Never Mind The Backlogs

Cryptonomicon is still good going whenever I have time to pick it up, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel an ongoing and recently gnawing need to feed greed. Which is rather absurd, given that American Gods has languished, unopened, for far too long on my bedside table and needs a lot of TLC, The Prince really should get reread soon so I can return it to the guy I borrowed it from six months ago, and I really want to finish Love In The Time Of Cholera some day instead of reading it halfway three times and inexplicably abandoning it each time despite liking it very much.

So I suppose that means I shouldn’t go out and buy Atonement today then.

Of course there is also the small matter of all the other books that remain unread and completely unfamiliar, such as Cases And Materials In Company Law, Cheshire And North’s Private International Law, Dworkin’s Law’s Empire, Shaw’s International Law…

I think this all boils down to an acute case of eyes bigger than brain.

Memory Hole

A character in Cryptonomicon (435 pages down, 918 minus 435 more to go!) referred to a “peace dividend”. It took about 10 seconds for me to remember what that was and where I’d learnt about that from (preparing a case on disarmament for the World Schools Debating Championships in ’98). In a Dublin cafe Alec described Singapore as “monetarist” (amongst other things) to a friend of his and for at least a few seconds I couldn’t remember what that meant either.

Passing thought: how much have I forgotten and don’t even remember ever knowing? Facts, ideas, people?

No Simile Intended

From Cryptonomicon:

“The taxi stops. The driver turns and looks at him expectantly. Randy thinks for a moment that the driver has gotten lost and is looking to Randy for instructions. The road terminates here, in a parking lot mysteriously placed in the middle of the cloud forest. Randy sees half a dozen big air-conditioned trailers bearing the logos of various Nipponese, German and American firms; a couple of dozen cars; as many buses. All the accoutrements of a major construction site are here, plus a few extras, like two monkeys with giant stiff penises fighting over some booty from a Dumpster, but there is no construction site. Just a wall of green at the end of the road, green so dark it’s almost black.”

I reread this paragraph a couple of times, struggling to figure out the simile. Then I finally realized there wasn’t any. He meant real monkeys.

Clockwork Orange, The Eye In The Door, The Passion

“Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver.”
– A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

One of my all-time favourite passages about music, and certainly one of the most distinctive. The other day some words from it came to mind when I was listening to Sigur Ros, so I thought I’d put the whole passage up here for everyone else to love too.

Elsewhere in reading, I finished Monday’s library books and headed back for more yesterday: Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami), The Ghost Road (Pat Barker, the last book in the Regeneration trilogy), Art And Lies (Jeanette Winterson), The Child Garden (Geoff Ryman).

From Monday, The Eye In The Door was a worthy sequel to Regeneration, which says a lot given that I loved Regeneration. It moves away from Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen to focus on Billy Prior, who had initially intrigued me less than the former two because he was completely fictional, as opposed to being a war poet I entered the story already loving. The book’s success, for me, lies in two accomplishments: firstly, making me interested in Prior as an individual beyond morbid fascination with his war experiences, and secondly, the idea of divisions within the self in almost everything the book explores, from homosexuality to class conflicts to Prior’s psychological problems to Dr Rivers’ difficulties in treating Sassoon. Engaging stuff, and Pat Barker’s accessible writing style helps a great deal.

Loved The Passion. Loved the language, loved the imagery, loved the quirky humour, loved it, loved it, loved it. Not exactly a hard-hitting book of ideas, and not particularly insightful even with regard to its major theme (passion, unsurprisingly), but all the way through I felt caressed by words, and often, that’s all I need or want.

An Equal Music / Galatea 2.2

An Equal Music is worth the read if you love classical music or are a classical musician, and even more so if, like me, you just happen to be a lapsed violinist/pianist living in London with a hankering for Vienna.

Having said that, I should clarify that you may not necessarily like the book after you’ve read it. You may, for example, get completely pissed off with the “classical musician psyche”, which I identified with occasionally, but more often than not was slightly stupefied by. This is possibly one of the many reasons why I gave up classical music for debating, where people are just as dysfunctional but at least a little more rational.

One thing I did understand completely in the book was the protagonist’s devotion to his violin, not merely as an exceptionally sweetly singing member of its class of string instrument, but as a unique entity in itself – the feel of it under his chin, the bounce of light off its varnish. The smoothness of its neck under the skin of his thumb as he goes from first to fourth position. Force me to choose between slashing my arm with a knife or slashing my violin and I will unhesitatingly and willingly make myself bleed. The fact that it lies long-neglected and lonely in its case as I write this makes no difference to what I’ve just said, although it does make me feel painfully guilty.

Galatea 2.2 was fascinating, but less of an easy read. Again, it dealt with ideas I personally like reading about, so if you tend to be drawn to variations on the Pygmalion myth, artificial intelligence, academia, the passions of reading and trials of writing, then this one’s very much worth a try. I actually found it far more moving than An Equal Music, and found its characters (even the computer) decidedly more multi-faceted. Oh, I should add – apart from all the things listed above, it’s also about where life and love seep into cracks between the compartments, and why that ultimately makes it so difficult to learn the human condition without living it yourself.

Smoke And Mirrors (Neil Gaiman)

Urgh of the day, courtesy of Galatea 2.2 (Richard Powers):
“You cut up monkeys?” I whispered to Diana. “Rhesus pieces?”

The other book I finished yesterday was Smoke And Mirrors, and let me just say that if I were Neil Gaiman, no child of mine would ever be allowed to read any of my writing (except the books specifically meant for children) until they were at least 15 and I was satisfied they were emotionally stable.

He has a knack of finding the nightmare elements that lurk in everyday life (and in the wonderings of any imaginative kid lying awake in bed) and fleshing them out from fringe dwellers of reality to full-fledged, card-carrying members of the Scary Things Which Really Exist, Really community.

Perhaps I’m assuming an overly-protective parental persona here, but I still remember 15-year-old me eying clowns and dolls (except if they were Barbies, in which case I’d have fond memories of childhood haircut cum decapitation afternoons) with trepidation, and all this without watching It or Child’s Play, mind you.

But it’s not so much that I think reading Neil Gaiman would terrify a child, because that depends on the child, I guess. I think what bothers me is that the suggestion a child gets from reading Neil Gaiman is that nothing is ever quite what it seems. That there are dark undertones to everything, that bide their time and lie in wait for the unfortunate and unwary. And I think that childhood (and, perhaps, old age) are the rare times in life that you should be allowed to embrace certainties. You can always trust Mummy. Snow White was good, the mean queen was bad. Your jack-in-the-box isn’t evil.

Ironically, one of the reasons Neil Gaiman is one of my favourite writers is precisely this ability he has to subvert the order of things, to cast menacing shadows on familiar objects. And that’s why I thoroughly enjoyed Smoke And Mirrors. But I wouldn’t read those stories to a child.

I wonder what bedtime stories have been told in the Gaiman household.

The Sportswriter / Galapagos / Anil’s Ghost

More books, by the way:

Smoke And Mirrors and Angela’s Ashes, both of which I’ve been meaning to buy for the longest time.

A History Of Amnesia (Alfian Sa’at, one of my favourite Singaporean poets)

Ghostwritten (David Mitchell) and Galatea 2.2 (Richard Powers) from the Marine Parade library, which is full of books I can’t find in the UCL library and is an exceedingly pleasant place to lose yourself in for a few hours. Or a week.

Had to zip through Anil’s Ghost and Galapagos in order to finish them by their due dates, after taking far too long to get through The Sportswriter due to the fact that it seemed to induce chronic narcolepsy. It’s not that it’s a bad book – the writing had its moments, and some parts were marginally poignant, but it just moved far too slowly and I never found myself able to like or understand the protagonist very much, such as when he suggested to his ex-wife that they go into a room and make passionate love in the house of his friend who’d just committed suicide. She wasn’t keen, and I don’t blame her. Perhaps it’s a very male book.

Galapagos started off feeling like classic Vonnegut, and I was expecting great things, which might have been why I was a little disappointed by the end of it. There were all these fascinating little tidbits of how life was to be on the Galapagos island of Santa Rosalia for his motley crew of apocalypse survivors, and I kept reading in eager anticipation of finding out more, but was never given it. He wraps the book up hastily, and the reader is left to make imaginatory leaps between years on the island. What was daily life like? Who was the first human with flippers? How long did it all take?

I realize that longing for details like that aren’t always what reading Vonnegut is about – a Vonnegut book almost wouldn’t be a Vonnegut book without fistfuls of misleadingly simply expressed ideas, liberally sprinkled across paper and time, with you as reader expected to hunt, gather, and interpret. Given that I loved Slaughterhouse 5, The Sirens Of Titan and Cat’s Cradle, this disappointment in Galapagos is hard for me to justify, since it doesn’t seem a lesser book than these. I guess at the end of it all, I just wanted something it whetted my appetite for but didn’t give me. I still love Kurt, though. He’s given me enough gems, and is allowed to be less than marvellous every now and then.

I enjoyed Anil’s Ghost, mostly because I’ve always liked Michael Ondaatje’s writing style – the introductory passage alone wouldn’t let me go until I’d read it three times – but also because its content appealed to me. Forensics, archaeology, politics, and the tragedies it can bring about; loss, courage and sacrifice, lives of quiet desperation. It’s not anywhere as lyrical, scenic or romantic as The English Patient, but there’s a subtle, unambitious beauty in this book that I found equally (though differently) moving.

253 (Geoff Ryman)

253 (via lukelog) is the Web edition of a novel I thumbed through in a bookstore a year or two ago, enjoyed, but then promptly forgot about, which is less an indictment of the work itself than of my Swiss-cheese memory.

Very brief description: it’s 253 people on a London Underground Bakerloo line train, each described in 253 words, each description hyperlinked to the others where relevant. The train will crash at Elephant And Castle.

It’d be interesting to take a print copy of the book on the Tube, read it conspicuously, then eyeball each passenger in the carriage in turn and scribble furiously in the margins. Then again, most people probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Far stranger things happen on the Tube, after all.

Rick Astley Rut / Regeneration (Pat Barker)

(NoBloggerLove post 3: Friday 6 July)

Conversational snippet, which proves that Wednesday night’s clubbing ordeal was, at least, not all for naught:

Friend: Michelle, I just feel like I’m in a rut.
Me: _____, things could be worse. At least you weren’t dancing to Rick Astley on the platform at Mambo Night, for example.
Friend: You have a point. I feel better now.

* * *

(NoBloggerLove post 4: Saturday 7 July)

Regeneration is one of those books that makes me want to slap myself on the head after finishing it.

There’s a kind of seething frustration, a sort of “I can’t believe I spent all these years not having read Regeneration” sense of annoyed wonder at this book that I’ve deprived myself the pleasure of over a significant period of time, either through ignorance or apathy.

It happens occasionally enough to be just about right – any more frequently, and I’d worry about my ignorance; any less frequently, and I might start to miss that exciting feeling of making a find. It last happened some time in January, I think, when I heard Paul Simon’s Graceland for the first time, and again, there was this feeling, this vexation, that the rest of the world had spent years listening to Graceland, and I’d stupidly missed out.

If, like me, you like war poetry, especially Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and think the idea of being a fly on the wall in the hospital where they met and where Sassoon received “treatment” for his opposition to WWI is intriguing; if you enjoy subtle, intelligent writing somewhat in the vein of The Remains Of The Day, which is, in my opinion, a showcase of the art of saying just enough and no more, and if you haven’t read Regeneration (I don’t know about the other two books in the trilogy yet, but I’ll definitely get to them ASAP), then you might just be heading for a slap on the head.

The Invisible Library

The Invisible Library collects books which have only ever existed in other books, which is the wonderful sort of idea that floats around in my head from time to time, gets scribble-listed on scraps of paper and then promptly lost, which is why it’s a good thing someone else actually took the time and trouble to put it all together and get it online.

Books that sound intriguing:

  • Maniacs In The Fourth Dimension (my favourite fictitious author Kilgore Trout, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five)
  • Incessant Fartings of Imperial Scriveners
  • The Law’s Codpiece
  • What Bothers Priests About Holy Confession (all from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel)
  • Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Forced To Find Out (Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe)
  • The Blancmange Tragedy (Edward Gorey)