind Assassin from 2000, Margaret Atwood flirts with meta-fiction, alternating newspaper obituaries with, classic narrative fiction, with tryst scenes in another time period in which one of the two lovers invents a bad science fiction story for idle amusement. In a book where one of the major characters is killed off in the first sentence, I really thought the writing would be action packed and to-the-point, but the switching between forms felt amateurish and distracting and while Atwood seemed to be having a good time playing with form, I wasn't having a good time reading. The little sci-fi story particularly irritated me, partly because it was so bad. Either this is obviously bad, I thought, which I find hard to believe since I am such an admirer of Cat's Eye - a brilliant novel - or it's tongue-in-cheek, but either way fifty pages of it wore me out regardless of the reason and I nearly abandoned the book. Then the form changed to a classic narrative alternating between present day and memory, told to us by an elderly woman who is related to all the people of whom we read obituaries. The writing seems surer handed now, as I would expect from Atwood, and the story has me much more interested, but after about 100 pages or so it looks like we're changing back to the meta-fictional hodgepodge. Maybe having some of the narrative context will help, if it ends up being a bad as last time this may be the last you read of this book.