Jul 04 2015

Pavane by Keith Roberts

So that was weird. I first encountered this book in college where, haunting the oddly stocked shelves of the library, I stumbled across the Gollancz version: no blurb, no explanation, just a bright yellow dust jacket with the title, author and the symbol of the Crab people in brick red on the cover. Desperate for any reading material, I checked it out, and after a slow-ish start (because I did not give a shit about trains and I felt that The Lady Margaret chapter went on and on about their handling,) I was plunged into a world so different yet similar. And then the ending! The ending! The book has haunted me since, and when it finally came back into print, Jay got me a copy for a recent birthday. Finally had time to read it, and… I dunno. I think it’s a book that doesn’t bear re-reading. The surprise of it is so overwhelming that going into it again, you expect the same experience, and it just can’t happen. Also, with time and experience, certain things stand out, such as Roberts’ discomfort with writing adolescent women and, worse, the odd gaps in logic and story-telling. Almost two decades later, the ending doesn’t make sense to me any more, though it was perfectly mind-blowing to me at the time. But other things have become better: my annoyance with train talk, for example, matured into an appreciation for the love behind it. And I wonder, too, if my own style of reading hasn’t become more demanding of an author, less demanding of my own imagination to fill in the intellectual blanks.

I’m wistful, still, for that first experience of wonder now colored by a more adult disappointment that what I once thought exquisitely beautiful and strange just wasn’t as much as I’d thought it.

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Jul 04 2015

How To Be Both by Ali Smith

So I got the Eye/Camera version, and I’m probably in the minority of people who found Francesco’s side more compelling than George’s, if only because it felt like a whole arc, unlike George’s half, which just sorta ended. But I’ve never been a fan of the grief narrative, as evidenced by my disdain for the vast majority of autobiographies written by people 40 or under: too much wallowing, not enough art.

Which is something that could never be leveled at Francesco’s half. Art abounds! I loved the imaginative invention of Francesco’s history, even as I’m not entirely sure why B sent this to me. We’d been discussing a boy I know, whose pre-Raphaelite beauty sneaks up on you unexpectedly, prompting her to send me this book. And there are certainly passages that spoke to me of love and reality in ways other books didn’t. One of which I’ll quote to end this review (ironically from George’s half):

You can’t just make stuff up about real people, George says.

We make stuff up about real people all the time, H says. Right now you’re making stuff up about me. And I’m definitely making stuff up about you. You know I am.

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Jul 04 2015

One Life: My Mother’s Story by Kate Grenville

So how to describe this book without devolving into a slew of Personal Issues that had me sobbing so hard at points in the book that I had to set it aside and just cry from the relief of knowing that someone, somewhere, experienced the same pain and came out intact and even, dare I say it, happy?

Anyway, terrific biography of an astounding woman. The value placed on the maternal instinct and how it matters just as much to a woman’s sense of self and personal fulfillment as outside work, and on crafting the best life possible even when circumstances work against you, and of the role of literature and art in giving life meaning, really resounded in me, as did the value of childcare that was loving and nurturing without being prohibitively expensive. When I first received this book as a gift from darling B, I didn’t know what it had to do with me that she thought I needed to read it so urgently: it’s nice to know that she still understands me through time and distance. Gorgeously written, One Life is a fitting tribute to someone who loved and was loved, fully and thoughtfully.

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Jul 04 2015

The Mistborn Trilogy Boxed Set by Brandon Sanderson

Ugh, Brandon Sanderson, why are you so good at writing?!?!

Stayed up the other night just to finish this, and cried my way through the ending. Not as badly as I cried through 40 entire pages near the end of Way of Kings (which was also partly due, I feel, to the Mistborn trilogy being stylistically less polished than WoK, but that’s understandable since Sanderson continues to hone his craft to exquisite result,) but still, there was quiet sobbing in the dark. It was a very satisfying conclusion, though, and cements my respect for Sanderson even more.

I’m also glad I went and bought this in the trilogy format for my Kindle so that I forced myself to read the entire thing through. I think I’m done with not reading completed series novels in a row: it works so much better if you just go through them all at once. But then, I usually feel compelled to re-read earlier novels in order to make sure I’m refreshed on the events that might take place in following books. I no longer have the time for that kind of reading, tho!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/07/04/the-mistborn-trilogy-boxed-set-by-brandon-sanderson/

Jul 02 2015

Od Magic by Patricia A. McKillip

How do you pronounce the first word of the title? I asked a couple of friends who had read Od Magic before me, and their first response was a pause, and then, “Hm.”

Online Scrabble has since taught me that “od” is an actual English word, somewhat archaic, meaning “a hypothetical power once thought to pervade nature and account for various scientific phenomena.” Which in a way is too bad, because before stumbling across the definition (fortunately, with a double-word score), I had thought about different ways to parse the word as part of the title, and to tie it together with the considerations of magic that form one of the book’s key themes.

An early chapter points in that direction, too:

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Jul 01 2015

Yendi by Steven Brust

Yendi is the second book published in Steven Brust’s long-running Vlad Taltos series. It takes place after the prologue of the first book, Jhereg, and a fair amount of time before that one’s main story begins.

As I noted previously, “Vlad’s world is a high-magic setting, with death often no more than an inconvenience (though it can become permanent under certain circumstances), and teleportation common enough that Vlad will undertake several in a busy day, and that his office has a designated spot for both incoming and outgoing teleportation. This not the kind of book that explores the ramifications of commonplace magic very rigorously; it’s the kind of book that takes such things as read and gets on with telling a fast-paced adventure story.”

Taltos himself (the name is pronounced in the Hungarian way, with the final “s” said like “sh”) is a human, low in status and very short-lived compared with the human-like race called Dragaerans, who dominate the part of the world seen in Brust’s novels. Vlad is a mid-level mafioso, because that is all that the social setup allows a person of his background to be. Though the adventure story in the book concerns a mafia war that is more than it seems, the following passage was, for me, the heart of the book:

“… my father ran a restaurant. The only people who came in were Teckla [peasants] and Jhereg [mafia], because no one else would associate with us. My father … wouldn’t let me associate with Easterners [humans] because he wanted us to be accepted as Dragaeran. …
“My father tried to make me learn Dragaeran swordsmanship, because he wanted to be accepted as Dragaeran. He tried to prevent me from studying witchcraft, because he wanted to be accepted as Dragaeran. I could go on for an hour. Do you think we were ever accepted as Dragaeran? Crap. They treated us like teckla [the animal, not the peasantry] droppings. The ones that didn’t despise us because we were Easterners hated us because we were Jhereg. They used to catch me, when I went on errands, and bash me around until—never mind. …
“I hate them. … I joined the [Jhereg, i.e., mafia] organization as muscle so I could get paid for beating them up, and I started ‘working’ [assassinating] so I could get paid for killing them. Now I’m working my way up in the organization so I can have the power to do what I want, by my own rules, and maybe show a few of them what happens when they underrate Easterners.
“There are exceptions … But they don’t matter. Even when I work with my own employees, I have to ignore how much I despise them. I have to make myself pretend I don’t want to see everyone of them torn apart. Those friends I mentioned—the other day, they were discussing conquering the East, right in front of me, as if I wouldn’t care.
“So I have to not care. I have to convince myself that I don’t care. That’s the only way I can stay sane; I do what I have to do. …”

The heat of this passage also partly explains one thing that bothered me as I read the book: the amount of casual killing, without apparent consequences. Hand-to-hand combat with lots of casualties is a common characteristic of sword and sorcery fantasy, all the more so when the main character lives outside of what little law prevails in such a setting. I enjoyed reading Conan, Elric, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and dozens more that featured scores of bodies that wound up on the wrong end of a sword or a spell. At some point, I may go back and see if I gloss over all of that as easily as I once did, because now, reading that four guards were quickly dispatched by the hero’s bodyguards gives me pause, even if the lead character has no second thoughts and none of it seems to have given the author any pause.

Taltos and his people, however little solidarity he generally shows with them, have been on the receiving end of discrimination and violent abuse in the Dragaeran Empire since time out of mind. Among other things, he is working to be able to pay some of that back.

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Jun 28 2015

Lock In by John Scalzi

A long time ago, John Grisham came to the bookstore where I was working to sign copies of his second book from a major publisher, The Pelican Brief. His first, The Firm, had been an enormous hit, and there was every indication that the second would sell in mass quantities as well. No movies had yet been made from his books, so he had not yet ascended into the stratosphere of success that comes with having nearly every book made into a major motion picture. Oxford Books, now known in Atlanta as “the late, lamented Oxford Books,” had supported Grisham early on The Firm, and he was both pleased to be back and personable with staff and buyers. Naturally, many of the staff had a literary bent; how could it be otherwise? People had enjoyed The Firm, and now The Pelican Brief. Indeed, they thought the second was better: tighter plotting, less improbable, more depth to the background. Surely, though, now that Grisham had the commercial security of two big hits, and given how he was developing, he would turn from legal thrillers to write something with more heft, more ambition, something more self-consciously literary.

He didn’t, of course. By all indications, he has done exactly what he wanted with his publishing career, and been massively successful with it. He has the skill to write pretty much any damn thing he wants — I prefer his non-legal books such as Bleachers, or Playing for Pizza; I think they are touching, honest, and well-constructed — and accessible legal thrillers are what he wants to write. Fiction writing, and especially commercial fiction writing, is not a video game in which an author levels up from accessible to ambitious, or from clear prose to literary. For one thing, the one is not necessarily better than the other; for another, accessibility does not necessarily preclude ambition. Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, for example, is so accessible it’s catchy (Ask Louis Armstrong! Or Frank Sinatra! Or Ella Fitzgerald! Or Robbie Williams! The lyrics are best in German, of course, though apparently the Czech version is a local classic as well. But I digress. Too catchy.) but it’s also word-for-word perfect, and plenty deep.

John Scalzi writes accessible, exciting science fiction because although he is capable of writing pretty much anything — except maybe a dull book — that’s what he chooses. As he put it back in 2007,

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Jun 24 2015

More concerning The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz

I thought that the next bit I wrote here would be about something lighter, or at least something fictional, but Milosz has well and truly grabbed and held my attention.

The middle section that I have just finished, particularly the nearly 100 pages (out of 530 in the main text) Milosz devotes to Polish Romanticism, is the crux of his account of Polish literature. It’s the period of the most widely known works of Polish writing, and the time of the first works with which Milosz’s own prose and poetry, as well as that of his peers, is in dialog. There are some monuments amidst earlier Polish literature, such as Kochanowski’s poems, and in his earlier chapters Milosz has also scrupulously laid out where he sees the early foundations of Polish theater and narrative writing, but the achievements of the great Romantics of the nineteenth century are the ones that stand out as living works for Milosz.

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Jun 18 2015

The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz

Every literature should be so fortunate as to have a Nobel laureate write a textbook history of its development. The only down side I can see to The History of Polish Literature — so far, that is, I am up to the middle of the 18th century, although that’s just a little less than the first third of the book — is that Milosz published the main manuscript in 1969, and added a brief Epilogue in 1982. The half-century mark since its publication is creeping up, and just a few things have happened in Polish public and cultural life since then. (A friend who is a Polish novelist was eight when the revised edition was published; Milosz does not mention her.)

Milosz may have set out with a purpose that he called “purely utilitarian,” to wit, to provide “as much information as possible within a limited number of pages and, at the same time, to avoid the scholarly dryness which, more often than not, comes form the author’s lack of emotional involvement with his subject.” He can’t help going well beyond that utility. “At no moment during my work did I feel boredom,” he writes, “indeed, I was playing more than toiling, and several passages preserve, I hope, a trace of my smile.” (p. xv)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/18/the-history-of-polish-literature-by-czeslaw-milosz/

Jun 16 2015

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Twenty years and more after reading Stand on Zanzibar for the first time, I was surprised at how vividly its opening had stayed with me. First up the extended epigraph, a quotation from McLuhan, a warning to the unwary about what Brunner is about to spring on his readers, unsuspecting as they may have been in 1968, perhaps less so now. “Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. … Innis makes no effort to ‘spell out’ the interrelations between the components of his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits.” (Brunner brackets this bit of the real world at the beginning of his book with a “message from our sponsors” at the very end, “This non-novel was brought to you by John Brunner using Spicers Plus Fabric Bond and Commercial Bank papers interleaved with Serillo carbons…” His note from the present has become an item in a time capsule.)

Then two sections of rapid-fire sensory input, moderately mediated through prose. The first resembles the script for a news show, mashing together visuals, sound effects, neologisms and background information for the world that Brunner is not so much introducing to his readers so much as throwing them head first into the deep end. The second is titled, “Read the Directions,” and it has bits of narrative that introduce characters who will appear later, but starts off announcing the setting, “For toDAY third of MAY twenty-TEN ManhatTEN reports mild spring-type weather under the Fuller Dome. Ditto on the General Technics Plaza.” In the next six pages, no fewer than two dozen characters make a brief appearance (“Guinivere Steel’s real name is Dwiggins, but do you blame her?”), interspersed with bits of advertising, overheard dialog, and excerpts from The Hipcrime Vocab (HIPCRIME: You committed one when you opened this book. Keep it up. It’s our only hope.), a Devil’s Dictionary of Brunner’s invented 21st century written by Chad C. Mulligan (“a sociologist. He gave it up.”) who returns as an important character and a bit of an authorial stand-in.

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