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Reading Notes (Whores, Virgins, Epileptics, Psychotics)

I've had a run of great reading lately, and thought I'd share. As is usual for all my commute books, all of these are notable for their ability to keep a very sleepy Michelle awake on the way to work and all but the graphic novel come in handbag-friendly sizes.

Memories Of My Melancholy Whores (Gabriel Garcia Marquez): I've read 100 Years Of Solitude and Love In The Time Of Cholera twice each, and with each reread I was amused to find that I'd remembered so little of the plot that it was almost like reading a whole new book. This isn't a diss, it's more that his books are so dense with atmosphere and observation that I find myself just living from moment to moment, thoroughly immersed, until I reach the end and wake up from a beautiful, fragrant dream which then fades away as quickly as dreams always do. I think this is the reason some people find it difficult to get through his books, because sometimes you're just not in the right mental mood for that sort of commitment. Anyway, Whores has a lot of what is wonderful about his writing within a much shorter and more accessible package (assuming you don't find stories about a 90 year old man engaging a 14 year old prostitute to be inherently inaccessible, that is) so I recommend it to Garcia Marquez fans and newbies alike.

On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan): I routinely read any new Ian McEwan book, but due to various dissatisfactions I've felt with his other books, he's always been an admired-but-not-favourite writer for me. He's amazing at taking an incident (usually narrated in vivid, heart-in-mouth detail) and building on it, fleshing out causes and consequences and the inner lives of the people involved with incredible depth and perspicacity, but in my view something else often lets him down - pacing for Black Dogs and Saturday, plot for Enduring Love and Atonement, and just too much obviousness for Amsterdam. I'm undecided on how believable I find the "incident" here - a disastrous wedding night for the virginal protagonists - but its awkward, cringeworthy moments, and how McEwan uses them to elaborate on the lives of Edward and Florence, their love and its sad aftermath, are masterfully done, like a perfectly formed distillation of his best abilities unmarred by any of his imperfections. My favourite McEwan book yet.

Epileptic (David B.): I don't always get graphic novels, in that I often find the writing decent but don't feel the drawings have added much to my appreciation of the whole. (Blankets, Jimmy Corrigan, I'm looking at you.) Epileptic is different. The plot is interesting on its own - the author's brother develops epilepsy in childhood, and his family life becomes dominated by his parents' efforts to find a cure and the increasingly disruptive manifestations of his brother's illness - but it's the complex, surreal drawings which make this extraordinary, and elevate it to my personal graphic novel pantheon formerly inhabited only by Sandman and Watchmen. I can't describe the richness of artistry that unfolds in these small black-and-white pictures in a way that you can appreciate without experiencing the book for yourself, it would be like trying to describe Guernica to someone who's never seen a Picasso painting. Just read it.

Stuart: A Life Backwards (Alexander Masters): Masters was working for a homeless charity (not for altruistic reasons, because it paid well) when its directors got convicted for permitting the trafficking of drugs on the premises, even though they had made concerted efforts to prevent this and the same problem afflicted almost any other homeless charity facility. In the course of the campaign against their convictions, Masters met alcoholic, polydrug-addicted, violently psychotic, frequently suicidal Stuart, who was also actually quite a success story of rehabilitation, relatively speaking. The book is the story of Stuart's life and of the friendship between the two very different men. It's funny, illuminating, and really sad, and I think it will interest anyone who has ever given a moment's thought to the problem of homelessness.

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

I picked up Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in the library simply because it was a nice handbag-friendly size for my commute, but if (like me) you've lost track of Ishiguro's work since An Artist Of The Floating World or The Remains Of The Day, this one's worth a read.

NLMG reminded me how wonderful Ishiguro is at illuminating the silences between people, the myriad things that may come to your mind during a conversation but which, for all sorts of reasons, you decide to leave unsaid. I don't think I noticed this in his other books that I've read, but in NLMG he's particularly adept at bringing this to life in the interactions between women, or at least it's very true to my interactions with women anyway. I think he really skewers the things that can render even conversations between fairly close, caring and not particularly immature girl friends a mire of unvoiced resentments. Kathy is able to be annoyed with Ruth's various facades and disingenuities, while understanding (and sometimes appreciating) why Ruth puts on the acts she does. Ruth is able to engage in genuine and close friendship with Kathy while she continues, through knowing inaction, to deny Kathy a precious and irreplaceable happiness. Tommy, the third major character in the book, is also quite accurately characterised (as far as my interactions with guys go, anyway) as being more straightforward, less calculative, not completely oblivious to all that's going on between his two close girl friends but simply not wired to view things through the convoluted web of surface-vs-imputed-meanings that girl interactions have to be filtered through.

Do you know what I mean, or does none of this strike a chord with you? I mean the insecurities and disingenuities of your girl friends which chronically and acutely infuriate you, yet because you figure that they wouldn't be like this if they weren't fragile, you decide to be the bigger person and not crush them by letting on that you see right through them. But because you're not perfect yourself, you can't totally let go of your annoyance either, and it ends up colouring your interactions with them anyway, anything from throwaway comments which indirectly target an insecurity, to deliberate obtuseness when they're fishing for affirmation, to finally just limiting the quantity/method of your interactions. (I have girl friends who I like in person, but I don't like how they come across on their blogs, or vice versa, and other girl friends who are lovely alone but put on facades in certain social settings, so I sometimes try to pick how and where I interact with them accordingly.) Perhaps the dispassionate observer might wonder why you don't just cut off these dysfunctional relationships, but there's the rub - underneath all this bullshit you still like these people, you know they have good hearts, and you want to believe others will ultimately give you, too, the dignity of the holistic analysis, rather than write you off for your own annoying faults. And so we hold on to these relationships, and everything left unsaid represents the good and bad we can't let go of.

That was a bit of a tangent, wasn't it? Anyway, the point is that the major strength of Never Let Me Go, for me, is how consummately Ishiguro gets all of the above. Another of its strengths is how elegantly he unfolds the story, but it's a little tough to discuss this without introducing spoilers. If you pick this book up cold as I did without knowing much about it, I daresay you will be a little surprised initially at the opening chapter's hints about the central premise of its plot, and you might even be dubious about whether it's your sort of story - I was. But I soon found that this didn't matter, and (with apologies for being so cryptic, really) the third major strength of the book is how he uses the first strength to illustrate how little it matters.

King Rat: Needs A Remix

Oh dear, my naffness premonition about King Rat turned out to be right. Check out these lines:

• "Saul's heart was beating like a Jungle bassline." [This is after Saul had been running for ages. Fuck saving the metropolis, dude has some serious irregular heartbeat issues to worry about! You want to exaggerate like this, say his heart was beating like Moby's Thousand, but a jungle bassline is just...medically wrong.]
• "The rats and Saul left the relative safety of London's nightlands and entered the warehouse, the frenzied jaws of Drum and Bass, the domain of smoke and strobe lights and Hardcore, the Piper's lair, the heart of Darkness, deep in the Jungle." [Again with the unnecessary capitalisations. Are we in Brixton or the Hundred Acre Wood?]
• "The Drum and Bass felt as if it would lift the hatch out of the floor, off into the sky. It was unforgiving, a punishing assault of original Hardcore beats." [It feels a bit off to use that usual MC patois of "original hardcore" in a description like this. Is it just me?]
• "She pulled the record back, let it forward again a little, pulled it back, scratching playfully like an old school rapper, finally releasing her hand and switching off the first tune in a smooth movement, unleashing the new bassline." [Scratching like a rapper? Also, reading about how someone DJs is like watching paint dry.]

Apart from the drum'n'bass cringeworthiness, some other things about the book's plot seem a bit misconceived, sort of like what you might come up with if you went out to a massive jungle night with your mates back in the day, took a lot of E, brought everyone back to yours to come down on some spliffs, and while lounging wrecked on your plonk-stained student flat carpet, started brainstorming ideas for a book. For example (some spoilers to follow, but I think they're so damn obvious long before they happen that there's no harm giving them away now):

Continue reading " King Rat: Needs A Remix"

King Rat (China Miéville)

I decided it was about time I read some China Miéville (although he's a notable writer in his own right, I must admit the main draw for me was that he's said the Borribles trilogy is one of his biggest influences) so I went looking in the library shelves. I know Perdido Street Station is his most celebrated work, but when I read the blurb on the back of King Rat it was clear I had to start with that instead:

Something is stirring in London's dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul's father, and left Saul to pay for the crime.

But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into his prison cell and leads him to freedom. A shadow called King Rat.

In the night-land behind London's facade, in sewers and slums and rotting dead spaces, Saul must learn his true nature.

Grotesque murders rock the city like a curse. Mysterious forces prepare for a showdown. With Drum and Bass pounding the backstreets, Saul confronts his bizarre inheritance - in the badlands of South London, in the heart of darkness, at the gathering of the Junglist Massive.

Like the DJ says: 'Time for the Badman.'

Potentially a bit naff, I know (who capitalizes dance music genre names like that? It's like a Winnie the Pooh book), but how can I resist? I'm hoping it'll be like Neverwhere...with riddim.

O RLY?

I have to return House of Meetings to the library today without having finished it, unfortunately (The Somnambulist got in the way), but before I do I just have to capture this rather intriguing line: "...even in their most intimate dealings the women, too, were worked on by socio-economic reality. In the post-war years, there were no non-swallowers in the Soviet Union. None."

Brideshead Revisited: Test Your Word Power!

Soon after starting Brideshead Revisited I decided to keep track of the number of words I encountered within it that I didn't know. This throwback exercise was inspired firstly by the dismay of finding that within the first two pages of the book I had come across two words I wasn't quite sure of, and secondly by my first attempt at playing Free Rice where I stagnated at level 46 and got tooth-gnashingly annoyed.

I was embarrassed to realize in the course of this exercise that although I had encountered some words a number of times before, I still didn't quite know what they meant, perhaps because the context they had been used in at the time had been enough for me to follow what was written, or I simply didn't bother to look them up. Funnily enough, having learned this bunch of words from Brideshead Revisited, I played Free Rice again today and easily got to level 49. I guess our primary school teachers really did know what they were talking about!

Just for fun, I'll start by listing the words on their own so you can check how many of them you know off the bat. After the list, continue reading for a little more context to the words and links to dictionary definitions.

1. verismilitude
2. panegyric
3. jejune
4. sacerdotal
5. lapidary
6. muniment
7. suborn
8. glaucous
9. manumission
10. crapulous

Continue reading " Brideshead Revisited: Test Your Word Power!"

Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)

Alec recently enjoyed Brideshead Revisited so I read it too in a fit of foppery. Waugh's prose was masterful but I thought the book's comic moments were far more successfully realized than its theme (described by Waugh in his foreword as "the operation of divine grace" on the book's main characters).

The Catholics in this book struggle with the outward moral strictures of being Catholic but are indifferent to the internal. We aren't privy to any thoughtful exploration of their faiths, just an inexplicable attachment to following some rules (eg. not divorcing your husband even though you have a loveless marriage and have fallen in love with someone else) but not others (eg. not cheating on your husband in the first place). I honestly don't understand why they continue to feel any residual attachment to Catholicism when they have long ceased to practise it; it feels more like an explanation of the power of superstition rather than divine grace. I guess Graham Greene has just spoiled me in this regard, because I really think Waugh's attempts here don't hold a candle to anything Greene has accomplished in a similar vein.

But in case anyone reading the previous paragraph has immediately decided that Brideshead Revisited doesn't sound like their kind of book, let me discourage you from that - it has many inimitably funny moments and it always feels wonderfully luxurious after I overdose on modern fiction to plunge into the vintage elan of a writer like Waugh. Here's a passage I enjoyed - Anthony Blanche, my favourite character in the book because he's just totally fabulous, describes the fumbling attempts of some fellow students at Oxford to dunk him in a fountain (due to his excessive fabulousness):

About six of them came into my room, the rest stood mouthing outside. My dear, they looked too extraordinary. They had been having one of their ridiculous club dinners, and they were all wearing coloured tail-coats - a sort of livery. "My dears," I said to them, "you look like a lot of most disorderly footmen." Then one of them, rather a juicy little piece, accused me of unnatural vices. "My dear," I said, "I may be inverted but I am not insatiable. Come back when you are alone." Then they began to blaspheme in a very shocking manner, and suddenly I, too, began to be annoyed. "Really," I thought, "when I think of all the hullabaloo there was when I was seventeen, and the Duc de Vincennes (old Armand, of course, not Philippe) challenged me to a duel for an affair of the heart, and very much more than the heart, I assure you, with the duchess (Stefanie, of course, not old Poppy) - now, to submit to impertinence from these pimply, tipsy virgins..." Well, I gave up the light, bantering tone and let myself be just a little offensive.

Then they began saying, "Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury." Now as you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, "Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstacy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified libido and see me bath, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.

Do you know, they all looked a little foolish at that? I walked down with them and no one came within a yard of me. Then I got into the fountain and, you know, it was really most refreshing, so I sported there a little and struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home, and I heard Boy Mulcaster saying, "Anyway, we did put him in Mercury." You know, Charles, that is just what they'll be saying in thirty years' time. When they're all married to scraggy little women like hens and have cretinous porcine sons like themselves getting drunk at the same club dinner in the same coloured coats, they'll still say, when my name is mentioned, "We put him in Mercury one night," and their barnyard daughters will snigger and think their father was quite a dog in his day, and what a pity he's grown so dull. Oh, la fatigue du Nord!

Bigging Up The Borribles

While randomly surfing Facebook groups after first joining, I found and immediately joined "The Borribles would kick Harry Potter's bourgeois arse", a view which I heartily subscribe to and have hinted at here before too.

From that group I discovered the author's official site and this article by Peter Lyle for TANK magazine which captures much of what I really love about these books, as well as my usual experiences in trying to tell people about them.

"They're called the Borribles."

(Blank look)

"It's this children's book from the '70s."

(Blank look)

"They're these oiky kids with pointy ears who live in all the shitty bits of London and fight the grown-ups and the Wombles and..."

"Do you mean the Borrowers?"

Except that for me, no one brings up the Borrowers either. (Which is fair enough really, they were pretty lame.)

Anyway, I just wanted to encourage anyone who's done with the latest Harry Potter and feels a sense of loss or whatever to give the Borribles a try. They are some of the most memorable and gripping children's books I have ever read, and I really don't understand why no one seems to know about them.

Reading the books again as a grown-up living in London gave me new insights into what made them so great (Lyle likens the presence of London in the books to its presence in the writing of Dickens, and to the Dublin of Joyce's Ulysses) and the rest of the article continues to open my eyes to things I hadn't thought about before: that the areas in which London's Borribles choose to make their home - Battersea, Tooting, Wandsworth, Stepney, Whitechapel, Neasden and Hoxton - are today an "index of then down-and-out, since gentrified, bits of the city," and that "in an era when children's books about chosen ones, picturesque and ethnically-cleansed boarding schools, timeless English architecture and the universal use of received pronunciation dominate the entire fiction market, The Borribles is a celebration of everything that doesn't fit with that vision."

You can read the first chapter of each Borrible book at the site, though if you've never read any of them then I recommend (in case of spoilers) that you only read from the first book.

Virginia Tech Tangent

I won't bore you with more of the banality already permeating the blogosphere's attempts at gun control discussions in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, neither will I bother with some empty words about my heart going out to the bereaved families. Words like "sympathy" and "empathy" get misused all over the place when stuff like this happens, but frankly I've always felt what the English language actually needs is a word where you acknowledge your complete inability to imagine or fathom what a suddenly bereaved family is going through, because you simply haven't experienced anything even remotely analogous. I think it's more respectful.

But anyway, the reason I mentioned this at all was just to highly recommend We Need To Talk About Kevin (Lionel Shriver) to anyone who hasn't already read it. I don't think I managed to write about it here at the time I read it - strange that I did write about Vernon God Little since I don't think that's anywhere as good on the same topic - but it was one of the best books I read last year. Call me a philistine but good prose alone is never quite enough to secure my allegiance to a book if its plot or ideas don't impress me. This one has everything - good writing and characterization (you might feel a bit irritated by the snottiness of the narrator at the start, but press on), ideas about motherhood that I'd never read much about before, and as for plot let me just ask you to do yourself a favour, trust me that this book is worth reading, and don't read the Amazon reviews in case they've got spoilers.

Is it ridiculous of me to suggest you read a work of fiction at a time when more than enough horrifying details about a real crime are flooding the newswires? Perhaps, but if the topic does interest you, this book allows you a more contemplative take on things than finding yourself riveted, despite yourself and more out of rubbernecking curiosity than any higher motive, to online videos of Cho's demented ramblings. Which is why I have closed those Firefox tabs and decided to reread the book instead. Your mileage may vary.

Iran Don't Walk

A little heads-up for any Singaporean readers who're into graphic novels: if you borrow 4 books from the Orchard library, you can use your loan receipt to enter their contest to win a collector's edition box set of Persepolis 1 and 2. Just look for the box in front of the main counter. (I don't remember how much longer the contest is on though, so if you're keen, drop by soon.) And if you win, please email me so I can curse at you.

Ten Book Meme

Yish tagged me to do this. In other news, go buy Yish's book, y'all! If you can get your hands on a copy, that is - I understand the bookstores carrying it are sold out.

1. One book you have read more than once
Which one to choose, anyone who loves reading and procrastination has read multiple books multiple times. I guess I'd single out Jane Eyre, which I first read at 8 and reread at 23. On second reading I suddenly realized that the first reading seemed to have moulded so much of my attitudes and personality, without me even knowing it.

2. One book you would want on a desert island
The Bible. Sorry, not the coolest of choices but it's hella thick so I'd have lots to read, and if I can think of one good time to reconnect with my faith, being stuck on a desert island would be it.

3. One book that made you laugh
Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn is funny most of the way through, but there's a scene near the beginning which is just spectacular. The enjoyment's all in the reading so I won't bother summarizing it, but for those of you who have read the book I'm talking about the scene in the ER when Lionel's Tourette's syndrome is making him erupt with fragments of the lame joke he was telling his dying mentor in the car.

4. One book that made you cry
No book has ever made me cry, but Dan Rhodes' Timoleon Vieta Come Home once came close. If I'd been reading it in a different context I'd probably have been fine, but I was in a train on the way to see a friend whose mother had suddenly passed away, so I guess I was feeling emotional to begin with.

5. One book you wish you had written
The Power and the Glory (Graham Greene). It showcases everything I love about Graham Greene, who showcases everything I love in a writer. If I could only write with such frugal elegance, such precise insight, and such deep compassion, I might come a little closer to displaying those traits as a human being. Oh, and it actually has a plot. I'd never write a book with no freaking plot.

6. One book you wish had never been written
Can I have a series, please? All ten million volumes of Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time saga (I quit around volume 6 and am stupefied as to why I stuck around that long). Ye gods, there are more likable characters in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich than in these books.

7. One book you are currently reading
Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is probably the one most worth mentioning since Kafka On The Beach is an utter pile of poo so far. It's a damn hard book to explain though - go read the Amazon synopses.

8. One book you have been meaning to read
A hilarious cab ride with Olive, Erik and their incompatible reading tastes reminded me that despite meaning to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest for the past eight years and borrowing it from my local library about five separate times, I've never started on it. Olive's view: Lucky escape, hon. Erik's view: READ IT! IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE! Which brings us neatly to...

9. One book that changed your life
I'm sorry but in all honesty I can't come up with one. I mean, it's like asking me to name one food that changed my life. No one food changes my life but obviously I can't imagine life without food. (Man, I'm deep this evening.)

10. Now tag five people:
Remarkable Things [done!]
Shoopscoop [done!]
Solitary Fish [done!]
Atarashi [done!]
London Calling [done!]