July 9, 2010 · 2:14 pm

De Niro’s Game: Not about the actor

I checked out Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game from the library because I had spent an hour or so checking out “best book lists” in an effort to overcome my recent spate of terrible reads. It showed up on several lists, and without reading a plot summary, I decided I’d give it a try. I think from the title I expected that the book would be about a game show, or maybe the actor – Robert De Niro. Wrong!

The novel centers on the first person protagonist, Bassam, as he tries to escape Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, and his best friend, George – who also goes by the name “De Niro” (one part of the title explained). The two begin the novel messing about with a casino – stealing money and what not – and so you might at first expect the titular “game” to be related to gambling. Not so! The game, as it turns out, De Niro’s game in The Deer Hunter: both Bassam and George literally and symbolically play Russian Roulette as the two try to navigate the politics of the Civil War and the psychology of having been raised as “hunters”.

I did enjoy the story, and I appreciated Bassam’s narrative voice – not an entirely reliable narrator, certainly not very sympathetic in his actions, and yet someone, I still cared about him and wanted him to be okay – but what I enjoyed most was the use of extended similes and metaphors. Scenes are described with one rich simile which is then compared to something else, and compared to something else, an on, until you’ve reached the end of a breathtaking sentence that really does wonderful work with the imagination and in conjuring the sensory and emotive registers of the scene (that sounds  a bit like an ad for perfume, but I do mean it – the similes are mind-blowing, and not in a Tom Robbins “what does this have to do with anything” kind of way, but in a melding of all kinds of different experiences). The metaphors – hunting, dust, cannibalism, games, smoking, the moon – carry throughout the novel and interweave with one another to a degree where I found it difficult to be sure what one alluded to, or whether the whole point was a collapse of clear meaning. In any case: full points for narrative style.

If nothing else De Niro’s Game  breaks the cycle of bad writing and reminds me that a good book can make you forget just about everything (including a heat wave of temperatures in the 40 degree Celcius range, a thesis that refuses to write itself) and if it doesn’t help you forget, it at least puts into perspective so-called “problems”.

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July 4, 2010 · 5:24 pm

Ramona Quimb(l)y to the Rescue

                 I’m trying to write a lot these days. Writing things that I feel neither confident about or certain are worth writing, and so I spend a lot of time plagued with self-doubt. Enter Ramona Quimby, whose name I consistently misremember and mispronounce as Ramona Quimbly. I first met Ramona as a child, probably aged 8 or 9. I remember reading her stories and thinking ‘yes!’ and feeling like I understood everything Ramona went through. I loved that bad things happened to Ramona, but that she continued on being brave, being peppy, and giving her all to the world. So now, much older, when I have my occasional moments (or as of late, my frequent moments) of insecurity – when I feel exactly as I did at aged 9 when I wasn’t quite sure whether anything I did was right, or mattered – I return to Ramona. I’ve been on a bit of a stint: reading ‘Ramona the Brave’, ‘Ramona Quimby: Aged 8’, and ‘Beezus and Ramona.’ I don’t know whether the books themselves bring me comfort, or whether reading them reminds me of being 9 and well looked after by my parents, but whatever the cause, reading Ramona makes things feel better. I can’t in good conscience recommend Ramona, because perhaps you never read her as a child, or perhaps you don’t identify with precocious, misunderstood little girls, so maybe I’ll just suggest that you read it if you’re interested in finding out what it’s like to be a little kid and overwhelmed by the world. Or maybe returning to your own childhood “yes!’ book – because they really do make everything feel a little bit better.

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July 4, 2010 · 5:14 pm

Several Misses and a Sort of Hit: All the Names, The Angel’s Game and Little Bee

A friend recommended All the Names to me after a conversation we’d had about archives and libraries. The conversation started with me telling my friend about Carlos Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind and the wonderfully imaginative “cemetery of forgotten books” (a repository of endangered books, preserved by a ‘last reader’). My friend suggested All the Names because it engaged with some of the questions evoked by the idea of a ‘last reader’: what role do readers play in keeping information/people/ideas alive? what is a story without a reader? Never one to turn down a recommendation, I dutifully set out reading All the Names, not noticing the author – Jose Saramago. About 1/3 of the way into the book, when I was quite sure I recognized the style of writing, the frustrating pace of the narrative, and the preoccupation with symbolism, I realized the Saramago of All the Names was quite certainly the same Saramago of Blindness – a book I (strongly) disliked. Rather than pushing myself to finish a book I wasn’t engaged by and felt quite sure that I would not finish with any feeling of satisfaction, I stopped reading it. And so All the Names registers here as a miss. Certainly interesting for ideas of the archive, nevertheless a narrative style that lends itself well to torture by boredom.

After the same conversation I followed up on Zafon to find out if he had written anything else since Shadow of the Wind. Much to my surprise and delight I found he had published The Angel’s Game this year. I eagerly went to the library and picked up the book. What a shame to find myself in the throws of another miss. The Angel’s Game, while engaging (in the sort of way a CSI episode is engaging on a Monday afternoon when you’re home sick and have to choose between CSI and a cooking show), merely replicated (sometimes explicitly, sometimes accidentally) the plot of Shadow of the Wind. Far too many chapters began and ended with “a dark and stormy night” (sometimes literally replicating this phrase) and indeed Zafon seemed to run the list of synonyms for dark, wet, dreary and cold. I did sympathize with the author, it must be difficult to try to replicate or surpass the imagination (and popular success) of a first novel like Shadow, but all the same, I run out of sympathy rather quickly when phrases are directly repeated within several pages of one another – not a terribly sincere attempt at creativity, and not much respect for the attentive reader.

After the second miss (and beginning to feel desperate for another good book) I consulted my mum – often my best source for recommendations. She didn’t let me down – she suggested Chris Cleave’s Little Bee. I ended up downloading the book from my local library (an amazing new service from the library: free audio and e-books!) and listening to it while waiting for buses and washing dishes. I suspect that had I read anything half-way decent before Little Bee I would not have enjoyed it as much as I did, but given the string of wretched narratives that preceded my listening, I did find myself enjoying (as much as one can enjoy a book about refugees and suicide) Little Bee. Far and away the best character is Charlie – the young son of Sarah O’Rooke – who dresses as batman and attempts to rid the world of “baddies.” The clear distinction Charlie draws between “good” and “evil” carries throughout the novel. While the narrative seems interested in raising questions about how one comes to be “good” or “bad” or whether there are degrees of “goodness” or “badness”, it does not, in the end, trouble whether these categories are permanent or how they come to be constructed, which is, I think, too bad given the opportunities the plot offers to consider such questions. Nevertheless, a good read (particularly for the summer, as the narrative catches you right away and offers few dull moments).

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May 24, 2010 · 2:34 pm

The Book of Negroes: Second time, Still terrific

                            When my supervisor suggested I read Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes I was delighted. Delighted because I had already read the book in 2007, and enjoyed it a great deal; and delighted because the narrative aligns nicely with ideas about historical fiction I am working on. So this post begins with the caveat that I already liked the book when I read it, and that I wanted to like it again while I was re-reading it. No surprise: I liked it.

The novel has won spades of awards and garnered Lawrence Hill the kind of critical attention he has deserved for years (his novel Any Known Blood is also terrific and well worth the read). The protagonist, Aminata Diallo, speaks with a captivating voice as she recounts her experiences being captured and kidnapped in Africa, transported to America, enslaved in the indigo fields and later in a domestic setting, escape to New York and then Nova Scotia, a return to Africa (Sierre Leone) and finally a journey to England to work with abolitionists. The epic journey is signaled from the first few pages, so it is not necessarily the particular destinations that strike the reader as remarkable, but rather the tenacity and grace of the speaker.

I did find the first time that the section on Aminata’s return to Africa dragged because there was no close relationship between Aminata and anyone else to follow; and perhaps because unlike the other sequences, time passes very quickly, whole years disappear in pages. In the earlier sections a year or two is given a fairly large chunk of text, allowing the reader to become fully immersed in the setting and relationships. This second time through I did not find the section dragged as much, but it still stood out because of its different narrative scope.

The descriptions are vivid and detailed; the voice is consistent and engrossing; the plot is painful, yet important for bringing to readers a story not often told in popular fiction and for doing so with great effect.

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