Books Review
Apr. 29th, 2009 06:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raxSo one of the reasons that I'm such a big McSweeney's fangirl is that when I first picked up an issue or two of their magazine and read a few stories I was blindsided and basically like "Oh my god, you can do that in fiction?" Issues 18 and 20 in particular knocked my socks off with things I had never seen before and even a couple I had never imagined; that's what got me to subscribe to their novel feed, in the hope of seeing more of the same in long form. And a couple of them delivered, The Children's Hospital in particular, though Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth also qualifies, and maybe that tiny book of short shorts by Sarah Manguso. Some of the others were quite good if not revolutionary: Here They Come, for example. This winter I read and re-read a lot of McSweeney's short fiction and for the most part it didn't catch my breath in the same way even though it was mostly very good, because it seemed mostly very good in the same way. So I asked the professor in the fiction class I'm taking right now if he could recommend something to read that woud be different from what I've been reading, and he suggested two books to me.
The first, Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, is a short novel I finished a few weeks ago that I've already recommended to a few of you. If you hate thematic or emotional spoilers, you should just let someone else hand you this book after blacking out all of the back cover and inside dust jacket text. (I'm looking at you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gaudior .) But since most of you are only going to read a book if it sounds interesting, here's reason number one to read the book: Winterson successfully produces a compelling narrator whose gender is never revealed. At first you're fumbling around and being like "Wait, am I supposed to be just picking up on this?" After a while, though, you realize that Winterson is screwing with you, passing you hints in multiple directions, creating scenes that read differently based on the character's gender and forcing you to consider both at the same time, creating scenes where it really doesn't matter at all and you forget for a few pages. Personally, I think this was brilliantly done; there are one or two sentences I felt were maybe needling me too much about the fact that I was reading the story rather than telling me the story, but really, who am I to complain about that. :)
Every five to ten pages, it felt like Jeanette Winterson was punching me in the face through the book. I would stop what I was doing, which on at least one occasion was walking down the street, and just stare at the book for a moment, shouting "What? What? You can do that? What?" IT was really really refreshing. She did things I hadn't seen done before! I can actually see myself pushing in some of the same directions in the story I'm working on right now, which is exciting. Maybe they're things you'e seen before, in which case it might just be a good book. But the way she switched discourses, the way she aggressively pulled the rug out from under me and then substituted a different rug within the space of a sentence, and the choice of whether or not to make shocking events feel shocking... wow. I was blown away. My one major criticism, and admittedly it's a pretty major one, is that when I got to the end of the book, I was really hoping for Winterson to explain why she had been punching me in the face all novel. To me, the novel's ending is just her shrugging her shoulders, smiling, and walking away without delivering an explanation or even a parting shot. Incredibly frustrating. Is that the point? Maybe.
The second book, and this one took me two weeks because I was biking everywhere instead of taking the train, was Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters. This is a much longer epistolary novel that takes place over a wide range of time. At first I thought it was setting me up to be something like Michael Cunningham's The Hours, except good; then I concluded that homosexuality was a red herring. Which isn't actually quite true, but it's more like one of a large number of interwoven subplots set against the backdrop of Europe between World War I and World War II. We follow the two main characters from childhood to old age, though some times are paid far more attention than others. I almost want to draw their lives out as diagrams, affecting each other from afar and intersecting at seemingly random points in order to form some sense of pattern.
One of my favorite things about this book is the way that, even in letters, the characters have conversations with themselves, going down into two or three levels of thought and often using the voices of people close to them. I actually want to write a short paper about how this way of structuring a stream of consciousness is a lot like A Hu-Li in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, except more subtle. As they receive each other's letters, sometimes voices cross the narrative streams; certain phrases recur like musical motifs across the various letters. "Hopeful monsters" is one of those phrases, and one of the ideas of the book is that of a macro-evolution of thought, the terrible events of the first half of the 20th century constructing an environment where humanity could fundamentally change. This is an uncomfortable thing to think about the deaths of many millions but, especially having read scads of apocalyptic fiction recently, it's actually a really interesting idea. Certainly you could argue that the near-apocalypses of books like Earth Abides or The Children's Hospital produce hopeful monsters. (Though then what in the hells is Pickie Beecher?)
The way the characters deal with sexuality and relationships is fascinating. The homosexuality is not quite a red herring --- but it's not specifically a queer novel, except that it queers the discourse in general. If you called the main characters queer or polyamorous or other modern labels they would just sort of stare at you confused and respond with vague witticism, because they're not really mindfully engaging with their non-normativity in that space; they're much more interested in physics, biology, and philosophy. The way that the characters and the narrative itself are blase about their actions is both really refreshing and a little frustrating, but given the characters in the story I'm working on right now, I have no right to complain :) Is it fair to say that they act too much like people in books and not enough like real people? Is that cogent? Because that's how I was left feeling. Nonetheless, I recommend this book as well; the writing was very striking and I might edit this to show a couple of examples later but right now I need to get to work.
The end of the novel reveals that actually this is a prequel to another set of novels based on the characters who show up in the last fifty pages of the book and don't seem to fit in. It's possible that there's a giant superstructure that's amazingly awesome, but I'm not sure if I'm willing to read five more books to find out. I'll probably pick up one other when I am next unsure what to read; right now, I've started on Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita In Tehran at the recommendation ofhari_mirchi , and I need to spend less time reading and more writing for a while.
The first, Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, is a short novel I finished a few weeks ago that I've already recommended to a few of you. If you hate thematic or emotional spoilers, you should just let someone else hand you this book after blacking out all of the back cover and inside dust jacket text. (I'm looking at you,
gaudior .) But since most of you are only going to read a book if it sounds interesting, here's reason number one to read the book: Winterson successfully produces a compelling narrator whose gender is never revealed. At first you're fumbling around and being like "Wait, am I supposed to be just picking up on this?" After a while, though, you realize that Winterson is screwing with you, passing you hints in multiple directions, creating scenes that read differently based on the character's gender and forcing you to consider both at the same time, creating scenes where it really doesn't matter at all and you forget for a few pages. Personally, I think this was brilliantly done; there are one or two sentences I felt were maybe needling me too much about the fact that I was reading the story rather than telling me the story, but really, who am I to complain about that. :)Every five to ten pages, it felt like Jeanette Winterson was punching me in the face through the book. I would stop what I was doing, which on at least one occasion was walking down the street, and just stare at the book for a moment, shouting "What? What? You can do that? What?" IT was really really refreshing. She did things I hadn't seen done before! I can actually see myself pushing in some of the same directions in the story I'm working on right now, which is exciting. Maybe they're things you'e seen before, in which case it might just be a good book. But the way she switched discourses, the way she aggressively pulled the rug out from under me and then substituted a different rug within the space of a sentence, and the choice of whether or not to make shocking events feel shocking... wow. I was blown away. My one major criticism, and admittedly it's a pretty major one, is that when I got to the end of the book, I was really hoping for Winterson to explain why she had been punching me in the face all novel. To me, the novel's ending is just her shrugging her shoulders, smiling, and walking away without delivering an explanation or even a parting shot. Incredibly frustrating. Is that the point? Maybe.
The second book, and this one took me two weeks because I was biking everywhere instead of taking the train, was Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters. This is a much longer epistolary novel that takes place over a wide range of time. At first I thought it was setting me up to be something like Michael Cunningham's The Hours, except good; then I concluded that homosexuality was a red herring. Which isn't actually quite true, but it's more like one of a large number of interwoven subplots set against the backdrop of Europe between World War I and World War II. We follow the two main characters from childhood to old age, though some times are paid far more attention than others. I almost want to draw their lives out as diagrams, affecting each other from afar and intersecting at seemingly random points in order to form some sense of pattern.
One of my favorite things about this book is the way that, even in letters, the characters have conversations with themselves, going down into two or three levels of thought and often using the voices of people close to them. I actually want to write a short paper about how this way of structuring a stream of consciousness is a lot like A Hu-Li in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, except more subtle. As they receive each other's letters, sometimes voices cross the narrative streams; certain phrases recur like musical motifs across the various letters. "Hopeful monsters" is one of those phrases, and one of the ideas of the book is that of a macro-evolution of thought, the terrible events of the first half of the 20th century constructing an environment where humanity could fundamentally change. This is an uncomfortable thing to think about the deaths of many millions but, especially having read scads of apocalyptic fiction recently, it's actually a really interesting idea. Certainly you could argue that the near-apocalypses of books like Earth Abides or The Children's Hospital produce hopeful monsters. (Though then what in the hells is Pickie Beecher?)
The way the characters deal with sexuality and relationships is fascinating. The homosexuality is not quite a red herring --- but it's not specifically a queer novel, except that it queers the discourse in general. If you called the main characters queer or polyamorous or other modern labels they would just sort of stare at you confused and respond with vague witticism, because they're not really mindfully engaging with their non-normativity in that space; they're much more interested in physics, biology, and philosophy. The way that the characters and the narrative itself are blase about their actions is both really refreshing and a little frustrating, but given the characters in the story I'm working on right now, I have no right to complain :) Is it fair to say that they act too much like people in books and not enough like real people? Is that cogent? Because that's how I was left feeling. Nonetheless, I recommend this book as well; the writing was very striking and I might edit this to show a couple of examples later but right now I need to get to work.
The end of the novel reveals that actually this is a prequel to another set of novels based on the characters who show up in the last fifty pages of the book and don't seem to fit in. It's possible that there's a giant superstructure that's amazingly awesome, but I'm not sure if I'm willing to read five more books to find out. I'll probably pick up one other when I am next unsure what to read; right now, I've started on Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita In Tehran at the recommendation of
hari_mirchi , and I need to spend less time reading and more writing for a while.