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zichji asked: Do you like this picture? http://thebanditqueen.tumblr.com/post/996136920/thatkindofwoman-justbesplendid-william-waldron
Yes, yes I do.
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Various Positions Review for Liticism
So today the lovely Bethanie Blanchard, of Crikey’s literary blog Liticism, has published a book review I wrote. Various Positions is the debut novel from Canadian author Martha Schabas. It follows the the quietly brilliant 14 year-old Georgia Slade as she navigates pressures of ballet, strained family life, and her own growing sexual curiosity. In a way, Georgia functions as a kind of inverted Lolita. Schabas’ prose is simply exquisite. You can read the full review here.
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The Boat by Nam Le
Last year, first-year students at my uni were able to buy this book for $5. After successfully convincing (well, bribing) a fresh-faced student, Nam Le’s collection of short stories sat on my bookshelf for nearly a year. And this is what The Boat taught me: the first (and probably only) rule of short story reading.
Rule #1: When you finish one short story, DO NOT flip the page and immediately continue reading. You might be in the mood to keep reading. Don’t. Put the book down and back away. Go for a walk, watch reruns of Arrested Development, take an advanced acrobatics class—I don’t care what you do, but you need to make sure that you don’t treat the next story in the book like the next chapter of a novel. It’s not. It should be obvious that each short story is a self-contained work, but if you don’t give yourself space between each story, your brain will not treat the next page as a new beginning, and will flow on from the last story. Every time I dived straight into a new story after finishing the previous one, I had to stop and re-read those first few pages in order to re-establish the characters, and to relocate myself from modern-day coastal Victoria to mountainous Japan in the 1940s. Nam Le’s prose knows no geographical bounds, and you will need to adapt accordingly.
These short stories vary greatly in terms of character and setting—Le takes us from parched Vietnamese boat people to a 30-something American woman visiting Iran. He goes inside the mind of a New York artist estranged from his daughter and a child solider in Colombia. He leads us through the tumultuous times of a teenage boy living in a Victorian coastal town, and uses disjointed prose in the story of the young Japanese girl before the fall of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Needless to say, Le is capable of thoroughly researching his stories and he doesn’t shy away from creating protagonists who are profoundly different from himself. Nor does he shy away from writing about himself as a writer and his tense relationship with his father. Overall, I generally prefer my prose to be a little more poetic, but Le’s storylines are fascinating and the writing is solid and to the point.
In terms of book set-up, I would have swapped the first and final stories. (I also would have made sure that the font was consistent throughout, because it’s INFURIATING when it’s not, but this is probably not Le’s fault). The first story—Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice—is extremely good, and probably the one that has stuck with me the most after reading. It’s an autobiographical story about Le’s father visiting him in Iowa, where Le is undertaking a writing course. Detailing the days before a deadline, this story is Le writing a story about writing a story, which is very meta. Initially, I wasn’t convinced by Le’s prose, especially the fairly uninspired line: “Her body smelled of her clothes.” By the end of the story, however, I came to appreciate the raw and real way Le wrote about himself and about writing. It’s a rare insight into the author that you wont usually get as a reader. As a stalker, maybe, but not as a reader.
But here’s why breathing space between the stories is so vital—this first story, autobiographical, written in first person, precedes two other stories that are also written in first person prose. This requires the reader to suspend disbelief more than usual, especially seeing as we have just gained access into Le’s mind and his position as a writer of characters. For this reason, I probably would have put the autobiographical story at the end of the collection. On the other hand, we see immediately that Le is grappling with his role and personal ethics as a writer, and this is a worthwhile observation. Perhaps the writing is not as captivating in this first piece, but the story is powerful.
The second work, Cartagena, took me a while to get into because I read Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice immediately before it. (Do not make this same mistake. See Rule #1 of short story reading). Le successfully builds a sense of danger, but at first the story felt unreal. Instead of immersing myself in this new protagonist—a Colombian teenager for whom violence was a job—I found myself wondering how Le devised such a character. I couldn’t fully sink into the alternate reality of the story because I had read Le at work and now I irrevocably saw him as the puppeteer. The end of the story makes this one—I was completely captivated by the final paragraphs.
Meeting Elise makes you feel all kinds of things for its protagonist (a New York artist seeking a reconnection with his daughter): outrage, pity, disgust, despair. The story is fragmented and it, like father and daughter, never quite match up—it’s a series of close misses. The ending is mildly confusing, rainy and open to interpretation.
At first, I felt Halflead Bay was a stronger piece that the other stories, but this feeling dissipated because the story dragged on for too long. It’s a classic coming-of-age type story with impending tragedy. It follows teenage boy Jamie, and Le’s depictions of Jamie’s interactions with friends, girls and family seem so true to life that the scenes play themselves out before you.
Hiroshima—I liked what Le was doing here; staccato sentences delivered from the mind’s eye of a young Japanese girl. In terms of plot, it’s the least memorable of the collection. This story is more about capturing a moment from a specific angle than tracing a narrative arc. This story shows that Le can describe want, and make the reader hunger and thirst, and this ability comes to the fore in the final harrowing story, The Boat.
Tehran Calling is ambitious, but well-executed. Many of the shocking facts of this story were blunted for me, because I have already encountered them in Marjane Satrapi’s poignant graphic novel Persepolis. Nevertheless, Le circumvents this potential problem of not being a first-hand witness by telling the story through Sarah, a 30-something American lawyer, who is visiting her activist friend Parvin in Iran. Sarah can’t quite comprehend the stifling theocracy, and neither, it seems, can Le. While there is some reflection on Sarah’s relationships, with Parvin and with her former lover, Paul, the story is essentially a snapshot—we are given no solution or resolution as the story fades out.
I was honestly exhausted by the time I got to the final story, The Boat. Every story is a serious tale of identity and loss, and is always so earnest in its execution. The Boat is permeated with heat and salt and an ocean of torturously undrinkable water. It follows Mai, a young Vietnamese teenager who is put on a boat by her family to escape. We’re given clues of the horrors of war and reeducation, but the real horror is life on the boat—the oppressive heat and the stench of coming death. Nothing is overtly said about the politics; it’s all about one person’s struggle on the boat, and this represents everyone’s struggle. It’s hard to find relief in these stories—a sense of lightness or a dash of irony would be a welcome release for the weary reader. Le makes us feel like the characters on the boat—we thirst for a drop of cool water to relieve the harshness. But we won’t find this relief in The Boat, because Le’s boat people do not.
Posted on February 28, 2012 with 2 notes ()
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Farraguette, or, Where Did Those Last Few Months Go?
It’s been months and months since my last blogging action. See this pretty little picture?
Blame her. She goes by the name of Farraguette, and she’s a time consuming little thing—she demanded that every single leaf in her was beautifully laid-out, that her measurements were just right, and that she be adorned in all kinds of fonts. Spending so much time with her made me irritable, obsessive, and, I’m convinced, added another degree of blindness to my squinty eyes. And her constant bleating for a Photoshop make-over seemed like some kind of passive-aggressive way of scorning my technological incompetence.
Fortunately, she had four designated carers and between us we were able to cater for her high-maintenance personality. When we released her into the world, I wanted to boast about her most astonishing features, to shield her from the cruel criticism of jaded university students… At this point I realised I was thinking of her as my child, and that I was probably too attached.
Sure, she took over my life for a few months, but my, what a read! This little snack had a taste of everything—politics, art, music, TV, sport, interviews, reviews, literature and humanitarian pieces, complete with sex column and fake university handbook. She was delicious and nutritious, as my dear friend would say. Not only that, she turned out to be a winner, so now I get to repeat the magazine-making process, again and again, in 2011. I can hardly wait!
Posted on November 6, 2010 with 2 notes ()
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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
I really enjoyed this – Wilde’s only novel. It reads quite like one of his fairy tales, which are beautiful and poignant (and a post will be later dedicated to these, to be sure!). But The Picture of Dorian Gray is longer and more embellished than these. Wilde capitalises words to make them sound like big important concepts: Art, Beauty, and Soul.
As always, his characters voice witty epithets and make insightful quips about society. There are many of those Wilde-ian paradoxes that I just love and that leave me getting my head around them for a long time after the first reading.
The basic plot focuses around a Jesus-type concept, where the portrait of Dorian Gray, which captures the youth and beauty of Dorian – a living art – is to bear the signs of age, sin and life, while Dorian Gray himself remains eternally youthful and full of Beauty.
Here are some of the interesting questions it raises and I grappled with:
Is sin bad – does it mar the soul, or the picture of Dorian Gray, with knowledge of consequences, or is it the act itself, heedless of consequences? His portrait – now with a cruel mouth as the result of his first cruel act – doesn’t appear to change for the worse after learning of the dire consequences of said act. Dorian’s soul is intimately bound up in the portrait, so it would appear that consequences don’t make his act worse in the portrait’s portrayal. Is the portrait aware of the dire consequence before Dorian is, or is it the just the sin, and its potential for harmful consequences, that stains the portrait?
At the end of the piece, Dorian changes his ways, to become ‘good’. Yet he realises that his portrait, instead of decreasing in ugliness, has become more so. The ‘goodness’ of his act is revealed, through the portrait, as an act of vanity, which in turn makes the picture more hideous. So motivation as an important part of one’s actions, perhaps?
Wilde’s concept of Art in its relation to life is truly interesting: Basil and Sybil are characters whose lives are inextricably bound in their respective Art. Basil, the painter of Dorian’s portrait, puts too much of himself into his work and is consequently a quite boring, plain, uninteresting person, according to Henry, the ‘negative influence’ in the novel. Sybil Vane, an actress Dorian falls in love with – can no longer act the part of Juliet in love because she has felt what real love is. Yet Dorian no longer loves her because she has lost her Art, and paradoxically she kills herself – young, beautiful, dramatic – a real-life tragedy that restores her to the pedestal of Art.
The book provides an insight into Wilde’s vision of Sin, Soul, Beauty and Art, all within Wilde’s incredible grasp of language. It’s amazing!
Posted on July 5, 2010 with 1 note ()
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Angular Momentum
Today I read this comic, which is something I do when I am procrastinating from study. I like this one because you start out by thinking that it is overly scientific and nerdy, but then realising that science can be cute and endearing.
Posted on July 5, 2010 with 2 notes ()
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The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barberry
Every time I walked into a bookstore, I would longingly eye off this book. For (I kid you not) nearly two years. I read the reviews on the back cover so many times that I got to the stage where I believed that someone had actually recommended it to me and I must read it. What drew me to this literary delight? The cover. Swirly blue lines on a pale yellow backdrop is my one of my weaknesses, apparently. And there’s a row of French terraces on the front. How could I say no?
The Elegance of the Hedgehog – such an intriguing title! – is set in Paris and has two storylines that eventually converge. One follows a middle-aged concierge who, unbeknownst to her posh tenants, has an appreciation for art, literature and beauty, and especially for Leo Tolstoy. The other follows a 12-year-old girl who is determined to commit suicide and burn down her apartment (in the building that the concierge oversees) on her thirteenth birthday. Until that day comes she decides to write down some ‘Profound Thoughts’ and a ‘Journal of the Movement of the World’ to appreciate her final months.
The concierge’s rantings on Kant and all things high-brow are entertaining, and funnily the young girl’s musings are equally clever, but with a Japanese tint to them. I feel it lost a bit of momentum in pursuing the plot, and the characters surprised me at times (but then, isn’t that the mark of a good, developed, spontaneous character?) but I really enjoyed the overall experience of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, especially the beginning where such interesting characters were introduced and the book was feeling its way a bit. It had a tinge of experimentalism in it, which I liked. Both characters intellectually try to discover something profound or meaningful or beautiful about life, which sounds a bit pretentious but I think it was done well.
But the one thing that stuck with me about this book is that it made me rethink my prejudice about the colour pink. I hate pink and refuse to wear it; in my mind it has always been associated with an intrinsic, sickening girly-ness that repelled me. But Solange (the girl wise beyond her 12 years) writes:
‘I love pink. I think it is a colour that gets a bad press, it’s made out to be a thing for babies or women who wear too much make-up, but pink is really a subtle and delicate colour, and it figures a lot in Japanese poetry.’
And so now I want to learn Japanese so I can read subtle and delicate poetry, infused with pink, under a cherry-blossom.
Posted on June 13, 2010 with 2 notes ()
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Books books books
I love books.
And not it’s not just the stories nestled within pages that can alter the way you speak, infiltrate the way you think, leave you numb with silent joy or unspeakable grief…although I definitely do love these. I love owning books that have been owned and loved or discarded by others before me, with inscriptions written by people to others that I may never meet, but I feel connected to because we have read the exact same words. I love fanning through a brand-new paperback, when the smell of the pages wafts out to you. I love matte covers and flexible spines. I love finding spelling mistakes and encircling them in red ink. I love treasuring special copies and the feel of damaged, but loved, books that have been travelling with me everywhere, always on hand to save me from the boredom of public transport, the social awkwardness of a solitary chai and the (at times) disheartening interaction with other people. I love stacking them on bookshelves and lending them to loved ones.
And I always, impulsively and regrettably, judge a book by its cover. Horrible but true.
So, this blog, so far a mere question alongside a photo I took one time, I am going to make an outlet for my love of books. Wish me luck!
Posted on April 30, 2010 with 2 notes ()
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I thought this would be an appropriate first picture to post on ‘dappled sunlight’. This was taken on a train in the early morning. Reflections of sunlight before heading away from the green and away from the rivers that we swam in, flowing along with the rapids, propelling ourselves off rocks into their depths. Heading back to the city with its anonymity and twisting alleyways.
Posted on April 24, 2010 with 1 note ()
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Today I started a blog. Now what?
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