Feb 05 2015
This was a hoot.
As the back cover says, “the Reduced Shakespeare Company‘s classic farce” presents, after a fashion, all 37 plays and does something to with the sonnets in just over 90 minutes of stage time. They do the comedies all at once, in a bit
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/05/the-complete-works-of-william-shakespeare-abridged-by-adam-long-daniel-singer-and-jess-winfield/
Feb 03 2015
I suppose it would be smart to wait until I got to the part where Italy can properly be said to be Mussolini’s before writing about a book called Mussolini’s Italy, but my progress through this volume has been so slow — “deliberate” would be a kinder word, if less accurate — that I might lose the thread entirely before then.
Bosworth’s book does a lot of what I like histories to do: it locates Mussolini and Fascism within larger currents of Italian and European history; it reaches back to trace continuities, so as to make the differences of the new era clearer; it’s careful with explanations; and it shows the contingency of how events looked at the time. In the particular case of Italian Fascism, it shows clearly how the desire to make things anew rose from the experience of soldiers on the fronts of World War I. While the war didn’t blow up the Italian state, as it did the Russian, German, Austrian and Ottoman Empires, it revealed the old order as inadequate to the demands of the returning soldiers. Bosworth is very good at showing how various threads that became Fascism arose from a largely inchoate desire for something new in national life that would give meaning to the sacrifices of the front.
October 1922, the month the Fascists seized power with their March on Rome, is closer to World War I than it’s common to see in histories that concentrate on western Europe. Only a month earlier, Turkish forces under Atatürk regained control of Smyrna, effectively ending the war in the former Ottoman Empire and deciding it in favor of Turkish nationalist forces. October 1922 was also the month when the Bolsheviks captured Vladivostok, ending the Russian Civil War in the far east and cementing Communist control of the Tsar’s former empire. The Soviet-Polish War was only a year in the past. In Germany, there had been armed uprisings in 1920 and 1921. So while I’ve often read of the Fascist seizure of power as a harbinger of the politics of the 1930s, it might be just as illuminating to see it as another 19th century regime swept away by the First World War.
I’m a little past a third of the way through, and Bosworth is just starting to describe actual Fascist rule. I’ll see if he’s as thorough with the execution as he has been with the setup. But probably not speedily.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/03/premature-evaluation-mussolinis-italy-by-r-j-b-bosworth/
Feb 02 2015
Third time wasn’t the charm. I’ve tried twice before to read Buddha’s Little Finger, and it just didn’t catch with me. This time around was no different.
Usually I describe reading Viktor Pelevin with a short monologue accompanied by hand gestures. “It’s like somebody opened up your brain” — both hands held together to form something like a sphere, and then rotating the one representing the top over to the side as if there were a hinge between them — “and did this” — holding the lower hand in a bowl shape still, then making a mixing and scrambling motion with the forefinger of the other hand — “and then closed it back” — doing the hinge gesture in reverse, so as to end with a sphere again. I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t what everyone wants a book to do. Even I don’t want a steady stream of it. But from time to time, it’s kinda awesome.
My favorite of Pelevin’s books is A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories. These stories bring fantastic and surreal elements into early post-Communist Russia in a way that still leaves me amazed. He captures not just the grimness of Russian life at that period, but the inherent weirdness, and then uses that as a springboard to go to unexpected places. The title story is about exactly what it says. Then there’s “The Prince of Gosplan,” which is something like a day in the life of a mid-level bureaucrat crossed with an Infocom text-adventure game, with no in-story preference about which element is real. And half a dozen more genre-bending mind-stretching tales.
The Life of Insects and The Yellow Arrow both scratched a similar itch. But Buddha’s Little Finger? I don’t know. I bounced off of its surface and was never drawn to its depths. Maybe next time.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/02/buddhas-little-finger-by-viktor-pelevin/
Jan 28 2015
I’m about a quarter of the way through Truth and Fear (concurrent with more Discworld, The Iliad – to see whether it captures me the way The Odyssey did, and in a modern translation since I bounced right off of Chapman’s, and probably some other things that rise to the surface of the to-be-read piles), and I wanted to just sketch out a few things that I had in mind about the relationships between our consensus history and the imagined Russia of Peter Higgins’ novels.
I’m also starting to think that the series is About climate change, though I’m not sure how thoroughly the author is aware of it.
Hitherby spoilers, and randomness.
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/28/vlast-and-cool-and-dangerously-sympathetic/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/25/the-giant-book-of-stories-by-various/
Jan 23 2015
The Whisper of the River follows Porter Osborne, Jr. to college in the city of Macon, Georgia, in the late 1930s. It also follows Run with the Horsemen, the first book of Ferrol Sams’ semi-autobiographical trilogy.
Young Osborne, improbably known as Sambo, grew up as the only son of a planter in rural Georgia in the years just before and then during the Great Depression. The first book related Porter’s childhood with warmth and affection, but did not hide the feudal relations that governed the agricultural South of the time, nor the violence underlying those relations and the effects that violence, both repressed and expressed, had on the people of the farm and the region. Porter is smart and precocious, and by age 16 has exhausted what his high school has to offer.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/23/the-whisper-of-the-river-by-ferrol-sams/
Jan 22 2015
Margaritte is a 16-year old girl of mixed heritage – Apache, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and white. She lives in the underprivileged town of Idaho Springs, Colorado, and deals with an alcoholic father and an ineffectual mother in addition to the pressures of trying to avoid becoming a statistic. The author speaks with an authentic voice that penetrates, that reveals the depth of the difficulties that Margaritte faces as she works for a future that is a future and not just a repeat of being trapped in the cycle of poverty that plagues Native Americans. Margaritte is a very accessible character. The writing is raw and doesn’t hold any punches, so you understand exactly what Margaritte’s life is like and how difficult her chosen goals are. I recommend this book for young adults and adults both. It’s good, and thought-provoking.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/22/crazy-horses-girlfriend-by-erika-t-wurth/
Jan 21 2015
Here we go with another horror novel by Joe Hill. I admit that this book wouldn’t have even crossed my radar if they hadn’t turned it into a film with Daniel Radcliffe, but I’m glad it did.
The story focuses around Ig Perrish, who wakes up one day to find that he’s got horns. As he works on figuring out what the hell is going on, he discovers that the horns come with certain powers that he can use to manipulate people and things. With this realization comes the decision to right a terrible wrong that was committed in the past, and which ruined his life in the doing.
That’s the basics of the story, and it’s a good enough framework for a really decent horror book, but Joe Hill takes it beyond that. This book is also a bittersweet love story, and a mystery as well, as Ig uses his unexpected changes to figure out who owes the price of a life. It’s funny, too, in a macabre sense.
I enjoyed it, and I would recommend it to others who like horror that’s not all blood and guts but more psychological and creepy.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/21/horns-a-novel-by-joe-hill/
Jan 20 2015
The protagonist of The Three-Body Problem is a Chinese woman named Ye Wenjie. She barely survived the Cultural Revolution in China, and is so disillusioned by her experiences that she takes the opportunity as a governmental scientist to hijack an official program that’s attempting to make contact with aliens. She succeeds in making this contact, and encourages the extraterrestrials to invade Earth. Space being what it is (mainly large, very, very large), this takes a very long time to actually occur, and in the meanwhile a secret society in favor of the aliens is set up, which catches the attention of another scientist and a police detective, who work to figure out exactly what’s going on and why.
That’s the short breakdown of this book. The even shorter version goes something like this: PHYSSSSSSICSSSS! LOTS AND LOTS OF PHYSICS! OMG MATH!
This was fine for me, because I love science fiction when it’s using hard science. That doesn’t mean I found it an easy read, though, because it wasn’t. The character development left a little something to be desired. It wasn’t so much that the characters weren’t interesting because they were, but they kept getting interrupted by long expositions on science-y stuff. I had to drag out Wikipedia a few times to get through certain sections because I truly wanted to understand it, and it wasn’t necessarily always written on a layman’s level, which is actually kinda bad for a book that’s trying to attract leisure readers and not people who want to devour a textbook. Think of Isaac Asimov on a really good tear and not noticing that he’s leaving people behind.
The sections of the book that focused on the Cultural Revolution and its impact on intellectuals and society overall, etc., were far more accessible, but of course not at all science fiction-y. Furthermore, Ken Liu, who translated the book into English, worked very hard on footnotes and such to help people understand things on a cultural and political level, so that was immensely helpful.
I liked the book. I’m not sure I have the stamina to read it again, but I’m not sorry that I put in the time I did, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to get the next two books when they come out in English, because I do want to know what happens next, and really that’s what a book is supposed to do, yeah?
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/20/the-three-body-problem-by-cixin-liu/
Jan 19 2015
I don’t know how I feel about this book. On the one hand, the depictions of violence and its physical aftermath were gripping and convincing, but something about the internal lives of Therese and Laurent felt off. I don’t know if Emile Zola was intending to moralize, or to present their guilt as the inevitable result of their actions, but it all felt a little self-conscious and stiff, less novel than homily (though, surprisingly to me, entirely devoid of the influence of the church. Were the French not religious in that era?) I don’t know if this impression is due to something being lost in the mores of our differing times, or if I’m just expecting a greater level of sophistication than can be expected of the degraded characters depicted here.
Oh, just checked Wiki: apparently, Zola did mean for each of the four main characters to represent one of Galen’s humors, and for the novel to show the inevitable results of their conflict, to which blah. I find most novels that were written to prove a philosophical point to be rather poor as novels, and this was no different.
Another problem I had with this book is the way guilt was apportioned to Laurent and Therese. It seems incredibly sexist to say that she was just as guilty as the man who actually conceived and executed the murder, because obviously she was a witch who could control Laurent with her, how shall I put this, feminine wiles. Poor Laurent, who’s just a big overgrown boy incapable of agency without some wicked woman to set him down the path to ruin. I’m not denying her culpability, but in terms of guilt, I think he’s got a lot more to answer for than she does.
But that is, I believe, an unpopular opinion in circles which believe that the woman who wanted her husband dead deserves a harsher punishment than the person who actually pulled the trigger (as was the result of a recent court case in Virginia. Look it up.) Dunno if that’s even as much about misogyny as an instinctive fear of intelligentsia, but it just seems like another shitty iteration of the Nuremberg defense, only for lesser stakes on the part of the doers. Eh, whatever: I was raised to believe that merely thinking or feeling something wicked is no sin, but that acting wickedly is. Morals eh?
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/19/therese-raquin-by-emile-zola/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire