Tag Archives: 10-10-12

April 11, 2011 · 4:36 pm

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold: Death be Cause

       A good spy novel ought to have double agents, sacrificial women, and neat fight scenes. John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold has these elements. It’s a really good read: well paced, brilliantly plotted, and smooth in the necessary transitions in narrative focalization that allow the reader access to pieces of information, but not quite enough (for me at least) to piece together the mystery before le Carre is ready to have it all out.

The novel grapples with questions of whether individual lives are worth sacrificing for the sake of the larger good, and then explodes this (somewhat banal) moral question by tackling whether there is such a thing as a “larger good” at all. These questions might sound overwrought, but the novel does a remarkable job of weaving these ideas into character and plot in such a way as to not read as clunky or melodramatic (with the one notable exception of Leamas’s and Liz’s conversation in the car).

A great cold war novel in its descriptions of tension along the borders and in its attention to the similarities between the two powers in both ideology and method. A great spy novel for its emphasis on plot, but with a suitable level of character development that allows the conclusion to by poignant and affecting.

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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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April 5, 2011 · 12:20 am

Two Cakes Fit for a King: More tales than fairies

                               Not that I need to compare Vietnamese folktales to the British/German folktales that I grew up with, but it’s hard, when reading stories about princesses and adventures, not to compare. And I have to say the Vietnamese stories did away with a lot of the magic (with the exception of a talking turtle) in favour of hard hitting moral lessons that announce themselves as moral lesson (behave!). Not in an Edward Gorey kind of way, more in a… hmm… ‘don’t be promiscuous.’

I liked the folktales because they are short and I’m falling behind on my reading list (in large part because I’m ‘stuck’ on the Satanic Verses, a book that will not give itself over to me easily), which I know is not a good reason to like a book, but there you have it. It’s April in 10-10-12 and I’m admitting to enjoying something for its brevity. Take me as I am.

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March 27, 2011 · 8:52 pm

Tricked: Yes, I was.

                       When I was putting together the 10-10-12 list, Alex Robinson’s Tricked, came up on a number of “best of” lists in the graphic novel categories. This being the case, I’m worried about the rest of the recommended texts, because I didn’t like Tricked, at all.

I didn’t like the plot (six seemingly independent narratives predictably collide in a climax that is neither surprising (though it ought to be), nor compelling as a woeful musician who can’t write a new song until he’s inspired by a sexy young ‘muse’! is subject of an attempted shooting by a crazy! man! only to be saved by the fraud who is redeemed! all in the restaurant of the kind gay couple reunited with their daughter! and served by the ill-used, tender hearted, fat-but-still-beautiful! waitress).

I didn’t like the characters (each more predictable than the last, with the faint exception of the sports fraudster who is only interesting because the reader has zero sense of his motivation for being a fraudster, except maybe that he likes to spend money on whores).

The graphic parts are okay. I don’t know whether having read Jimmy Corrigan means that every graphic novel after is going to feel like a tremendous disappointment, but after Jimmy Corrigan the graphics in Tricked are a tremendous disappointment (see post on JC for caveat about my assessment of graphic novels). I’m not capitavated by word bubbles that have icicles to convey anger, nor wowed by pages of spirlaling word bubbles to convey lunacy. I’m coming to understand that the really engaging and interesting graphic novels are not those that use the simple pairing of emotion/place with graphic as a way to add to the meaning of the text (e.g. a crowded place has overlapping word bubbles; or, embarrassment has characters with flushed cheeks), but who use the graphics to create a meaning all its own, where the text is the addition, the superfluous detail, perhaps even unnecessary because the graphics impart their own significance. Anyway, Tricked doesn’t have these singularly significant graphics, just the ‘oh gosh, he’s upset, and I can tell he’s really upset because there are angry lines radiating from his body.’ (I continue to be wholly self-conscious about my reading of graphic novels, so if I’m way off base here, I do apologize, I’m new to graphic analysis and open to correction.)

So: bleh plot, no characterization worthy of note, and ineffectual graphics. I was told this was a “great” graphic novel by reputable sources. I was… tricked.

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