Tag Archives: bestsellers

November 18, 2013 · 1:31 am

Looking for Alaska: Making Meaning *You Should

On the prompting of my childhood/adolescent/lifelong friend, J., I’m testing out a new way of starting reviews. At dinner last night she told me that she skimmed my reviews as quickly as possible to find out whether the book was worth reading, without spoiling the read itself (it’s true I’m prone to spoilers). She asked whether I might include some kind of rating system in the first paragraph to alert would-be readers to the urgency, necessity or avoidance of a particular read. Less keen on the scale of 1-10 model, she suggested something like “must,” “maybe” and “don’t.” So I’ll try it out and you can let me know what you think. I think 3 choices is a bit limiting, so I’ll go with five: Urgent Priority to Read (5), You Should (4) If You’re So Inclined (3) You Shouldn’t (2), Priority to Avoid (1).

For John Green’s *Looking for Alaska* I’ll offer a “You Should” rating.

And now for the proper review:

My high school Philosophy teacher, Mr. M, approached the existential philosophers with a certain (albeit appropriate) skepticism. He suggested that the existential questions, while worth considering, were most often ignored by “the masses” or easily solved by “making meaning” (given that life has no inherent meaning to an existentialist) in one of two ways: creation or destruction. He fingered all of us in the room and urged us to consider how we might make our own meaning. I (obviously) still remember this lesson and often reflect on whether my desires to have babies or write a novel are borne more out of panicked impulse to make my life count for something than from any intrinsic desire to have a [baby] [novel] [marathon completion]. 

John Green’s *Looking for Alaska* has its own Mr. M in the form of the curmudgeonly Religion teacher who pushes his students to think beyond memorizing names or dates and to think instead about the implications of religious questions in their everyday lives. But more than a teacher figure, the text asks and answers the same question: What can we expect out of life? What makes life meaningful? What responsibility/authority do we have to make our lives worth living? 

These questions are explored against the usual drama of teenagers at boarding school: pranks, lust, foreign exchange students and too much calculus. Think John Knowle’s A Separate Peace rewritten for 2006 and with a massive online cult following. 

It’s a brilliant book not for any particular innovations in plot – that much is pretty staid – but for its novel answer to the question of what makes life meaningful? I won’t do too much spoiling in giving the answer, but the novel took my usual atheist angst about my inevitable death and consumption by worms and brought to it a fresh and even (gasp) hopeful promise about why life (and death) might be meaningful.

And for the intended teenage audience I imagine these questions and the answers presented in *Looking for Alaska* are ever more urgent. That the novel does not gloss or diminish the poignancy and “reality” of these questions for an adolescent audience seems at once both respectful of its readers intellect, but also of its readers complex emotional life. I appreciate that much young adult fiction – including that which I read when I was myself a teen – doesn’t shy away from the difficult, confusing and overwhelming. But this book more than many others I’ve read presents these questions as *actual questions* and sees the problem of answering them as one that all people – not just young people – have to muddle their way about answering. I guess it offers the reader some responsibility, too, to sort out for him/herself what the answer might be. 

And so because this is a book that asks difficult questions and presents compelling – and fresh! – answers, and because it gives funny/smart/round characters a chance to grapple with these questions/answers, and because it’s set at a boarding school and who can resist a good boarding school story (hello Harry Potter fans) I’ll give this book its (4) You Should rating. Go read it. You Should for the book’s sake and because it will help you look/be hip and cool with the teenage crowd (so hot right now). 

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October 1, 2013 · 1:24 pm

The Orenda: Ambivalent

The Orenda* is well plotted historical fiction with reasonably complex characters, but its thematic questions are muddy. The plot, narrated from the three, alternating first person perspectives of Bird (the warrior), Snow Falls (the damsel) and Christophe (the Jesuit) has a classic development. In a three act structure the plot introduces our three characters and their relationships, sets the conflicts and sees the climax and resolution. The structure appropriately mirrors what Boyden has setup as a climactic moment in indigenous-settler relationships – that is, the historical period narrated is imagined as a “tipping point,” to borrow from another Canadian writer. The “resolution” bleeds into the reader present with a concluding paragraph from the chorus of the novel who reminds the reader that while these events took place in the historical past, the relationships/resonances continue.

The chorus also makes the argument that what appears from the present as obvious mistakes on the part of Wendat, were not at all obvious at the time. I suppose this is where my ambivalence emerges. If the narrative wants to ask questions about historic responsibility for the death of indigenous peoples and cultures – and indeed the book offers this up as a sort of genocide – and if it wants to ask these questions in a complicated way, it aims to do so through narrative point of view. By showing three different perspectives on events the text weaves form and content to emphasize not only multiple perspectives in historiography, but multiple perspectives in “present” events: that even while, or maybe especially while, an event unfolds the outcome – (the reader’s present) is not at all known or certain. That individuals act in the immediate moment in ways that best align with their personal and cultural values and beliefs, and that to hold any one person accountable for not foreseeing the future is unfair.

As unfair, perhaps, as not assigning *some* accountability within the text for what can only be read as unjust values and beliefs. If the text holds that personal values and beliefs dictate behaviour, the text also introduces as sort of moral relativism that excuses behaviours and beliefs that cause harm and stem from arrogance. In particular I’m referencing the text’s position on the Jesuit priest Christophe. While we can see that his behaviour is guided by his beliefs, the text passes no judgement – to a fault, I think – on these behaviours/beliefs, instead suggesting that Christophe acts in the only way he possibly could based on his belief structure. Historical blame gets diffused into this sort of relativism and happenstance. Except that the Wendat people Christophe lives with change *their* behaviours and beliefs – so change is possible! – in response to living with him for years. Why then, can we we not see some change in Christophe? 

The unwillingness to adopt or present a *position* on the history can be seen again in the descriptions of torture. The Haudenosaunee and Wendat routinely torture one another; in a few lines the Jesuits compare this torture to torture occurring as part of the Spanish Inquisition, as a way, I suspect, of suggesting that neither is more “savage” than ther other, just practicing their particular beliefs in ways appropriate to their respective (cultures). This point is one Boyden raises in interviews, too, I suspect as a way of diffusing criticism that the narrative presents the indigenous as “savage torturers.” Except by equating one form of torture with another the narrative repeats this kind of moral equivalency and so, moral ambivalence. I’m dissatisfied with this equivalence/ambivalence because it seems to me from the perspective of the present – and from the present reading into this past – the events that led us to today are not (at all) open to relativism and ambivalence. Responsibility ought to be assigned in the past, and responsibility ought to be acknowledged/taken in the present.

That said, I’m excited and curious to hear how the book gets taken up by the reading public. With all the “buzz” the book is getting I’m confident it will be on many reading and prize lists and it will most certainly stimulate lively conversation – an outcome the book well deserves. I look forward to hearing what you think and to talking about the book and the history-present it describes.

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June 4, 2013 · 1:24 pm

The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared: TERRIBLE

I tried for THREE WEEKS to read *The Hundred Year Old Man Who Fell Out the Window and Disappeared* and while I got 150 pages into the text I couldn’t finish it. It was just so useless. The plot – a 100 year old man (Alan) flees his nursing home, steals a suitcase full of millions of dollars, and is pursued by the millions owners. Meanwhile (in the style of a 4 year old picture book) Alan pick up characters along the way creating a menagerie of misfits. Recipe for humour maybe, but in this case a recipe for annoyance and boredom. Interspersed with the chapters of Alan and misfits we have episodes of Alan’s life – like Forrest Gump we have him show up in the major historical moments of the last century. Not only is this implausible but the plotting makes Alan nothing more than a game piece without his own character depth, development or interest.

It all combined to a be a book where nothing much seemed to happen, waiting for the plot to get going was too much. I stopped reading it. And I’m not apologizing for it. Even though this book came recommended from J. and usually she gets it bang on. And this was just The Worst. Sorry J. 

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April 19, 2013 · 7:27 pm

Under Budapest: Breathtaking

                             It is such a pleasure to write this post. My former McMaster colleague (I suppose we’re still colleagues? alumni colleagues?) and occasional writers group members Ailsa Kay has published a breathtaking novel that I just loved. It’s something of an odd relief to love it – there’s a bit of nervousness in reading a novel written by someone you know (what if I don’t like it?) – with the only risk now that I won’t do anything close to justice to how great of a read it is (and note that I’m not often one for reviews filled with effusive praise).

The plot is described on the back of the novel as a “jigsaw puzzle” and I suppose that’s an apt comparison (with a caveat): the early chapters offer apparently discrete plot pieces with separate settings and characters. As each subsequent chapter unfolds, however, the reader finds edges to the pieces that echo earlier chapters in a way that confirms the pieces do in fact fit together. For instance, I was amazed how the repetition of a single word “veritable” proved enough of a narrative cue to pull this reader back to the earlier narrator and connect the two pieces. The caveat is that I think the puzzle comparison makes too much of discrete parts. The only real gap is from the first chapter to the second and from there on this reader felt quite sure that the unfolding plot was crafted in such a way that the pieces were not “scattered” so much as deliberately and thoughtfully placed – one following the other. I suppose, though, there is some of the triumph that comes from assembling a puzzle – in watching as the whole picture takes shape and in seeing the connections. 

What is most remarkable is the way Kay achieves this pulling together. The seamless (and truly remarkable) ease in which the third person limited narration moves allows the reader to know more than any one character and so to see the whole in a way the characters themselves cannot. For this reader I felt an agonizing frustration as I wanted to share – to yell! – at the characters what I knew so that they might avoid making mistakes and poor choices.

This care I felt for the characters is somewhat surprising given that they are, for the most part, not overly sympathetic. Tibor, in particular is just. so. sad. His anxiety combined with his fumbling attempts at coming across as self-assured are cringe-worthy. His mother (name escapes me at the moment) oh wait – Agi/Agnes – is superbly drawn with her different modes of being in Toronto/Budapest as clearly marked as the change in her name. 

Oh! Speaking of Toronto/Budapest: what a novel for setting! Think back to *The Night Circus* and the brilliance of setting there – this book sees setting (as the title suggests) as integral to the plot and characters, and is a character in and of itself. Budapest has a personality just as much as Tibor or Agi (and to a lesser extent Toronto) that makes the unfolding history/mystery all the more compelling as it reads like a biography rather than simple description. 

**Some spoilers**

While I could gush all day I ought to register my few complaints – I was not totally sold on the betrayal of Agi by Gusomethingsomething for Zsofia. Gu***’s explanation of his sudden devotion reads a bit thin, and I might have rather the affair been an ongoing thing rather than something that emerged in the moment of the revolution. Though as I write this I see some symbolic merit to this origin point, I still feel the treachery to be too sudden to effect the kind of torment Gu*** goes on to feel.

**spoilers done**

That said I cannot – I can’t! – recommend this book with any more urgency or conviction. Go read it! The combination of genius plotting, masterful character development and an utterly rich setting makes it impossible to put down and a true delight to read. 

(note: I’m predicting a bestseller – so read it now while it’s still hip to be in the know about the hottest new read) 

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