I almost never read book reviews, either before or after I read a book, if I know I am going to read the book anyway. Take the Man Booker short list, for instance. Every year I try to read as many of them as I can and always the winner. I don’t care what anyone else thinks of these books. I don’t care what the book sellers think of the books (although they always say nice things so they can sell them). I don’t care what the NY Times thinks of these books. I’m going to read them anyway, so why spoil a wondrous adventure by reading what someone else thinks before I even get there. Now, this may seem a bit of a contradictory attitude from someone who writes a book view blog – and it is. I’m happy to tell you all what I think about a book, and I’m happy to hear what you think after I have read the book, but I just don’t usually ask for advice from strangers. I don’t think you should either so... let’s be friends.
Carol Birch has written an interesting book. I love the premise which is taken from a couple of real life situations. She did some homework and added some inspiration and made a story worth telling. Did I say this is a 2011 Man Booker short list book? It is! I opened it with excitement in my heart. I read about a little boy in the mid 1800s who is full of life. I read about a time that was hard and dirty in England. I read about a man who had a menagerie of wonder. It was all good and I was loving it.
Then I read about a ship that sailed to exotic places seen through the eyes of an innocent. I read about a friendship that felt real and people who were full of conundrums. I read about the wonders of being at sea and landing on foreign places, also full of wonder. I read about a hunt for a dragon.
Then I read – oops, not going to tell you this part. I’ll just say that the next part was hard going. It made me feel insane. I wanted it to end. I didn’t like it. I got scared and tired. It spun me around but it wasn’t spitting me out, it was holding me in there for too long. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was tied down and it wasn’t pleasant. OK, enough! I’m not sure whether this was genius or crap and it will take me a while to make up my mind. Thank God I don’t have to do it right now. Birch writes with authority and conviction and that won points with me. It all feels authentic and I appreciate that. I’m just not sure.
When that part did finally release me, melancholy stepped in. Living with the past isn’t always an easy thing to do, and this was my favourite part of the book. It’s tender and sweet (mostly) and I have an enormous amount of empathy with the last 50 pages or so of this novel. And these characters will stay with me for quite a while. As I said, the main character in this novel is based on a real boy’s account of his traumas. Poor lad! Birch brings him back to life in the character of Jaffy in a way that is commendable. I won’t read this again (I hardly ever do re-read a book even though I often say I would) and I won’t recommend it without reservations. I’ll be interested to see how it does in the Man and I will read her next book as well. Carol Birch has just gone on my reading list.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
Caribou Island by David Vann
I don't know if I was influenced by my first David Vann novel Legend of a Suicide but I waited to start Caribou Island until I had a whole day to devote to this book. I remembered having to put down Legend at one point and feeling like I was walking around with a chain wrapped around my leg dragging something heavy behind me. I knew that book was waiting for me at home and I knew I had been foolish to ignore it for more than a few minutes. Legend rewarded me greatly for not leaving it lying fallow for long.
Caribou Island started out with a silent scream. There was a tension like a wire vibrating in the wind, not stopping any part of the world but distracting, there in the background. And, again, I didn't know if I was predetermining a disaster or if Vann was just this clever. There was a great little story happening in Alaska, a place I am familiar with. I spent some time there so I know the colours, the cold, the wet, the moss, the wood. I fit into his fictional world very well. But still there was that damned humming coming from somewhere, not distracting me enough away from the story but always there.
This is a story of ordinary people. They are flawed like all of us. But they are living in a dramatic landscape that serves the purpose of overwhelming their petty foibles – snow that locks them into inaction, storms that keep them still and inactive, summer mosquitoes that distract them from their thoughts of leaving. So they settle for less than they are worthy of. They live lives of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. David Vann is an expressionist in the best way. He describes the landscape, the inhospitable north, and the ordinary, everyday crap better than most. I'm not going to tell you what happens in this book and I don't want to spoil the wonder of reading it for the first time but I have to share a few lines that, I hope, will tempt you.
“She always imagined the opposite: her mother in a fit of passion, distraught at losing her husband to another woman, unable to imagine her life without him. But what if she simply hadn't felt anything anymore, after losing everything? That was a new possibility, something Irene couldn't have guessed. And it felt dangerous. You could end up there without having noticed the transition at all.”
“Without her footsteps, no sound. No wind, no moving water, no bird, no other human. This bright world. The sound of her heart, the sound of her own breath, the sound of her own blood in her temples, those were all she would hear. If she could make those stop, she could hear the whole world.”
I guess I have a Kantian-like hubris because I want everyone to love what I love. I often don't take personal preferences into consideration when it comes to literature. I argue (often alone, in my head) with people who don't enjoy the books that I think are essential to being a human being. So, for this book view I will leave it at this – I loved this book.
Caribou Island started out with a silent scream. There was a tension like a wire vibrating in the wind, not stopping any part of the world but distracting, there in the background. And, again, I didn't know if I was predetermining a disaster or if Vann was just this clever. There was a great little story happening in Alaska, a place I am familiar with. I spent some time there so I know the colours, the cold, the wet, the moss, the wood. I fit into his fictional world very well. But still there was that damned humming coming from somewhere, not distracting me enough away from the story but always there.
This is a story of ordinary people. They are flawed like all of us. But they are living in a dramatic landscape that serves the purpose of overwhelming their petty foibles – snow that locks them into inaction, storms that keep them still and inactive, summer mosquitoes that distract them from their thoughts of leaving. So they settle for less than they are worthy of. They live lives of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. David Vann is an expressionist in the best way. He describes the landscape, the inhospitable north, and the ordinary, everyday crap better than most. I'm not going to tell you what happens in this book and I don't want to spoil the wonder of reading it for the first time but I have to share a few lines that, I hope, will tempt you.
“She always imagined the opposite: her mother in a fit of passion, distraught at losing her husband to another woman, unable to imagine her life without him. But what if she simply hadn't felt anything anymore, after losing everything? That was a new possibility, something Irene couldn't have guessed. And it felt dangerous. You could end up there without having noticed the transition at all.”
“Without her footsteps, no sound. No wind, no moving water, no bird, no other human. This bright world. The sound of her heart, the sound of her own breath, the sound of her own blood in her temples, those were all she would hear. If she could make those stop, she could hear the whole world.”
I guess I have a Kantian-like hubris because I want everyone to love what I love. I often don't take personal preferences into consideration when it comes to literature. I argue (often alone, in my head) with people who don't enjoy the books that I think are essential to being a human being. So, for this book view I will leave it at this – I loved this book.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan
Simile – noun – a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared, as in “she is a rose”.
Lots and lots of similes – nouns – distracting and annoying, as in “similes are like mosquitoes because they buzz around you and you want them to go away”.
OK – there is my stubborn opinion and prejudice again. I can't help it. When something annoys me, well, it just annoys me. It just makes me crazy. The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan was a little, no, a lot like that – too many similes amongst other things.
I know, I watch the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club too, and most of them enjoyed it and found it intellectually stimulating. I agreed with them for the first few pages. Interesting character in Jacob Marlowe and great name for a sophisticated, intelligent werewolf. I assumed he was handsome, well dressed, well read and clever. He has an offsider who is willing to go to vast lengths to make sure he survives, a vampire clan after him, a man who has enlisted an army to kill all occult phenomena especially werewolves, and a Lone Rangerette who wants to save him for her own villainous reasons. There is someone else who enters late in the piece but we'll keep that a secret just in case you want to give this one a go. Whatever else I am, I am not a spoiler of surprises – I know how to keep my mouth shut.
As I was saying, in the beginning I thought this was going to be a great read. Full of Kant-like philosophies on the meaning and meaninglessness of life right alongside bodice ripping sex scenes and descriptions of wolf-eating-human scenes. Not for the squeamish. But pretty soon I felt like I didn't know what I was reading. Is this a dime-store paperback werewolf story or a treatise on the value of life? The dichotomy was too much for this supernatural loving reader. Nope, didn't cut it.
Now, I have been happy with Sookie Stackhouse silly vamp stories (Charlaine Harris needs to give it up though because now they are just getting stupid) or the deeper Sergei Lukyanenko vampire novels. I have also loved some philosophical novels – Rand, Orwell, Woolf (no pun intended), Tolstoy – but Duncan gets the two confused and by mid book you can feel it. Which is it going to be? Unfortunately neither ends up working very well. The flow is not there. One minute you are in the adventure, sex and murder and the next you are reading a diatribe (with lots of similes) on the longing and disappointment and the regrets of a life long lived.
Werewolves live two lives – one as a savage beast and one as an ordinary walking-around person. Duncan writes as if he has two persona as well but I didn't know which one to believe and unfortunately neither came across as very authentic. This book was written to be a movie script right from the start. In fact there was even some music written to read the novel by - http://www.antiquebeat.co.uk/thelastwerewolf/ - and it's been done before so many times. The unhappy outsider who...no, I have to stop there or I'll give it away. Just think Blade meets Kate Beckinsale. Even the last chapter feels like a Sarah Connor voice over.
Lots and lots of similes – nouns – distracting and annoying, as in “similes are like mosquitoes because they buzz around you and you want them to go away”.
OK – there is my stubborn opinion and prejudice again. I can't help it. When something annoys me, well, it just annoys me. It just makes me crazy. The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan was a little, no, a lot like that – too many similes amongst other things.
I know, I watch the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club too, and most of them enjoyed it and found it intellectually stimulating. I agreed with them for the first few pages. Interesting character in Jacob Marlowe and great name for a sophisticated, intelligent werewolf. I assumed he was handsome, well dressed, well read and clever. He has an offsider who is willing to go to vast lengths to make sure he survives, a vampire clan after him, a man who has enlisted an army to kill all occult phenomena especially werewolves, and a Lone Rangerette who wants to save him for her own villainous reasons. There is someone else who enters late in the piece but we'll keep that a secret just in case you want to give this one a go. Whatever else I am, I am not a spoiler of surprises – I know how to keep my mouth shut.
As I was saying, in the beginning I thought this was going to be a great read. Full of Kant-like philosophies on the meaning and meaninglessness of life right alongside bodice ripping sex scenes and descriptions of wolf-eating-human scenes. Not for the squeamish. But pretty soon I felt like I didn't know what I was reading. Is this a dime-store paperback werewolf story or a treatise on the value of life? The dichotomy was too much for this supernatural loving reader. Nope, didn't cut it.
Now, I have been happy with Sookie Stackhouse silly vamp stories (Charlaine Harris needs to give it up though because now they are just getting stupid) or the deeper Sergei Lukyanenko vampire novels. I have also loved some philosophical novels – Rand, Orwell, Woolf (no pun intended), Tolstoy – but Duncan gets the two confused and by mid book you can feel it. Which is it going to be? Unfortunately neither ends up working very well. The flow is not there. One minute you are in the adventure, sex and murder and the next you are reading a diatribe (with lots of similes) on the longing and disappointment and the regrets of a life long lived.
Werewolves live two lives – one as a savage beast and one as an ordinary walking-around person. Duncan writes as if he has two persona as well but I didn't know which one to believe and unfortunately neither came across as very authentic. This book was written to be a movie script right from the start. In fact there was even some music written to read the novel by - http://www.antiquebeat.co.uk/thelastwerewolf/ - and it's been done before so many times. The unhappy outsider who...no, I have to stop there or I'll give it away. Just think Blade meets Kate Beckinsale. Even the last chapter feels like a Sarah Connor voice over.
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