Here's what I think happens with this book: I think people think it's Victorian. The title sounds Victorian, right? And it's about...I think we call tHere's what I think happens with this book: I think people think it's Victorian. The title sounds Victorian, right? And it's about...I think we call them the landed gentry*? and their dissolution, which is a major theme of the late Victorians. Lawrence even puts sort of a Victorian feel into his writing.
* which I always thought meant, you know, they had landed somewhere. Like Iceland? I always pictured well-dressed ladies and gentlemen stepping off boats. So that's a confusing thing to call them.
So I think two things happen when people read this book, or decide not to read it: a) They think it's stuffy, because on the surface it sortof is; b) The sex bits are totally incongruous - again, I think, on purpose - and people either don't realize what's happening or they do realize it and are confused by it.
Seriously, I've heard people disliking this book and I think they thought they were reading a stuffy old Victorian thing with bizarrely out of place smut shoved into it. And if you think that's what this is, then...well, that sounds great to me, but your mileage may vary.
Anyway, it's not that. It's set in the aftermath of WWI. There's a Brave New World reference.* Lawrence is a contemporary of Hemingway and Steinbeck and Faulkner; this is a modern novel. And he's talking about the death of the aristocracy, most obviously through the obvious metaphor of Chatterley's impotence. Lawrence has serious things to say about the nature of relationships between men and women, and how they're changing, and how women are taking control of their sexuality, and I think he's put it in this anachronistic setting to help make his point. He's talking about the death of the Victorian world. It's sharper than people think it is, is what I'm saying.
* Astute people might note that Lady Chatterley's Lover was published in 1928 and Brave New World wasn't even written until 1931, so wtf? Lawrence and Huxley were apparently friends, so my best guess is that Lawrence saw an early draft. It is not a We reference; the quote is, "Olive was reading a book about the future, when babies would be bred in bottles, and women would be 'immunized.'" That can only be Brave New World.
Also, Lady Chatterley feels a lot of things in her womb. Every time she sees a hot guy her womb, like, twitches. I didn't realize wombs were this jumpy....more
There are two texts for Marlowe's definitive treatment of the Faust myth, and no real consensus on which is more authoritative. The A text is shorter There are two texts for Marlowe's definitive treatment of the Faust myth, and no real consensus on which is more authoritative. The A text is shorter and punchier, but the B text includes some good stuff too. The arguments, briefly:
- Marlowe expanded his hit play into the B text, which is therefore authoritative; - Someone else added some shit in later, so the A text is authoritative.
Don't believe the Wikipedia page, btw, it's a mess.
I prefer the A text. The B text is quite a bit longer, and while some of the additions are good, much of it is forgettable; you get the important stuff with the A text and you'll be less likely to wander off to play with your dog. ...more
This one guy starts as a champion of the people and turns into a corrupt demagogue. It's a gripping story and a terrific book - sortof a political noiThis one guy starts as a champion of the people and turns into a corrupt demagogue. It's a gripping story and a terrific book - sortof a political noir - but you're like come on, that would never really happen.
"Listen here, there ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity."...more
"I'm afraid the creatures are learning to steer better with their space wings" is either your favorite sentence ever or you're not gonna love Lovecraf"I'm afraid the creatures are learning to steer better with their space wings" is either your favorite sentence ever or you're not gonna love Lovecraft.
Lovecraft can be silly, racist, and extremely purple, but he has this terrifically unique imagination: his stories feel like nothing else. And they're very enticing. There's a certain feel to his stories - a pallid green glow - a whole collection of words like "eldritch", phrases like "foetid green ichor" - that feel forcefully Lovecraftian. "The foulest nightmares of secret myth" is what he's about. He's a true individual. I dig him.
Some brief notes on some of his more famous stories:
PARODIES? Herbert West - Reanimator (Ha, this was a ton of fun) The Hound (also great)
RACISM! Horror at Red Hook (Whee!) He (Racism alert!)
CTHULHU Dunwich Horror At the Mountains of Madness (Fun stuff) Shadow out of Time (Kinda too long) Call of Cthulhu Whisperer in Darkness (fantastic! This is where we get the space wings.)
THE REST OF IT The Case of Charles Dexter Ward The Dreams In The Witch House Colour out of Space (Great...sortof like a parable about radioactivity?) Shadow over Innsmouth
While this Penguin edition is lovely, I'm supplementing it with a cheapo Collected Works on my Kindle, for the stories I want to read that aren't in this collection....more
The answer is sortof. Spanking the Maid is actually a lengthy, postmodern allegory, I guess for the creative process although (like this white whale I read about once) with enough general effectiveness to stand in for any number of other annoying processes. That's pretty good in itself - allegories involving spanking are a thing we could probably use more of, or at least a thing we could not use less of - but it's also one of those "YO CHECK IT OUT, ALLEGORY" situations - again, like that whale - where you're kinda like yeah, dude, I get it; I mean, it's not a subtle piece of work.
"No seriously though," you ask, if you are Jennifer, "But is there spanking?" Yes, there is spanking! There is a lot of spanking. It is chock full o' spanking. It's spanktastic! If spanking was white guys, this book would be Harold Bloom's Canon*. See, the allegory is that there's this maid who keeps trying to clean this dude's room but she does a lousy job and he has to punish her by spanking her, as one does; similarly, you keep having to try to discipline your brain to create great art, by spanking it, but your brain's panties keep falling down about its ankles while it's trying to dust. Or something like that.
* Because Harold Bloom's Canon has a lot of white guys, and this book has a lot of spanking. Get it?
I like Coover's "The Babysitter" a little better; it's similarly aggressively pomo, and similarly amused by waving its penis around, but I thought it was more complicated than this was.
Briar Rose is better, too, a winky novella about Sleeping Beauty, entertained or tortured through the years by a procession of fantasies about her own rescue, woven into her brain by the evil witch, a funhouse Scheherezade, while her faithful princes die in the hedge outside. According to John Banville's worshipful intro, this is about love.
BTW, this is impossible to get on Kindle even if you know where to look, so if you want to read this you're going to have to hold a book called "Spanking the Maid" up in front of your face, which is either good or bad depending on whether you're on the subway and a creep....more
What's it like The frustration or the joy of reading Dickens, depending on your attitude, is his digressiveness. Since, some will tell you, he was paidWhat's it like The frustration or the joy of reading Dickens, depending on your attitude, is his digressiveness. Since, some will tell you, he was paid by the page, he tended to produce a lot of pages, with the result that books like Bleak House are great rambling ambles. If you read books in order to find out what happens next, you may be frustrated. But if you read them to be immersed in someone else's world, they're terrific.
Bolano too was paid by the page, in a way. He wrote 2666 in the last five years of his life, knowing he was dying, intending for it to be published in five parts, to provide for his family after his death; so he was plenty motivated to produce a lot of pages. 2666 contains a recipe for brussels sprouts with lemon, which sadly calls for boiling rather than roasting; some increasingly creative ways of saying "vaginally and anally raped"; and this:
Only the digestive system of herbivorous animals, said Florita, is equipped with substances capable of digesting cellulose and therefore of absorbing the glucose molecules that make up cellulose."
- this section will go on to analyze diarrhea in great detail - after which I made the note "Srsly, wtf?"
What's it about So if your question is, "But what's it about?" then this is not the book for you. For example, major (view spoiler)[: although the infamous Part IV feels at times like a murder mystery, there will be no reveal. The Ciudad Juarez killings that inspired it were the result (I guess) of a culture in which the murder of a woman became a relatively common way of expressing frustration, and that's the horror Bolano is telling you about. There is no Bad Guy here, just murder. (hide spoiler)]
You read 2666 to be immersed in Bolano's wonderful, weird brain. You read to see "buildings propping each other up like little old Alzheimer's patients." Or for this:
And then, as if a breath of foul air had wafted into a commercial for sanitary pads*, the silhouette of a man made them freeze.
You will get sentences like these nowhere else in literature. At times Bolano careens into a kind of prose poetry, as in the long paragraph around 77% when a girl describes the transparent obsidian sacrificial altars of the Aztecs:
At first the light was black or grey, a dim light in which only the inscrutable silhouettes of the Aztecs inside the pyramids could be seen, but then, as the blood of the new victim spread across the skylight of transparent obsidian, the light turned red and black...
It's difficult to get the power of a passage like that across without the full (much longer) bit, and without the "Gah, what's this now?" feeling you get when the story lurches into it out of nowhere, but poetry is what it is - new, offhand, weird poetry, maybe not exactly poetry, but certainly not exactly prose either.
* And let's be clear here, there's a lot of talk about the horrific sections of this book, and they are, but Bolano is often very funny, too. Here's my favorite description of kissing ever:
The girl's tongue was very dry at first and Reiter caressed it with his tongue until it was thoroughly moistened.
I can't even paste that without cracking up.
What is it But if your questions is, "But what's it about?" god, dude, let it go, it's about the search for the missing cult author Archimboldi, Bolano, dying, pours out everything into an attempt to write his masterpiece: 2666 is about death and masterpieces. "Every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces," he says, before setting the pantheon of great writers of works "magnificent and sometimes monstrous" apart from "the epigones and authors he called the Horde." Bolano considered himself, I think, a secret author, and his hopes didn't rise past becoming the kind of cult author his protagonists, here and in Savage Detectives, are in search of. But 2666 represents his best effort at creating something worth going in search of. And it's one of those rare cases, like Infinite Jest, where someone with vast potential just nails it.
How strange he would find it if he knew how high he's risen since his death. By some fluke of fate, we all found him after all, and how lucky we are! Because 2666 is a masterpiece. Magnificent, and sometimes monstrous....more
Louisa May Alcott, a transcendentalist feminist of ambivalent sexual orientation and the author of sensational novels, is asked by her publisher to wrLouisa May Alcott, a transcendentalist feminist of ambivalent sexual orientation and the author of sensational novels, is asked by her publisher to write a book for girls; she's like eh, that sounds super lame, but she does it anyway, "in record time for money," and here we are.
What's startling about Little Women given the intro I just gave it, and the reason it worked then and still works now, is its absolute sincerity. There's not a trace of sarcasm in the entire thing; it remains a sweet-natured book full of nice people doing nice things.
Another way to say all that is, of course, "corny," and it is that too. You know how sometimes you re-read a beloved book as an adult and realize there was much more going on under the surface than you caught when you were younger? Well, this is not one of those books. It's utterly straight-forward.
The life lessons given here are basically still sound. Alcott recommends marrying for love; she's not against a woman being the primary breadwinner. In a very gentle, nonthreatening way, she's true to her feminism, and you'll find nothing truly objectionable for your child. A lot of God stuff, so your mileage may vary on that. These were probably the last women on earth to read shitty old Pilgrim's Progress.
Our lead character, Jo, and our semi-autobiographical one, bums me out a little; if you don't mind spoilers, here's why. (view spoiler)[Alcott never married. While there apparently was a Laurie for her, of sorts, there was not a Bhaer, and it shows: Bhaer is a totally unreal character. He's the husband equivalent of Steve Carrell describing boobs as sandbags in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
There was a moment when Jo turned Laurie down and it looked like she was going to become a single author, and I really liked that, even before I learned that that was what Alcott actually did. But Alcott sortof copped out on her own life, I think, marrying Jo off to this neutered Casaubon, and it stuck in my throat a bit. (hide spoiler)]
Little Women has neither subtlety nor malice; it succeeds purely because of Louisa May Alcott's sheer charisma. It was, is and probably always will be a very pleasant book....more
A great rambling hilarious explosion of stream-of-consciousness writing from one of the more execrable protagonists I've run across, Money is surprisiA great rambling hilarious explosion of stream-of-consciousness writing from one of the more execrable protagonists I've run across, Money is surprisingly effective. Surprising because there's a novel buried in all this postmodernism, with an actual plot and actual twists, so cleverly hidden that I didn't even see it coming until it showed its hand. And it's that plot that makes me like this book much better than ancestors like Tropic of Cancer that seem to disdain anything like it.
The distance between author and narrator corresponds to the degree to which the author finds the narrator wicked, deluded, pitiful or ridiculous
says Martin Amis, or the character named Martin Amis inside the book, and John Self is all of those things in spades. In case you have any doubts about that, Amis the author will make it crystal clear:
It's always been phenomenally clear to me that the women I've hit don't like being hit one bit. If they did, what would be the point of hitting them?
John - a wonderful kind of unreliable narrator, by the way, because while he always tells us the truth, he also tends to be blackout drunk during key moments - is wicked, deluded, pitiful and ridiculous, and I spent the book wondering how the hell things seemed to be going so well for him; what's the message Amis is sending here? Nihilism? Why is he writing a book in which his completely horrible protagonist gets away with everything?
Is there a moral philosophy of fiction? When I create a character and put him or her through certain ordeals, what am I up to - morally? Am I accountable?
And what if he has no real ordeals? What if he wins? Then what are you up to, morally? And then there are spoilers: (view spoiler)[He doesn't, and maybe you saw this coming but the essential grift of both the plot and the book completely snuck up on me: I was hoodwinked as badly as Self was.
We are all stomped and roughed up and peed on and slammed against the wall by money.
The book can drag at times: there's no variance in tone or pace, it's just one breathless rush of awful behavior, and it does start to muddle together at a certain point. But one can't really knock a writer for achieving exactly what he set out to. This is a complete success....more
Ximena is totally into Rodrigo, but Ximena's dad and Rodrigo's dad are both wack old assholes, and her dad humiliates his dad in a wack old assThe Cid
Ximena is totally into Rodrigo, but Ximena's dad and Rodrigo's dad are both wack old assholes, and her dad humiliates his dad in a wack old asshole fight, so in order to save his family's honor Rodrigo is all
Spurious pity mixed with monstrous pride! Quick to insult, are you afraid to fight?
and kills Ximena's dad, because good plan, dude - dads sound like such a hassle, man, seriously - so then Ximena is super pissed, and she's like
From all your knights I now demand his head Whoever brings it me, I'll share his bed.
And then guess what happens? I am not going to tell you! You should find out by reading this play, because it's total balls. It's awesome, man. Rollicking plot with great momentum, and gorgeous flourishy Shakespearean language.
And Bolt's translation is on par with Richard Wilbur's brilliant Moliere. It's that good. Beautiful lines, in effortlessly rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter. It's so smooth!
For love - sweet source of all my bitter pain Breeds subtlety in every lover's brain.
Right? This whole thing is just the shit, man.
The Illusion Almost as good; it's apparently sometimes called Corneille's The Tempest, and I understand why. It's sortof a meta examination of the nature of the stage, and there's a magician. Again a very satisfying plot, with twists and terrific speeches. More of a straight comedy....more
Sharp, focused and righteously angry, but...I don't know if it's just that I've been aware of and pissed off about Chappaquiddick for so long, or whatSharp, focused and righteously angry, but...I don't know if it's just that I've been aware of and pissed off about Chappaquiddick for so long, or what, but I felt like I've heard this story before, had these emotions already. I like the gambit of staging an entire book in the moment of a catastrophe - a "life flashing before one's eyes" thing, but the execution feels too slight - too easy? - to be great. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon, though, especially if you don't mind getting a little bummed out....more
Y'know, this is terrific. Screamingly funny - that speech Fitz-Nottle gives is amazing - and deceptively intricately plotted. It's a puzzle book, righY'know, this is terrific. Screamingly funny - that speech Fitz-Nottle gives is amazing - and deceptively intricately plotted. It's a puzzle book, right? Our heroes get into what seems like an untenable situation, and the suspense is wondering how Jeeves will fix it, and that's all very cleverly done. Jeeves is sortof a dastardly hero, and Wooster himself is one of the great unreliable narrators....more
This is a review of the play, not this translation. I read Paul Roche's translation, which (as usual) was clear but not smashingly elegant.
Bleak is thThis is a review of the play, not this translation. I read Paul Roche's translation, which (as usual) was clear but not smashingly elegant.
Bleak is the road...I am coming.
Alcestis, the earliest of his extant plays, shows Euripides doing what he does best: overturning the rocks of myth and poking at the worms underneath. The story: Admetus has been promised by his buddy Apollo that he can escape death if, when his time comes, he can convince someone else to die in his place. Sadly, no one wants to do this for Admetus except his loving wife, Alcestis, who faithfully dies for him. And if that sounds like "WTF dude" to you, well, folks did things differently back then - but actually it sounds pretty fucked up to Euripides too, so here we go.
The juicy part of the play comes when Admetus's dad Pheres shows up. Admetus is on his way to bury Alcestis, and he's understandably a bit raw, and he starts raging at his dad, who is after all super old and why couldn't he have died? And his dad is like
"I'm the coward, you say, you - you prince of cowards Shown up by a woman who died for you! ...Keep your mouth shut, coward, and remember If you love your life, so does everybody."
Lol, pwned. Once again, Euripides the trickster breaks the cocks off the Greek statues.
The play is confused by the intervention of Heracles, who (view spoiler)[kinda bails everyone out and gives us a sudden happy ending. Fuckin' Heracles, right? It's often, as my boy Ronald points out, difficult to classify Euripides' plays, and that holds true here. It mixes comic and tragic tones and leaves you unsure what you've got. (hide spoiler)] But this is one of my favorites.
Update: with time, the deus ex Heracles has kinda gotten to me; I'm downgrading this to four stars because of the ending....more
Recently voted the best ever crime novel by some dudes, and I can understand why: this is a perfect mystery. Perfect puzzle - and I love that ChristieRecently voted the best ever crime novel by some dudes, and I can understand why: this is a perfect mystery. Perfect puzzle - and I love that Christie finds it unnecessary to give us some big lurid case; it's an incredibly mundane small-town murder - perfect clues, perfect ending. It might be the best mystery novel I've ever read, including Holmes; it's that well done.
And this book is completely impossible to say much more about without spoilers, so...I won't. If you know you know; if you don't, quick read this book before someone spoils it for you....more
I'm trying to figure out what it is about books like this that makes them perfect for me. It's tight and focused, that's one thing. It's a great storyI'm trying to figure out what it is about books like this that makes them perfect for me. It's tight and focused, that's one thing. It's a great story with acute insight into human nature, that's another. It's well-planned; there's not a sentence that doesn't point in the right direction. Each word is chosen carefully. Little details, like the way Stevens uses "one" instead of "I" at any point where he wanders too close to his own emotions.
It works on two levels, both equally effectively. On the surface, it's a terrific, penetrating look at one person who's failed to live his life. It's a tragedy and it carries a tragedy's sense of inevitability: given the protagonist's fatal flaw, his life leads inexorably to his fate.
And under that, it's about choosing one's masters, and how a failure to think critically about one's situation can lead to disaster. Stevens fails on both personal and much larger levels to take any agency - to question his place and his path - and the consequences are perhaps larger than one might expect.
It's a subtle, quiet book, but always engaging to read - the sort of book where one plans to put it down after the next paragraph, but somehow finds oneself still reading two pages later - and it's beautiful. Ishiguro completely masters Stevens' voice, never giving too much away, but letting exactly enough slip through Stevens' cracks. He does a perfect job of telling a much different story than Stevens does.
This is the best book I've read in some time.
BTW, I loved Stevens' fixation on the idea of "banter," and his hilariously inept attempts at it. It culminates - and ties in to maybe the main theme of the novel, the idea of "dignity" - with his one successful joke:
"It's rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir. But I suspect it comes down to not removing one's clothing in public."
Among many other things, this book is very funny....more
Roald Dahl understands that the interests of children, which are to get into as many things as possible as thoroughly as possible, and the interests oRoald Dahl understands that the interests of children, which are to get into as many things as possible as thoroughly as possible, and the interests of adults, which are to get children to shut up and sit down, are not just incompatible but war. Reading him brings me back vividly to a time when the daily battle was to get around the unpredictably cranky obstacles of grown-ups in order to get to the important things, like climbing all the way through that culvert to see where it comes out, or turning the living room into a space ship by covering everything in it in tin foil, or even being left alone to read whatever deeply inappropriate book has caught one's fancy.
TMI Dept: I don't know if it's some kind of deep proto-adolescent imprinting thing or what, but I am hot for Quentin Blake's illustrations of Miss Honey....more
Cryptonomicon is one of those plotty books, where things happen and then other things happen, which isn't really a knock: some of the best books ever Cryptonomicon is one of those plotty books, where things happen and then other things happen, which isn't really a knock: some of the best books ever are plotty. Lookin' at you, Count of Monte Cristo. But when you write a book about a bunch of stuff happening, it succeeds based on whether all the things that happen feel like part of a whole - whether all the threads come together. At their best, these books are giant jigsaw puzzles: a successful one is a masterpiece of planning ahead, and authors like Dumas or Hugo take your breath away when you realize how carefully they've set you up.
And Cryptonomicon pulls off that plottiness. Stephenson throws a lot of balls in the air; the story spans sixty years, from World War II to the late 90s, and rounds the globe, from some made-up country near England to the Phillipines, with plenty of stops in between. It's an impressive feat, and I can't poke a single hole in it. Nice work, Neal!
I mean, look, while insight into human nature isn't necessarily necessary in a plotty book, it helps to have some. Dumas and Hugo are wrestling with fate and evil and control; they're asking big questions. You're not gonna learn a whole lot about human nature from Cryptonomicon. There are some cool characters, like uber-Marine Bobby Shaftoe, but basically these are just people who do things.
And it has to be said that Stephenson has little to no grasp on how women operate. He seems to like women - this isn't a misogynist book - I'm just not sure he's met very many of them.
Which kinda ties into why I didn't totally love it all. It's impressively put together, but it's...well, I was reminded of David Foster Wallace very often: same conversational tone, same exceptional technical intelligence - but Stephenson is - how do I say this? - he's just not very cool. Which I know, you're like "Wait, you're comparing someone's coolness unfavorably to DFW? He wasn't cool!" But he was! He wouldn't have said so, but he totally was cool.
Maybe I can say it like this: DFW was a geek; Stephenson is a nerd.
So this is a nerd epic. It succeeds at what it wants to be. I enjoyed it. I didn't love it....more
Some of the things science fiction writers tend to do irritate me. They make up words, they throw gee-whiz laser guns in when they don't add to the stSome of the things science fiction writers tend to do irritate me. They make up words, they throw gee-whiz laser guns in when they don't add to the story, and they're more prone to eye-rolling love stories than genre-less fiction.
And here's Neuromancer totally doing every one of those things, but for some reason I don't mind it here.
I'm not totally sure why. It starts with Gibson being a very good writer, certainly. And the heavy noir influence certainly doesn't hurt. But aside from that, I don't know, maybe I was just in a good mood this week.
I didn't find the technology badly dated, largely because Gibson doesn't really even try. His descriptions of hacking are more metaphorical than predictive; he understands that, whatever, I guess you write some codes or something, but after that he basically describes acid trips and lets that be the end of it, so what are you gonna argue about?
I'm not gonna go rushing out to find the rest of this series - it's still sci-fi, after all - but this is some of my favorite sci-fi. I dig it....more
Here's the first thing I love about The Sea, The Sea: its title. Isn't it wonderful? Imagine how boring it would have looked on a shelf if it had justHere's the first thing I love about The Sea, The Sea: its title. Isn't it wonderful? Imagine how boring it would have looked on a shelf if it had just been called "The Sea." But with that profoundly simple decision to repeat itself, it suddenly drips horror and madness and obsession. It's just brilliant. Almost makes me wish Emily Bronte had called her book "The Moor, The Moor."
And then Murdoch plays this terrific game with the opening sentence:
The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine.
Which is the boring first sentence of a book that should be called "The Sea." It even says "bland"! Blahhhh, lame, until you get to the next paragraph:
I had written the above, destined to be the opening paragraph of my memoirs, when something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it even now after an interval of time and although a possible, though not totally reassuring, explanation has occurred to me.
And there's the first sentence of a book called "The Sea, The Sea." Whee! Off we go, madness and horror. ...more
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