May 23, 2011 · 12:13 am

Not Without My Daughter: So much worse than bad

                                           Not Without My Daughter is bad for so many reasons: excruciating plotting (what should take a paragraph takes pages to develop), poorly developed characters, and an utterly and totally unsympathetic protagonist.

The whole point of the novel is to gain the reader’s sympathy for Betty, held hostage with her daughter in Iran by her husband, and through our hoped-for-sympathy to drum up anti-Iranian sentiments. Except Betty is the least sympathetic character I’ve encountered. Which is saying something because she is, according to the account here, held hostage, beaten, denied communication with others, and forced to have sex with her husband. And yet still I couldn’t care about Betty. In fact, if I’m being wholly honest I’d say I sometimes wanted Betty to stay trapped in Iran because I thought she sort of deserved to be miserable by virtue of her absolute self-absorption. And that was the really surprising part. For a book purportedly about a mother’s devotion to her child such that when given escape options she doesn’t take them for fear of losing her child, Betty embodies the sort of selfishness usually associated with sociopaths. She’s just. so. terrible.

I felt embarrassed reading the book on the bus for fear those around me might think I in any way endorsed or connected the anti-Muslim sentiments of the book, the racism against Persians, the pro-American propaganda. But more than embarrassed I felt sad that such a book so filled with hate, prejudice and racism had been published to such wide popularity (now a feature film starring Sally Field).

Disgusted by the content, troubled by the popularity, dismayed by the total lack of literary merit, I can only say that Not Without My Daughter is so much worse than bad.

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May 15, 2011 · 7:04 pm

Read a Few: Wrote Little

               Okay. So I started a new job. And am set to defend T. in three weeks. And it’s taken away some of my time usually spent reading and writing. Time now taken up with matching my Reitman’s “office lady” wardrobe, packing a lunch box, and sifting through mostly dull paperwork.

I have been reading, I just haven’t been posting. I feel sort of like this cow – only eating good books and not trash – but a heap of good books, so heaped that I have trouble seeing the end.

I read Katrine Raymond’s Preservation an amazing first novel set in Toronto and populated with academics, ghosts of Canadian history and marvelous diary entries. It’s a fabulous mystery with careful plotting and sensitive characterization. I’d tell you to go out and read it, but it’s not published (yet) and only available through the author. So… stay tuned.

Then I read Siddharatha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which in addition to making it difficult to fall asleep because I became so paranoid that I have cancer, provided a fascinating and rich history of the disease. I was particular struck by the descriptions of early manifestations and treatments of the illness. I was less taken with the second half of the book focusing on the present iterations of the disease and advances in chemotherapy because they drifted to the too technical. I was also less taken with the occasional melodrama about cancer “survivors” and their “bravery” a narrative which seemed to intent on dictating a “proper” form of engagement with the disease, and left out the possibility of not wanting to “fight” or not being “brave.” I was surprised, too, but the scant mention – in the latter half of the book – of cancer consumerism, the sense that certain cancers (breast, for instance) receive the lion’s share of fundraising support (or crass consumerism depending on your view) at the expense of other less popular, but no less prominent cancers (e.g. lung or colon). Wish he’d gone into that.

I’m just finishing up (like last ten pages, so I’m posting now in case I drift into another abyss of no-posts) Keith Leckie’s intoxicating Coppermine – a book which, despite my mum’s recommendation, I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy, but holy man is it ever good. So good! Like stop reading this blog and get to your local library good. It’s set in 1913 and details the murder investigation of two french missionaries in the Arctic by Corporal Creek of the Northwest Mounted Police. It’s impossible to put down both because the plotting is so good, but more because the characters are so rich. That the plot follows “real history” makes the mystery and suspense all the more intense. I really can’t recommend this one highly enough.

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April 25, 2011 · 9:51 pm

Animal: Sad Aborted Puppies

     I think Alexandra Leggat’s Animal is about more than abortions and puppies. In fact, I know it’s also about uneven expectations in relationships, compromises, and the lies that appearances belie, but when I think of my overall impression what comes to mind are abortions and dogs. I don’t even think the short story collection has a single story with an abortion in it (miscarriages, yes) but somehow many of them contain the same kind of sadness: aborted love, aborted futures, aborted choices. As for dogs, characters routinely long for particular dogs. Not in the way a teenage girl longs for a prom date, but in the way older women long to return to their younger bodies so as to live in them with pride and confidence: that is, a frustrated, anxious and sad kind of longing. I’m not sure why it’s dogs they long for, and not, say, other people. Perhaps because the collection as a whole suggests other people ought not to be trusted, ought not to be relied upon, because they will inevitably be selfish.

I preferred stories in the middle section of the collection – no good reason why. On the whole I felt too many of the stories ended with a “This is a very symbolic ending!” kind of wrap-up, and that characters received uneven development. All the same, the rich thematic scope and some brilliant descriptions of suffering women makes the collection a worthwhile read if you’re into depressing scenes in bathtubs.

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April 20, 2011 · 3:39 am

Freakonomics: More Freak than Nomics

      Freakonomics proudly proclaims in its introduction, and again in its conclusion, that it is a book without a unified theme. This being the case, telling your reader there is no unifying theme (re: point) does not make this lack in any way… okay. While I enjoyed the disparate sections of the book for their confident tone, measured pace and didactic, (albeit sometimes overly hand-holding) explanations of everyday phenomena, I found the overall absence of an argument/organizing idea/central question to be frustrating and perplexing.

I am bothered by a book that claims to be about looking for relationships between far-fetched phenomena when it is really about an author having noticed two similar phenomena, having deduced plausible explanations, then grouped the two things together only to claim that the deductions came about as a result of novel questioning (questions like: what do a drug dealer and a sumo wrestler and an aborted fetus have in common?). Novel questioning might better be thought of as something like this: what makes this book without a theme, or apparent point, a bestseller?

Further minor complaints: “economists” are credited with doing much of the work of sociologists; cause-and-effect is not the same thing as “incentive” based decision making; causality and correlations often mysteriously swap when the given example requires.

Minor praise: a collaborative book always impresses me.

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