Travels With My Aunt ( Graham Greene): Excerpts

Travels With My Aunt is the first of Graham Greene’s “entertainments” I’ve read, and it’s as wonderful as his serious novels. This book doesn’t just have one good story, it has about fifty. The first excerpt here tickles my funny bone the same way Dan Rhodes’s writing does, and the second is taken from a great story which I have unfortunately had to truncate, and which is much funnier in its completeness.
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Review + Excerpts: Vernon God Little (DBC Pierre)

Vernon God Little isn’t a bad read at all, but I’d personally classify it as a borrow-don’t-buy. I was extremely impressed by it, but as someone who reads purely for leisure (okay, and perhaps an occasional intellectual brownie point), I haven’t the faintest desire to ever read it again. It would probably make a fairly good movie, but only if Tarantino directs.

DBC Pierre’s prose is stingingly funny, but the plot is ultimately frustrating for the rational reader, which makes the suspense in the ending fall flat. The entire story is dependent on accepting that the protagonist, who sees the world through glasses so bitingly perceptive that they would best be described as gunmetal-tinted, is more inept at proving his innocence (of a schoolyard mass-murder) than an eight-year-old child would be. At times I was reminded of my exasperation while watching The Blair Witch Project, after which I seem to remember proclaiming “People that fucking stupid really just deserve to die!” a little too loud on the streets of London.

However, if you’re going on holiday, or are sick in bed and need something rollicking(ish) and entertaining(ish) and which pokes merciless fun at fat small-town Americans, you could do much worse than Vernon God Little. Here are two vulgar passages from it to help you decide. If you don’t like them, don’t read the book.

* * *

“Man, remember the Great Thinker we heard about in class last week?” he asks.

“The one that sounded like ‘Manual Cunt’?”

“Yeah, who said nothing really happens unless you see it happen.”

“All I remember is asking Naylor if he ever heard of a Manual Cunt, and him going, ‘I only drive automatics’.”

* * *

“You never heard of the paradigm shift? Example: you see a man with his hand up your granny’s ass. What do you think?”

“Bastard.”

“Right. Then you learn a deadly bug crawled up there, and the man has in fact put aside his disgust to save Granny. What do you think now?”

“Hero.” You can tell he ain’t met my nana.

“There you go, a paradigm shift. The action doesn’t change – the information you use to judge it does. You were ready to crucify the guy because you didn’t have the facts. Now you want to shake his hand.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I meant figuratively, asshole.”

And The Winner Is…

…Rene, who wrote a really sweet sincere email about what this blog has given her over the years. I loved all the jokes everyone contributed, really I did, but in the end, being told that my blog actually meant something to somebody, and had done for several years, was what gave me the biggest and happiest smile. Sappy but true.

[Original post and competition rules]

So congratulations Rene, and thank you so much to everyone else who gave it a shot. I’m pretty happy with how this competition turned out, so I might try it again in the future if an appropriate giveaway object presents itself.

Till next time, let me leave you with a story:

This guy walks into a pub and half his head is a big orange. He asks for a pint of lager. The bartender says “Excuse me, I couldn’t help noticing, but half your head appears to be a big orange.”

“Yeah, had that for a while now,” the guy says.

So the bartender says “How did that happen, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I was in this old junk shop,” the guy explains, “and I found a lamp. I gave it a rub, and this genie appeared! He offered me the standard three wishes, so for my first wish, I asked for every woman I’d ever meet to fall madly in love with me. The genie waved his genie hands around and suddenly every woman was looking at me with sparkling eyes. For my second wish, I asked for a wallet with a million quid in it, which would never be lost or destroyed, and which would replenish itself whenever I spent any money. And my wish was granted.”

“And the third?” the bartender prompted, leaning forward eagerly.

“And for my third wish,” the guy said, “I said I wanted half my head to be a big orange.”

Inaugural Syntaxfree Book Giveaway!

“At work Veronique made a point of not mentioning that she had killed Princess Diana at the weekend. She had practised not mentioning it as she took César for his morning walk, and all the way to the office – on the street and in the Métro. She decided that the best strategy would be to not say anything at all, in a case a confession were to slip out by mistake, like the time she had meant to discreetly clear her throat in a restaurant and ended up coughing an oyster into the middle of the cheese board.”
– The Little White Car, Danuta de Rhodes

After his third book Timoleon Vieta Come Home a few years ago, one of my favourite authors declared that he would never write another. I was unsurprisingly rather dismayed, but hoped that some miraculous change of heart might come some day.

As things turned out, I ended up getting a rather more miraculous change than I had hoped for. For even though Dan Rhodes has not published anything since Timoleon Vieta Come Home, a few months ago I came to hear about a new literary voice fast gaining attention for her debut work, The Little White Car. Her name was Danuta de Rhodes. She was apparently 24, French and female.

Highly amused, I emailed Dan to assure him that despite my conservative Catholic upbringing I would not be renouncing my fanhood, and would gladly support the creative efforts of himself and indeed all other transgendered individuals. I also mentioned, in passing, that I hadn’t actually read the new book yet as it was only available in hardcover in Singapore, and as a poor student I would have to wait for the paperback.

A few weeks ago, a package arrived. The Little White Car was in it. Inside was written:
“Pour Michelle,
Avec beaucoup d’amour,
Danuta”

I devoured it over that weekend. I loved it as much as I’ve loved all Dan’s other books, and at least this one didn’t make me feel like bursting into tears in the middle of a crowded train carriage. Also, there is really nothing cooler than reading a book containing an extended passage where the protagonist confesses her secret shameful love for The Roxette Collection: Don’t Bore Us – Get To The Chorus!, where the author of said book has previously made your mutual secret shameful love for said band public by blasting Fading Like A Flower at his book launch party in order to find you, because you’ve never met in real life before.

And so I decided that the time had come for the INAUGURAL SYNTAXFREE BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Here’s how it works:

  • Me, a grateful recipient of a gift from an author I love.
  • You, a resident of a country with a reliable online bookstore presence (Singapore, UK, US are all fine, but you’ll have to suggest a store to me if you live somewhere else), so that I don’t have to pay Amazon an obscene amount to ship the book to Easter Island.
  • Most of my friends no doubt already have a long list of reasons they wish they’d never met me, but here’s another: to participate in this giveaway, you have to be someone I’ve never met. Simply because I like the idea of buying a book for someone I don’t know in real life. Also, it’s pretty easy to buy books for my friends if I want to, but if I shove books into the hands of random strangers on the MRT they will probably think I’m an opposition politician and call the police. You don’t have to be a total stranger to me – if we’ve emailed before, or exchanged comments on a blog, that’s still fine. As long as we’ve never met in real life.
  • So if you qualify, post a comment (or email syntaxfree dot gmail dot com if you’d prefer) and make me smile. It’s pretty easy to make me smile, especially during the work week. Two of the best ways are to either kiss my ass or tell me an excruciatingly bad joke, but I’ll be happy with any effort which goes beyond “Pls give me the bk, k thx bye.”
  • If you elicit the toothiest smile from me, I’ll write back to you and ask where to send your book.
  • Deadline: Monday 7 February 2005.

Excerpts: Fugitive Pieces (Anne Michaels)

I finished Fugitive Pieces before the tsunami took over 250000 lives, but I’ve only managed to get round to typing out my bookmarked passages today. Reading some of them again in the wake of a natural disaster that literally changed how our world turns, I haven’t been able to help reading them in a slightly different light, with new victims on my mind rather than the old.

It is facile to liken a tsunami to the Holocaust, but thankfully that won’t be necessary. This book is much less about whys, and more about what nows, and in that sense at least, the agony of the survivor is universal. Michaels explores this beautifully for the first two thirds or so of the book, but doesn’t manage to sustain it once protagonist Jakob Beer dies and a new character abruptly takes over the narrative. Ben feels like an unnecessary coda to what would have been a complete and admirably compact work on its own, and the reader doesn’t really get enough time or incentive to care very much about him.

Despite its acclaim, Anne Michaels’ writing doesn’t always hit the mark for me – I find some of her pseudo-poetic abstractions a little overindulgent and frankly rather meaningless – but when it does, it is profoundly evocative.
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Jimmy Corrigan: The Dullest Kid In The World

Much like my struggles with Life A User’s Manual a while back, the only thing that’s keeping me reading Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Chris Ware) is the paroxysms of joy it seems to inspire in its Amazon reviewers.

I remember picking the book up in Borders shortly after it won the Guardian First Book Award, and abandoning it soon after, stupefied, for The Wire. (Which, of course, can be stupefying in its own way eg. “Oh look, a critical re-appraisal of the Appalachian free jazz movement!”) I chanced upon it again in the Marine Parade library last week, so I decided to give it another try. So far, so blah. I’m finding the flow of the panels extremely non-intuitive, and I’m not getting the big deal about the quality of the drawing either. I’ll keep wading on though – Life A User’s Manual did pay off in the end. And at least it’s a good way to get me sleepy at night.

Graham Greene: The Power And The Glory

Again I am brought to my knees by Graham Greene. Again I find myself fumbling for words that deserve to be used in a review. Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is an incredibly audacious book; perhaps one day I’ll write an equally bold one about Graham Greene – because in my life so far (narrow-horizoned as it admittedly has been), I have not read a writer who can equal his understanding of what it is to be human.
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