31

Oct

~don delillo~ mao ii

m2Read it in: just under a week

I’m sorry, but this post will be biased.  Why?  Because I worship Delillo like cup of hot coffee during winter exams, like a hug from a friend during menstruation.  His prose is incredible and his plots are unfathomable and his works make me feel like there are no words to describe.  He’s probably married, but I would take him on as a literary husband.

So Mao II is about many things.  It’s about an author who feel lost in himself and travels the world somewhat aimlessly.  It’s about a woman with a strong sense of community and spirituality that she can’t let go of.  It’s about the changing nature of the world, about the point of authors, about terrorism, about life and death.  Like most Delillos, it’s about everything.  Everything in the world is compacted into this tiny 250 page novel.  That’s what it feels like when you’re reading it, anyway.

Not only do I love Delillo’s prose and his characters, his plots (well, everything about him…) but he also includes pictures in this novel, and that I really like.  There are pictures at every major break in the novel.

m21 m22 m25m24m23

Sometimes the pictures are talked about.  Sometimes they simply provide a raw setting for the events that follow.  They are all loosely connected.  I love them.  It adds to the sheer depth of the novel.

If you open the book and flick to any page, you will find some awe-inspiring quote, something to make you think, make you feel uncomfortable, that remains with you long after you turn the last page.

The future belongs to crowds. (pp 16)

 

“Crowds,” Scott said, “People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are, totally jampacked, and I think of how they merge with the future, how the future makes room for the non-achiever, the nonaggressor, the trudger, the nonindividual.  Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd, pedaling, trudging, faceless, sort of surviving nicely.” (pp 70)

 

“And isn’t it the novelist, Bill, above all people, above all writers, who understands this rage, who knows in his soul what the terrorist thinks and feels?  Through history it’s the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark.” (pp 130)

 

She saw a man weaving through the subway saying, “I have holes in my sides.”  Not even asking for money or shaking a plastic cup.  Just going from car to car in that firm-footed pace you learn to adopt in the subway even if you are broken-bodied.  She tried to read the Spanish directions about what to do in an emergency.  “I have holes in my sides.”  There must be something about the tunnels and crypts of the city that makes people think they are Jesus. (pp 145)

Oh, how I love Delillo.  I read him on the bus and spend the rest of the day digesting what I’ve just read.  I would sit in the back room at work with my headphones on, listening to Sigur Ros (as I will recommend you do in a moment), eating my food automatically while soaking up Delillo’s prose.  Everything was lost except the novel, the descriptions, the meaning of life (or lack thereof) that was contained within those pages.  Read it, please.  It’s a short one, and if you haven’t discovered Delillo yet, please do yourself a favour!

Read it if you: are literate.

While reading, listen to: Varúð Sigur Ros over and over and over again.  This song will never stop fitting this book.  It sounds like a crowd moving.  It sounds like a thunderstorm brewing.  It sounds like New York City and Beirut and London all squashed together.

11 years ago Short URL 2 Comments

Last Name D/Postmodern literature

////////////

13

May

~jiang rong~ wolf totem

WTRead it in: close to two months

I read this on the recommendation of one of my relatives, who always gives me a stack of books to take away every time I visit her house so much so that I am worried I will have to pay more for overweight baggage on the flight home.  Needless to say, I tried to finish this one while I was still staying with her, but the whole 800 pages thing somewhat delayed me.

As my rule is that every book I start I must finish, taking on something 800 pages long is something I have to consider for a long time before starting.  Will it be worth it?  One hundred pages through, will I regret I ever opened it?  Will it haunt my bedside table for months and months before I can make the time to finish it?  It was the same with this one.  I’d never read anything like it and hadn’t even come to it myself, at that, but had had it passed onto me by someone who (I thought) didn’t know my reading tastes.  (Now from latter experience I know that she knows my reading tastes absolutely and will trust her on every recommendation)

Anyway, one of the contributing factors to beginning this one was that it had won the Man Asian Prize.  Any panel of judges who decide to take on a book of 800 pages, manage to read it to the end and after that decide to award it a significant prize must have thought it was pretty amazing.  I have to say that I understood why they thought so after I finished it.

So the story is about a young Chinese man who goes to live for a couple of months in the Mongolian plains, sampling the lifestyle.  At the same time it is about the shepherds of the Mongolian plains and their struggle to survive, in particular, the threat of the wolves to the survival of their sheep, also their livelihoods.  But on a larger scale it is about the diminishing lifestyle on the Mongolian plains which is being subjected to the Chinese cultural revolution, increasing industrialisation and the view that traditionalism equals backwardness.

The book is full of metaphors for one thing or another.  Through what the characters experience you can really get a sense that it means something else on a deeper level.  It is a beautiful book, yet it is also tragic, violent in parts, cruel and incredible.  The images depicted, especially the scenery passages, are written just beautifully.

When I first started reading it, I wasn’t sure what to make of it.  Reading the language, I sometimes felt as if I was reading a non-fiction novel, what with all the descriptions of the behaviour of the wolves, the lifestyle of the Mongolian shepherds.  But it turned out this was for the best.  Not only did I become used to this style of prose, but I also gained a complex understanding of what life was like for these people.  You knew what was going to happen because you could already understand the cycle of cause and effect that dictated these people’s lifestyles.

One more thing, and that is that although 800 pages is a significant trek, I often come out with the feeling that long books always trump small books.  You journey along with the characters, you live months and months with the regularity of picking up the same book every day, diving into the same world, the same characters, getting to know what it’s like.  You know everything there is to know about that world, all the information has been bequeathed to you and you understand it in the same way that you understand what you are learning in university or what your tasks are at work.  When I turned the final page, I felt like I had been shut out of that world, that the world had ended, even more so because the ending is such that you know that the events of the book can never be again, that it has all changed since now and those times can never reoccur.

It’s sad and long, but please read it.

Read it if you: are interested in the nomadic life of Mongolian shepherds, like nature-oriented literature, are interested in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, like wolves… or maybe not…, enjoy antagonism between human and animal with both sides having an equal chance of victory.

While reading, listen to: Varðeldur Sigur Ros

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Historical fiction/Last Name R/Literature

///////

27

Apr

~cormac mccarthy~ the road

TRRead it in: one day

There was a period almost this time last year where I read one book a day.  It was a fantastic, relaxing time.  There are some situations in which I wish I hadn’t tried to finish one whole book in such a short time period, and some where I am glad that I did.  ‘The Road’ was one book that I was glad to finish in one day.  Not because it was bad, of course – this is Cormac McCarthy, how could I find it bad?

However, I once read somewhere that this book was meant to be read without stopping, and this is easy to see.  We have no chapters, as such.  There are just scenes, one after the other, some vividly frightening, some incredibly sad, some happier than others.

For a brief synopsis, it’s about a father and son in a post-apocalyptic American setting, walking constantly to get to the sea, though they are not sure what they are going to do when they get there.  They are looking for civilisation, though the brief encounters they have with other humans are never very close to any definition of ‘civilisation’.

I haven’t seen the film of ‘The Road’, the most I’ve seen is the trailer.  But I think the book is probably better, simply because I don’t know how a film can trump this masterpiece.  Watching the trailer, I thought perhaps the film emphasised more of the horror aspects of the novel – there are some scary scenes – and not the overall feel of it.  But I’m probably wrong, having not seen the film, only the trailer.  What I want to say is that I don’t think this novel is horror in the way we classify horror to usually be.  It’s frightening and it’s one of those ones you can’t stop thinking about for hours/days/months after you’ve finished it.

It was frightening for me not only because there were parts in which they were trapped with no way of getting out, but because there was the overall intense feeling of loneliness, solitude and vanished hope.  It was incredible.  After each situation in which they were in danger, there wasn’t a feeling that, now that they had gotten themselves out, they were safe.  They were never safe and they never would be because there is nowhere to go.  It feels as if there is no one left except themselves; the other people they meet are only shadows of what humanity was like long ago.

We are able to sense this loneliness in a deeper sense because of the occasional moments of relief we are given – memories from the father of the time before the disaster, and also this wonderful scene in which they find a bunker full of things with which they can live their life comfortably – that are followed by the sheer inevitability that these cannot last, that life back in reality, walking the desolate road, will always have to resume.

This was my first Cormac McCarthy, picked up for all of five dollars at a book sale, and I was simply astounded by the prose.  I had never read anything like it in my life.  I felt that no book could compare to it, and it seemed for a long time that all other books simply paled in comparison.  Here is a little snippet of prose for you (this was the first time I found myself having to stop to write prose passages down, they were too good to forget):

‘The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.  Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.’ (page 192-3)

I love the way this passage gives us such a sense that the experiences of the characters are a part of something so much bigger than themselves, but at the same time we experience a sense of complete hopelessness and we know that there is no civilisation out there, that the entire earth is like this and that, no matter how long the pair travel along the road, they will never find what they are looking for.

I also love McCarthy’s use of long, long sentences endlessly connected by ‘and’.  Read my ‘All The Pretty Horses‘ review for some more samples and discussion of this.

At the end is a twist, however, that did indeed almost (or perhaps it did…) make me cry.

Read it if you: would like to experience something completely alien to what you’ve ever felt, want to be astounded by prose, want to be depressed, feel like you’re taking your world for granted, want to read a simply beautiful modern masterpiece, feel as if you have no faith in modern literature (this will restore your faith).

While reading, listen to: Facades Philip Glass, The Road Soundtrack Oleg Ivanov (inspired by the novel), Valtari Sigur Ros, Roslyn Bon Iver

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Last Name M/Literature

/////////

14

Apr

~michael ondaatje~ the english patient

TEPRead it in: two days

I picked up this book on the recommendation of my auntie, who said that the film was fantastic.  In fact, so did everyone else who looked over my shoulder in those subsequent two days to see what I was reading.  By far, the film seemed more famous than the book.  I can’t work out why though.

The book is quite fantastic.  What drew me in from the very beginning (apart from the intriguing blurb on the back cover) was the style of prose.  The descriptions of the house, the landscape, the people, the emotions are just brilliant.  I am a sucker for good prose, I wouldn’t have cared if the storyline was romantic and soppy, I was just there for the prose.  But, as a matter of fact, the storyline was good as well.

So we find our characters in a derelict villa in Tuscany – the young nurse who is mentally war-torn, the Italian thief who has lost both thumbs, the sapper whose specialty is defusing bombs and the English patient, burned all and deprived of almost all bodily function, except the ability to talk.  Over the course of the book, all these characters’ pasts are revealed in great depth, especially that of the English patient, and as important questions begin to rise, so do tensions.

Quite a lot of this novel is told in the flashback form, but not how we would usually imagine it.  The author uses a lot of present tense as well as past tense, which is interesting, though I’m not quite sure why he couldn’t just stick to the one tense all the way through (it’s not a case of flashbacks in past and current events in the present; the quote below is from a flashback).  If anyone has any suggestions why he might do this, please feel free to comment!

Here’s a little snippet of the beautiful prose that I thoroughly enjoyed:

He feels everything is missing from his body, feels he contains smoke.  All that is alive is the knowledge of future desire and want.  What he would say he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet.  He cannot altar what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world.  Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world. (page 157)

Read this if you: have an interest in war stories (WW2), love beautiful prose, are interested in the desert, are Indian, need a relaxing break from fast-paced thrillers.

While reading this, listen to: Serenade (for piano) Franz Schubert, Glassworks (opening) Philip Glass, Premiere Rhapsodie (for clarinet and piano) Claude Debussy, Fjögur Píanó Sigur Ros

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Historical fiction/Last Name O

//////

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.