Oct 29 2015

Remake by Connie Willis

Most of the rest of Connie Willis’ writing would lead a reader to expect that Remake, her tale of Hollywood endlessly recycling classic movies and classic actors through digital magic, would be a screwball comedy that packed an emotional wallop. But no, this is as close to dystopia as Willis gets. As the back cover says, “moviemaking’s been computerized and live-action films are a thing of the past. It’s a Hollywood where Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe are starring together in A Star is Born, and if you don’t like the ending, you can change it with the stroke of a key.”

People in their legions still want to be in the movies, are still willing to do practically anything to be seen on screen, except that no one is hiring warmbodies anymore. Remake, reuse, recycle have been taken to their logical extremes, and nothing in the new Hollywood is being made that hasn’t been made before, starring and featuring people long dead but still bankable on opening weekend. Studio mergers have been taken nearly to their extreme, with most of the novel’s action concerning people affiliated with ILMGM. It’s not yet one big studio, but constant rumors of further mergers imply that even more recognizable names will soon be mashed together like Viamount. Studio intrigue has everyone simultaneously angling for a promotion and fearful of being left on the cutting room floor. Willis also take copyright litigiousness close to its limit, with suits being filed practically instantly, ruling coming in days or hours, and some films and images being out of litigation for mere moments before disappearing again from view while lawyers wrangle not so much about the merits but about their interests.

The dystopia of Remake is not so much physical destruction as it is personal degradation. Everyone is trying to score something, addictive substances, sex, a non-existent role in a movie, a place higher up the corporate ladder. It’s all very transactional, and at first it seems that no one cares. “I’ve never understood,” says Willis’ first-person narrator Tom, “why the faces, who have nothing to sell but an original personality, an original face, all try to look like somebody else. But I guess it makes sense. Why should they be different from everybody else in Hollywood, which has always been love with sequels and imitations and remakes?” (p. 8)

The women are all trying to be Marilyn Monroe, and indeed Tom refers to most of them as Marilyns. The exceptions are Hedda, a tough-dame reporter who knows everything and who is something of a friend to Tom, and Alis, a fresh face in from the provinces who does not look like a Marilyn and who wants, more than anything else in this world, to dance in the movies. Even though she knows the movie musical died, after a long period of poor artistic and financial health, in the 1960s.

There it is. There’s that screwball comedy trying to get out again. Because against all odds, despite the drugs and the transactional sex and the skullduggery and the soulless productions, people in this story still love the movies. They can quote the great ones; they have watched hundreds, know dozens by heart; they have felt the movie magic, want to see it again, want to make it happen.

The future technology that Willis handwaves about implies that time travel might be possible. Tom, in the throes of either too much of one substance or not enough of another, believes that he has seen Alis in an old movie, dancing her heart out for the camera. And he can’t find her in the present day.

What is going on? That’s the next scene, and it’s an original. Not a remake.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/29/remake-by-connie-willis/

Oct 28 2015

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Between the time when Ryszard Kapuściński saw the revolution in Iran in 1979 and when Shah of Shahs, his book on the subject, was published in 1982, his home country of Poland lived through its own revolution, one that started with strikes at a shipyard in the northern port of Gdańsk but collapsed as the Communist government declared martial law and fought back against its own people more effectively than the Shah’s forces had done, some two years previously and some three thousand kilometers to the southeast.

Kapuściński tells of the Iranian revolution mostly through a series of stories inspired by photographs he looks at while locked in a hotel room in Tehran, interspersed with accounts gleaned from his own daytime reporting in the city, before he again locks his hotel door against the armed bands that rule the night. The photos allow him to sketch the recent history of Iran, while the stories from his notes cover how the revolution came to pass, and what it meant to people he encountered.

The oldest photo he has acquired shows, according to its caption, the grandfather of the last Shah as a soldier holding another man — the assassin of Shah Nasr-ed-Din — prisoner at the end of a heavy chain. The two had made their way across the countryside from the site of the assassination to the Persian capital where the prisoner was to be executed. Thus began the ascent of the Pahlavis to the height of power in their country.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/28/shah-of-shahs-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/

Oct 28 2015

The Clasp by Sloane Crosley

The weird thing for me with this book is how little I care for the story that inspired it, Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace. That famous tale is essentially an account of vapid people doing stupid things, to their own detriment, exactly the kind of thing I have little patience for (looking at you, Fates And Furies.) But Sloane Crosley’s The Clasp is hilarious and heartfelt, and while her characters are far from perfect, they are also, at least, struggling towards the self-awareness that is markedly different from the self-absorption that seems to be the hallmark of too many fictional protagonists nowadays.

Essentially, you have three people who became friends while in college: Victor, who’s in love with Kezia, who’s in love with Nathaniel, who’s in love with himself (and is also good friends with Victor.) Though they try to stay close, their paths diverge with adult jobs and responsibilities. The wedding of a college friend brings them back together as they approach their thirties. Victor’s chance encounter with the groom’s mother soon has them haring off across France, Victor in search of the necklace from the de Maupassant story, and Kezia in pursuit of Victor, with Nathaniel along for the ride. It’s a terrific tale of adult friendships and of how time shapes love and emotions, couched in humorous observations of a certain (privileged) cross-section of American society.

And that perfect, perfect ending! While I would love to read what our trio make of the rest of their lives, I also reveled in the deliciousness of the way and the where Ms Crosley chose to end her book. Very well done.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/28/the-clasp-by-sloane-crosley/

Oct 28 2015

Chicken With Plums by Marjane Satrapi

Crushed this book in a single sitting today (tho it’s a graphic novel, so that’s not at all difficult) and was just devastated by that ending. Ostensibly the story of a musician who gives up on life after he cannot find a suitable replacement for his broken instrument, it’s a heart-rending tale of… well, I can’t say much more without giving it away. But, as usual, Marjane Satrapi plumbs her personal history for an exquisitely moving tale, that in this case examines what gives our lives meaning, and the little slights that can turn into fatal wounds, and all the different ways we cling to this world. It was also refreshing to read a book so firmly and lovingly set in Iranian culture and history. Ms Satrapi is a genius and a treasure.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/28/chicken-with-plums-by-marjane-satrapi/

Oct 27 2015

Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has observed that while plot is a literary convention, story is a force of nature. In Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett explores some of the things that can happen when these forces of nature latch on to people in his most unnatural of settings.

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.
Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.
Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling … stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.
And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper. …
This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.
So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story.

Once upon a time, a witch knew that her time was coming to an end. The witches of Discworld, like the wizards, know precisely how long they will live. Desiderata Hollow had lived a long and full life, but she had never been much of a planner, and now she had to pass along one of her most important responsibilities — fairy godmothering — to a successor with no time for explanations, only a wand and an envelope sent to a young witch.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/27/witches-abroad-by-terry-pratchett/

Oct 24 2015

Busting Vegas by Ben Mezrich

Wait, so this is the second book he wrote about MIT students who figured out how to scam casinos?

Anyway, the story itself is compelling enough, but the writing is violently purple. The best description I’ve encountered of his writing style is “non-fiction pulp”: tolerable enough for a book, I guess, and much improved by the time The Accidental Billionaires, the only other book I’ve read of his, is published 4 years later. And while I enjoyed Semyon’s story (and found the techniques they discussed absolutely fascinating) I thought the epilogue rather disingenuous, and am willing to put the blame for that more on Ben Mezrich than Semyon: if there had been a progression displayed in the book of Semyon’s movement from sheer self-interest to enlightened enmity towards the casinos, then I’d have found it much more believable.

As it is, very useful for those interested in blackjack and casinos, tho the writing style is a bit of a slog.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/24/busting-vegas-by-ben-mezrich/

Oct 21 2015

New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear

There isn’t a zeppelin on the cover to let readers know this is an alternate history, but by way of making up for it, Elizabeth Bear sets the book’s first story on board hydrogen-filled German airship. The Hans Glücker is on its way from Calais to the jewel of British North America, the eponymous New Amsterdam. Bear introduces “Don Sebastien de Ulloa, known to the Continent as the great detective,” the first clue that the story will feature a murder on the airborne occident express. There are fourteen passengers, plus a crew of less than a dozen, and introducing the rest of the cast allows Bear to sketch out the world while penciling in the characters’ backgrounds.

Britain and France are engaged in a long-term struggle for supremacy. Both retain colonial empires in North America into the 20th century. France is a post-Napoleonic republic, while Britain was ruled for many years by an Iron Queen (more Gloriana than Victoria). Germany is not a major power in Europe (may not even be unified), but Imperial Russia is. And by the way, Don Sebastien is a vampire, and magic works. Both are disreputable, and in the world of New Amsterdam the craft work of magic is giving way to the predictability and power of science and industry. (One of the later stories suggests, however, that the two might work together, with magic supporting Monsieur Tesla’s broadcast electrical power in Paris.)

The second story introduces Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett, sorceress to the British Crown, thorn in the side of the independence-minded Mayor of New Amsterdam, close confidante of Duke Richard, the King’s man in North America. She is a hard-boiled detective, a hard-drinking forensic investigator whose service to truth is not always welcome in the corridors of power. She is called to the scene of a grisly murder that bears signs of having had a supernatural aspect. Not least that the rest of the family of the deceased has vanished, seemingly into thin air, but in a world where demons may come when summoned, thin air is not the worst place a family could vanish to.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/21/new-amsterdam-by-elizabeth-bear/

Oct 19 2015

The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski

By the time Ryszard Kapuściński returned to Ethiopia, the revolution had already swept Emperor Haile Selassie from power. He engaged in something like journalistic archaeology, digging up the people of the Palace from where they had gone to ground to avoid execution in the violence that followed the revolution. The Emperor reads as if it had been told to him in whispers, as perhaps it had, at night, in an undisclosed location.

Once they had been the people of the Palace or had enjoyed the right of admission there. Not many of them remained. Some had perished, shot by the firing squad. Some had escaped the country; others had been locked in the dungeons beneath the Palace, cast down from the chambers to the cellars. Some were in hiding in the mountains or living disguised as monks in cloisters. Everyone was trying to survive in his own way. …
They caution me again, needlessly: no addresses, no names, don’t say that he’s tall, that he’s short, that he’s skinny, that his forehead this or his hands that. Or that his eyes, or that his legs, or that his knees … There’s nobody left to get down on your knees for. (pp. 4–5)

The book proceeds with a series of testimonies, identified by the speaker’s initials, describing life in the court of His Highness, His Supreme Majesty, the Emperor Haile Selassie. How that court functioned, and how it finally succumbed to what are commonly called the forces of modernity. Periodically, Kapuściński puts in his own observations or recollections, separated from the other accounts by italics and serving as a bridge between the world of the Palace and that of an outside observer.

Kapuściński first came to Ethiopia in 1963 for a meeting of African heads of state. He was then a reporter for PAP, the official news agency of Poland under a Communist but de-Stalinizing government.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/19/the-emperor-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/

Oct 18 2015

Aunty Lee’s Delights (Singaporean Mystery #1) by Ovidia Yu

I’ve babbled on about my issues with Malaysian writers before (nutshelled: I want them to be super good, but when they are, I immediately hate myself for not writing, too,) and with this book, I realized that those issues extend to Singaporean writers, as well. I think it might be due to the two countries sharing a Straits-culture, and engaging in a sibling-like rivalry, distinct from our relations with other close neighbours like Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines. Anyway, I was extra sensitive to this book and my reactions towards it, but am fairly pleased with the outcome. Nothing like a book critic patting herself on the back for objectivity, no? 😛

Anyway, apart from the authenticity, I really enjoyed the complexity of the characters (with one notable exception: more on that later.) The book took a controversial subject and presented various realistic reactions to it, while grounding the narrative very firmly in a Singaporean society I recognized. Ovidia Yu writes with kindness and love in much the same way as her protagonist cooks one of her delectable meals.

However, I felt that the mystery itself was sloppily handled. Deductive leaps were made that non-omniscient characters could not have come up with: a standard problem with first-time mystery writing. And the denouement, while satisfactory from a Singaporean society viewpoint, was both obvious in whodunnit and extremely muddled in why. Of course the killer is the stereotypical Ugly Foreigner with the superiority complex. But his motivations didn’t make sense! Was he actually with the ex-gay movement? And why bother staging his uncle’s death via automobile at all?

I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series, as it’s spiritual comfort to read of people “back home” every so often, but I do hope the mystery in it is an improvement on this one.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/18/aunty-lees-delights-singaporean-mystery-1-by-ovidia-yu/

Oct 17 2015

Sky Key (Endgame #2) by James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton

In the interval between Endgame: The Calling and Sky Key, I got heavily involved in the Endgame: Ancient Societies augmented reality game, a primarily on-line game that involved solving puzzles and being creative after declaring yourself for one of the 12 lines. I chose to be a Nabatean, and set up our online community, and then did pretty well on the all-line leaderboard. Fast forward: I’m now a character in Sky Key, along with one of the greatest friends I made through AncSoc. So I’m a little biased when it comes to Sky Key, because eeeeeeeeee, I’m in it, eeeeeee!

Ahem. Which, to be honest, does have its drawbacks, as there are certain things about the inclusion of Stella and the Vyctory storyline that probably raise more questions for me than for the average reader. Also, the reader who fell for the series with the first book will likely be taken aback by the lessened focus on Sarah, but I think it makes sense, and I found her grief entirely convincing (even if I found Jago’s refusal to deal with Sky Key at the end somewhat out of character.) I also really liked the continued nuanced differentiation of the Players, as with Hilal’s message. Some got it right away (An,) some had to work to decode it (Sarah and Jago,) and some just didn’t give a shit (Maccabee and Baitsakhan.)

Aside from finding the ending incredibly satisfying due to being the competitive sort, I also found Shari’s struggle, as well as Maccabee’s decisions, intensely moving. Using a child as an emotional focus can feel like a maudlin trope, and I’m used to lesser authors exploiting that for all it’s worth, but Greg Jordan, I mean, James Frey (heh) and Nils Johnson-Shelton handled it really well.

The main thing this book has as a drawback is, ironically, also its greatest distinguishing feature: the puzzles. The constraints of writing to accommodate for those mean that the format gets a little choppy, tho again I’ve read much worse in “regular” novels. As with The Calling, the story is terrific for a puzzle book, and even for a fantasy novel. Here’s looking to Book Three (which I might also be in, teeheehee!)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/17/sky-key-endgame-2-by-james-frey-and-nils-johnson-shelton/