21

Dec

the murder and revolution franchise

br22We are getting hit by an avalanche.  That’s right, an avalanche of youtube advertisements, 3D posters and movie trailers, all to celebrate the next installment of the Hunger Games trilogy.  Lord help us.  If you haven’t already realised this, I am not a big fan.  I found the second book of the trilogy just disappointing.  Having survived a crazy situation of ‘kill-everyone-until-there’s-no-one-left’, the characters surprisingly enough get to go straight back into another game of ‘kill-everyone-until-there’s-no-one-left’.  I think it’s worn a little thin, don’t you?

But that’s not the point here.

I just recently finished reading Battle Royale.  That’s right, the creme de la creme of sadistic-game-show novels.  Look on the internet and you will find time and time again people comparing Battle Royale to the Hunger Games.  Apparently HG wasn’t inspired by BR, but I’m going to take that with a grain of salt.  There is one striking similarity between the two, and that is that both are incredibly popular.

Despite the fact that these books force children into horrifying situations and brutally kill them, often with graphic descriptions, Battle Royale has become a cult classic and The Hunger Games is now a million dollar franchise.  That’s not all.  One of my favourite books of all time, The Lord of the Flies, features children killing one another as well.  Although it was criticised for being so violent, especially because the violence involved young people, it is now a classic.

  • Kill Theory (2009) is a movie where a crazy evil guy forces a group of teenagers to kill one another until one person is left
  • The Tournament (2009) is a movie about a tournament devised by rich, bored people, who pick contestants from the special forces and underworld groups to kill each other until one is left, for a cash prize
  • Gantz (2000-13) is a manga series about a group of students who, on reaching the afterlife, realise they have to kill aliens before the end of the human race occurs (or something like that)
  • The Lottery (1948) is a short story in which townsfolk are told to draw slips of paper out of a lottery; the chosen person is then stoned to death to ensure a good harvest
  • The Running Man (1982) is a Stephen King novel about a game show in which a couple of men run to escape ‘Hunters’ before time runs out; individual members of society can also receive cash if they see the men
  • The Long Walk (1979) is a Stephen King novel where teenage boys must endure a grueling walking race until only one is left alive
  • Series 7: The Contenders (2001) is a black comedy film about a game show where contestants are given guns and told to kill each other for the cameras
  • The Condemned (2007) is a film in which convicts are brought together and told to kill each other for a broadcast
  • The Most Dangerous Game (1924) is a short story about a man who enters a game situation on a deserted island where he must elude capture for three days

A couple of things stand out about this list.  First of all, none of these have become best-sellers or cult classic movies, although they tick the crazy-killing-game box.

Perhaps the write-a-bestseller-like-Suzanne-Collins list should go something more like this:

1. Crazy game show scenario
2. Include small children
3. Include a revolution against society

For some reason, it’s the combination of a brutal game show and a revolution against society that makes these books so popular.  But the two pretty much go hand in hand already; you have to have a totalitarian society already (in most cases) if the characters are going to be caught in any scenario where they have to kill each other off.  And in that circumstance, the most sensible thing for any decent protagonist to do is to decide to team up and rebel against society as a whole.

I don’t really know why people are so fixated on this idea, but it seems to have been that way for a while.  Remember right back to the Roman era (you can remember that far, can’t you?) when there were gladiator fights in pits to entertain the richer Romans?  Doesn’t that sound strikingly familiar?  Suzanne Collins states that this is one of the places where she drew her inspiration for HG.

But there seems to be an extra element added to this that makes it so popular.  The inclusion of very young people.  My sister pointed out that a lot of these books that become extremely popular are aimed at a Young Adult audience, so perhaps it is a result of YA readers out there being excited by something completely different that has finally become available to their genre by the inclusion of age-appropriate characters.

Or maybe there’s just something morbid in us that likes to see children be brutally killed?  It’s definitely controversial.  I feel that literature, for a while now, has been like those murder mysteries I like to watch on TV.  They will kill off old ladies and women and men, but never children.  Anybody under 20 years old is strictly avoided.  Well, they’ve finally broken past that and it’s hell for leather.

What do you think makes violent/mass murder novels so popular?  Why do you read them?

Because personally, I love them.

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Off topic

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07

Nov

~kamila shamsie~ burnt shadows

bsRead it in: couple of days

Another one from my last holiday reading spree.  This one was also recommended by my auntie, who knows how much I love Japan.  I also have a deep interest in the atomic bombings, so I was pretty keen to read this one.

But Burnt Shadows isn’t just about the bombing of Hiroshima – that’s only where it starts.  It travels through India, through Pakistan, through Afghanistan and later America.  You do the whole world from the time when everything was separated into axis and allies, right up until now, when everything Middle Eastern is presumed to be in relation with terrorists.  From one broken world to another, with many adventures along the way.

We meet the protagonist on the day of the Hiroshima bombing, where she loses everything.  We then follow her to India where she finds the man she will marry, and they are caught up in the violence as India severs its ties from the British and Pakistan is created.  Later on, her world is changed by the nearby war in Afghanistan.  She is caught up in world event after world event.  It really puts the events into perspective for you.  It’s one thing to see them on television, on the news, but to hear stories of them and the way they’ve changed people’s lives is another.

If anything, this book made me want to learn more languages.  As a student struggling to become fluent in my second language (Japanese) before I can even think about learning others on top of that, I felt very much like a global idiot.  The protagonists of this book can speak three, four, five languages or more.  It makes me so jealous!  But it also shows you what you can do with more than one language.  You can see into other identities, fit into places you wouldn’t otherwise be able to fit into, meet people and speak with people who otherwise wouldn’t talk to you, or say certain things to you.

This book is like an epic.  An epic in less than five-hundred pages.  We go to so many places in such a small amount of time.  Well, at least it felt like a small amount of time to me – who read it in only a couple of days, and at the end of it sat down thinking ‘where am I?’ and walking dazed to the kitchen to get a cup of tea.  Yes, that’s how I usually act when I’ve finished a book.

So, it’s good.  Just take it slowly.  Swallow it carefully and take the time to digest it, don’t follow my example, please.

Read it if you: are interested in the cultures of Japan, or India, or the Middle East, are interested in languages, want to travel this area more, have an interest in modern history, like a read that’s like riding a roller-coaster, like depressing things

While reading listen to: Four Tet Unspoken, Four Tet She Moves She

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Last Name S/Literature

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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

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30

Apr

~jack kersh~ hotel sarajevo

HSRead it in: one week

There was a time in my life when I came to feel as if there had only ever been pictures of war-torn countries on the TV that were Middle Eastern.  The footage hardly ever portrayed European blood being spilled.  It was strange.  But as I looked through my history books, I realised that not even that long ago there was conflict in a European country that was prolonged and extremely bloody.  I couldn’t even remember it, let alone imagine it.

This book helped me to understand what it was like.  Well, I’ve never really been able to understand all of the politics involved in the wars, who were the belligerents and so on.  But more than anything, I am able to understand how this war, in particular the Siege of Sarajevo, effected the day to day lives of people, and this is the most inteHS1resting part, in my opinion.

So, the Siege of Sarajevo lasted from 1992 to 1996 and was the longest siege in modern warfare.  Snipers shot down at civilians from the hills, shells were blasted into apartment blocks, buildings ruined, supplies cut off, basically they were trying to kill the entire population of the city.  In this setting, we meet our main character, Alma, who while trying to locate her parents and survive the siege, is experiencing love, sorrow and all those others icky teenager-y emotions.

(–> picture: a man collects firewood on the street)

The historical setting is what really intrigued me about this book.  As I said, I could never imagine a European city to be in such a state of decay and violence.  Naive as I was, I then realised that a European country had been host to a monstrous genocide.  But the day to day struggle of these people to survive really inspired me, and I’ve now written more than a few short stories with Sarajevo as the setting.

This book is a harsh but realistic introduction to this.  It’s about kids in a situation where no kids should be.  They live in an abandoned hotel, they ration their food, they raid and steal forTHE SIEGE OF SARAJEVO provisions, some die and the others bury them, they experiment with love and loss and life and death with no constant adult presence to guide them through.  It’s an amazing story and all the more amazing because it’s based on fact.

(–> picture: the ruins of Sarajevo)

Very, very tragic though, but I would have been annoyed at Mr. Kersh if he tried to make it into a happy-ending-fairytale-esque story when, for so many people, it wasn’t like that at all.  It is shocking at every turn, but also surprisingly beautiful in parts.  The emotions of the characters, who seem too young to experience real, adult feelings, are surprisingly deep.  The storyline catches you with its unpredictability, highlighting the very unpredictability of life in Sarajevo at that time – at any moment you could be blown up or shot down or die of hunger or illness.

Read it if you: are interested in the Bosnian conflict, think Europe is beyond genocidal wars (it will surprise you), like war and survival stories, don’t mind a bit of tragedy (okay, a lot).

While you read it listen to: Miss Sarajevo U2, From the Ground Up Sleeping At Last

11 years ago Short URL 3 Comments

Historical fiction/Last Name K

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29

Apr

~sonya hartnett~ the midnight zoo

TMZRead it in: maybe a week

Yes, I’m catching up on old books.  This one is so old that it’s classified Young Adult, though I do think it’s a little better than most of those things you pick up in the YA section.  I could consider it almost my transition book from YA to adult fiction (that’s not supposed to sound as if I started reading porn due to this book).

First of all, it’s beautifully written.  It was the first book in which I noticed the prose more than anything.  Before that, it was all about a good, intriguing storyline, interesting characters, action scenes, whatever.  But this story, unlike all those, is unique in its setting, cast of characters and the beautiful descriptions that combine all these things.

It won some sort of a prize – and I treat that as a recommendation more than any of those quotes on the back of the book (Stephen King once recommended Stephanie Meyer to me, and I haven’t looked at him in the same light since).  The storyline was probably the most minimalistic I had ever read at that time in my life.  It consisted of two young boys and their baby sister picking their way through the remains of an unknown (we guess some sort of Eastern European) city during the war (Second World War?  We never find out) who come across a zoo and make friends with the animals.  So the human characters in this book number about three – if you count the baby which never actually has any dialogue.  The setting never ceased to intrigue me.  I based subsequent creative writing pieces on the descriptions of the ruined city in this book.

Alright, alright, I’ll give you a sample:

‘If the old bell had been hanging in the steeple it would have rung to announce midnight, twelve solemn iron klongs which would have woken the villagers from their sleep and startled any small creature new to the village and unaccustomed to the noise.  But the bell had fallen from its height weeks ago, and now lay buried in silence beneath the rubble; no small creatures forgaed in corners, because every scrap had already been carried away in beak and mouth and paw; and no woken villagers lay grumbling, for the people, like their bell, were gone.  Their homes stood ruined, their beds broken into pieces, the bedroom walls now slumped across the streets.  Even the steeple, where the bell had hung for centuries, had had its pinnacle torn away, so the tower now stood against the sky like a blunt unfinished question.’ (page 1)

Pretty good for a humble YA novel, right?  No wonder it won an award.  This was the passage that greeted me on the first page – subsequently, I was hooked and bought the book right away even though it was a hardback and therefore cost me more (money spent on books is never wasted, in my opinion) and besides the fact that I could have borrowed it from a library.

So, in a way, this book is like ‘The Road’, but for young adults – without so much death and depression, and with the protagonists as young kids – just the perfect book to get a moping teenager started on a life of Cormac McCarthys, Don DeLillos and endless other existential pieces of literature.

Read it if you: are looking to restore your faith in YA, like nice descriptions mixed in with childish characters, an interesting setting and a tinge of fantasy (talking animals…), like war settings.

While you read it, listen to: Standchen Frederick Schubert, Leave No Man Behind Hans Zimmer, Tristesse Friedrich Chopin

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Last Name H/Young Adult

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