Margaret Atwood
Iris Chase narrates her life story in three views: the present (as an 80 something woman), the past (what an 80 something year old woman remembers of her youth), and from within a secretive love affair. The love affair is also part of the past, but written as 1st person present. The setting is 1930's central Canada (Toronto and environs) and follows the political landscape of WWI, Depression, and the Red Scare from the Canadian perspective. It turns out, however, that this book is not really about story or plot. It is about Iris and her sister Laura. It is about who two sisters are, not about what they do or how they live. It is about relationship, love, endurance, guilt, duty, and place.
I must admit that I didn't love this book. It didn't do enough. Probably the only reason I stayed with it was because the three view mechanism that Atwood used to tell the story changed views often enough to allow me to push through. But in the end, not enough happened. I am thinking that in order for character to mean something, the characters must engage with the world. They must do something in order for character to be revealed or formed. I feel the same displeasure with TV like "Downton Abbey". The characters sit around being (outraged, pleased, confused, put out, etc.) and we don't get to see often enough where these values come from or how the affect you in the world. And we don't want the other extreme, where there is all action, and no character (a la Clive Cussler). Many, I am sure, would argue that sci-fi often goes to this extreme of plot without character, but I would argue that good sci-fi at least tackles big ideas, which can become character-like in how you think about a story. Maybe I need to try a couple of "pure character" books of the highest quality to see how they sit with my theory.
Wait
note: this book is part of a Reading Lolita in Tehran project, which you can read more about here.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel
Adam Johnson
I suppose that this is fictional realism. That is, a fictional story that is based in reality. This could have actually happened. In fact, the story and writing reminded me a lot of both Unbroken and Shantaram. Specifically, all of these stories follow a protagonist through a portion of their life and the life described is fantastical. The events and interactions and series of coincidences are crazy/amazing that they could happen to a single person. And these three books are non-fiction, fiction based on a true character and pure fiction. But the gestalt is the same.
Based on his research and interviews with those who have interacted with North Korea, Johnson creates the character Pak Jun Do. Jun Do is raised by his father (a single dad) in an orphanage. He takes on the identity and characteristics of an orphan (a particularly low social class) while his self identity is as a regular kid who lost his mother. As Jun Do grows, we follow him through his jobs as a tunnel rat (military position of living/fighting in the tunnels that cut under the DMZ), a covert radio operator on fishing boat and in prison. We are introduced to the crazy social strictures of North Korea, ostensibly a fear based society where it is better to feed yourself to a shark that to lose your copy of the portrait of the Great Leader Kim Jung Il. It is also a society where the story is king. It is more important to have a believable story, or at least plausible, than to be a truthful person. This way at least you give the listener something to hold their hat. Johnson contrasts this with the American society, where the truth of the story doesn't matter, but it is because we judge the honesty/trustworthiness of the person. Johnson demonstrates this throughout the book, but really drives it home in the second half when he starts following Commander Ga, the Minister of Prisons and Mines. His interactions with the interrogation unit are highly illuminating.
Perhaps the most valuable part of the text is the appendix interview between Johnson and his editor. This interview gives some background on the research done to create the characters and describe the culture of the close North Korean society. This interview gives confidence that we really are reading fictional realism. Without this, you could easily mis-categorize this novel as dystopian. In fact, maybe the most amazing thing is that this story is more on par with Hunger Games and Divergent than it is with any realistic situation.
A great book on many levels.
Read
I suppose that this is fictional realism. That is, a fictional story that is based in reality. This could have actually happened. In fact, the story and writing reminded me a lot of both Unbroken and Shantaram. Specifically, all of these stories follow a protagonist through a portion of their life and the life described is fantastical. The events and interactions and series of coincidences are crazy/amazing that they could happen to a single person. And these three books are non-fiction, fiction based on a true character and pure fiction. But the gestalt is the same.
Based on his research and interviews with those who have interacted with North Korea, Johnson creates the character Pak Jun Do. Jun Do is raised by his father (a single dad) in an orphanage. He takes on the identity and characteristics of an orphan (a particularly low social class) while his self identity is as a regular kid who lost his mother. As Jun Do grows, we follow him through his jobs as a tunnel rat (military position of living/fighting in the tunnels that cut under the DMZ), a covert radio operator on fishing boat and in prison. We are introduced to the crazy social strictures of North Korea, ostensibly a fear based society where it is better to feed yourself to a shark that to lose your copy of the portrait of the Great Leader Kim Jung Il. It is also a society where the story is king. It is more important to have a believable story, or at least plausible, than to be a truthful person. This way at least you give the listener something to hold their hat. Johnson contrasts this with the American society, where the truth of the story doesn't matter, but it is because we judge the honesty/trustworthiness of the person. Johnson demonstrates this throughout the book, but really drives it home in the second half when he starts following Commander Ga, the Minister of Prisons and Mines. His interactions with the interrogation unit are highly illuminating.
Perhaps the most valuable part of the text is the appendix interview between Johnson and his editor. This interview gives some background on the research done to create the characters and describe the culture of the close North Korean society. This interview gives confidence that we really are reading fictional realism. Without this, you could easily mis-categorize this novel as dystopian. In fact, maybe the most amazing thing is that this story is more on par with Hunger Games and Divergent than it is with any realistic situation.
A great book on many levels.
Read
Monday, March 10, 2014
The Reading Lolita in Tehran Project
Emma, Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Pride and
Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Dean's December,
Herzog and More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow
The Clown by
Heinrich Boll
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
The Master and
Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
If on a Winter’s Night
a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Big Sleep by
Raymond Chandler
Under Western Eyes
by Joseph Conrad
Jacques Le Fataliste by Diderot
Shamela and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary by
Gustave Flaubert
The Diary of Anne
Frank by Anne Frank
The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat
The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller and Washington Square by Henry James
In the Penal Colony
and The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Confidence-Man
by Herman Melville
Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading and Pnin by
Vladimir Nabokov
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad
The Language Police by Diane Ravitch
The Net of Dreams by Julie Salamon
A Thousand and One Nights by Scheherazade
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky
Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by
Muriel Spark
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman by
Laurence Sterne
Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
Address Unknown by Katherine Kressman Taylor
A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe by Anne Tyler
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Galileo's Dream
Kim Stanley Robinson
I love this guy's work. Both the Mars Trilogy (Red, Green, Blue) and The Years of Rice and Salt show deep insight into culture, civilization and the politics of being. The current book is no different. Basically a biography of Galileo, Robinson provides a fascinating look at the political and cultural context for Galileo's life, work and the decisions he made. Intersperse this with a bit of 1000 year time travel to the Galilean moons of Jupiter we have jumped from historical biography to science fiction. I love that Robinsons starting point is that future humans would sacrifice two gas giant planets in the solar system as a source of energy to push a quantum time travel device into the past. Of course you would do this. And now that it is done, we have a mechanism to look at Galileo and his impact on our current scientific worldview, posit his impact of the future of humanity and dabble in explanations for a universal/scientific revelation of the identity of God (and get Galileo's thoughts on the matter while we are at it). Robinson blows my mind. Unfortunately, with all of this fascinating and interesting storyline, I found that I was not engaged in this book like I have been in the past. I was actually able to put this down for weeks at a time. Apparently it is possible for a book to be fascinating, but not engaging. But still, read this book, and then let's talk.
Read
I love this guy's work. Both the Mars Trilogy (Red, Green, Blue) and The Years of Rice and Salt show deep insight into culture, civilization and the politics of being. The current book is no different. Basically a biography of Galileo, Robinson provides a fascinating look at the political and cultural context for Galileo's life, work and the decisions he made. Intersperse this with a bit of 1000 year time travel to the Galilean moons of Jupiter we have jumped from historical biography to science fiction. I love that Robinsons starting point is that future humans would sacrifice two gas giant planets in the solar system as a source of energy to push a quantum time travel device into the past. Of course you would do this. And now that it is done, we have a mechanism to look at Galileo and his impact on our current scientific worldview, posit his impact of the future of humanity and dabble in explanations for a universal/scientific revelation of the identity of God (and get Galileo's thoughts on the matter while we are at it). Robinson blows my mind. Unfortunately, with all of this fascinating and interesting storyline, I found that I was not engaged in this book like I have been in the past. I was actually able to put this down for weeks at a time. Apparently it is possible for a book to be fascinating, but not engaging. But still, read this book, and then let's talk.
Read
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