Tag Archives: 10-10-12

May 23, 2011 · 6:53 pm

The Thief: As great as NWMD is terrible

      The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner and the Newberry Honour Winner for 1997, is just so great. Our anti-hero, Gem, captivates the reader from the opening scene in his jail cell to the closing scene in his bedroom. I wanted him to succeed, yet I worried about his decisions, though I somehow came to believe his justifications for his actions. Knowing as you do how much I love good character, it should be little surprise that I loved (really really loved) The Thief.

The narrative does a masterful job letting the reader believe they have deduced secret ‘facts’ of Gem’s life – and this reader did deduce certain elements – but nevertheless codes some plot details with such subtlety that the climax remains suspenseful and surprising: we are taken in, not taken advantage of; we are rewarded for close reading, but still given the pleasure of a surprise twist.

More praise for plot: the adventure manages to contain itself. Where other YAF adventure stories (or adult adventure stories for that matter) fall prey to endless delays, meandering side-journeys, and excruciating details of campfires, trail food, and horses, The Thief delivers enough detail to convince and captivate, but arrives at the destination by such a direct route as to leave no question that it really is the destination that holds the magic and adventure, and not the journey.

The interweaving of Greek-cum-novel-civilization mythology and the struggle of our (darling) Gem to make sense of the apparent power of the Gods in everyday life is careful, measured and thought-provoking: what, the novel asks, do we owe to destiny and what do we owe to our own wits?

It’s really just so good. And something like 120 pages. I. tells me that there are two other books in the series, but this one ends with a decisive conclusion, something I admire and appreciate, as this is a complete work in its own right, and not simply a set-up for later books and other purchases. I’ll likely read the other two books because I loved this one so much, but I may save them, as they really are “Gems.”

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Filed under 100 Books of 2011, Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction, Prize Winner, Young Adult Fiction

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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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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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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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