Tag Archives: 10-10-12

September 25, 2011 · 5:34 pm

The Book Thief: Devasting (and beautiful)

Mark Zusak’s The Book Thief hurts to read. In the most straightforward way it’s the story of a young German girl and the town that raises her before and during World War Two. It is also the story of the power of words to save people from the insanity of isolation and the power of words to ignite and fuel beliefs that argue for dominance and destruction.

I have had over the course of this latest reading project opportunities to consider why I read, what effects reading has on me and what reading cannot accomplish. The Book Thief adds to this ongoing conversation I’m having with myself about the utility and responsibility of reading by arguing that it is in sharing stories – reading to others; showing others the painful and glorious experiences we’ve had; giving away, stealing and borrowing stories – that something like a common humanity emerges. I know that will sound trite, and perhaps it is, but on finishing The Book Thief I feel, well, simply overwhelmed with a kind of reverence for story-telling. And so if I fall into cliche I do so out of a helplessness for other words that might convey the power of this story in particular, but of stories – for me, at least – entirely.

I need not give anything away about this book – not comments on the at first irritating, but later endearing narrator, nor comments on the unexpected setting; neither comments on the pace of plot or the fully realized characters – because the narrator routinely tells the reader what is coming. And maybe it is this foreknowledge, this preparation, that makes the story so devastating. The recognition as you lie, sobbing your way through the final chapters, that the story, to be true, could only end this way. But that knowing the outcome doesn’t affect the imperative to read and hear the whole story. That you read because you must know not what happened, but how and why. And that the justifications and explanations will never be satisfactory, that you will want to write another, a happier, ending, even while you recognize that a neater ending would be somehow worse. 

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September 21, 2011 · 9:35 pm

Zeitoun: Novel News

       At age fifteen or sixteen I began a semi-permanent ban on television. The no-television-under-any-circumstances policy lasted from 1999-2001, with a reprieve on Sept 11, and then again enforced as of Sept 12. I began university in 2002, and from that point until the present I haven’t owned a functional tv. I’m still a voracious consumer of news – listening to daily reports on the radio and reading newspapers in print and online – just a consumer of news without the barrage of images to accompany the stories. This consumption pattern meant that in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans I didn’t see (m)any images of the disaster. I certainly heard reports, read stories of the damage, looting, and unpredictably zealous or absent support from the authorities.

So when I read that Dave Eggers – one of my long favoured authors* – had written another news-novel (more on the genre distinction in a moment) about one family’s experience of the Hurricane, I put it on my list. I admit that what I read amounted to novel news to me in the sense of altogether unknown news about the hurricane. I had little idea that so many citizens were wrongfully and illegally detained in the aftermath of the hurricane; I wasn’t sure about the reports of rape, looting, assault (though to be fair, the novel does a fairly poor job of clarifying whether these events did in fact take place; rather, Eggers points out that there were contradictory news reports and leaves it – frustratingly – at that).

Grounding the hurricane (ha!) in the story of one family – the Zeitoun family – allows the reader to care deeply about the disaster because it has been carefully and thoroughly personalized. I wonder whether the Zeitoun family already inhabited a host of compelling issues in contemporary American life, or whether Eggers emphasized these issues in order to craft a more compelling novel (okay, so I don’t actually wonder, but it’s worth asking the question), but whatever the case, the Zeitoun’s embody questions of race, religion, patriotism, the precarious middle class in ways that read as genuine and appropriately complex.

In terms of genre I have a hard time accepting the designation of ‘non-fiction’ (as assigned by my library). The book is a novel, a historical one, perhaps, or what I’m calling here a news-novel. It has the usual plot, characters, and setting, but more crucially in the ‘novel’ designation – for this reader, anyway – it has thematic preoccupations (what can one man accomplish when set against nature? against the state?), symbols (the flood, drowning, risks of water, rainbows, bleh), and a shifting point of view. Much like What is the What the news-novel asks the reader to accept that what is written is for all intents ‘true,’ but allows that in any telling there will be fictional elements. It is, in short, a genre I like.

*I also like Dave Eggers. Those with reservations who have only read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius would do well to try reading something else he’s written. I myself enjoyed AHWOSG, but see a stark (really) difference between the autobiographical work and his news-novels and short stories. So here’s my plug for an author I adore (not like he needs a plug, but still): he’s really very good.

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September 19, 2011 · 10:48 pm

The Tipping Point: My Word-of-mouth view? Not so good.

    Part of me thinks that because more people will read this post (being driven, no doubt, by their search lust for ‘bestsellers,’ and not for ‘Malcolm Gladwell’) that I ought to spend a good deal of time crafting a thoughtful and reasoned response so as to fuel my relentless hunger for more readers. But given that I’m not particularly concerned with how many readers I have, I’ll write my review with as little care as, I suspect, Malcolm Gladwell researched his book.

Much like Freakonomics, Gladwell has written a book that could benefit from a combination of research, peer-review, and a good editor. Unlike Freakonomics, The Tipping Point does have a unifying thesis (and a remarkably logical, and hence dull, organization with repeated transition sentences and maddeningly precise topic sentences – really, if you’re trying to teach essay writing this is the book for you), just not a terribly inspired one: some things become popular while others do not.

That’s about it. The book’s exploration of why this is the case falls into three neat categories (again, good for teaching essay writing): context, ‘stickiness’ and ‘the law of the few.’ Each category is “explained” through particular case studies. So arises my beef (as it were): particular, however compelling, case studies does not a proven point make. Case studies that illuminate research are engaging ways of accessing complex research findings. Case studies that serve as a platform for sweeping generalizations give the merits of academic study a poor showing.

I’m sure Gladwell had a difficult time in writing his ‘afterword’ not including the gleeful observation that his own book reached something of a tipping point by becoming an international best seller. Such restraint. Would that I were a maven, salesman or connector myself I might here begin a global word-of-mouth campaign defaming the book. As it is, it’s just you and me. And while I know that my lack-of-mavenness means you may not take this recommendation seriously, I’ll give it anyway: don’t read The Tipping Point.

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September 18, 2011 · 9:00 pm

Lady Chatterly’s Lover: Sex and Coal

         I find great similarity between knowing nothing about a book before reading it, and thinking I know everything about a book before reading it: in both cases I’m surprised, though in the latter case, perhaps less pleasantly so. I approached D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover with the conviction that it was a sexy book. Not just gleaned from the title, but from years of being told by those I know personally, and by the wider literary world, I felt sure when I first sat down with the book that I would be reading in the vein of erotica.

To be fair the novel does narrate some steamy, and deeply arousing, sex scenes. But if I were made to describe what this book is “about,” I’d find myself pressed to say “sex” or even “an affair.” Instead I might have to say that it is about class conflict, industrialization, the animality of humans, and the alienation of the post-war period. Hardly the stuff of sexy drama.

How then does Lawrence succeed in making coal something sexy? Well, the illicit cross-class affair between Lady Chatterly and her plebeian lover – the gamekeeper of all people! – ground the thematic questions in their respective characters and I suppose trick the reader into suffering through long passages on the plight of colliers with the promise of wet thighs. I shouldn’t say ‘trick,’ because the affair stands as synecdoche for the post-war, industrial age, and we’re likely meant to be as titillated by the violation of class strictures as we are by the descriptions of variously flaccid and erect penises.

And perhaps I would have been, had I not been expecting a book banned and talked up for its sexiness. Rather, when confronted with long passages on the utility of coal I found myself wondering whether everyone else had been reading a different version of the text, or were perhaps better at skimming, or whether I might have, in my terrible expectation, done the book a terrible injustice. And this, I think, is most likely the case. Had I not been turning each page waiting for the affair to begin, and then waiting for the affair to get steamier, and then waiting for the affair to be over, I might have better appreciated the rich and provocative descriptions of class conflict and a society coming to terms with loss and bewilderment. In the few moments when I put aside my adolescent preoccupations, I was moved by the clarity with which Lawrence captures suffering and loneliness. It’s my suggestion then, that if you do decide to read, or re-read, Lady Chatterly’s Lover that you do so draped in a cold, wet towel after watching scenes from a factory farm documentary. For the book isn’t (only) sexy, and you’ll spoil it something awful if, like me, you try to read it that way.

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