HoL Book Club | Part 1 (Front matter, back cover, dedication, flap copy)

Tags

book challenge, book club, books, gothic fiction, HoL, house of leaves, literature, mark z danielewski

After a lengthy hiatus, I have decided to make a return to blogging. What pulls me out of my prolonged absence is a cocktail of slightly unpleasant things that life has thrown at me this week. Thursday especially was a pretty nasty bastard, I’ll have you know.

Here are the ingredients, in case you should want to emulate my Poe-esque misery:

• Add two parts arctic ‘Beast of the East’, by standing out in the freezing cold for 50 minutes. You are not allowed a coat, and should stay there in the whipping rain until your marrow aches with pain, you can’t feel your ears and your nose is dripping like a broken tap.
• This, along with one parts of fatigue, will ferment to produce influenza-like symptoms quite nicely, with a pinch of voice loss to kick-start the whole thing. Fever, in the form of so many Shelobs will insert their pincer-like legs into your shoulders and neck, and if you are lucky, the small of your spine will also host a little succubus intent of riding the hell out of you indefinitely.
• By day 3, your voice has completely gone, or it alternates between a foghorn and the squeak of a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood. It is important that you are bedridden and mentally ‘crawling up the walls’ (a la The Yellow Wallpaper). This means you will do ANYTHING to combat the boredom within and without.
• Day 4 gifts the afflicted with an unbearable itch that pulsates like gamma rays from the INSIDE of ones forehead, just behind the eyes. I call this the ‘Clockwork Orange’ effect. It is okay to want to claw your eyes out, but to no avail. As a bonus, within the ears there is further movement that can only be described as something out of The Wasp Factory. Yes, wasps. Angry ones. In your head. Buzzing. Itching. And no way to itch it…
• Day 5 and you have to do something or you are going to go fairly insane… you are ill, you are missing World Book Day at school (the only time of year that is worth being a teacher at a school), everything you eat tastes like sawdust (oranges mostly). And if that is not enough, there is the grim approach of your 35th birthday, along with the thought of ‘what am I doing with my life?’ What is a girl to do?

So it is with all moments of productiveness, that are spurred on by desperation I find, that something comes to the rescue: The House of Leaves Book Club!

I thought to myself ‘why not?’ After all, it’s been 11 years since I entered that formidable htnirybal House on Ash Tree Lane, 11 years since I experienced quite literally the most powerful piece of fiction I have ever come across. I liked the fact that MZD planned this so close to his birthday, which is close to mine. I liked that it was a gargantuan project (once you fall into the house, there is no coming back out). In short, it felt like fate.

I’m never on time for book clubs, but this one started yesterday. Those taking part should be reading between the dates of 26th February and 3rd March the following:

• Front matter, back cover
• The dedication
• Flap copy

Now, since most people will have different editions (some coloured, some not) you will have to adjust what you read. Since I’ve gone through this monstrosity before and lived to tell the tale, for me it’ll be like entering the Overlook Hotel after Johnny went mental and the place was abandoned for years.

For those who have never read HoL but heard about it, the experience is a completely unique. There isn’t a novel like it, and I liken it to the mad genius of Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, where the novel has a life, will and consciousness (rather a ‘lack of’ of its own).

Those of you who have ever watched Stranger Things, will appreciate how Danielewski takes and uses the many tropes of horror fiction and makes it a thing entirely its own. Where there is the ‘underverse’ in Stranger Things, there is the also the monstrous labyrinth in the house.

FIRST-TIMERS WARNING: This is no spoiler, but if you decide to do the read-along, then you will inevitably run into the CODES – these are secret messages embedded in the text/ footnotes/ margins etc. I shall be periodically posting my thoughts about these as I come across them. If you do not know what I mean by this, check out the official FB website, where the madness has already begun with people cross-referencing like mad between the pages: House of Leaves Book Club.

There is also the real madness of the ‘coding’ forums, which can still be found here: Mark Danielewski Forums (caution upon entry is advised… it can get rather too much in there with the info. Spoiler alert…)

So, I’m off to read the bits assigned and will come back to address the all important question that MZD will be posing, which is:

“How does “This is not for you” apply to the book, the reader, and Johnny Truant?”

Is anyone game to read along with me and throw some theories out there?

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Top Ten Tuesday | Most Intimidating Books

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Ayn Rand, books, Dark Tower, don quixote by miguel de cervantes, james joyce, JD Salinger, literature, Miguel de Cervantes, roberto bolano, salman rushdie, satanic verses by salman rushdie, stephen king, Thomas Pynchon, Top Ten Tuesday, ulysses by james joyce, virginia woolf

This meme is brought to you by The Broke and the Bookish. Today’s topic is the top ten most intimidating books that we all dread to read for one reason or another. Here is my list of titles:

1. Ulysses by James Joyce – I will feel like a complete failure/idiot if I cannot get through this book in one sitting. Especially since it is THE most important book in modern literature. EVER. *shudders*
2. The Waves by Virginia Woolf – Sometimes Woolf can be completely incomprehensible to me. Her writing is like a strange melody with a hidden beat. I have to hunt for the damn thing in all the dense foliage of her prose. ‘The Waves’ completely baffled me and I wound up running to the nearest exit to this weird labyrinth of fiction.
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes – The sheer size of it puts me off. It lives on the shelf next to Milton’s Paradise Lost.
4. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger – I really don’t know why people call this a great novel. Never really saw it myself. Intimidating when you can’t see what millions of others can.
5.  Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon – He is so awesome. ‘The Crying of Lot 49‘ changed my taste in books drastically. It was also one of the hardest damn books I’d ever read. What if I don’t get this one?
6. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand – The books scares me (sheer size), Ayn Rand scares me (have you seen her?) OMIGOD.
7. 2666 by Roberto Bolano – I have a love/hate relationship with Bolano. I keep expecting the same kind of pleasure I get when I read Borges but get confused when I don’t. Confused and angry. Not quite the same as intimidated, but…
8. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie – So much controversy around this novel. What if I end up hating it? Will it cost me a well-respected author?
9. House of Leaves by M.Z. Danielewski – I read this once before. I don’t think I’ll read it again anytime soon. I have never been so scared of words and the things they can unravel both within and without. Danielewski is king. I grovel at his feet.
10. The Dark Tower series by Stephen King – A mammoth seven book series that I have only briefly dipped into. I don’t know if I can last the distance…

That’s my list of intimidating books guys. How about yours? Are there any above that scare the bejesus out of you? Would you add to the list?

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Looking Back at 2011 | A Year Through Books

Tags

American, book challenge, kurt vonnegut, literature, Michael Ondaatje, Slaughterhouse-Five

It’s that time of year again folks, a fresh new year. We’ll all be setting ourselves fresh new reading challenges, so it’s the perfect moment to look back at 2011 and see what we have accomplished and how we can further improve on our performances. I see that throughout the year I’ve discovered how some of heavyweights like ‘Beowulf’ are not all what they are cut out to be. Yet a penny dreadful like ‘Sweeney Todd’ can turn out to be a surprisingly solid five-star read!

A way to do this is to looks at goodreads.com’s ‘2011 Reading Challenge’. Being a slow reader, my personal record has never gone past more than 50 books, yet I was determined to do better. And I did, I managed to read 72 books. I’m thrilled! For 2012 I’n trying a tentative 70!

Here’s my selective reading journey for 2011:

5 Star Reads

White Oleander – Janet Fitch
The Snow Goose – Paul Gallico
Man in the Dark – Paul Auster
Peter Pan – JM Barrie
Beginners – Raymond Carver
The Cellist of Sarajevo – Steven Galloway
Marvels – Kurt Busiek
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Schaffer
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
The Legend of the Sleey Hollow – Washington Irving
The Tales of Bejamin Bunny – Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Peter Rabbit – Beatrix Potter
Labyrinths – JL Borges
A House of Pomegranates – Oscar Wilde
Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
Sweeney Todd – Anonymous
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Venus in Furs – Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

4 Star Reads

Prisoner of Zenda – Anthony Hope
The Angel’s Game – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Nazi Literature in the Americas – Roberto Bolano
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
2BR02B – Kurt Vonnegut
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Doll Short Stories – Daphne du Maurier
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Aesop’s Fables – Aesop

3 Star Reads

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Octopussy and the Living Daylights – Ian Fleming
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – A. Solzhenitsyn
Kung Fu Trip – Benjamin Zephaniah
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
The Informers – Brett Easton Ellis
Point Omega – Don DeLillo
Wolverine: Origins – Paul Jenkins
The Spy Who Loved Me – Ian Fleming
The Summer Without Men – Siri Hustvedt
Dune – Frank Herbert
First Love, Last Rites – Ian McEwan
Dr. Faustus – Christopher Marlowe
Japanese Fairy Tales – Theodora Yei Ozaki
English Fairy Tales – Joseph Jacobs
Grimms Fairy Tales – Brothers Grimm
Beowulf – Anonymous
The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith

2 Star Reads

Tales of Freedom – Ben Okri
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Civil War – Mark Millar
Florence and Giles – John Harding

1 Star Reads

Lost World – Patricia Melo
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur – Violette LeDuc
Lost Souls – Poppy Z Brite

So, how was your reading year? I hope you had an interesting one, and good luck for all the 2012 challenges.

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Book Review | ‘Florence and Giles’ by John Harding

Tags

book review, edgar allan poe, florence and giles, gothic fiction, henry james, john harding, literature, peter ackroyd, poe a life cut short, the turn of the screw

Florence and Giles by John Harding

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was my Hallowe’en read for the year, and I did get rather excited at the prospect of a ‘Poe’ meets ‘The Turn of the Screw‘, but it really wasn’t to be. While the concept is firmly rooted in the Gothic tradition (thanks to it being almost a re-write of the illustrious, aforementioned title by Henry James) it really does lack in the ‘scare factor’ that it so promises on the back cover.

This is the story of Florence and Giles, two orphaned children living with their estranged uncle in a vast, sprawling estate known as Blithe House. However, the name of the house is grossly misleading as nothing about the place is ‘blithe’. It is a cold, forbidding mansion with ancient turrets and a dark history. Florence is our precocious little narrator, and guides us through the ghostly happenings of the place and the strange people who live there.

Besides her quiet, rather innocent brother (who needs protecting most of the time) there is her uncle, a pedantic odd sort of man who much to Florence’s annoyance, forbids her to read. Despite her uncle’s stern request Florence does read and her midnight sojourns to the crumbling library were the most enjoyable parts of the book. A bit of a childhood fantasy come true for me! Another endearing aspect to Florence’s personality is her affection for Shakespeare, which she admires so much that she adopts his ‘word-forgery’. As a result she develops her own take on English, splicing words together to make them seem more dramatic. In some aspects she is uncannily like her uncle, and as the novel progresses is further strengthened to suggest a far closer blood-bond.

However when it comes to the accidental death of the old governess, and the appointment of the new one, I find things get a bit tedious. I could clearly see that the new governess was supposed to be a very scary witch-like character, possibly even a revenant, and Harding almost DID pull it off in a particularly hair-raising sequence, but it was never followed up after that.

Instead there is a ‘twist’, in that we realise that our narrator may not be as reliable as we first thought. For me, the turn of events served to kill the story rather than improve it.

It is a good novel for gothic fiction fans, but those looking fora bit more ‘oomph’ needn’t bother. If you want something like Poe, read Poe. There are really no substitutes for them in my opinion, but having said that I do commend Harding for having a go at it.

If you are interested in Edgar Allen Poe, please read my review on Poe: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd.

View all my reviews

Teaser Tuesday 26/7 | War Time Reads…

Tags

annie barrows, Cambridge, chicklit, historical fiction, kazuo ishiguro, Kensington, literature, mary ann shaffer, never let me go, Reading, Shropshire, teaser tuesday, the guernsey literary and potato peel pie society, war

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Now I’ve taken some time out from novel-writing, I’m happy to be back doing Teaser Tuesdays again. This week I have noticed my reading to be a bit ‘themed’. On one hand I have the charming “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows and on the other “When We Were Orphans” by the master of understatement, Kazuo Ishiguro. Both are set around WW2, but cover vastly different perspectives.  They both came highly recommended, and rightly so.

“It was the summer of 1923, the summer I came down from Cambridge, when despite my aunt’s wishes that I return to Shropshire, I decided my future lay in the capital and took up a small flat at Number 14b Bedford Gardens in Kensington. I remember it now as the most wonderful of summers.”  – Page 3

 
“I’m going to run through the wild-flower meadow outside my door and up to the cliff as fast as I can. Then I’m going to lie down and look at the sky, which is shimmering like a pearl this afternoon, and breathe in the warm scent of grass and pretend that Markham V. Reynolds doesn’t exist.” – Page 143

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Book Review | ‘Tales of Freedom’ by Ben Okri

Tags

african literature, Ben Okri, book review, literature

Tales of Freedom by Ben Okri

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

“But to hear Mozart in a bombed city: how much more beautiful it sounds, as if it were composed to somehow soothe the ruins, to promise a wiser future rising from the rubble.”

I don’t know how healthy it is to review a book I read in little over two hours last night, but here goes; there’s something odd at work in these short tales of ‘freedom’. They are evasive, slippery and almost gaseous in substance. They pass through you like a ghost, making you shiver with the tiniest fleck of what it might be. I don’t even think they want to be understood in the conventional way, so they neatly side-step the maw of theoretical analysis. I groped and groped for the bridging element between them as is usually the norm for a collection of short stories, but found none. There are a total of 14 micro narratives that include ‘The Comic Destiny’ (a literary mash-up of Dante‘s ‘The Divine Comedy‘ and Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot‘), ‘The Racial Colourist’ (an absurd scenario of racial categorisation evocative of Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’) and ‘The Golden Inferno’ (a very clever parable on ignorance and third-world poverty).

This was a very quick read owing to the generous spacing between the lines and the shortness of some pieces. Even though I had trouble understanding what Okri meant with some of these stories, I am nevertheless convinced every one of them were written with a very definite moral lesson in mind. My usual choice of fiction being of the literary type might have meant I’m a little handicapped when faced with stories of a poetic ilk, which means I’ll probably be diving into ‘Tales of Freedom’ at a more leisurely pace.

As I said, the stories are themed around concepts of ‘freedom’, but with some I failed to see how they could be classed as such. The language was also very sparse and plain. I got a sense that Okri was playing around with the bare nuts-and-bolts of story-telling; even less than that, possibly with a single transcendental idea, like he was trying to distill pure emotion into words. At times the sparsity of the text was so great that whatever half-baked conclusion I was trying to arrive at just fell through in the end. There are, in short, gaps in these narratives; and those gaps were probably put there on purpose. If there is one thing a reader cannot stand (and I know this from myself) is an omittance, a story without a ‘core’. It’s our comfort point, a home base both reader and writer touches mid-way through a tale. Without this, the reader-writer relationship suffers a disconnection and this is what I felt with ‘Tales of Freedom’.

Okri does make a mention of this kind of writing in the book itself, referring to it as ‘stoku’:

“A stoku is an amalgam of short story and haiku. It is a story as it inclines towards a flash of a moment, insight, vision or paradox… stokus are serendipities, caught in the air, reverse lightning.”

I leave it to you to make what you will of Okri’s little note on the form, but the stoku certainly played tricks on my mind, forcing me in the end to ‘read’ into or fabricate my own morals from the frustrating transparency of some of his stories.

View all my reviews

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Quick Review | ‘Poe: A Life Cut Short’ by Peter Ackroyd

Tags

biography, book review, edgar allan poe, gothic fiction, literature, peter ackroyd, poe a life cut short, Rufus Wilmot Griswold

Poe: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Anyone interested in the life of Poe will be aware of the tremendous hype surrounding his death. It is a fact that he died in a state of delirium, and was found in this state only a week after he had cheerfully waved goodbye to his aunt from a steamboat bound from Richmond to Baltimore. This was the last sighting of Poe until he was found dying six days later in a dirty tavern. What happened during that missing week is a complete mystery; one that is just as confounding as his tales of ‘ratiocination’ or detective fiction. Ackroyd’s short but succinct biography of this enigmatic literary figure begins with his death and the scant facts of his final days on earth.

As an author of the perverse and the macabre, Poe’s literary legacy has somehow managed to pervade all aspects of his life, and this is something Ackroyd explores without falling into the trap of sensationalism. But having said this, there were certain themes that ‘haunted’ Poe which Ackroyd looks at in great detail. Poverty, death from consumption, loneliness and abandonment were some of Poe’s most destructive and constant companions; demons that rode his back and coloured his outlook on life. As an orphan, Poe always yearned for love in the way of literary recognition. Acceptance by the masses was to be his vanity; which sadly pointed to a very deep and forlorn void stemmed by the women in his life; or a lack of them.

“Be silent in that solitude
           Which is not loneliness, for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
           In life before thee are again
In death around thee, and their will
          Shall overshadow thee: be still.”

Ackroyd deftly highlights in a straightforward manner how all these elements combined to produce Poe’s most extraordinary tales of terror and the suppressed psyche. Through them, Ackroyd explores the varying stages of Poe’s mental and psychological health, which unfortunately were always in a state of painful flux. If he was ecstatic and full of hope one minute, he would be found floundering in the pits of despair the next. Ackroyd doesn’t state as much, but he gives the impression that Poe might have been a manic-depressive or even bipolar. But it was probably his alcoholism that condemned him mockery by his literary peers and kept him from the fame that he so despaired for. Ackroyd documents how Poe struggled to keep a job down due to his binge-drinking and lost some very prestigious positions because of his unpredictable nature. In fact, drink was a common demon to the Poe family, as a letter by William (a cousin) shows.

“William Poe also wished to caution his cousin against that ‘which has been a great enemy to our family.’ The enemy was of course, a ‘too free use of the Bottle’. The Bottle was the demon of the Poes.”

But despite the negativity, Ackroyd also states Poe’s achievements. He was for one, a great critic who had an innate understanding of real art. He was a perfectionist, and it was often this sensitivity to beauty and an aggressive intolerance for anything short of it that earned him many enemies. Ackroyd describes how his reviews were often scathing, bordering on personal attacks. In ‘Poe: A Life Cut Short’ Ackroyd tries hard to present Poe as a more rounded personality. His loves were all-consuming and full of sacrifice; his hate was also much the same; and his financial state did not hinder him from saying exactly what was on his mind. His most famous disagreement to date is probably with Rufus Griswold, who abhorred him so much that after Poe died, he published a false memoir which stated all sorts of defamatory allegations against the deceased. Much to my relief, Ackroyd sensibly ignores this aspect of Poe’s life (again, too much hype), but does make a statement that very neatly sums up the actions of Griswold:

“Poe had met Griswold two years before, and they had circled each other in mutual suspicion masked by professional admiration. Griswold had succeeded Poe at Graham’s Magazine, where he had gained a reputation for literary chicanery. But the publication of his anthology in 1842 brought him a measure of success. Poe was ambivalent, describing it as ‘a most outrageous humbug’ to a private correspondent while lauding it in print as ‘the most important addition which our literature has had for many years received.’ The protestation was not enough. When a wholly and sarcastically negative review appeared in the Saturday Museum, Griswold assumed (wrongly, as it happened) that Poe had composed it. The there came Poe’s animadversions upon the book in his series of lectures. But Griswold eventually had his revenge. After Poe’s death he would be responsible for the most lethal character assassination in the history of American literature.”

This probably illustrates the reason why Ackroyd found it wise to steer clear of this episode (as interesting as it is). He acknowledges the fact, but does not allow it to take over and give birth to half-baked theories and gossip about Poe’s death that have found root over the years. A ‘character assassination’ it definitely was, but Ackroyd also makes it clear that Poe was no angel during his time as editor of various journals and magazines. For one, he reveals that Poe regularly wrote ‘spoofs’ or ‘hoaxes’ that were soon found out to be nothing but lies. These little events did not go in his favour, and reflected badly on his status as a credible editor.

Overall, I think this biography did a good job in weeding out the ‘gossip’ from the ‘facts’ surrounding Poe’s life. Ackroyd is an academic writer, and I appreciated his sensitivity in what went into the account and what was left out. The best thing about it is that Ackroyd allows the reader to make up their own mind about Poe. There is a very clear relationship between his life and his works and Ackroyd gets this just right. His account is not overdone with quotations which neatly side-steps the path to sentimentalism. After reading this I realised that Poe was a difficult man to pin down. The accounts of him vary from being as ‘unstable as water’, a ‘characterless character’ to being ‘the merest shell of a man’. Those who loved him commented on his deep intellect and his way with words. I think Ackroyd sums it up very well when he states that:

“Like a salamander he could only live in fire. But the fire was often started by himself. He stumbled from one passionate outburst to the next. He hardly seemed to know himself at all, but relied upon the power of impassioned words to create his identity.”

While alive, Poe’s words were constantly used against him. He was mocked and ridiculed, only because he had mocked and ridiculed others (a sign of starting the fire himself in many ways). But it was only after the death of this orphan, when only his words were left that he finally found his identity.

“Tennyson described him as ‘the most original genius that America has produced’, worthy to stand beside Catallus and Heine. Thomas Hardy considered him to be ‘the first to realise in full the possibility of the English language’… The science fiction works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells are heavily indebted to him, and Arthur Conan Doyle paid tribute to Poe’s mastery of the detective genre… The orphan, in the end, found his true family.”

View all my reviews

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Book Review | ‘Rape: A Love Story’ by Joyce Carol Oates

Tags

American, book review, Gulf War, joyce carol oates, literature, love story, Rocky Point Park

Rape : A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“After she was gang-raped, kicked and beaten and left to die on the floor of the filthy boathouse at Rocky Point Park. After she was dragged into the boathouse by the five drunken guys – unless there were six, or seven – and her twelve-year-old daughter screaming Let us go! Don’t hurt us! Please don’t hurt us! After she had been chased by the guys like a pack of dogs jumping their prey, turning her ankle, losing both her high-heeled sandals on the path beside the lagoon. After…”

This is how Oates’s story begins, with the unspeakable brutality of a gang of drunken youths on the fourth of July. After making the fateful decision to walk the ‘long way’ home, Teena Maguire’s life would never be the same again. For that night, she would be raped in the presence of her daughter Bethie, and left for dead. The horrible event rocks the sleepy city of Niagara Falls as Teena is discovered the next day by NFPD Officer Dromoor. As a Gulf War veteran who served in Operation Desert Storm and who had seen the worst of human suffering, the sight of Teena’s broken body was something he would never forget.

But that isn’t the end; there is an ‘after’ and it is this dreadful ‘after’ that Oates focusses on with such alacrity. What happens to the victims? The assailants? Their families? The community? What happens at the hearing, and how does it affect peoples’ opinions? For Teena, Bethie and her elderly mother, every day is a battle to survive through the shame of what has happened and the fear and loathing of the community and their attackers, who only live two blocks away from them.

However, something strange begins to happen. First, one of the rapists is shot dead, then another two go AWOL. Before long people begin to suspect that there is a silent angel of justice at work. But who is this mysterious person taking the law into their own hands?

In ‘Rape: A Love Story’, Joyce Carol Oates takes the common themes and transforms it into a uniquely intense and uncomfortable experience. She achieves this by cleverly alternating the narrative between third and second person perspective, which in turn is largely addressed to Bethie as if it were a kind of confessional. This has two effects; it helps to convey at times the pure, raw emotion that needed to bring the past to life and at other times the statistical objectivity that is crucial to the parts dealing with the scenes of the trial and the hospital. This places Oates’ novel apart from others, as it enables the reader to see the story from different perspectives.

Oates also casts an eye on the corruption of the justice system as the trial rapidly turns Teena from victim to the accused party. A whole slew of social prejudices crop up as Teena, an attractive single mother, is looked upon as a provocateur that ‘had it coming to her’ and is ostracized along with her daughter. As with all small communities faced with big tragedies, this strange dynamic suddenly unearths many suppressed feelings, grudges and misgivings that Oates is especially successful at portraying.

Other themes that are explored are luck and destiny, justice and closure. Although the book is fairly short (150 pages), Oates manages to cover a great number of the difficulties that face women with this kind of tragedy.

“There was a final shake of the dice. Another time it might have been averted. When Casey said, ‘Teena, let me drive you two home. Wait a minute, I’ll get the car,’ and your mother thanked him and kissed him on the cheek, telling him not to bother – ‘We want to walk, don’t we, Bethie? It’s a perfect night.’”

Bethie in particular keeps thinking about that fateful night, about what would have happened if they hadn’t taken the walk through the park. The desperate wish to somehow go back in time and set things right is an impossibility that permeates the text and makes a very strong impression on the reader. Despite everything though, Teena and Bethie do get a closure of sorts and are even able to carry on with their lives thanks to their saviour who liberated them from the crippling fear of living with their enemies. Even though this is about a rape, elements of sacrifice and of a ‘fatedness’ with the unknown saviour adds the unexpected, unusual ‘love story’ twist to this tale. I think this book will stay with me for a long time to come.

I give this 4/5 stars.

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Quick Review | ‘Amulet’ – Roberto Bolaño

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amulet, book review, Latin America, literature, Mexico, Pedro Garfias, poetry, roberto bolano, south american

Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it won’t appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won’t seem like that. Although, in fact, it’s the story of a terrible crime.”

And so begins the awkward, hallucinatory tale of Auxiliano Lacouture; the narrator of our story and self-proclaimed ‘mother of Mexican poetry‘. The story begins neither here nor there,but winds itself around people, events and fragmented memories like a kite driven by a wayward wind. Lacouture’s erratic narrative comes to rest on odd moments between art and people as Bolano tries to express the deep, subliminal messages sent and received by poets and their poetry.

“I am the mother of Mexico’s poets. I am the only one who held out in the university in 1968, when the riot police and the army came in… I stayed there with a book by Pedro Garfias.”

The story itself is loosely anchored around the drastic events of 1968, when the government ordered the storming of all state Universities, including the one Lacouture attends. Suddenly Lacouture finds herself trapped alone in the lavatory on the fourth-floor of the university, where she stays for 12 days without food or water. With nothing but a poetry book and her own memories, Lacouture begins to deconstruct events, recalling, rewinding and often going forward in time to piece together this unlikely ‘horror story’.

Part stream-of-consciousness, part feverish prophecy; the story unfolds as a metaphor for the confusion and rage that swells in the heart of Mexican poetry. Poets dead and alive populate the narrative, adding to the confused, collective cacophony of a country that rests on political turmoil. Amongst this, Lacouture emerges from the lavatory as a heroine, and is hailed by professors and students alike as a champion of literary art. She becomes a living legend, but her solitary confinement has opened a mystical door inside her. She had become a muse, a ‘Calliope’, as her eyes begun to see the power of poetry beyond the page, as she sees the army of the dead marching towards the unknown.

“And I heard them sing. I hear them singing still, faintly, even now that I am no longer in the valley, a barely audible murmur, the prettiest children of Latin America, the ill-fed and the well-fed children those who had everything and those who had nothing, such a beautiful song it is… I heard them sing and I went mad.

And although the song I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure.
And that song is our amulet.”

The quote above is the last paragraph and neatly ties up the ideology that drives this book which was pretty sketchy to begin with. The roundabout telling of the story and it’s incongruence sometimes frustrated me. But something inside me told me to keep reading on. Somewhere in there is a method to the madness, it glimmers through the tangle of voices the novel is composed from. I would say a re-read is in order if I am to truly understand that method.

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‘Crazy’ Best Bits II | What is Literature?

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Benjamin Lebert, crazy, literature

 “So what are you reading?” Janosch asks.
“The Old Man And The Sea.”
“Is it literature?”
“I think so.”
“So what’s literature?”
“Literature is where you read a book and feel you could put a line mark under every line because it’s true.”
“Because it’s true? I don’t get it.”
“When every sentence is simply right. When it reveals something about the world. And life. When every phrase gives you the feeling that you would have behaved or thought exactly the same way the character in the book does. That’s when it’s literature.”

Another life-enhancing dialogue between young teenage philosophers, Janosch and Lebert, this time trying to figure out the meaning of ‘literature’. And I’m glad to say, they get it spot on. Real literature carries inside it the lining of life. Something lived, something tasted, something suffered. Lebert sums this up with a grace beyond his years.