Category Archives: Book I’ll Forget I Read

February 24, 2011 · 4:14 am

Jimmy Corrigan: Wow.

     So in my life to date I think I’ve read in the neighbourhood of a eight hundred books. A figure arrived at with the base calculation of 50 books a year for the last ten years + 30 books a year for the ten years between 6-16.  A number of no consequence whatsoever except when contrasted with the six (total) graphic novels I’ve read: Spiegleman’s Maus I and II, Persepolis, Riel, and the Unwritten, and now, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan.

I mention all this because I have a lot of practice deciding what I like and don’t like about fiction (in the non-picture sense) and justifying those feelings with evidence from the text. I have, however, very little experience explaining why I do or do not like graphic novels (see my entry on The Unwritten for evidence) and so I am in the unfortunate position of writing that I LOVE Jimmy Corrigan and I have some sense of why, but it is, a very grasping sense. Graphic novels are not something I have enough experience with or training with to explain clearly, so take this proviso for what is and let me explain why (I think) I love Jimmy Corrigan.

1) There are beautiful sentences. True, graphic novels still have sentences, and I still recognize one them when I read it. Beautiful little gems peppered in dialogue and description that catch you and say ‘wham.’ (For a great article in defense of the beautiful sentence see 19 February 2011 Globe & Mail Books section back-page).

2) Pictures! Pictures that are not simply pretty, but add whole layers of meaning (to this admitted novice in picture-meaning-reading). Illustrations that captivate and confuse – where I spent time puzzling out not simply the direction of meaning (where do I read/look next?) but how the illustrations competed with the text, added to it, complicated it, and made it all the more weighty.

3) The plot. It jumps in time, space (dreams of robots), place and plausibility in ways that left this reader simultaneously confused and captivated. I worked reading this book to understand and appreciate not just the plot flow, but the significance of particular narrative asides and reoccurring symbols (a little red bird for instance, I finally worked out signaled a change in time).

I’m done with my list now. I also like Jimmy, but not so much as to put him in the list. He was a bit sniveling for my taste. Oh! That too! The perfect capture of sound in the text! I heard things as well as saw them.

So I’m more excited now for the other books in my Books with Illustrations category than I was before. Much more. Not so much as to read another one right away. My brain aches a bit. And I think I’ll review Scott McCloud’s stuff on graphic novels (thanks K. for the suggestion) before writing another analysis. Just in case those of you out there who care, care.

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February 23, 2011 · 2:33 pm

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: A Terrible Translation

It’s possible the diary of Thuy Tran, a Vietnamese doctor serving in the National Liberation Front army, is a good read in Vietnamese. In English it is… terrible. I tried hard to remind myself of the real life behind the narrative voice, of the fear and sacrifice, of her youth… but despite the evocative form (reading a diary feels like – maybe because it is? – an invasion) the writing is so terrible it’s distracting. I appreciate, too, that Thuy wasn’t a writer by trade and so my expectations for knock-em out sentences shouldn’t be high, but at a certain point – and I’d suggest this book reaches that point and then well passes it – bad writing (and by that I mean repetitive sentences, poor diction, exaggerated/universalizing statements) gets in the way of any appreciation of content.

I’m inclined to give Thuy more credit and blame the translator. I’d say, from my limited experience evaluating translations, that this is terrible translation. Randomly selected sentence: “These simple letters cannot diminish my longing. My heart lacks the warming fire of the Party” — lots of talk of anguish, transportation of feeling, longing – her heart/head are frequently “filled with many thoughts”.

Okay. So I didn’t like the writing.  Content? I was interested in her story of rising the ranks of the Party, of administering medical care in the jungle, of hating the “American imperialists.” All neat. I was far less interested in her jealousy and various crushes. I know its unreasonable to expect a diary to put limits on these kinds of entries, but all the same, by the end I was pretty fed up with her.

So. There you go.

On another note, I received a comment from a reader on my “The White Bone” entry to the effect that I didn’t do enough research into elephants, and that I considered humans to be far too unique, especially in my characterization of what elephants can and cannot do. I do appreciate the comment. I did try to be as careful as possible to limit my criticism to those things elephants cannot – to the best of my knowledge do – for instance, creating art. I rescind my comments about elephant burial practices to the extent that elephants do bury their dead, but do not, as far as I can tell, speculate on the afterlife of those elephants living with She-woman in the sky (as the novel suggests). I could have added elephants do not understand their world through the Biblical story of Adam and Eve (as the novel suggests), or practice monogamy (again, as the novel suggests). My criticism of the book was not intended as a criticism of elephants. Quite the contrary, I didn’t like the book because it reduced the complexity of elephant mindscape to that of humans.

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January 15, 2011 · 10:38 pm

Alice in Wonderland: This is it?

     I confess to be somewhat underwhelmed by Alice in Wonderland. With all the pop culture boo-ra-ha-ha I had thought it might be exciting and entertaining, alas. Maybe the problem is not with the book at all, but with all the pop culture reference, maybe I knew too much to let myself be captivated? Or maybe it was that the ending – poof! it was all a dream! – remains my least favourite way to end a story, ever. Ever. Such lack of commitment to a fantasy world, to the reality of the fantasy, blah. Bleh. Meh.

I did like the cheshire cat. I could have done without Alice and the Queen. Also the King. A far better story if narrated by the cat? Someone has written that alternate version, I’m sure, and if you know where I could read it, let me know.

It’s a sad moment to realize I might not like the book because I know the story too well from movies, television, and *being* in the world. A sad realization because the appeal of a book – in particular a book of fantasy? – is that it promises the realization of another, different (however allegorically or metaphorically similar) world in which to consider the problems and questions of the world in which we live; yet as I read this book I spent much of my imaginative time comparing what I read with what I had seen, scattered in images and references, across my life. A lesson to myself to always read before I watch? Or to accept that the canonical and commercial become something other than simply books or stories, and must be considered as more expansive enterprises. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not what I had – in delusion, perhaps – expected when reading this classic.

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December 19, 2010 · 9:31 pm

Solar: The Accidental Ending

            Ian McEwan’s latest novel Solar reminded me a lot of Richler’s Barney’s Version: a crotchety old man who eats too much, cheats on his wives, cheats his way through his professional life, is exceptionally self-deluding, dirty and grumpy. I loved Barney, I wanted him to figure things out, to be okay (thus the brilliance of the novel). I didn’t care one way or another whether Michael Beard had things work out for him in the end, and in the end he really did have a hell of a lot to be worried about: marriage, job, career, health, all falling apart and all I could wonder was when the book would stop making fat people out to be lazy slobs. When the ending did arrive it arrived unexpectedly – and not in the ha ha! surprise great twisty ending – but a reaction where I wondered whether the catastrophes facing Beard were too great to imagine any other way out then to kill him off. Not a poetic or justified or symbolic death, just a panicked, how to resolve the narrative death. Suffice it to say, disappointing. I admire the occasionally very funny moments of the text and the recognition of the ways in which politics and the press shape as much of science as the actual researchers do. Too bad the narrator was so unsurprising and un-affecting. And the terrible ending, let’s not forget that.

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