I’ve decided to participate in the Blog Improvement Project. This is 2010, a time of newness, a land of opportunity and it is with this time I wish to partake a challenge. A challenge to improve my Blog!
Enough of all that.
The first task asks as mere mortals to draw-up a list of goals we wish to achieve. I have been thinking about these for a while, I say thinking, more glancing over them in the fragments of my daily thoughts of “where did I leave my sock?” or “ten different pads of ruled paper but not one single pen!”
Without further ado:
- I recently changed the theme of this blog (yet again) but I’m not going to change that. I want to fix the header because there are a few scraggly bits. That a big job.
- Edit existing posts into clearly defined categories. I try and keep it organised but sometimes I just leave it uncategorised which is like leaving your childhood teddy in a box labelled unwanted. That’s never happened to me.
- I want to make my reviews more clearly structured. That is synopsis, review & verdict and more quotes, more information perhaps. I want it so people can read it easily.
- To make commenting easier. I’m going to ask more questions and pingback to other blog posts perhaps because they have reviewed the same book I have or something. Also, a question now: do you have to fill out a form before commenting on my blog?
I think that might be it. I’m sure I’ll look at other peoples’ posts and “homage” their goals.
I like the blog Nonsuch Book I just like the way where it exists in a small, confined place but still seems uncluttered. Plus it has lovely looking book covers which always helps.
quickly looking at my googlereader Rebecca Reads and Farm Lane Books have good examples of proper categorisation.
OK OK I know it’s technically February but, you know, shut up. I did quite well with reading this month, reading 14 which is 2 more than last year.
I read two books yesterday, and completed two more. I haven’t completed Dictionary of the Khazars but my excuse is that you can dip in and out of it. I should hopefully have it finished by this week.
Out of the 14 books I’ve reviewed 7. I will review the rest soon.
The Theban Plays & The Glamour
Sulphuric Acid & Changing Planes
The best book I read this month would be The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell (review coming soon…I hope) and the worst would have to be Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel.
This month I want to read the following:
History: A Novel by Elsa Morante
To Be a Pilgrim by Joyce Cary
The Separation by Christopher Priest
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
Has anyone read any of those books? What did you think of them??
Publisher: Canongate
Paperback: 278 pages
Synopsis:
The Death of Bunny Munro recounts the last journey of a salesman in search of a soul. Following the suicide of his wife, Bunny, a door-to-door salesman and lothario, takes his son on a trip along the south coast of England. He is about to discover that his days are numbered. With a daring hellride of a plot The Death of Bunny Munro is also a modern morality tale of sorts, a stylish, furious, funny, truthful and tender account of one man’s descent and judgement. The novel is full of the linguistic verve that has made Cave one of the world’s most respected lyricists. It is his first novel since the publication of his critically acclaimed debut And the Ass Saw the Angel twenty years ago.
Review:
In The Death of Bunny Munro, Nick Cave portrays a man leading himself down a road of destruction destined to end badly. Bunny Munro is not a sympathetic character, in fact, all sympathy falls away when you spend a small amount of time with this prehistoric ass that cannot, and will not keep it in his pants. We gradually come to realise that this is a sad, lonely old man who is past his time. The ending is in stark contrast with the lightness and playfulness of the beginning; it’s a book where you’re with a man slowly dying.
This is a novel that is steeped in sex; not just the act of copulation but also the very idea of it permeates its way through. Bunny does not go a minute without thinking about it, often in slightly graphic detail. He objectifies women, seeing them as mere receptacles; he worships the “vagina” like some orifice he can corrupt. He does some despicable things throughout the novel, and you begin to realise that the so-called “lothario”, who thinks he knows “without arrogance or hubris, more than he knows anything in this world, that he could fuck Georgia in a heartbeat” (p. 118), is a man who perceives to a “ladies man” but is just an idiot and sexual deviant.
Along for the ride is Bunny Jr., a boy who does not quite understand what is happening or why. We see, pretty early on, that there is no hope for Bunny the Elder but for Bunny Jr. there is. The strange thing is he has a more believable characterisation than the main character yet Bunny Jr. feels sort of real, or almost like a proper boy. What I liked about his character was unlike the Hollywood child, he acts like a real nine-year-old boy. He isn’t a mini-adult and so his thoughts and his actions are different, they go off into different areas and directions, and he certainly doesn’t have all the answers. And like most kids, inexplicably, he loves his parents, he “loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer or more capable” (p. 73).
The problem with The Death of Bunny Munro is the characterisation, and in this book, the characters are key. It’s a shame then that Bunny doesn’t live up to his premise and the introduction of his father near the end can’t change him into a three-dimensional character. After a while, his one-note sexual predator vibe gets tired and the situations he enters begin to seem stale. It becomes stagnant quite quickly and you begin to will it to end. It’s not Cave’s writing skills that are at fault because he has a finely tuned ear for writing some pretty dark stuff which can be quite a joy to read. The story just doesn’t have much to say or do and so you often think what is the point of this scene or what the point is exactly. The stand out character is Bunny Jr., a pretty decent portrait of a young boy stuck in a crazy world.
In the end, The Death of Bunny Munro is a confident and self-assured work from a man who writes some of the best lyrics in music, yet there are more flaws than pluses. The Proposition was better, and if you want greatness then listen to any Bad Seeds album.
Verdict:
A readable story that doesn’t live up to the brilliance of Cave’s other work. However, I do hope he doesn’t take twenty years to write his third novel.
Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Marg that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.
I went past the library yesterday and was drawn to it like a moth to a flame, a magnet attracted by another magnet, a fly around….
thirty minutes later I had come out with four books. Damn that bewitching place!
click on the images for more:
plus I think someone is knocking on my bedroom window. OMG!
I’m writing these reviews very quickly so you’ll have to forgive me if it all seems rushed.
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Hardcover: 127 pages
In Sulphuric Acid, Amelie Nothomb writes a thought-provoking tale of what could happen if suddenly people were rounded up, sent to a camp, forced to work until they couldn’t and then were sent to be executed and all the while it was the most popular television show.
The blurb on the front-flap wrote that the novel is about celebrity and peoples’ attraction to it. I don’t agree with that, of course, naturally, the idea of “celebrity” will come into it. The aspect of “15-minutes of fame” and the rise of the “reality star” but, I think, Nothomb writes more on the subject of responsibility, the degrees of involvement, the passivity of the audience and the television and idea of what is “freedom”?
Nothomb questions the validity of the argument of “we weren’t directly involved so we can’t be blamed”, the audience watches the show and Pannonique (the main character) argues that they are the true criminals. So, we have to question whether we can hide behind our “passive involvement”, and whether we create these shows ourselves. If a show like this were to exist would we watch it and justify it by saying, it’s there and we might as well. You could easily say “I wouldn’t watch it” but many would. We watch horror because we can say to ourselves that we are watching a fiction, we aren’t “bad” people. The television works in the same way, there is an element of fiction to it. We are always somewhat removed from the reality in that we are viewing something through another gaze and that, for some people, would make watching a reality-death-show plausible. It’s not real it’s on TV mentality.
There is also the question of even if you are “free”, in that you have no restraints: physical or otherwise, are you still “free”. Pannonique is locked-up but she is held in high-regard and her morals are, for her, so irrefutable she would rather let people die than give in. Then, on the other hand, we have her main tormentor, Zdena (one of the guards) who appears to be free but is plagued by self-doubt and is treated by employee, workers, the media and even the prisoners as someone to be looked down upon. Is she more “free” than Pannonique because there is an illusion of her life having no visible boundaries?
Publisher: Gollancz
Hardcover: 224 pages
Changing Planes is a collection of stories about being able to travel to different “planes” as in different dimensional planes.
I think if you come to this book wanting a unique example of world building you will be disappointed. The worlds and its inhabitants that Le Guin creates are far too much like ours but I don’t think Le Guin was trying to make unique worlds, they are allegories and satirical takes on societies.
There were some stories that are worth mentioning like the tale of the plane where everyone had communal dreams, a great passage at the end is “for them to fall asleep is to abandon the self utterly, to enter or reenter the limitless community of being, almost as death is for us.” Or the story about people who don’t need to sleep but exist in an almost dream-like state where they cannot fully function. Le Guin writes:
To be a self, one must also be nothing. To know oneself, one must be able to know nothing. The asomnics know the world continuously and immediately, with no empty time, no room for selfhood. Having no dreams, they tell no stories and so have no use for language. Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future. They live here, now, perfectly in touch. They live in pure fact. But they can’t live in truth, because the way to truth, says the philosopher, is through lies and dreams.
Yet, apart from some decent tales, for most of the time I kept flicking back-and-forth to see how long I had left to read. Not a very good sign. It isn’t a great book but I wouldn’t discourage people not to read it.
It’s been a fair while since I wrote about Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. I wasn’t sure I was going to continue with my endeavour but I suddenly have an hankering for all things Tintin. I’m going to write this one quickly…I’ll try to be more in-depth in later editions.
As I wrote previously, Tintin had some teething problems in his inauspicious début and the same applies here. It is perhaps, infamous (at least in Britain and North America) as the book that put Tintin back in the spotlight but for all the wrong reasons. I’ll make my views clear, Tintin in the Congo is racist and does show dated colonialisms but it is also presented in such a ridiculous way it’s hard to take seriously. I’m not making excuses and I’m not trying to exempt the work from any criticism because even without the slapped-on racism and animal cruelty on display, it is terrible as a piece of narrative art.
It has a coherency in structure lacking in the haphazard, two-pages-at-a-time presentation of Land of the Soviets. We also see the beginnings of Herge’s ligne claire style, which would become a defining feature of Tintin. Yet, it has more in common with the ugly, both aesthetically and in the plot, of Land of the Soviets. They both portray Tintin as a boorish character, his “help” consists of ordering the Congolese into fixing his mistake, killing a snake and wearing the hide of a monkey. It is fascinating to read and see how easily Tintin can fall into being a prat because of his need to help. In later adventures, his “boy-scout” attitude and spirit seems endearing and something to strive for. In LotS and TitC, these same attributes turn him into a fascist.
Tintin as a character doesn’t quite work without a strong cast of characters, he’s the perpetual “man-child” but he is also the perpetual “straight-man”. In the early adventures Snowy acts as the comedic foil to Tintin’s diligence until Captain Haddock is introduced. Without this element, Tintin can often seem dull in comparison.
In the end, TitC should really be looked at in a historical context, by that I mean in the context of other Tintin adventures. As a piece of art, it doesn’t work but as a gestation and as a look into the beginnings of a much-loved character it is invaluable.
COMING SOON (hopefully): TINTIN IN AMERICA
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Pages: 168
Ah, Sophocles master of Tragedy, you sure knew how to make everything turn to shit. The Theban Plays, consisting of Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, involve the infamous Oedipus (he of kill father, marry mother fame).
Looking at the plays as one entire trilogy, the overwhelming theme of you cannot escape fate prevails. These characters are not so much entities but rather, pieces to be moved into place. Oedipus cannot escape from his destiny, much as Creon cannot in the third. Yet, there is a semblance of realism in the plays; the characters do behave in a slightly more naturalistic way, the setting and story is concentrated on a lower plane rather than an astral. Stylistically, but not thematically, the plays are different from modern day in that there a lack in anything approaching scene setting. Apart from a few nondescript words the setting is bare bones, making it a wonderful opportunity for people to approach the play from different angles. The Brecht version of Antigone comes to mind here, the play is ripe for transposing the action into different settings and even adapting it too different situations.
Publisher: Gollancz
Pages: 240
If you’ve ever read a Christopher Priest novel, you’ll know that he has a habit of not only hoodwinking you but doing it so well you don’t know whether you’re supposed to read the book upside down. I suppose spoilers are in warning here, although I’ll try and be as general as I can.
I’m not too sure what I think of The Glamour, on one hand I enjoyed the total ambiguity of it. Who can we trust? Can we trust anyone? Is it even real? Yet, on the other hand, it really hits the ol’ “I want answers!” part of my brain. The book will not be for everyone because it is slippery, like trying to hold onto sand. What you thought was a character or what their motivations were are ripped from you. I enjoyed reading Sue’s part (although was it even her) because I began to believe her, I believed that she could turn invisible but after reading it through a different perspective it just seemed delusional. Each subsequent perspective changes the novel.
The ending is the biggest wtf in the novel. It’s either a brilliant and shocking move or a two fingers up to the reader. It totally changes the entire book, and we have to question everything that has come before. You even have to question whether it’s real or not, do these characters even exist, is it just a book? Is it the book you’re holding?
Publisher: Oneworld Classics
Paperback: 200 Pages
An indelible delight through the remarkable world of language, Exercises in Style is, by all means, a wonderfully “show-off” piece of work. One unremarkable story told in 99 different styles, Queneau pulls off an impressive linguistic romp through the art of storytelling. While not every piece, delivers, and some aren’t even very readable; the collection, in a succinct 200 pages, shows that perspective is a slippery, fallible thing and that storytelling is complex in its many different forms and contortions. Yet, in the end, it’s a whole lot of fun.
Publisher: Picador
Paperback: 192 pages
Roberto Bolano is entirely worth the hype, yet, like most authors, there will be ebbs and flows in quality. Not as mind-bogglingly great as classics like 2666, Amulet is good but compared to his other works it’s positively mediocre. That’s not a word that can be used lightly to describe Bolano’s work. Yet, Amulet is mediocre in comparison. It’s difficult not to compare with his other novels, Bolano’s work are through-and-through his own; themes of political upheaval, the lost and the wandering, poets and poetry, ghosts of the past. His work belongs to each other, they inform and intersect; characters pop-up as background characters and there is always a haunted quality to them, something on the edge of the horizon. Amulet has a sense of a ghost writing the tale; it never fully forms but wisps away. It’s similar to By Night in Chile, in that it recounts a life but while By Night is a hallucinogenic and claustrophobic novel, Amulet is just dull. A Bolano novel to be read after reading 2666, The Savage Detectives etc
