Books Post - Most of 2018 So Far

[radiantfracture]

I didn't do any books posts in the final quarter of 2017 because I was embarrassed by how little reading I'd done. I haven't done one yet in 2018 because yes, yes indeed, reasons.

Therefore, here are some books, working backwards from the most recently completed.

* * * * *

Mary Stewart, Ludo and the Star Horse. This is a chapter book, one of Stewart's children's novels. It was rapturously recommended on the latest episode of Backlisted. It is out of print and very hard to get cheaply even online. Challenge accepted. I found it at the Uni library. I liked Ludo, though not as overwhelmingly as the podcast host, who remembers it from childhood and finds it magnificent. I teared up at the end. I will not spoil the clever structure. The plot moves very quickly – for an adult reader, it’s more like a short story.

Simon Armitage, Translator. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Obviously I've been enjoying the hell out of this.

Barbara Comyns, The Juniper Tree. A retelling of the eponymous fairy tale, with some Bluebeard thrown in. I didn't really know the fairy tale, and this is a fully realized plot in its own right, even without knowing the references. A painful psychological study, very acute and alive, and a retelling that valorizes the stepmother character, which is a happy intervention. The main character is a white single mother of a biracial child, whom she loves but does not always adequately protect. The protagonist works in an antique shop, rebuilds her life after a disfiguring accident, and struggles gently with her hilariously awful mother and ex-boyfriend. Maybe a little slow-moving? The ending comes all in a rush, but this is appropriately overwhelming given the events.

Louise Erdrich. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. Rather wonderful. I think I'll try to use parts of this in my course. Erdrich expands the definition of book to all visually recorded material, with insightful results. Wise, full of land-based knowledge, satisfyingly daily, wry. Illustrated by sketches of a series of petroglyphs that Erdrich shows to be complex texts.

Timothy Findley. The Wars. I thought I'd read this long ago, but it turns out what I'd done was read Findley's short story "Stones." I thought this novel was very good. It's formally playful and ethically complex. The book's conceit is that you are a researcher, piecing together the story of Robert Ross from interviews and documents -- you become the narrator. The story is, in places, perhaps a little too propelled by Findley's own fixations. There's a violent assault whose purpose I understand, yet which still reads as unnecessary and ill-fitting to me. I didn’t like Not Wanted on the Voyage (I read it twice to be sure), and I thought Spadework was on the low end of okay, but The Wars is deservedly a classic of CanLit.

Jean Rhys. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. Hmm. Very good, though it's difficult to recommend, precisely, as nothing really happens, nobody really changes, and no insights are gained by anyone. A closely drawn vignette from a painful life only growing more painful. Contains a great deal of well-observed awkwardness and many missed opportunities; the action consists mostly of doomed and half-hearted attempts at connection or salvation on the part of selfish people.

Falen Johnson. Salt Baby. A play about a young woman who's grown up on the Six Nations Reserve, solidly a part of her community but also alienated because she "looks white" – hence her nickname, Salt Baby. I read this because my colleague was teaching it. I liked it, and we had a lot of fun co-teaching a class about it. He took his students to see the production at our local theatre, and I tagged along. We all enjoyed the performance a great deal. The students were an enthusiastic and responsive audience. It's a fairly quiet play, without much obvious tension – a meditation on identity and the vexed question of authenticity. In performance, it was atmospheric and funny, and somehow very absorbing. It was much easier to see what the protagonist saw in her somewhat clueless white boyfriend when you could witness the physical affection between them – the chemistry was very well-played. The lead performer, Dakota Ray Hebert, is stellar. The music was excellent.

Timothy Snyder. On Tyrrany. Snyder identifies a series of 20 parallels between the current presidency and other tyrranies. Some of these short essays are strong, but Snyder is a historian, and I was expecting something more substantial. This read to me like a series of blog posts or online articles (but really blog posts). I'm right with Snyder on the value of the project, but the book (which is tiny – a pamphlet, really) felt as though it had been rushed out to catch a moment, to the detriment of more complex insight into the subject. I hope it proves useful.

Anita Brookner. Providence. This was another Brookner that I had to stop reading halfway through because of the profound internal agony of the central character, to pick up later when I felt stronger. As always, the casual cruelties of human relationships are exquisitely observed. The protagonist, Kitty Maule, is a university lecturer, and I laughed out loud at the dissection of academic behaviours -- awkward cocktail parties, department meetings in which everyone has their own unique doodling style. There's a pleasing parallel between the French novel the main character is teaching in her seminar and her own love affair. Providence is less redemptive than some of Brookner's other books, and the ending is a little bit too Gotcha! for me – it would work really well in pure academic farce, but this novel was more nuanced than that, so it sat oddly with me.

I get a bit tired of Brookner's passive protagonists, all wishing they could be awful and demanding and coquettish femmes fatales. I wish she had decided to write an awful, demanding, coquettish femme fatale as a protagonist just to get it out of her system, and to prove that it probably isn't actually all that great being such a person.

* * * * * *

Some books plus some books is some books.

{rf}

Comments

[cmcmck]

I prefer to re read Gawain in the original when I do so but a good translation is always useful.

[kenjari]

I had similar feelings about Providence. I have little patience for that type of passive protagonist, especially combined with a narrative that was, at least for me, pretty inert.

[radiantfracture]

I thought it was mostly a good translation. There are a few weird choices, but it moves along bouncingly. I've got the Tolkien edition for comparison -- I might use one stanza from it for class.

Do you have a preferred translation?

[radiantfracture]

I think in the other Brookners I've read, it felt to me as though the protagonist gleaned some sort of very hard-won insight or fortitude from the experience of passively adoring the rotten guy, but here it just seemed like a cruel joke -- which, as I say, would have worked fine in a full-on farce, but seemed odd here.

[larryhammer]

On Tyrrany is all too slight -- I was hoping for a more substantive expansion of the original blog post. Having a few more details on each point was useful, but overall not as meaty as wanted or needed.

[radiantfracture]

It was probably unfair of me to expect something more Hannah Arendt, but -- I was.