Category Archives: Prize Winner

April 17, 2011 · 12:20 am

Gorazde: Difficult

           War correspondent Joe Sacco’s graphic novel, Gorazde, is difficult to read. It reports on the experiences of Edin, a Bosnian Muslim, during the siege of Gorazde and describes in text and image the atrocities committed during the siege of the city and of neighboring towns, and of the violence of diplomatic decisions that favoured political expediency over human life and well-being.

As I read the book (in a single sitting, it’s entirely captivating) I asked myself what made the graphic form so effective in expressing the individual and collective suffering as compared to text-based reportage. I’m not sure I have a good answer (again, see my comments on my new-to-graphic-novels) though I suspect that it has to do with pacing. Sacco does well to slow down the pace of reading in scenes of high tension and great suffering, and in so doing required this reader to pay – uncomfortable – attention to scenes I might have more readily surged through in a text-based version. With little choice but to read snippets of sentences set against black-and-white images of intense action, the graphic version demanded my investment in each character, and in each scene that I certainly wanted to avoid reading about.

While I found Sacco entirely effective in using graphics to describe and pace his narrative, I also admired the text of the book, which did an admirable job contextualizing the conflict, while also attending to individual stories and experiences (one two-page spread, in particular, featured a compendium of “interviews” which aptly captured shared and different responses to the return of Serbs to Gorazde).

I’m not sure I appreciated Sacco’s sometime self-congratulatory digs at other reporters who “only” came to Gorazde for one or two days, while he spent considerable time in the city and made multiple trips. I appreciate the difference such reporting experiences must effect in the kind and quality of writing produced, however, I nevertheless felt these comments were less effective in attacking the West’s apparent disinterest in the suffering and death of others (as was perhaps the intent) than they were in conveying Sacco’s confidence in his reportage expertise. While many of Sacco’s self-reflexive comments approach the difficult question of why he should be able to leave and return to safety with little trouble, I do not think the text goes far enough in interviewing the reporter himself.

That said, it’s an incredibly compelling story and one, oddly I suppose, made better still by the difficulty of its reading.

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April 9, 2011 · 3:27 am

The Satanic Verses: A Better Book than I am Reader

     Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is the first book to fall victim to the time pressures of reading 100 books in a year. In my rush to read the book, and cross it off the list, and move on, I didn’t (at all) do justice to the richness of the text and found myself trying to skim sections that demanded close reading. I realize now that I will not (again) risk missing out on a brilliant book for the sake of a self-imposed list-making exercise. So be warned, there may be other two week hiatuses while I make my way through long and/or dense works.

So with the caveat that my sometimes confusion with plot sequencing probably had more to do with my inattention than with the book itself, I liked the book (I probably ought to love it, but again, my failure as a reader this go around). I enjoyed the interwoven narrative voices, temporal scopes and thematic questions: what does it mean to be a coherent and contiguous self? are relationships principally of convenience or of care? how much, or can we, take advantage of those we love and have them still love us? what does God have to do with any of these questions? That said, I didn’t necessarily enjoy the uneven introduction of metafictional techniques (it is only in the last, say, 100 pages that the ‘author’ begins to comment on these thematic questions and interrogate the action of his characters). Okay, so it’s a very small complaint.

The magic realism of Allie’s climb of Everest and the butterfly pilgrimage that then reverberate in the realist scenes are striking not for the “magic” (ooo aaa…. magical things integrated into reality) but for the reminder that magic isn’t someone surviving a fall from 30 000 feet, or the parting of an ocean, the real magic – the stuff that really ought to blow our minds – is the idea that a father can love a son after thirty years of not speaking; or that forgiveness is possible; or that a single person can hold within themselves competing feelings of love and hate and not be destroyed by those competing impulses. The magic, in other words, is reality.

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March 24, 2011 · 4:06 pm

Freedom: Undecided, but all signs point to ‘no’

               I can’t decide whether I liked Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. The irony of my indecision is not lost on me, an irony that arises from the book’s central preoccupation: how does too much ‘freedom,’ or the demand to have ‘freedom’ (to make choices, mostly) ensure our collective and personal unhappiness? So I give you my reasons for enjoying the book and for feeling frustrated with it, and will pass to you the supposedly empowering, yet wholly unbearable, freedom to decide for yourself.

I appreciate Freedom for its unambiguous political position. The novel clearly sets out its agenda: capitalist, neo-liberal policies are destroying the planet and making people unhappy and unhappier. Though I found myself frustrated by how needlessly repetitive this message became as the wanton destruction caused by entitlement and greed frames the actions and relationships of each character and all of the plot. I’m all for thematic clarity, but such singular thematic focus is a bit… exhausting.

The male characters are compelling. Walter, Joey, and Richard make difficult choices, develop complex moral and intellectual positions, and change through their experiences and relationships. The male characters are rich and believable. The women? Not so much. Long deabte with M. about why/whether the gender of an author bears any relationship to their ability to write compelling characters of a different gender. General consensus at the end of the conversation is that it ought not to matter – there is nothing inherent about a genered experience that precludes imagining that experience – but that, in some novels, it does matter. And in Freedom the women are alternately flat and predictable (Connie and Jessica) or so underdeveloped that their decisions are surprising, their actions inexplicable, and their motivations wholly unknown (Patty). Patty’s character frustrated me the most, as a good part of the novel is her autobiographical voice, and yet despite her own portrayal of her life and her decisions she remains defined by one character trait – her competitiveness – that does little to explain her actions. It’s unclear whether Patty is a smart woman or not, whether she loves Walter at all (despite her earnest insistence that she does, nothing in her autobiography or actions suggest why she might love him, or evidence this love), what makes her a ‘good’ mother, or how she (didn’t) manage(d) the transition from star basketball player to suburban wife.

This last point on Patty’s transition recalls another difficulty I had with the novel: critical plot events take place in the gaps between chapters and the impact these events ought to have on characters are missing because they aren’t narrated. Lalitha’s death for instance, Patty’s injury, Joey’s conversion to democratic and ethical business practices… these events that we are told are crucial in our characters’s developments are absent, and so too are the character reactions; thus, the supposed changes the characters experience read as changes we are told about, rather than witnessing.

The best scenes are those that abandon the didactic tone and allow characters to behave ‘freely,’ and in so doing to announce to the reader their intentions and positions without unnecessary exposition: i.e. Walter’s hunting of the neighbourhood cats, Joey’s watch business, and Walter’s no smoking campaign.

Freedom successfully highlights the contradictions of a neo-liberal society, the dangers of living in communities that privilege the individual over the collective and protect and reward individual capital accumulation at the expense of the common and environmental good. Thematic questions aside, Freedom is a bit of a bust. Characters act for inexplicable reasons that require heavy-handed narration and overly repetitive symbolism (I’m inclined to think it’s 550 pages might easily have been cut to 300 without losing its political impact). Read it yourself; you’re free to decide.


 

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March 20, 2011 · 11:23 pm

Sense and Sensibility: Most severe, in every particular

       This picture of a grumpy goose has nothing to do with Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility, and everything to do with how I felt reading the predictable plot.

All of the things I like about Jane Austen’s fiction (nuanced character development that complicates the idea of character by playing with the difference between how a character behaves, their focalized p.o.v, and the expectations/reactions of others; and lively satirical jabs at feminine manners/upper class ceremony) were either missing in this text, or buried under fatiguing descriptions of countenances.

The women in the novel, with the exception of our heroine Eleanor, too readily succumb to fainting illnesses, extremity of emotion and consumption. That said, I did like how catty they are to one another, because there’s something oddly reassuring about hearing Austen’s characters think thoughts I, too, share (why must this woman continue to talk about how much she wants babies? why do I have to go to X social event, even though I don’t want to go and my host doesn’t want me to go?). Is it reassuring? Maybe it should be disquieting to find that the comedy of manners continues, largely unchanged, centuries later; yet, I think this is the brilliance of Austen and why so many readers resound in her praise, that is, how precisely she identifies social anxieties. While the particular social concerns shift (I am not, for instance, terribly worried about why so-and-so did not leave me their card, or whether so-and-so will lend me their carriage) the affective response of being slighted, or feeling inadequate, or jealousy, persists. (So, too, do the concerns about finding an attractive and affluent mate…)

Even with her satirical brilliance and canny capture of social anxiety and affect, I didn’t like Sense and Sensibility. And not just because of the extended descriptions of fainting spells, but rather for the narrative style of reporting dialogue (and not simply allowing it to unfold), the too-heavily foreshadowed conclusion that led to a predictable and tedious plot, the conclusion itself, and (this one pains me a little), the perfection of Eleanor. I know I’m meant to just love Eleanor, but I don’t. Instead I felt how keenly I was meant to love Eleanor, how very much I’m to see her level-headedness, her acquiescence to all of life’s misfortunes with grace and humility, as markers of her exceptional character. Instead I felt put off: no character is so good, so giving, so thoughtful. Or rather, if there is someone so wholly selfless and charitable, I don’t want to know her. (Or read her thoughts for 600 pages.) So there.

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