Tag Archives: 10-10-12

October 11, 2011 · 10:18 pm

Fanny Hill: *blush* *blush* *yawn*

      Gosh but Fanny Hill has A LOT of sex in it. Sex between men and women, women and women, men and men, partners of varying ages, mental and physical abilities, in different positions and in different environmental conditions. It is in short, a novel without a plot, but instead a collection of events that allow for the graphic narration of sex. So many mentions of exploits, things gorged and red, thrusts, sighs and wetness. In fact, I’ve included a word cloud so you can see just how much of the text (all of it!) is given over to narrating sex.

Yep, it’s not one to read/listen to out in public. Such blushes.

But despite the titillation and *cough* excitement of the first few chapters of Fanny Hill, I admit I quickly became bored of yet another sex scene with yet another virgin or yet another “mistaken” attempt at anal sex. Which isn’t to say that I’m a virtuous or prudish reader, rather, that 250 pages of the same plot events would be boring no matter what was being narrated! Yawn.

As for the limited character development… well, I was disappointed. Fanny is principally awesome because she isn’t at all embarrassed or ashamed of her wanton behaviour, rather she relishes pleasure and seeks it out for herself. But the conclusion of the text sees her marrying her one true love and renouncing the wanton life in favour of riches and monogamy. Yawn. Given just how scandalous the rest of the book is, I can see little reason to end it with such convention. I had rather hoped she’d die of venereal disease… Perhaps one of my 18th century scholar-friends can provide me an answer to why such a conventional and annoying ending?

So while I’ll recommend Fanny Hill if you’re looking to diversify your personal pleasure reading, I can’t recommend it well if you’re at all interested in anything approximating plot, character or thematic development.

Leave a comment

Filed under 100 Books of 2011, British literature, Fiction

Tagged as , , , ,

October 11, 2011 · 1:14 pm

How I Live Now: Gets it all right (almost)

                    There aren’t many books that I wish I’d come across earlier in my life. Every so often there’s a book that arrives at just the right time (A Jest of God for instance), but more often then not what I read offers something in the present, and then – if it’s any good – becomes a narrative I circle back to when necessary or prompted. But I do wish I’d had Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now between the ages of 16-21 (which maybe makes the title into something of an oxymoron – to have wanted it *earlier*, but there you go). I wish I’d had it then because it perfectly captures the terror of having to find a way to adapt and to live in novel, unpredictable and entirely beyond-your-control situations and environments (re: being a teenager, or rather, being a person).

Our protagonist, Daisy, is remarkable for what she doesn’t find remarkable about herself. She’s anorexic, in love with her cousin (and he with her), having sex at 14, sent away from her home in New York for being ‘difficult,’ yet none of these ‘things’ about her are presented in the narrative as in any way exceptional, or understood by her as exceptional. Rather, the introduction of successive plot moments and character traits – a war! an eating disorder! incest! – that in another text might dominate the narrative, are here simply further instances of how Daisy – how we all – must find ways to live in the unexpected, unchosen and unforseen.

Though I’m very glad to have read the book now I wish I’d be able to read the book when I was a teenager because Daisy doesn’t always triumph, or manage to “live well” in these uncontrollable circumstances. She makes mistakes, she’s scared, she’s selfish. But she also doesn’t make apologies for these less-than-heroic reactions, instead she makes subtle changes, trying always, it seems, to find ways to live as well as she can – even if that isn’t an accepted or ideal way: an admirable model for any teenage girl (or 20-something woman…).

I found the tone of the novel initially disconcerting (in the same way as Going Bovine, come to think of it, so maybe I’m just not hip anymore?). Rosoff uses Random Capitalization and odd. punctuation. in order to capture the rhythm and tone of her protagonist, but for whatever reason (poor editing?) these affectations are all but dropped in the latter half of the novel as the plot picks up. A generous read might draw a relationship between Daisy’s developing sense of individuality and personal strength and the emergence of a traditional (and hence more confident – I think anyway – tone), but given the spotted lapse back into Serious Thought Are Capitalized I suspect instead that the affected tone got in the way of the more compelling plot moments. I’m open to disagreements on this one (if only because I liked the book so much that I’d be happy to find a way to redeem this otherwise bothersome aspect).

So should you be a young adult yourself, or should you know one that is finding it all too much, let me urge a read of How I Live Now. There’s some kind of inimitable comfort in reading a novel that reminds you that no matter how unpredictable, unconventional or uncontrollable your life feels (and is), it’s livable, when living means fucking it up, imperfection, risk, and knowing what you’re doing doesn’t make any sense (at all), but doing it anyway.

Leave a comment

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

Tagged as , , , ,

October 9, 2011 · 6:01 am

Two Generals: Poor

    A poor showing by Scott Chantler, who is by all accounts (if awards are to be thought of as accounts) something of an accomplished graphic novelist. This graphic novel, Two Generals, reminds me of stereotypes of Can lit as suffering from such an inferiority complex that it feels the need to do everything in a painfully dull and sincere way so as to assure readers that it can in fact be taken quite seriously because it follows as the Rules and Decorum of Serious Fiction.  As a result there are panels like the one pictured above where we readers are informed by the (terribly subtle choice of red) colour scheme that something is amiss outside the building. The colour scheme throughout – green is “narrative,” black is “memory” and red is “blood and death” – is so simplistic as to be obnoxious. Similarly, the text of the novel reads as if it were borrowed wholesale from the recorded minutes of the local historical society when the very dullest and driest speaker was at work – e.g. “At 1:30Pm, with the men of the HLI back aboard, the first of the landing craft began to make their way out of the port of southhampton” (56 – and I swear to you, I turned to a page at random) and so lacks any (any) sense of character or a compelling plot. I mean the plot is the INVASION OF NORMANDY and I was bored. And I certainly didn’t care a whit about the death of one of the Generals. Perhaps because I had repeatedly been told that “this would be his last Christmas,” or “not all of them would be alive at the end of the day.” I’m not an uncaring person, but really, I feel an instinctive defense toward indifference and scorn when I’m prompted with such terribly written lines.

Maybe the silver lining here is that in identifying this work as terrible I’ll earn your trust as a reader of Can lit. So while you’d be pressed to find a bigger booster of Canadian history, or a more defensive champion of the triumphs of Can lit, you can know that when I’m praising national works I’m not doing so (just) because I’m a little nationalist, but because often times Canadian authors are busy writing truly remarkable, and often under-recognized, work. This is certainly not the case with Two Generals, which I would hope – despite it’s purported mission of helping us all remember – will quickly be forgotten and not integrated like so many other poorly crafted historical fiction (*cough* Paul Gross’s Psschendaele) into the school curriculum just because the Historica-Dominion Society thinks its a good idea. Oh wow, so turns out I have a lot of hostility toward this particular book. And so as a good Canadian, let me just say: Sorry?

Leave a comment

Filed under 100 Books of 2011, Book I'll Forget I Read, Canadian Literature

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 8, 2011 · 7:40 pm

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: I have a lot to say

     So where to start?

The expression “best at the beginning” may not apply in the case of David Mitchell’s (entirely brilliant) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoett, which opens with the graphic narration of a breech birth. Putting visceral reactions aside, in this vivid first chapter Mitchell expertly lays out the thematic questions of the novel – a dizzying array of concerns from national, linguistic, familial, class and gender filiation and affiliation to the worth of artistic or generous sensibilities in a landscape of commerce and rigidly defined hierarchies of (gendered, military, national) power.

At times I wondered whether the thematic scope might in fact be too broad – the harrowing second part focused on the mysterious monastery, for instance, felt barely introduced before it was over – but I need not have worried so much, as the concluding two parts – a brief 30 pages between the two – weave the (until then seemingly distinct) threads together with such subtly that I worried instead that I had may have been an inattentive reader (I was not!) for not noticing the ever-tightening connections among the three principle plot lines. So bravo theme. Bravo plot.

I have questions about character. It is not the case of a poorly defined or undeveloped character; in Jacob, like Black Swan Green, Mitchell presents entirely fallible, and so entirely sympathetic, characters. Rather, I found Orito’s behaviour to be – in two remarkable scenes – somewhat at odds, and so I finished the book not entirely certain I believed her motivations, or understood the ‘core’ of character: I’m trying reconcile her self-preserving decision in relation to Jacob’s marriage offer with her selfless decision with respect to the monastery. *spoiler* In the conclusion of the text, when Orito explains to Jacob that he need not be forgiven because ‘he did nothing wrong,’ she implies that her knowledge of what happened at the monastery prevented her from leaving – a moral/ethical imperative that superseded her – utterly human – selfish motivation to leave. In conversation with P., who recommended the book, it was suggested that perhaps she acts out of some ‘martyr complex.’ Plausible, and so far, so good: outstanding character development and a fascinating moral question (would I save myself? would you?). But then! Almost as though Mitchell can’t stand to have Orito suffer, she finds on her return that she can trade her knowledge for different duties, and so escape the fate of those she purportedly sacrificed her liberty to be with. Orito’s decision and its subsequent ‘reward’, taken together with the (quite positive) outcome of Jacob’s ‘heroics’ on the watchtower suggest an implicit reward for selflessness, which I’m pretty sure annuls “selflessness.” Or maybe it just suggests that behaving with selfless intentions will result in unexpected reward. (I hear echoes of my time in Sunday school…) In any case, none of these comments should be construed as complaints; in fact, I think it’s clear that my difficulty reconciling the scenes and character decisions demonstrates the complexity of the narrative and its characters. And maybe also demonstrates that I’ve just finished it an hour ago and haven’t (necessarily) properly thought things through.

A final note then on historical fiction. The Publisher’s Weekly review of the book notes that it is a “dense and satisfying historical with literary brawn and stylistic panache.” If I can forgive “panache,” in that sentence, I cannot forgive the implied snub of historical fiction – that Mitchell has managed to attach “literary brawn” (whatever that is) to the otherwise merely “satisfying” genre. Okay, I’m too defensive. But this book is as brilliant as historical fiction as it is as literary fiction (again, let’s try to work out what that might be another day) and we need not get into genre splitting to say that. I do think Jerome de Groot’s observation that historical fiction requires a more ‘attentive reader’ because the genre demands a doubled willingness to suspend belief and to trust the author has some merit in this instance. I admit to previously enjoying only the shadowiest knowledge of early 19th century Dutch trading companies, let alone their Japanese outposts, and so the novel allowed me a measure of discovery not just of human motivations, relationships and sacrifices, but of a historical period and setting utterly unfamiliar. So while Mitchell may not be credited with the brilliant complexity of my favourite genre, I’ll say bravo anyway, as he’s done a tremendous job highlighting just how effective a relationship between the literary and the historical can be in evoking and provoking.

In sum: bravo. 

Leave a comment

Filed under 100 Books of 2011, Erin's Favourite Books, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , ,