• I wrote a review of Louis de Bernières’s Corelli’s Mandolin for my group book blog, which you can find here.
• I was still thinking about Wally Lamb’s This Much I Know Is True for literally weeks after finishing. I finally had to lend it to a friend to stop staring at the cover on my desk and silently internally weeping. Yikes bikes.
• Here is a pretty good review of the Great Gatsby movie that I think pretty well sums up my reaction to it, if you weren’t tired of it already.
Happy Monday!
Of course I saw Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby on the opening night, because it is one of my favorite books and I read it like six times in high school and I wrote my college application writing sample on it and also I like seeing Leo DiCaprio in roles he might be good at. Here is what I thought about it. I am too lazy to hide spoilers behind a cut, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet and would like to, probably stop reading now.
I reread TGG last weekend and avoided all movie gossip prior to the showing, so I went into the theater both prepared and ignorant. With F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose fresh in my mind, I was constantly picking out direct lines from the book. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie adaption that stayed so true plot-wise to the original book, with two exceptions. One was the absence of Gatsby’s funeral. Not crucial, but added a nice wrap-up to the novel. The other and larger change was that Nick Carraway is apparently now in a sanitarium for morbid alcoholism??? Luhrmann used it as a nice little device to explain Nick’s ongoing narrative of events past, but it seemed a bit of a desperate gimmick. As the setting of the movie’s very first scene, it also began a portrayal of Nick that, while complete and complex in its own right, was not entirely who I had found Fitzgerald’s original narrator to be.
I think it’s pretty standard that, when done well, movies are generally more emotionally charged than books—you can’t ignore the visual aspect when reacting to plot developments. I liked that diCaprio’s Gatsby was emotional and sometimes fragile; I sympathized more with him and his blind optimism than I did with Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, whose essence is, after all, built on a façade. That was true with diCaprio as well, but seeing his clear agony when planning his reunion with Daisy really drove home his desperation to repeat the past.
Nick Carraway’s increased sentimentality I did not appreciate. Fitzgerald’s Nick is, to me at least, a deliberately understated character. He’s an observer, but not necessarily a passive or tender-hearted one. Tobey Maguire’s Nick, by contrast, was drawn to Gatsby to the point of besottedness. Interesting in its own right, I suppose, but often drew the focus of the film from Gatsby, the undisputed hero of the book, to Nick and his own reactions and emotions. He was a weaker observer, asexual at the very least, at one point even lewdly taunted by Tom Buchanan for “always liking to watch.” His affair with Jordan, implied so strongly in the book as to make it obvious, never really materializes (although Jordan herself, one of my favorite characters in the book for her extreme disinterest, was far too giddy in the film for my tastes).
The true scene stealer here, and the primary reason I would watch this movie again, was Joel Edgerton as Tom. I suspected from the trailer that he could be great, and he was fantastic. Tom—brutish, bigoted, and abusive—is a bit of a one-note character in the book. Edgerton kept these key traits, but also underlined how vindictive and truly dangerous he was. In one of the plot’s most pivotal scenes, the confrontation in the hotel room between Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy, you could clearly see the emotional duality in Tom’s actions: rage at what he has just discovered between Gatsby and his wife, and a controlled confidence that he will emerge on top. The tension in the audience was palpable as Tom goaded an increasingly excitable Gatsby, giving real substance to Daisy’s doubts about her future with a bootlegger of questionable dealings. (The tension was there, at least, until any one of Carey Mulligan’s lines. The true disappointment in this movie, all her lines were stiffly delivered and reminded me instantly that I was sitting in a movie theater watching career actors and that I had a sugar headache from eating too many watermelon Sour Patch Kids.)
I’ve read a few reviews of the movie since Friday night, almost all negative (except for a seemingly universal awe for Edgerton’s performance). Yes, it wasn’t the greatest movie ever made, but please, reviewers, get off your high horse. You are not God, you are not F. Scott Fitzgerald, you do not know the one true meaning of TGG. I found the movie to be enjoyable, entertaining, and, for the most part, well done, and I’m perfectly satisfied with that.
I read Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone a few months ago, and it’s stuck with me pretty solidly. Lamb doesn’t pull any punches with the s*** that goes down, but his characters are so real in their complete flawed effed-up-ness that it kept me page turning until the end. I decided to follow up with Lamb’s other famous novel, I Know This Much Is True.
IKTMIS is the story of identical twin brothers Thomas and Dominick Birdsey. Thomas has paranoid schizophrenia and has been institutionalized for half of his life, almost twenty years. The story opens with Thomas entering a public library and cutting off his own right hand, believing his sacrifice has been commanded by God to stop the approaching Gulf War. Dominick, the narrator, searches through his relationship with his brother, recalling a childhood with a submissive mother and abusive stepfather and trying to come to terms with his existence as the mentally and physically “whole” twin.
I should’ve been prepared for Lamb coming out of SCU, but honestly, this was probably the most emotionally difficult book I have ever read. Each of the characters experiences a pain that is almost palpable in its intensity, and Dominick sits at the forefront of this. Bound to his brother for life by love, fear, and guilt, he is unable to move forward on his own or forge an identity for himself separate from that of Thomas’s protector. Dominick himself certainly isn’t a perfect protagonist: he’s often arrogant and aggressive. After growing up both scornful and jealous of his brother’s sensitivity, he martyrs himself in caring for Thomas, accepting that sole responsibility as his role in life.
The best thing you could do was cut your losses. . . Play defense. That was something I always understood and Thomas never did.
The second half of the book weakened a little for me, as Dominick is hospitalized after an accident, reads their grandfather’s memoirs, and searches for their father’s identity. But the first half— Man, the first half just ripped out my heartstrings. These identical twins, so close they can tell when the other one is hurt, and one spending his life watching the other be destroyed, unable to either help or leave. It’s a story of redemption, really, for Dominick, redeeming himself for failing to protect both Thomas and himself.
“. . . there are two young men lost in the woods. . . I may never find one of the young men,” [Dr. Patel] said. “He has been gone so long. The odds, I’m afraid, may be against it. But as for the other, I may have better luck. The other young man may be calling me.”
For the very first time, my suggestion won the nomination for next month’s nostalgic English majors’ virtual book group—Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette. I managed to snag a library copy and realized yesterday that it was due today, which meant I had to speed-read it and must now take super copious notes to retain anything for next month’s discussion.
WYGB centers around eccentric and agoraphobic Bernadette Fox-Branch and her teenaged daughter, Bee. According to her husband, Elgin Branch, Bernadette is a genius; according to the Seattle private school community, she’s a menace. To Bee, she’s simply a best friend. After Bernadette disappears right before a family vacation to Antarctica, Bee compiles personal and professional emails, newsletters, and memos in an attempt to find her mother and discover why she ran.
Semple’s strength here is definitely her humor. As a past writer for Arrested Development (among other hilarities), she deftly skewers Seattle’s upper-middle class community, especially private-school parents and Microsoft, where Elgin works. Bernadette’s rants on the “bike-riding, Subaru-driving, Keen-wearing” people who surround her were both amusing and bittersweet with homesickness for the granola-filled PNW. (Although Seattle is definitely a different brand from Oregon—for starters, Seattleites have money.)
Sometimes these cars have Idaho plates. And I think, What the hell is a car from Idaho doing here? Then I remember, that’s right, we neighbor Idaho. . . And any life that might still be left in me kind of goes poof.
I must admit that as much as I enjoyed it, I’m a little hard-pressed to think of discussion topics for WYGB. Aside from the fact that I believe we all hail from the PNW (and certainly went to college there), I’m not sure what else there is for a handful of starving ex-English majors to really sink their teeth into. In itself a worthy academic challenge, I suppose. Really, though, I’m pretty sure we could spend the entire time calling out the hysterical Seattle stereotypes. As the NYT points out:
[Galer Street School] gives three grades: S for “Surpasses Excellence,” A for “Achieves Excellence” and W for “Working Towards Excellence.” So every kid is some kind of excellent.
BAHAHA. So funny because so true. God, I love the PNW.
As I’ve said several times before, I am actually an old woman. High on the list of my guilty pleasure reading material, then, is author Anne Rivers Siddons. I’ve previously written on my all-time fave book of hers, Colony, and I picked up Peachtree Road last weekend at the library book sale and immediately dove in.
PR is full of Siddons’s favorite themes: the South, love, betrayal, madness, family loyalty, I could go on. Basically everything that (for me) makes a real cozy page-turner. Cousins Shep and Lucy could not be more different, but growing up together in 1940s’ Atlanta left them forever bound together in ways that brutally and even fatally cripple both of them. Shep is the rich heir of distant parents, plagued by his own sensitivity and sabotaging loyalty; Lucy is the unloved oldest daughter of a social-climbing mother who never recovers after being abandoned by her father at the age of six. The book follows them through their tumultuous adolescence all the way through middle age, as Lucy flits from husband to lover to husband and Shep retreats further and further into self-imposed isolation in the house he grew up in.
Colony remains my favorite Siddons work. While certainly dark, there’s a larger sense of beauty, mostly rooted in the New England coasts and Charleston swamps of its setting. PR is dark all the way through. Through its setting, some action from the civil rights movement is included, but this takes a back seat to the internal demons constantly plaguing the characters, primarily Lucy. The love between Shep and Lucy is twisted and warped, with little to no redeeming gladness. Certainly an interesting psychological study, but not necessarily the kind I look for in a guilty pleasure reading. Their Catherine-Heathcliff bond was a little too much for Siddons to tackle.
One of Siddons’s greatest strengths, I think, is her description of place, and PR did not disappoint. In an early speech from Shep that may very well have been taken from Scarlett O’Hara fifty years earlier, he explains why he never left Atlanta:
It’s passionless, calculating, self-satisfied, intolerant, insensitive, uncultivated, vulgar, even soulless . . . but it’s alive!
That’s what I keep coming back to Siddons for.
I have to admit it: I have now become a quitter. Specifically, I quit reading Will Self’s Umbrella only 40 pages in.
I have a condition by which if I begin a book, I must finish it. This is not a stance I can easily be shaken from, not one I can easily talk myself out of. Often, friends, family, or even myself ask, “You clearly don’t enjoy this book—why don’t you just stop?”
I don’t have a good answer to this question. It’s a reasonable one, I admit, yet not one that I seem willing to face reasonably. At least I’m consistent: I don’t really quit anything easily. I have a persistence, tenacity, and stubbornness that usually goes far beyond the rational and is often more of a hindrance than a help. I have been known to hold out for people, plans, etc., long after a sane person would’ve given up on them, and usually end up sabotaging myself in the process.
In the particular case of Umbrella, it just was not really my jam. In hindsight, I should’ve known better after unfortunately seeing it referred to as “unabashedly literary” and “[the injection of a] revivifying drug into the somnolent body of literary modernism” (yeesh). It was this month’s book selected for my nostalgic English majors’ book group (I completely failed to blog about our last meeting—short stories—but I have notes about it somewhere for the next time I get bored/inspired).
This isn’t so much an entry about Umbrella, though, since clearly I didn’t get anywhere near far enough into it to even begin to discuss it (and thus why I skipped the book group meeting—quitter, quitter, quitter). This entry is more dedicated to my own musings as to why I feel so guilty putting down a book unfinished.
I was the kid who should have never, ever watched any of the Toy Story franchise, because I was already so convinced that all inanimate objects had feelings that those movies sent me into a years-long shame spiral as a child. I would cry whenever I lost anything, not only I was sad I no longer had it, but also because all I could imagine was that object alone, friendless, and forgotten. So part of it, I think, hinges on that—I’ve somehow decided that not finishing a book equates abandonment.
The other half is completely self-centered and the primary reason I tried so hard with Umbrella. I have also somehow come to see not finishing a book as a personal failure, a sign that I wasn’t good enough or smart enough to complete what I had started. Even though most of my thoughts while reading Umbrella ran mostly along the lines of “I don’t understand this, this is miserable,” all I was able to hear was “I don’t understand this, I’m disappointing my teachers, my parents, and myself by not trying hard enough.” It’s not a fun realization, to be sure, but one I have a hard time letting go of.
So. I credit this weekend’s library book sale with helping me to let go of Umbrella—at least for now. But when you have five brand new (to you) books waiting on your desk, each easily surpassing 400 pages and selected with immense care from tables upon tables upon boxes of books, what’s a girl to do?
Hey strangers. Let’s get started.
I’d had John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars on my to-read list for ages, but like every other new and decent book, it had a library waiting list a mile long. Luckily, I have friends with more disposable income/propensity to spend said income on books than I do. So I borrowed it, read it fairly quickly, and then held onto it for weeks until I finally got around to blogging about it (and, for the first time, missed an entire month. Sorry, February).
TFiOS is a book about young adults and (arguably) written for young adults, without being a young adult book. Like the metatastic An Imperial Affliction, it is a book about cancer without being a cancer book. It’s a book about death without being a death book. (Is that a thing? Who cares.) It’s a book that, basically, doesn’t try to be anything—and is beautiful for it.
Hazel is 16 and terminally ill with cancer. She loves her parents, ANTM (but I mean, who doesn’t), and the book An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten. She doesn’t love Support Group, which her mother makes her attend to attempt a normal social life. It’s at Support Group that she meets Augustus Waters, known as Gus, a 17-year-old in cancer remission with a prosthetic leg. The two strike up a friendship that—slowly, agonizingly slowly—becomes a romance.
I really can’t say too much more about the plot without major spoilers. Luckily, though, I found there was a lot more to this book than merely the plot. As the narrator, Hazel is biting, sassy, and not afraid to sound like the angsty teenaged girl that she is. The thing she struggles with throughout the entire book, though, is that she’s not really a teenager—she’s constantly, painfully aware that she is closing in on the finale of her very short life. How do you contain a life, a love story, a first kiss, a soulmate, to such a truncated timeline? Hazel’s and Gus’s physical and emotional states are chaotic and often humiliating, the stakes of every day are unbelievably raised, and it’s all far more romantic and unflinching than an expected lifetime.
…depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)
Hazel and Gus’s flirtation is adorably familiar to any survivor of a high school romance. At the same time, though, it’s constantly punctuated with agonizing abruptness. Hazel and Gus aren’t startled by this—it’s their entire life, every aspect of it, and they’re not spending it pointlessly wallowing—which makes it both refreshing and tragic. At one point, Hazel talks to a fellow cancer kid who’s been dumped by his girlfriend:
“To be fair to Monica,” I said, “what you did to her wasn’t very nice either.”
“What’d I do to her?” he asked, defensive.
“You know, going blind and everything.”
“But that’s not my fault,” Isaac said.
“I’m not saying it was your fault. I’m saying it wasn’t nice.”
Dayzz and dayzz of not reading/blogging. Hello, 2013!
I read Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone over Christmas vacation, so forgive me if my recollection of the book is not super detailed/accurate. SCU is Dolores Price’s first-person narration of her life—from a childhood of divorce, to a preteen rape victim, to a college dropout, to a mental patient, to a wife. It’s a messy, messy story, and not one that I went into (or came out of) lightly.
A friend had earlier compared this book to Augusten Burrough’s Running with Scissors, and while they are of a similar genre (let’s take this chance to coin the term bildungsroman disturbia), my emotional reaction to each was very different, perhaps due to the difference between memoir and fiction. RwS left me shocked, uncomfortable, and majorly questioning my own life boundaries and expectations. While SCU was no less shocking, no less uncomfortable, I finished it feeling gratified.
The difference, I think, was my attitude toward the protagonist. Dolores is no saint, no traditional heroine—in fact, throughout much of the book, she treats the people in her life horrifically. Her decisions made me cringe, her choice of allies terrified me, and her lifestyle was often repellant. Yet her tenacity and frankness caught my loyalty from the start. Throughout all the truly awful s**t in this book, I remained a firm believer in Dolores, a reading experience that’s not easy to overlook. Somehow, Lamb created a powerful and deeply sympathetic character out of disillusionment and pain. It’s something to be aware of before starting this book, I think, but well worth the emotional disturbance of reading it.
It’s been a while since I posted because it took me a while to get through this book—I’ve spent the past 2-3 weeks listening to the recording of Kate Morton’s The Secret Keeper. This was about 90% due to a free Audible download I acquired, and 10% due to my theory that I’d be able to focus more at the gym with a new recorded book than with the same playlists I’ve been listening to for at least the past four years (I will say that theory had a nearly 85% success rate the one time I tried it). This is the third Kate Morton book I’ve read (including The Forgotten Garden and The Distant Hours), so I felt enough of an expert to recommend her books as Christmas gifts for not one, but both grandmothers this year! So if you, too, share literary taste with your octogenarian relatives, I suggest you read on.
Like all her other books, TSK revolves around two main stories: the first from the past, relying heavily on orphans, lost lovers, and family secrets; and the second of a modern-day relative/somehow-involved person attempting to unravel the decades-old mystery. This particular book opens on a lazy summer afternoon in 1961, when 16-year-old Laurel witnesses her mother, Dorothy, commit a violent crime. Fifty years later and beside her mother’s deathbed, Laurel begins to make sense of what she saw and explore the trajectories of the past that culminated in that one act of desperation.
The majority of the story is told from three different viewpoints: the adult Laurel, the young Dorothy in war-torn London during the Blitz, and Vivian, Dorothy’s sophisticated and mysterious friend. As Laurel gradually uncovers, Dorothy and her fiancé became involved in a “plan” for their future that went terribly awry, a plan that resulted in deaths and irreparably shattered relationships, a plan with repercussions that reached 20 years into Dorothy’s future as a happily married mother.
As I’ve said, Morton’s books are highly formulaic, but this one had two major differences from the others I’ve read. First of all, I truly hated young Dorothy. I normally find the modern storyline to be the dullest: I’m less than interested in a thirty-something sad sack trying to figure out why she’s always felt her life to be missing something and then finding the answers in the past, etc., etc. Laurel, a 66-year-old Oscar-winning actress, was smart, resourceful, and had a refreshing amount of sass and cynicism about her (of course I identify with the grandmothers’ heroine). Young Dorothy, on the other hand, was revolting. Spoiled, whiny, manipulative, and quite frankly delusional, I found very little to recommend her throughout the entire story. I was far more interested with her fiancé, Jimmy (Morton’s excellent job of painting his carefree handsomeness and shock of brown hair falling into his face certainly did not hurt), and Vivian, who was just prickily enough to draw me in right away to whatever she was hiding.
The second thing that caught me off guard was the ending. No spoilers, but Morton’s MO is to divulge an “ending solution” to the mystery that all characters accept as true, then drop the real ending in a huge twist at the very end. I was practiced enough in this habit to recognize the false resolution as soon as it was revealed, but was equally certain that I knew exactly what the real ending would be. However, I was ultimately outsmarted—the true resolution was one that had never even occurred to me (although, looking back, it really should have).
This Christmas Eve, I’m sitting in my parents’ house in front of the fake gas fire, eating peppermint stick ice cream and watching my mother vacuum under the tree. In literary news, I’m giving my dad a copy of Wolf Hall and the movie A Man for All Seasons (the ultimate history nerd’s double feature!!). I also just finished She’s Come Undone, but since I’m behind on blogging and don’t have anything to read for the rest of my vacation, I’ll save it for next time.
In other words—happy holidays!!
Today, my virtual book group met to discuss Wolf Hall. As the first woman to win two Man Booker Prizes and the first author of a book and its sequel to both win Bookers, Hilary Mantel is causing quite a lot of buzz in the literary world. As a complete history nerd, this Book One in the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy was also a great pick for me. I’ve read quite a few books (fiction and non) on the Tudor reign, and what always fascinates me is how many different perspectives there are on the dichotomy of good and evil. So many characters, so many power struggles, so many conflicting perspectives on right and wrong—which is why there were also so many beheadings. Across the board, though, Thomas Cromwell is almost always a villain, which made Mantel’s focus on him especially fascinating.
One of the major themes we discussed today was the power of narrative and its pervasiveness throughout the novel. Again, Henry VIII’s reign was fraught with discord and feuding factions—the narrative is unclear, unorganized, and open to rewriting. Cromwell himself manipulates others’ narratives throughout the course of the story, attempting to shape the amorphous facts of reality into a cohesive and sensical narrative.
As one friend mentioned, Cromwell seems a true 20th-century man, at times out of his element. He’s a common man motivated by upward mobility, whose personal ethics are sometimes at odds with his governmental role. He takes every opportunity to give others a chance to save themselves from a brutal fate—during the climactic pages when he interviews Thomas More and judges him as treasonous for refusing to swear Henry VIII as the head of the church, Cromwell constantly tries to convince him to just give the king the minimum. He explains that just saying the words will be enough, just signing More’s name—there is no follow-up action required, it doesn’t matter what More actually believes, he can have his fingers crossed for all Cromwell or the king care. He’s unable to understand More’s refusal to do so, a stance which convinces Cromwell that More deserves his fate.
“I have never understood where the line is drawn, between sacrifice and self-slaughter.”
“Christ drew it.”
“You don’t see anything wrong with the comparison?”
Obviously, Cromwell’s attitude is mirrored by the religious and political thrusts of the time. Martin Luther and King Henry, though for conflicting reasons and at odds with each other, are each attempting to redefine the Christian church, to rework the gospel narrative. They seek to take away the immense power of the Church, the emphasis on a need for an interpreter for the common people. As Henry’s chief minister, Cromwell is charged with the task of distributing this message to the English, spreading the Act of Supremacy that More so objects to.
It doesn’t, as some say, make the king head of the church. It states that he is head of the church, and always has been. If people don’t like new ideas, let them have old ones. . . I am all for clarity.
Cromwell’s stance for clarity is certainly a precarious one. While I found the middle of WH slow going at times, it certainly picked up toward the end, and I can’t wait to read the second in the trilogy and Mantel’s newest Booker winner, Bring Up the Bodies.
