• 1001 BYMRBYD Challenge
  • About Zee
  • Book Challenges 2010
  • Rory Gilmore Reading List
  • Zee’s Book Reviews

Wordly Obsessions

~ … the occasional ramblings of a book addict …

Wordly Obsessions

Tag Archives: literary fiction

Book Review | ‘Shadow Dance’ by Angela Carter

15 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Book Review, Excerpts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

angela carter, Annunciation, Bloody Chamber, book review, Evelyn, gothic fiction, literary fiction, Morris, Nights at the Circus, Passion of New Eve, shadow dance, violence


Shadow Dance (Virago Modern Classics)Shadow Dance by Angela Carter

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“She was a beautiful girl, a white and golden girl, like moonlight on daisies, a month ago. So he stared at her shattered beauty… ‘She is a burning child, a fiery bud’ said Honeybuzzard, before he knifed her.'”

This is a very strange story about a ghastly nymphet called Ghislaine whose beauty verges on the grotesque even before her face gets slashed to pieces by the equally beautiful and androgynous villain Honeybuzzard. I am beginning to see a common theme in Carter’s particular stance on the nature of feminine beauty in that she loves to concoct her characters as a delirious mix of sexual depravity in virginal garbs.

‘Shadow Dance’ is a complex novel where the sexuality of characters are always suspect. The medusa-like Ghislaine (even her name is a monstrosity that smacks of the absinthe-odoured Lautrec ladies) is presented as an insatiable young woman who is forever scarred after a violent sexual attack cruelly orchestrated by two men; Morris, a nondescript antique-dealer who beneath the thin gloss is basically a failure in life and his flamboyant and dangerous sidekick Honeybuzzard.

“In the flickering blue light, Honey’s long, pale hair and high-held, androgynous face was hard and fine and inhuman; Medusa, marble, terrible… She gaped up, baffled, wondering, like the Virgin in Florentine pictures meeting the beautiful, terrible Angel of the Annunciation.” 

The two men are very unlikely friends and partners in crime, however the thing drawing the two together is the very thing that makes them incompatible: total incongruity of character. Morris is the total opposite of Honeybuzzard. Where he is all shy and retiring, Honeybuzzard is all knives and sharp corners. Like the title suggests, there is a very subtle shadow dance that occurs between these two men, they are both too much of one thing and not enough of another and it is through this need that they come into close proximity and tolerate each others intolerable acts. Even more subtle is the sexual tension between the two and the sense of how they can never truly enact the forbidden sexual desire for one another because they are, in a symbolic sense, each other.

Honeybuzzard and Ghislaine were the most interesting characters and I find Carter is at her best when creating the most outrageous personalities. She really does shine as she makes the most incredible habits credible. Ghislaine’s magnificent entrance at the beginning of the novel and Carters exquisite description of her will stay with me for a long while. It was nice to see the initial workings of ‘The Passion of New Eve‘ in this, her first novel; as I think Ghislaine and Honeybuzzard may have been test versions of the Tristesse and Evelyn to come.

Carter is also a master of jerking sympathy out of her readership for the most absurd of reasons. As poisonous as Ghislaine is, we cannot help feeling horror and shock at her attack by the hands of Morris, who was the one who planted the demonic seed of thought into the impressionable mind of Honeybuzzard. In roundabout ways we can decide for ourselves who was more or less to blame for the events of that night and how the aftermath affects not just the victim, but many other innocent bystanders who have no more than a fleeting acquaintance with the main people involved.

The most amazing thing about ‘Shadow Dance’ has to be the detailed descriptions of various degrees of depravity, whether this be in the state of a house or a relationship. Things are always a little bit tainted in Carter’s world and that’s what gives this a very gothic flavour. Everything is in a certain stage of its’ own undoing and even those who think they have finally captured a rag of relative happiness soon have it cruelly torn from them.

I adore authors who are not afraid to put their characters through their paces, who are brutal and precise if the story demands it. Carter cares very much for her characters, which is why she is so careless with them. They are not wrapped in cotton and protected by events, they live them out for us and brings us ‘the taste of pennies’ on our tongue. It’s always a pleasure to read Carter, for she belongs in the rare gallery of women writers such as du Maurier, Atwood and Morrison, who boldly go where no others have been and eke out new, savage pastures for readers to lose themselves in. They bring with them their own brand of femininity, one that tries to cleanse itself of the barbie-coloured optimism, and allows us to glance at the depths of our forbidden selves for a few therapeutic minutes – at the overwhelming burden of our dark ‘life-giving’ gifts and what this means in its terrifying totality.

View all my reviews

Related articles
  • Marina Warner on Angela Carter (gatherednettles.com)
  • Book review: “The Passion of New Eve”- Angela Carter (selfmadewomanblog.wordpress.com)
  • Read “The Werewolf,” A Short Fable by Angela Carter (biblioklept.org)
  • Recommended Reading: (windling.typepad.com)

Share this:

  • Email
  • Print
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • More
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Ahh Penguin Modern Classics, How I Love Thee! | Celebrating 50 Years of Good Reads, With Good Reads…

07 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

literary fiction, Penguin Books, Penguin Modern Classics, short story, virginia woolf


Authors we love, and some we don’t: 50 of the best writers of modern fiction are showcased in this collection of 50 little books as Penguin Modern Classics celebrates it’s fiftieth birthday. Which one will you choose?

There it is folks, an entire library of modern literary fiction in one compact little box. How convenient! Having read ‘Hell Screen’ by Akutagawa and ‘The Lady in the Looking Glass’ by Virginia Woolf, I have fallen in love with Penguin’s concept of bringing us tidbits of the best of contemporary fiction. I’m a sucker for short stories.

I am currently taking up the challenge to read ALL of the books in the series which won’t take long provided I can find them all. The great thing about this collection is that they contain stories that not only showcase an authors differing styles (as was the case with Virginia Woolf) but they also bring to light some of the lesser-known, but equally as good works too.

If you want to take up the challenge too then you can find more information abotu the books at the Penguin Modern Classics website or you can purchase the entire set at Amazon or Waterstone’s.

For those interested, here’s a list of all the book’s in the series:

RYUNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA Hell Screen

KINGSLEY AMIS Dear Illusion

DONALD BARTHELME Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

SAMUEL BECKETT The Expelled

SAUL BELLOW Him With His Foot in His Mouth

JORGE LUIS BORGES The Widow Ching – Pirate

PAUL BOWLES The Delicate Prey

ITALO CALVINO The Queen’s Necklace

ALBERT CAMUS The Adulterous Woman

TRUMAN CAPOTE Children on Their Birthdays

ANGELA CARTER Bluebeard

RAYMOND CHANDLER Killer in the Rain

EILEEN CHANG Red Rose, White Rose

G. K. CHESTERTON The Strange Crime of John Boulnois

JOSEPH CONRAD Youth

ROBERT COOVER Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady

ISAK DINESEN [KAREN BLIXEN] Babette’s Feast

MARGARET DRABBLE The Gifts of War

HANS FALLADA Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Babylon Revisited

IAN FLEMING The Living Daylights

E. M. FORSTER The Machine Stops

SHIRLEY JACKSON The Tooth

HENRY JAMES The Beast in the Jungle

M. R. JAMES Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book

JAMES JOYCE Two Gallants

FRANZ KAFKA In the Penal Colony

RUDYARD KIPLING ‘They’

D. H. LAWRENCE Odour of Chrysanthemums

PRIMO LEVI The Magic Paint

H. P. LOVECRAFT The Colour Out of Space

MALCOLM LOWRY Lunar Caustic

KATHERINE MANSFIELD Bliss

CARSON MCCULLERS Wunderkind

ROBERT MUSIL Flypaper

VLADIMIR NABOKOV Terra Incognita

R. K. NARAYAN A Breath of Lucifer

FRANK O’CONNOR The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland

D OROTHY PARKER The Sexes

LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA Through the Wall

JEAN RHYS La Grosse Fifi

SAKI Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER The Last Demon

WILLIAM TREVOR The Mark-􀀍 Wife

JOHN UPDIKE Rich in Russia

H. G. WELLS The Door in the Wall

EUDORA WELTY Moon Lake

P. G. WODEHOUSE The Crime Wave at Blandings

VIRGINIA WOOLF The Lady in the Looking-Glass

STEFAN ZWEIG Chess

Related articles
  • Christmas gift guide: 12 books and boxed sets for bibliophiles, part 2 (kimbofo.typepad.com)
  • The beauty of Penguin Books (guardian.co.uk)
  • Keith Haring’s Journals (thepenguinblog.typepad.com)

Share this:

  • Email
  • Print
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • More
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Book Review | ‘The Waves’ by Virginia Woolf

16 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 1001 Book Challenge, Book Challenges, Book Review, ebooks, Excerpts

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

1001 book list, book review, literary fiction, the waves, virginia woolf


The WavesThe Waves by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. ”

This was such a hard book to get into that it’s not even funny! I mean, I _KNOW_ what was going on, I know what Woolf was aiming for in the structural planning of the book, and I absolutely adore how well she kept up her water imagery. I am overwhelmed by her talent, but there is a fact that cannot be avoided; her novels are either going to be pure bliss, or absolute hell. This, to me, was hell. This disjointed narrative follows the lives of six characters whose voices intertwine to tell the story of the passing of time, how people grow from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. It is intensely nostalgic and is designed to mimic how the passing of what seems like an age, is nothing in relation to the world around us. This is perfectly symbolised by a side-narrative featuring the waves on a beach which begins each section of the novel. The end result is two stories set to two different time scales that run parallel to each other; the first being the transformation of the beach which through the duration of the novel is a mere day in relation to the storyline of the characters which spans their whole lives. This is a delicious juxtapositioning that truly works and gives the reader a sense of how fleeting life is with regards to the natural elements around us.

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”

However, this wonderful structure does not help. The fact remains that I just couldn’t stop my mind from wandering off because of how damn  internalized everything is. The downfall of the novel is that everybody is talking in their own heads and no one is really interacting with each other. It lacks action which I think is fundamental necessity. It doesn’t help that we sometimes get no indication of who is speaking when, it’s very much like the characters are all insular, disembodied voices that float somewhere in the ether directly above their tangible, physical selves. Yet in direct opposition to this, there are moments when these ghostly voices word an emotion or a moment that is often more real than reality itself.

‘The Waves’ is a very complex and deeply disturbing novel that reaches into and explores the ‘self’ inside us that thinks and records our personal histories free from the restraints of language. Whenever I reach for any of Woolf’s works I have always been torn in two about her narrative style. She is either a pioneer of capturing the obliqueness of human thought, or the one who releases it from the constraints of language.

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”    

I have not yet made up my mind on what she was really aiming for as a writer. However I am certain that through her novels and short stories she was forever travelling towards the first moment of our being, when we make our initial impressions of objects and emotions that are so unbearably poignant that it hurts. I could say that ‘The Waves’ has packed full of such moments, especially the first part.

This is a novel that I’ll probably have to come back to later in order to fully appreciate it’s beauty.

For now, 2/5 stars.

This novel is now available in the public domain at:

The Gutenberg Australia website and in numerous formats on Feedbooks.com

View all my reviews

Related articles
  • VWM on “Queering Woolf” now out (bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com)
  • Virginia Woolf’s Rules For Biography (isak.typepad.com)
  • There’s no need to be afraid of Virginia Woolf (classicritique.wordpress.com)
  • Reader reviews roundup (guardian.co.uk)
  • The Waves (cynsworkshop.wordpress.com)

Share this:

  • Email
  • Print
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • More
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Book Review | ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison

16 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 1001 Book Challenge, Book Review, Excerpts

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

african american literature, beloved, infanticide, literary fiction, love story, Sethe, Slavery, toni morrison


BelovedBeloved by Toni Morrison

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.”

This is Morrison describing why and how she went about writing ‘Beloved‘. When I first came to read the novel, I noticed a very uncomfortable gap, or rather ‘jarring’ between what Morrison was trying to say and what she ended up saying. Nothing was straight forward, even the first opening sentence felt as if it had been dragged out backwards from the psyche. The ‘slave experience’ that she mentions, and the claustrophobic memory of the dead that continually pervades the living is the catalyst Morrison uses to break down the hindering effect of language.

As a novel of extremities, ‘Beloved’ explores the limitless depths of love and hate, showing the places where they intermingle and become almost interchangeable. This is much more than just a ghost story, much more than the angry, persistent haunting of a mother who loved her baby so much, she had to choose between the better of two evils. The haunting is one that clings to the skirts of an entire race. I have often heard people say how disconcerting Morrison’s prose is apt to be, and how many have turned away from this fine novel with confusion, misunderstanding or even sheer disgust. I implore that they look again, for their own good.

Personally, after much wrestling with the novel, I have found that this disjointedness provides the perfect rhythm to a story about a people whose hearts are scarred by the unspeakable. This is not just about slavery, the evils of that practice nor how people escaped. It’s about what happens after; how a person goes about mourning for ones own wasted life, but also for those that came before them and those that might come after.

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

Because it is only after, when fate or a change in ones’ circumstance allows a moment of reflection, that the sting of the whip begins to reverberate in the soul.

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

Every character in this novel has their own tragedies. Even though Sethe is the main character and her infanticide the focal point on the novel, there are other more gruesome events. I can sympathise with Sethe, because Morrison boldly takes the reader down a very dark path to her particular reasoning. It is not something I could personally achieve on my own, but thanks to characters like Ella and Baby Suggs, I felt I could access the delirious logic of a woman on the edge of reason.

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”

This is not an easy book, it is hard to read and harder to understand. It works on many levels and tackles a lot of very thorny issues. Not for the faint-hearted nor the narrow-minded. It’s a mental workout which leaves you drained at the end. I’ll not be re-reading it for a while, because I feel this one will be staying in my mind for a long time. However I am glad I read it, because no literary work I have read thus far has ever looked at slavery as boldly as ‘Beloved’.

If you like your novels to have a bold streak in them, then ‘Beloved’ is for you.

View all my reviews

Related articles
  • Top 10 books I read in 2012: A Mercy (#10) (abbyfp.wordpress.com)
  • Yes, I Still Love Toni Morrison. (musingsfrommymacbook.wordpress.com)
  • Book Review | ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (mywordlyobsessions.wordpress.com)
  • Did I Mention I Love Toni Morrison? (musingsfrommymacbook.wordpress.com)
  • Tony Morrisson: Good, but never simple (echoculture.org)

Share this:

  • Email
  • Print
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • More
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Book Review | ‘Amsterdam’ by Ian McEwan

25 Friday Feb 2011

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Book Review, Excerpts

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

amsterdam, book review, british literature, ian mcewan, literary fiction


AmsterdamAmsterdam by Ian McEwan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

“Poor Molly. It began with a tingling in her arm as she raised it outside the Dorchester Grill to stop a cab; a sensation that never went away. Within weeks she was fumbling for the names of things. Parliament, chemistry, propeller she could forgive herself, but less so bed, cream, mirror… Molly, restaurant critic, gorgeous wit and photographer, the daring gardener who had been loved by the Foreign Secretary and could still turn a perfect cartwheel at the age of forty-six.”

This is the quiet yet disturbing tale of the unforgettable Molly, her sudden death and the memory she left behind in three former lovers who meet at her funeral. The story opens on a chilly February morning, as Vernon Halliday (broadsheet editor) and Clive Linley (British composer) arrive to pay their respects. Being close friends, they knew Molly before she became a famous restaurant critic. As her ex-lovers, they also share another mutual feeling; an intense dislike for Julian Garmony, the Foreign Secretary who once had a relationship with her and George, her morose and possessive husband. Her loss causes shock in the publishing world where she was known as the life of the party, but that isn’t the only shock her death gives way to. In the following days, Vernon and Clive are besieged by a strange numbness in the arm, a pact is made and the emergence of a series of grainy photographs threatens to undo them all.

The problem I had with this book is that I can’t call it a thriller, nor a love story in the conventional sense. It sits somewhere between the two and looks at the aftermath of relationships and those ‘residual’ emotions from a rather oblique position. Molly is already dead when the story beings and the reader is left to glean information about her through flashbacks often coloured by the emotionally-biased men in her life. As a result, Molly comes across as a party animal with a cat-like tendency to waltz in and out of people’s lives leaving them yearning for more of her apparently irresistible charisma.

As a character, Molly did feel a bit like an author’s fantasy of the perfect woman, and it didn’t help that her former lovers go through motions of morbid idolatry glossing over her faults as they go along. While this was amusing, as a female reader I also found it a bit silly and it ultimately made the male characters rather weak and underdeveloped. I think what McEwan was aiming for was ‘obsessiveness’, instead he managed to produce childish behaviour that wasn’t at all becoming for characters that are respectively a famous composer, a renowned journalist and reputedly the next prime minister.

One of the good things about the story is how McEwan reverses the roles, and has his male characters pine over a woman that was once ‘had but lost’. The jealousy that slowly emerges between them is also quite interesting, as it’s usually women who fight over a man, not the other way round. While Clive and Vernon complain about Georges possessiveness and his smothering attitude during Molly’s illness, they show signs of these very same traits even after she is dead and gone. Each man is seen to try to make Molly his own, but all they do is set each other up rather unsuccessfully I might add.

The strongest people in the novel were women; namely Molly and Garmony’s wife. The men seemed a little too lost and bewildered without them. For instance, Garmony cowers under the bed sheets after a scandal threatens his career. As the paparazzi wait outside his house, his wife (obviously the one who wears the trousers in the relationship) stoically marches outside braving the flashlights and the flurry of questions. She also picks up the pieces of her husband’s apparently irretrievable career from the brink of destruction with a rather clever interview that renders the scandal null and void in any journalistic sense. In short, I was left feeling little respect for the men, as all they seemed to do was mope and think about backstabbing the other ‘ex-lover’. I’m a bit ashamed to say it, but the men acted more like women and the women more like men.

Having said all of this, I can’t understand why McEwan was awarded the Booker Prize for this short novel. It’s far from perfect, though I must admit, the psychological thriller aspects of the book were wielded with expert precision. McEwan has that down to a fine art, as the plot twists and turns unexpectedly driving the reader through the narrative. My only wish was that he could have taken more time with it to flesh out his characters a bit more. If you ever decide to pick it up, you’ll find there is definitely room for expansion. Personally I was expecting ‘Amsterdam’ to be like ‘Atonement’ which is in my personal view is a far superior novel.

This may have been the Booker, but for some genuinely GOOD McEwan I recommend ‘Enduring Love’ or ‘Atonement’. McEwan is a very sensitive writer, who is able to pick out a beautiful, delicate tune from a handful of notes. If you enjoy a writer who looks at the emotional destruction within characters in great detail, then you’ve come to the right place. When given room to play, his style is discreet yet devastating. Such a shame that ‘Amsterdam’ did not live up to my expectations.

View all my reviews

Share this:

  • Email
  • Print
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • More
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Literary Blog Hop! | What Makes Contemporary Fiction A ‘Modern Classic’?

26 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Meme

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

classics, literary fiction, meme


Don\
Welcome to the ‘Literary Blog Hop’, a meme hosted by The Blue Bookcase for book bloggers who focus on reviewing literary fiction. This weeks’ hop comes with the question:
 
What makes a contemporary novel a classic? 
Discuss a book which you think fits the category of ‘modern classics’ and explain why. 

Being more a reader of contemporary literary fiction, you’d think I’d have a surefire answer to this question, but I’m afraid I haven’t. The problem with it is that unless you are a psychic, nobody can really say which books will end up becoming full-blown classics and which will be forgotten after the initial mass-media hype. This is especially true when it comes to contemporary fiction. For instance, the general set of rules by which books were judged as classics a hundred years ago, could turn out to be largely obsolete in today’s society. As methods of story-telling have evolved over the years, dividing and sub-dividing like an atom into various genres and linguistic styles, so have the expectations of its modern readers. Today’s book-lovers are different from the bookworms of yesteryear. So the classics that might emerge from modern contemporary fictions another 100 years from now, will inevitably differ from the classics published back in the 18th century.

But undoubtably our current classics would have been long-forgotten if it weren’t for the sagacity of their respective authors and the way they struck the right social and cultural chords that not only extended the longevity of their work, but also caused something of a ‘butterfly effect’ in the future of novel-writing itself. ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley is a great example of this. Here’s a universal classic that asks some very serious questions about creation, evolution, science and religion. These are not easy subjects to write about at the best of times, but the painfully human plight of Shelley’s hideous progeny and the demonic transgression of her scientist have become monstrous themes within modern culture. The novel has fascinated many through its ability to foreshadow the future of surgery and in the ethical issues surrounding the advent of ground-breaking scientific events like cloning and designer babies. ‘Frankenstein’ continues to haunt us as a permanent cultural reference in films, cartoons and comic-books. Famously said to have been born from a dream, it has even gone as far as foreshadowing itself. Many authors continue to be inspired by the original which has spawned countless spin-offs. Notable versions that spring to mind is the Dean Koontz trilogy and Peter Ackroyd’s ‘Casebook of Victor Frankenstein’.    

But something tells me that ‘timelessness’ shouldn’t be the only ingredient of a  future classic, but that it should also have something of the ‘progressive’ about it, something that sets the standard a little higher. When we look at the history of the novel, it’s always surprising to realise that it is, after all, a fairly new art form. And it is here that I look quite literally to the term itself to realise that it isn’t fuddy-duddy, moth-ridden verses that we should be praising; but another thing altogether.

nov·el 1 //  n. 1. A fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters.

 nov·el 2 //  adj. Strikingly new, unusual, or different. See Synonyms at new.


[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin novellus, diminutive of novus; see newo- in Indo-European roots.]

The word ‘novel’ was first coined in the late 18th century from the Italian ‘novella’, a transliteration for popular short stories during the medieval period. The ‘novella’ or novel, was a step towards ‘realistic’ story-telling, where characters and the narrative were firmly anchored in the mundane, everyday world of the reader. During this period, books like ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘Moll Flanders’ demonstrated the break from the fantastical, allegorical romances that came before. Instead, the novel focussed on exploring the moral values of the middle-class through the solitary struggles of a hero or heroine. However it was a little later with Samuel Richardson’s ‘Pamela’, that the character novel was truly born. A type that proved so popular, that it was made all the more famous by Jane Austen and later, the Bronte sisters. The key pattern here lies in the breaking with tradition, not of sustaining or prolonging a certain type of ‘literariness’. And since the novel quite literally means ‘new’, and a classic is a crowning celebration of the unusual or different; then this also has become one of the ingredients for a modern classic.

You may have noticed that the texts mentioned so far are classics that are also a part of the ‘canon’, meaning they are considered to be of outstanding artistic and literary merit. But in a day and age when literary theorists claim that there are in actual fact only 5 types of story in existence, and that all stories are an amalgam or these original five; I find it hard to see how we can continue to have more books added as ‘classics’ to an already mammoth list. This angle again poses a problem: can a re-working of a previous classic be accepted as a classic in its own right? And aren’t we running out of ‘original’ stories? For those who think nay, this thorny question can be answered quite nicely by Graham Swift’s ‘Last Orders’. Winner of the Booker Prize 1996, the novel itself was greatly influenced by Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’. Whether it will be accepted as a classic later on, only time will tell; but I remember having many a heated debate about the ‘legitimacy’ of Swift’s usage of Faulkner’s plot. To me, it looked like plagiarism; to others it was a work of post-modernist art and proof some timeless stories can be transposed onto an entirely different culture and still retain its original ‘ghost’ (see Suzan-Lori Parks ‘Getting Mother’s Body: A Novel’ for an African-American point of view).

I could probably go on and on listing things that need to be taken into consideration when choosing a modern contemporary classic. Having it win a handful of awards is always a step in the right direction, but not always a necessity. It must transcend time and space (not an easy feat!) and be eco-friendly in that every once in a while it should be recyclable. Then it should also be new. Not just new, but ‘unusual’ or ‘different’ even. So what can my nomination be for a modern classic?

File:Only Revolutions.jpg

“They were with us before Romeo and Juliet. And long after too. Because they’ve forever around. Or so both claim, carolling gleefully:
We’re allways sixteen.
Sam & Hailey, powered by an ever-rotating fleet of cars from Model T to Lincoln Continental, career from the Civil War to the Cold War, barreling down through the Appalachians, up the Mississippi River, across the Badlands, finally cutting a nation in half as the try to outrace history itself.

By turns beguiling and gripping, finally worldwrecking, Only Revolutions is unlike anything ever published before, a remarkable feat of heart and intellect, moving us with the journey of two kids, perpetually summer, perpetually sixteen, who give up everything but each other.”

To be honest, it was a toss-up between ‘Only Revolutions’ and Danielewski’s previous monster ‘House of Leaves’. But I didn’t want to make another reference to Gothic fiction, so I chose this amazing time-juggling literary word-play as one I’d like to see as a modern classic.

Parts of the book were constructed with the help of Danielewski’s online readership on his blog and alternates between two different narrators Hailey and Sam who are lovers on opposite sides of the US. If that’s not enough, they are also living in different centuries. One side of the book tells Haileys story (green eye with the golden flecks) and the flip side gives you Sam’s story (golden eye with the green flecks). Loosely based on the American ‘road novel’ made famous by Jack Kerouac,  ‘Only Revolutions’ is a vast cacophony of many genres. Told in a poetic narrative after the fashion of ancient Greek epics, Sam and Hailey’s stories travel towards each other where they collide in the middle of the continent (and the exact middle of the book) only to go back or forward in time again respectively. Hailey’s story begins on Nov 22 1963 while Sam’s starts on Nov 22 1893. Being a century apart makes their love story a unique one. Other notable oddities is that it’s exactly 360 pages long (one full revolution) with colour-coded words representing aspects of the narrators.   

Another thing I discovered by accident is that something very cool happens to the page numbers when you flip the pages of the book. But I still haven’t figured out the meaning of the black dots on the upper page. If anyone has read it and knows what I’m talking about, please let me know!

That’s an end to my rambling… now it’s your turn! What are your opinions? What would you vote as a modern contemporary classic?

Share this:

  • Email
  • Print
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • More
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Literary Blog Hop! – Most Difficult Literary Book You’ve Ever Read?

11 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Book Review, Meme, Writing

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

james joyce, literary fiction, meme, mrs. dalloway, stream of consciousness, ulysses, virginia woolf


 Don\

Welcome to the ‘Literary Blog Hop’, a meme hosted by The Blue Bookcase for book bloggers who focus on reviewing literary fiction. This weeks’ hop comes with the question:

What is the most difficult literary work you’ve ever read? What made it so difficult?

The most difficult book I’ve ever read has to be ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf. Going into it is like being hit with a  literary sledgehammer. Seriously. If you reckon you know ‘stream-of-consciousness’, then think again! ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is probably SoC perfection what with its mercurial ideas and shifting narrators. 

Mrs. Dalloway

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself… it was the moment between six and seven when every flower – roses, carnations, irises, lilac – glows, white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!”

SYNOPSIS
The story of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is set in post World War I England and is about one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a married middle-class woman who is preparing to throw a party later that evening. The novel works on a number of different themes including mental illness, existential issues, feminism and homosexuality. People who know a bit about Woolf will probably have heard about her own mental problems and her suicide. She was known to have been bisexual and a strong champion of feminist thought. All of these issues find voice in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ making it an excellent study of her life and her ideals.

The special thing about the novel is that even though it takes place over 24 hours, the story constantly shifts backwards and forwards in time. In reality, this is Woolf’s way of mimicking one day in the life of anyone’s mind, as she makes it clear that even though we are living in a constant ‘present’, our thoughts rarely ever do. The novel also has a very strong element of ‘voyeurism’ to it, as Woolf’s narrative switches from character to the next without warning, often delving into the world of private, often embarrassing thoughts. This also seems to show that people are never what they seem to be. Clarissa, a respectably married housewife entertains thoughts of suppressed love for her childhood friend Sally Bourton. Similarly, Septimus (a shell-shocked war hero) is still haunted by his commanding officer Evans. The story of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is essentially about the secret lives people live within themselves, and the things that go without saying which is rather, the omitted subtext of everyday existence.

All I can really say about this novel is that it has no ‘walls’. Yes, there is nothing to separate the thoughts of the characters or the characters themselves for that matter, because Woolf’s complete focus is on ‘memory’ and the organic behaviour of thought. Many writers have toyed with the idea of writing a novel that mimics the theatre of the mind, but few have ever got so close as to actually emulating that on paper. One of those successes being James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ gets a mention here, only because it is probably up there on the number one spot for the most difficult SoC book to read (both famous and infamous for it in equal measure!). In fact, it’s hailed as the most difficult book period, but since I haven’t read it yet, Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ takes first place for now.

When I first picked this up eight years ago, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was already a fan of Woolf, having read ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and some other essays of hers, but I never counted on experiencing anything quite as modern and intuitive as the complex style she exhibits here. In fact, before reading ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ I realised I had a pretty rigid view on what makes a successful novel. Normally, a book is constructed from a number of ‘building blocks’ like themes, symbolism, etc, and the way those blocks fit into each other (much like lego) depends on the way an author structures her narrative. Woolf  however completely blew my theory to pieces; how she did it I still don’t know, but one thing is certain, her writing is as fine as gossamer and as strong as steel-wool. ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is hardly a conventional novel. I see it as a gross concentration of memories, an intense saturation of isolated, fleeting feelings and thoughts that seem to be plucked from the mind and laid directly onto paper. The ebb and flow of the story may seem erratic at first, but like a 3D picture, once you adjust yourself to the pace and the multiple story strands, it becomes a very fulfilling read.  

  If you would like to read Mrs. Dalloway for free, Project Gutenburg Australia has very kindly uploaded the book in text, zip and HTML format.

Project Gutenburg Australia has a number of free ebooks in it’s archives that cannot be found in the normal Project Gutenburg website, so check it out when you have the time!

Share this:

  • Email
  • Print
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • More
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Literary Blog Hop! – What Is Literary Fiction?

05 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Meme

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

1984, frankenstein, george orwell, japanese horror story, Koji Suzuki, literary fiction, mary shelley, meme, science fiction


 Don\

Welcome to the ‘Literary Blog Hop’, a meme hosted by The Blue Bookcase for book bloggers who focus on reviewing literary fiction. This weeks’ hop comes with the question:

“What is your favourite book, and why would you consider it as ‘literary’.”

When I received news of this meme in my inbox, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to talk about a popular Japanese trilogy that has been on my mind ever since I read it about 5 years ago. The books I’m
talking about are known as ‘The Ring Trilogy’. The three books ‘Ring’ (1991), ‘Spiral’ (1995) and ‘Loop’ (2002) were written by Koji Suzuki and became a literary phenomenon all over the world. While ‘Ring’ is the most popular book in the series, ‘Spiral’ and ‘Loop’ provide an excellent follow-up to the chilling story of the cursed videotape that kills its’ viewers in seven days. Here is a short synopsis of each book without any spoilers.

‘RING’ – BOOK 1

Ring (Book 1)

“One night in Tokyo, four healthy teenagers die simultaneously. Autopsy reports list the cause as heart failure, but for journalist Kazuyuki Asakawa whose niece was among the dead, it seems something more sinister is afoot. Asakawa’s suspicions drive him to investigate further, which leads him to a strange videotape found in a mountain lodge the teenagers visited together over the holidays. At first, the tape is nothing more than a random series of unrelated images. However the images end abruptly, and what follows is an inexplicable message that condemns the viewer to die in seven days unless they complete a charm. But to Asakawa’s horror, the instructions have been erased. Now it becomes a race against the clock to find out the mystery of the tape, the truth behind the curse and who made it. 

Soon Asakawa realises the images themselves are a series of clues, which point to a terrible secret and an insatiable revenge against humanity.” 

____________________
‘SPIRAL’ – BOOK 2

Spiral (Book 2)

“Dr. Ando suffers from nightmares. In his dreams he is trying to save his drowning son. But everyday he wakes to the cruel reality of his death and the fact that his marriage has all but fallen apart. The only thing keeping him going is his job – performing autopsies. That is, until his old rival Ryuji Takayama, turns up on the steel slab. In High School, Ryuji was famous for being a  codebreaker. He would have remained undefeated, if it wasn’t for Ando. Yet here he is, and ironically Ando has the honour of doing the last duties. But Ryuji’s death soon turns out to be as cryptic as the codes they used to crack back in school. A blood test reveals the impossible truth that Ryuji died from a virus supposed to be extinct, and it turns out he isn’t the only one to have been infected. Being the only person ever to have beat Ryuji, Ando gets the unshakable feeling that his friend is controlling things from beyond the grave by chosing him to solve this mystery.

It’s not long before Ando’s investigation leads him to a videotape, and a crucial choice between life, death – and rebirth.”

____________________

‘LOOP’ – BOOK 3

Loop (Book 3)

“In the ‘Ring’, vendetta came in the form of a videotape. In ‘Spiral’, a mutating virus threatened the entire diversity of life. In ‘Loop’, everything about the ‘Ring’ universe is turned on its head, as the story opens on Kaoru Futami, a precocious ten year old boy born to an era on the brink of a cancer epidemic. This new, aggressive form of the illness is incurable; yet Kaoru has hope as his father lies dying in a hospital along with many other patients. Now a medical student, Kaoru sets out to discover the origins of the disease which takes him to the barren desert of New Mexico and the abandoned HQ’s of the elusive ‘Loop’ project. What he discovers there is an advanced artificial life programme designed to imitate all stages of human civilization. As Kaoru watches events unfold, he realises that a virus mysteriously wiped out the inhabitants of the virtual world; a virus that managed to escape the ‘Loop’ project and somehow find its way into reality.

Yet that isn’t all. Kaoru also finds himself facing a shocking personal truth and a destiny requiring the ultimate sacrifice.”

The reason I chose these books is because despite of their place in popular culture and the ‘hype’ generated by their film versions, I strongly believe they deserve to be recognised as literary fiction.

“The Ring Trilogy? Wait a minute… isn’t that mainstream fiction, Science-Fiction, Gothic horror? How the ‘Ring’ compare to the likes of ‘The English Patient’ and ‘The Catcher in the Rye’?”

Well, it can’t. Purely because of the difference in genres, but more importantly because books like the trilogy only begin to work on a literary level when it is perceived as a synergistic whole. In other words, you have to read them in order to get the full effect of the intricate way in which the seemingly disconnected plots come together to form the ‘big picture’. Suzuki also provides access to Japanese folklore, offering insight into how various supernatural beliefs developed in this culture. There is also the way each book takes mythological themes of death, life and rebirth and re-works them into a perspective the modern reader can easily relate to. One common problem is that literary fiction is often confused with the  ‘Classics’.  While the canon will always remain as a set number of key texts, literary fiction is the quite the opposite. If it can be regarded as a genre, it is the most flexible of them all, as literary fiction can turn up in any style of writing.  To clear things up, I feel a great need to classify once and for all exactly what literary fiction means.

Literary Fiction – A Short Introduction
The term itself is very difficult to pin down and is surrounded by a plethora of preconceived ideas, most of which are often negative to say the least. The words ‘literary fiction’ are often associated with highbrow art that is often written in a way to be largely unintelligible to the average reader, and more often than not, with a focus on garnering as many awards as it possibly can.

While some of these are tell-tale traits of literary fiction, I am glad to say that it isn’t as straight-forward or narrow as that. ‘Literary’ means ‘of words’, and a work of literary fiction often indicates one to be of considerable merit within its own respectful genre. It may also mean that the book is written with a focus on style, psychological depth or character development.The best thing about literary fiction, is that it often has something important to say about its subject matter or about the art of writing, which means a relatively new book can be classed as literary fiction.

These are traits carried by the books as each one takes the ‘viral’ theme and develops it in a new direction. While some people may not like the progressive changes Suzuki made in his follow-up novels, I thoroughly enjoyed them, as it challenged me to refocus my own theories and assumptions about the plot which taught me a lot about how important it is to keep a story as creative as possible. It was also wonderful to see a work that straddles more than one genre keep the plot balanced between the two. Even though horror and science-fiction do go quite well together, it is difficult to produce a story that is ‘credible’ enough to keep the reader involved, and this is a very important factor for both these genres. If you think of literary classics like Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, both depicted at the time, a fantastical future that was thoroughly make-believe. But what made them so popular for later generations was their grounding in the political and scientific theories at the time. Of course today’s critics hail them as works of immense foresight, as some of those fantastical things have become a reality.

Frankenstein’s monster was created by various body parts and resurrected through ‘galvanism’ or lightning. Today, doctors can perform amazing surgical feats such as skin grafts and organ transplants. We have also discovered that the human body has its own electrical current and cloning is now a reality. ‘Big Brother’ was the theme of Orwell’s dystopian story, as people are ruled by a despotic government that perpetrates mind control, constant surveillance of its citizens and torture. This scenario is not far off, as some governments i.e. China and Iran constantly monitor, block and censor information on the internet that goes against it’s policies. In a time where freedom of speech and thought has never been so relaxed; there are still parts of the world where people are punished for their thoughts. 

In the ‘Ring’, the now extinct smallpox virus finds it’s way onto a video tape, which when viewed infects its audience in the form of a curse. In ‘Spiral’ this virus mutates, finding it’s way onto the internet and to millions of viewers. The result is an epidemic on an unprecedented scale. Contrary to popular belief, in reality the smallpox virus is all but extinct. It is still kept alive in two places; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in United States and the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in Koltsovo, Russia. There have been rumours that the virus is intended for use in biological warfare.

The viral theme however does not end here, as in ‘Loop’ we are introduced to the concept of artificial intelligence; something that many programmers are working on. Lately gaming systems like the Nintendo Wii have made physical interaction a part of the gaming experience. There is a great desire to create an ‘intuitive’ relationship between man and machine. The iPad is a great example of how this what with the development of the ergonomic touchscreen and the facility to flip the screen any way you like. I feel that it’s only a matter of time before a totally independent artificial intelligence program is created. What something like this will bring only time will tell, but one thing is for sure, art often does imitate life which gives me the feeling that fiction offers us an uncanny glimpse into the future.

These are but a few of the big themes these books analyse. As technology takes over making our lives more easier, we tend to lose other things. We become alienated from the organic and the natural. What Suzuki tries to illustrate is what happens when the unnatural begins to control our lives as it changes it against our will. The symbol of the virus comes to mean many things. The mutation of it throughout the three books shows the relentless process of evolution and the fact that we haven’t arrived at out final state and we are still a work in progress. The creation of artificial intelligence (playing ‘god’) brings about the ‘curse’ or the cross all humanity has to bear for making something it cannot even begin to fathom. I could go on and on, but I would be giving away a lot of spoilers, and that wouldn’t be fair for those who wish to read and find out for themselves.

Oh, and for all those who think that Suzuki might have stolen the ‘world within a world’ plot from the Matrix films, think again. ‘Loop’ was first published a year before Matrix Reloaded was screened. How’s that for predictive fiction?

Share this:

  • Email
  • Print
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • More
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

RSS Links

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

RSS Feed RSS - Comments

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 636 other subscribers

Blog Stats

  • 364,583 hits

My Visitors

free counters

Recent Posts

Top Posts

  • Hunter S. Thompson | "Some May Never Live, But The Crazy Never Die"
  • Book Review | 'Heroes and Villains' by Angela Carter
  • Hymn to Isis | (3rd-4th Century)
  • Famous Quotes | Edgar Allan Poe
  • Book Review | 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold' - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • Would You Like to Smell Like Your Favourite Author?
  • Banned Books | Top Banned, Burned and Challenged Books
  • Sylvia Plath | 'Mary's Song'
  • Quick Review | 'South of the Border, West of the Sun' - Haruki Murakami
  • 'The Diary of A Young Girl' by Anne Frank

The best of the best of the best…

Bookish tweets

  • RT @Rachael_Swindon: Doing an experiment. Some 316 MPs claimed their utility bills on expenses last year, with some members claiming more… 4 days ago
  • 4 of 5 stars to The Sandman by Dirk Maggs goodreads.com/review/show/52… 1 week ago
  • RT @FreefromTorture: Still not deleting it standard.co.uk/news/uk/suella… 2 weeks ago
  • RT @BeckettUnite: • Firefighters don’t get subsidised food for saving lives • Nurses don’t get free parking for saving lives • Doctors don’… 2 weeks ago
  • RT @GNev2: They did! https://t.co/hWkIavggNN 1 month ago
Follow @WordlyObsession

Pinning stuff on boards is fun!

Follow Me on Pinterest

What’s on the Shelf?

Reading Wishlist!!

WP Book Bloggers List

For finding things…

50 books a year 1001 book list angela carter audiobook Benjamin Lebert book challenge book review books che guevara childrens fiction chinua achebe comic books crazy Dr. Gonzo dystopian edgar allan poe fantasy fear and loathing Fiction frankenstein goodreads gothic fiction Grapes of Wrath gustave flaubert Haruki Murakami hubert selby jr humour hunter s thompson ian fleming Indian literature Its monday what are you reading? japan japanese japanese horror story jm coetzee John Steinbeck Jorge Luis Borges kazuo ishiguro kurt vonnegut l. frank baum literary fiction literature liz jensen love story meme midnights children oscar wilde Paul Auster peter ackroyd poetry readalong religion roberto bolano Robert Rankin romance rory gilmore reading list rum diary ryu murakami salman rushdie science fiction short story stephen king sylvia plath teaser tuesday the motorcycle diaries the rapture Tokyo toni morrison Top Ten Tuesday United States ursula le guin virginia woolf war wondrous words wednesday writing

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Wordly Obsessions
    • Join 156 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Wordly Obsessions
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
%d bloggers like this: