Last time I flew Thai Airways, I was headed to Israel to tour with the band. We were typically boisterous, no doubt annoying to all those around us, and it was a great trip. When it came to booking this flight I insisted flying Thai again because, if nothing else, I remember the food being great. And so it was that Debbie and I boarded the plane to begin our journey. For the first step in my April challenge, The Mile High Book Club, I had my airport copy of the latest Underbelly stuffed in my backpack wedged somewhere between Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, a sheath of unread correspondence and my pharmacy-worthy stash of medications. Being the nervous character that I am, I was dreading flying into a danger zone. Things had been hotting up with the red-shirts. I called my travel agent a few days beforehand and asked what my chances of getting to Thailand safely were. "Oh, you'll have no problem getting there," he replied. "I just can't vouch for your safety once you've landed". Great. I don't sleep on airplanes as it is. Buckle me up and bring on the chow. But the food was crap. I've become a vegetarian since that last time I flew. Back then it was some yummy prawn/fish curry thing. This time, unidentifiable stuff in Clag sauce. At least I had some ass-kickin', cap-bustin' Aussie gangsta expose to cheer me up. Until...
A review of sorts.
Three things I won't dispute.
1.The first Underbelly was genius because there had really been a crazy gang war in Melbourne. Alphonse Gangitano was shot dead two doors up from my grandparents. Mick Gatto killed Andrew "Benji" Veniamin around the corner from where I work. And Victor Pierce was shot dead in his car outside the supermarket two minutes from my place. Goddammit I was a major player! Like most of Melbourne's population I was downloading copies of the TV series from torrent sites because it wasn't allowed to be aired in this town lest it prejudice a jury in some ongoing court cases.
2.The second Underbelly was kind of cool. I spent much of my childhood up on the Victorian/New South Welsh border and I knew that it had been the mafia hub for much of the 1980's. I even knew some of the colourful characters, though not in their drug dealing, cement shoe fitting capacities. I was not fussed either way by Matthew Newton's ass.
3. King's Cross is filthy place and has, on a number of occasions, made for interesting literary fodder.
So here's the thing. Underbelly: The Golden Mile probably should have been good. It probably should have been exciting. And it most certainly should have been more than a pastiche of vaguely interesting tabloid pieces. Andrew Rule and John Silvester have unfortunately become complacent. Lazy even. They know their book will sell whatever trash they fill it with. Heck, there is a built-in 12 week advertising campaign, with the latest TV series airing as I write. Yet, whereas the first two Underbelly books were coherent tales, this is just an episodic hodge podge. I can't help but feel they wrote each chapter as an independent article, perhaps intending it for sale to the highest bidding newspaper. Incidents are often repeated. As are explanations of who each key player was. Either the authors think their readers are idiots, or... um.. Nope, that's it. Arguably the biggest problem with this book is that it was beaten to the punch almost fifteen years ago by the amazing series Blue Murder. Many of the episodes contained in The Golden Mile were much more grippingly dealt with in a TV show that, rather like the first Underbelly series, was banned in its home state. As I put the book down I wanted to pop a cap in its ass. Told you I was a major player!
I spent a great couple of days lazing in Bangkok. Didn't see any protests, though apparently a couple of bombs went off while we were there. Survived a brutal thai massage as well as several fantastic meals at street hawker stalls (there's something eminently enjoyable about being the only white guy in a cavern full of feasting thai people). And I managed to wade through the majority of The Magic Mountain. It all came to an end too quickly, and off we trudged back to the airport. Straight to the bookstore. Where Number 2 on the chart was...
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo!!!! Yes. A free pass. Having already read it I could skip this one in the challenge and read something of my own choosing instead. I had Simon Lelic's Rupture in my backpack. Time to head off to Jordan.
Howler Monkeys and the Holocaust: Yann Martel's "Beatrice and Virgil"
on Tuesday, April 13, 2010
For years rumours have been doing the rounds about Yann Martel's "Holocaust book". I remember listening to an interview in which he discussed the difficulty of tackling the subject as a non-Jew. Credibility was always going to be an issue. As was the risk of causing large-scale offence where none was intended. The speculation surrounding the book in the lit world was quite interesting too. Last I heard, though to be fair this must have been around 2005, Martel intended to tackle the subject through allegory, using a monkey and a donkey as his protagonists. It was a proposition that must have had his publishers quaking in their boots, especially following the phenomenal success of his Booker Prize winning mush-fest Life of Pi. They had already scrambled to republish his first, fairly underwhelming novel Self and then quickly followed it with a collection of short stories. But in reality everyone was hanging out for whatever would come next. And there was a lot of hanging. Eight years to be precise. And for what? A bleak, dire Holocaust book about a monkey?
It takes considerably large cojones to alienate the throngs of feel-good nostalgia junkies who have bought first class tickets on your gravy train. Indeed, one could easily be tempted to pin a bravery award on Martel's jacket and send him on his merry way. However, Beatrice and Virgil is not just a brave book but a sublimely successful one. It isn't a Holocaust book in the traditional sense of the term, but rather a meditation on ownership of representations of the Holocaust. Now that most survivors have died it is, not to put too fine a point on it, the most morally complex and crucial question facing anyone who wishes to tackle the topic.
The book starts with the ponderings of Henry, a successful, prize winning author (um... thin veils people, thin veils) who spends five years writing a Holocaust book only to have it rejected by his publishers. So that accounts for five of the eight years, methinks. Henry is pathetically thin-skinned and pretty much gives away writing, opting to take his wife (and, later, kid) to an unnamed city where he can live in relative anonymity. Ever the gracious soul, he continues to answer fan letters from around the world that are sent to him via his publisher. Which is how he happens upon a segment from a strange script sent to him by an even stranger man. The script screams Beckett with its insular absurdity - Virgil and Beatrice discuss the nature of a pear. Also included in the package is a short story by Flaubert and a note from the sender requesting help. As luck (and authorial convenience) would have it, the sender lives in the same city as Henry and so, rather than sending one of his usual missives, Henry trudges off to the address on the envelope. The place is a taxidermy shop (as it should be in any good disturbing horror-esque work), owned by a reclusive, curmudgeonly old man. Beatrice and Virgil, the taxidermist explains, are an ass and howler monkey respectively. They are right there, stuffed, in the shop. The play isn't about anything. But he needs Henry to help him complete it. Why Henry? Well, of course, his big prize-winning book was about animals. He understood them. It is the second time disbelief must be suspended - why on earth would Henry agree to help this nutjob? For whatever reason, he does.
Slowly, the taxidermist reads sections of the play to Henry. It continues on its Godot-like way, but with a menacing undercurrent that Henry is sure hints at the Holocaust. Henry's wife, on the other hand, thinks Henry sees the Holocaust in everything. The topic is holding his entire life up. This time, however, Henry is right. Beatrice and Virgil's epic journey along "a shirt with stripes" is an act of escape. They have witnessed horrors. Or been victims of horrors. Perhaps, even perpetrators. They are trying to find a new language to discuss their experience. Here, Martel enters the realm of deep philosophical meditation. Who is this taxidermist that increasingly relies on Henry to write the play which answers the very question Henry had tried to ask in his rejected novel? Who can tell the story and in what form? Suddenly, a new character is thrust into the midst. It is a dead body. It has been there the whole time. Right under Beatrice and Virgil's noses as they pondered the various absurdities of life. Where did it come from? There is a backstory that the taxidermist hasn't revealed to Henry. Does this make the representation false? Or does it merely force Henry (and the reader) to recast all that has come before in a new light?
The last quarter of the novel takes an unexpectedly brutal turn. Violence, Martel suggests, will win. Or self-negate. Those left behind can only ponder the imponderable. Martel closes the book with twelve moral conundrums. They will force you to doubt yourself, who you are and how you live the story of your life. I'm sure that many of those who loved Life of Pi will give up on Beatrice and Virgil well before they come to the end. It is a great shame. Though terribly self-conscious in the literary sense, this is by far the better book.
It takes considerably large cojones to alienate the throngs of feel-good nostalgia junkies who have bought first class tickets on your gravy train. Indeed, one could easily be tempted to pin a bravery award on Martel's jacket and send him on his merry way. However, Beatrice and Virgil is not just a brave book but a sublimely successful one. It isn't a Holocaust book in the traditional sense of the term, but rather a meditation on ownership of representations of the Holocaust. Now that most survivors have died it is, not to put too fine a point on it, the most morally complex and crucial question facing anyone who wishes to tackle the topic.
The book starts with the ponderings of Henry, a successful, prize winning author (um... thin veils people, thin veils) who spends five years writing a Holocaust book only to have it rejected by his publishers. So that accounts for five of the eight years, methinks. Henry is pathetically thin-skinned and pretty much gives away writing, opting to take his wife (and, later, kid) to an unnamed city where he can live in relative anonymity. Ever the gracious soul, he continues to answer fan letters from around the world that are sent to him via his publisher. Which is how he happens upon a segment from a strange script sent to him by an even stranger man. The script screams Beckett with its insular absurdity - Virgil and Beatrice discuss the nature of a pear. Also included in the package is a short story by Flaubert and a note from the sender requesting help. As luck (and authorial convenience) would have it, the sender lives in the same city as Henry and so, rather than sending one of his usual missives, Henry trudges off to the address on the envelope. The place is a taxidermy shop (as it should be in any good disturbing horror-esque work), owned by a reclusive, curmudgeonly old man. Beatrice and Virgil, the taxidermist explains, are an ass and howler monkey respectively. They are right there, stuffed, in the shop. The play isn't about anything. But he needs Henry to help him complete it. Why Henry? Well, of course, his big prize-winning book was about animals. He understood them. It is the second time disbelief must be suspended - why on earth would Henry agree to help this nutjob? For whatever reason, he does.
Slowly, the taxidermist reads sections of the play to Henry. It continues on its Godot-like way, but with a menacing undercurrent that Henry is sure hints at the Holocaust. Henry's wife, on the other hand, thinks Henry sees the Holocaust in everything. The topic is holding his entire life up. This time, however, Henry is right. Beatrice and Virgil's epic journey along "a shirt with stripes" is an act of escape. They have witnessed horrors. Or been victims of horrors. Perhaps, even perpetrators. They are trying to find a new language to discuss their experience. Here, Martel enters the realm of deep philosophical meditation. Who is this taxidermist that increasingly relies on Henry to write the play which answers the very question Henry had tried to ask in his rejected novel? Who can tell the story and in what form? Suddenly, a new character is thrust into the midst. It is a dead body. It has been there the whole time. Right under Beatrice and Virgil's noses as they pondered the various absurdities of life. Where did it come from? There is a backstory that the taxidermist hasn't revealed to Henry. Does this make the representation false? Or does it merely force Henry (and the reader) to recast all that has come before in a new light?
The last quarter of the novel takes an unexpectedly brutal turn. Violence, Martel suggests, will win. Or self-negate. Those left behind can only ponder the imponderable. Martel closes the book with twelve moral conundrums. They will force you to doubt yourself, who you are and how you live the story of your life. I'm sure that many of those who loved Life of Pi will give up on Beatrice and Virgil well before they come to the end. It is a great shame. Though terribly self-conscious in the literary sense, this is by far the better book.
The Mile High Book Club: The April Book Challenge
on Tuesday, April 6, 2010
This month my ongoing quest to force myself into uncomfortable literary terrain takes an unforeseen turn skywards. Indeed, circumstance, rather than a desire for humour or self-abasement, dictates the April theme. I shall be embarking on considerable overseas travel and I don't greatly fancy schlepping piles of books around the world. I do, however, still need to feed my addiction. It is only natural, therefore, that I subject myself to a month of airplane reads; those books one buys at airports, intended for travellers. and the readers of which we tend to snub our noses at in self-righteous mirth. That said, I am always intrigued by airport bookstore bestseller lists. One would assume that they would be replete with works of mindless escapism, and yet there is considerable diversity between countries. Sure, they always have Dan Brown/Steig Larrson/JK Rowling peppered throughout, but other than the obvious few, I am constantly surprised by the weighting towards regional gems. And so for April I am subjecting myself to the will of the international travelling masses with my challenge The Mile High Book Club. At each airport I will buy a book in the bestseller list. I will not, however, have the choice of which book I buy. Rather, at the first airport I will buy the book at number one, at the second it will be the book at number two and so forth. The only flexibility will be in whether it is in the fiction or non-fiction list.
Given that we are already a week into April, I have already begun the challenge. In Melbourne, as I set off on my travels with a backpack empty but for my almost-finished copy of The Magic Mountain, I headed straight to the shop and elbowed my way to the chart shelves. There, at number one on the fiction list, was Lee Childs's latest. I cringed. It looked big. I had sort of hoped to get away with short books so that I could squeeze in as many books of my own choosing in between. I darted around the other side, to the non-fiction shelf and there, like a gift from Alfonse Gangitano himself, was the third book in the Underbelly series, The Golden Mile. If the other two were anything to go by, Silvester and Rule's latest would be another chunk of quintessential gutter Australiana. What better send-off could I get. I grabbed the book, proudly marched to the counter, paid and stuffed it in my backpack. And so the adventure begins...
The Number One Book at the First Airport: Underbelly: The Golden Mile by John Silvester and Andrew Rule.
Given that we are already a week into April, I have already begun the challenge. In Melbourne, as I set off on my travels with a backpack empty but for my almost-finished copy of The Magic Mountain, I headed straight to the shop and elbowed my way to the chart shelves. There, at number one on the fiction list, was Lee Childs's latest. I cringed. It looked big. I had sort of hoped to get away with short books so that I could squeeze in as many books of my own choosing in between. I darted around the other side, to the non-fiction shelf and there, like a gift from Alfonse Gangitano himself, was the third book in the Underbelly series, The Golden Mile. If the other two were anything to go by, Silvester and Rule's latest would be another chunk of quintessential gutter Australiana. What better send-off could I get. I grabbed the book, proudly marched to the counter, paid and stuffed it in my backpack. And so the adventure begins...
The Number One Book at the First Airport: Underbelly: The Golden Mile by John Silvester and Andrew Rule.
On Doublespeak, Lies and Literature
on Monday, April 5, 2010
So much for the power of inertia. March has sailed by and my posting has come to a grinding halt. Alas all is not lost. I completed the month's task of "Books I've Always Lied About Having Read" with a splash of added aplomb. As I made my through the list I found myself pondering other literary lies I have told, which led me to include another couple of books: Bulgakov's classic, The Master and Margarita, Paul Auster's debut The New York Trilogy and Thomas Mann's epic masterpiece The Magic Mountain. I also managed to sneak in a couple of non-list related books - Ian McEwan's new novel Solar, Friedrich Durrenmatt's creepy play The Visit and, for the sake of pure guilty pleasure, Belinda Bauer's Blacklands.
For the most part the March challenge gave me faith in my lit-radar. Although hailed as classics, many of the books I've lied about having read really weren't all that great. I was underwhelmed by authors and books I have previously trumpeted to the heavens in attempts to save (or gain) face - Adiche, Zusak, Bulgakov and, at the risk of doing the blog equivalent of when Jerry Seinfeld made out during a screening of Schindler's List, Anne Frank's diary. I don't intend to review them all here, but for what it's worth I want to wrap up a month of inactive blogging with a few brief thoughts on some books I now can truthfully say that I have read.
Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
Forgive me Eric Arthur Blair, for I have sinned. Although I did rather enjoy your quackingly good fable of despotic swine I, for no reason I can rightly identify, always avoided your much-heralded speculative masterpiece. Indeed, I even went so far as to read the Russian precursor that you are said to have plagiarised and then, finding it frightfully boring, proclaimed at every possible opportunity a haughty certainty that I possessed some sort of hidden key to your creative inadequacy. Whenever I whinged about Zamyatin, I was invariably met with the question, "Yeah but have you read Orwell?". At which point, to my everlasting shame I would lie. "Yes, and Zamyatin was better." By the time that stupid TV show came and stole your name, I knew the snowball had reached avalanche proportions. I could not in good conscience walk into any bookstore and purchase the novel without feeling like a teenager in a porno store buying pictures of four-legged loving. All the while I was decrying the shameless commodification and misappropriation of the title - it was like portraits of Kafka on crockery in Prague or Che Guevara t-shirts hanging in the windows of designer stores. But I was wrong and, I will go so far as to say, an idiot. Nineteen Eighty Four is amazing. Sure, you might have pilfered the idea from a Russian sci-fi hack but you were so much the better writer that he almost ought to be apologising to you. Zamatyn has all the flair of a Siberian sleet storm. You took his unrelenting drudgery and taught us all a lesson. And that ending... genius! This book, more than any other I read during the March challenge taught me that not only can pride sometimes be swallowed, but on the rarest of occasions it even taste good!
The Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger
A few weeks after Salinger died, I wrote about the hullabaloo surrounding the contents of his safe. I pondered the possibility of a lost novel or some more short stories, trumpeting the superiority of the latter over the one example we have of the former. I implied I had read all his meagre published works. It was something I was to do time and again over the weeks that followed, in all sorts of situations. During rehearsals for a play I was in, one of the other cast members came up to me and asked whether I had read Catcher In The Rye. I said that I had. "Isn't it the greatest book ever?," she followed. "Well, it's alright. Good. But hardly the best ever," I replied. God forbid anyone might have read an iconic book that I have not! Especially one that was suddenly back in the headlines. So much has been written and said about Catcher in The Rye that I assumed I knew enough simply through cultural osmosis. Now, having actually read the book I wish I could go back in time to when that fellow cast member proclaimed it the best ever and reply, "No!" It's pretty good. It's perfectly readable. And I'm sure it was dynamite at the time of its publication. But let's face it, Holden isn't some poster boy for disaffected youth. He's an annoying whinger, running away from a serious family tragedy who needs a good slap in the face with a wet, flaccid mullet. Take me to the fishmonger, Salinger acolytes!
The Dirt by Motley Crue
In my touring days, while everyone else was smoking weed, getting drunk or snorting blow off any available shiny surface, I would always be sitting in the corner reading. Sure, I had my vices, but my addiction was strictly of a literary kind. Occasionally, when supplies had run low and some poor schmuck was sent off to the bottleshop/pimp/dealer for a top up, people would try to make conversation with me to pass the time. I learned very early on in the piece that punk rock musicians as a whole had only ever read one book and that book was The Dirt by Motley Crue. Almost every conversation which began with "Whatchareeden?" turned to the glam rockers' exploits within three minutes. Now, if I was embarrassed that non-readers had read Catcher in The Rye and I hadn't, imagine my crushing shame whenever some drunken idiot with snot dribbling down their nose, pants half-fallen down and breath reeking of so many spirits that I suspected their mouth might have contained one of Dante's rings of Hell, could rattle off episode after memorable episode from the glorious rock n' roller's bible which I had never even bothered to skim. Thankfully these recurrent conversations caused me to know most of the stories and so pretty soon I could hold my own in any conversation that arose. But nothing prepared me for actually reading this testament to depravity. The Dirt is every bit as jaw-droppingly disgusting as legend would have it. And I mean that in the best possible way. How the members of that band are still alive is nothing short of astonishing. And I can safely say to everyone who I ever shared a backstage area with, we were all pretenders. And nobody else will ever be able to rise to the throne because Motley Crue well and truly trashed the palace. It may not be literature, but The Dirt is a true revelation.
For the most part the March challenge gave me faith in my lit-radar. Although hailed as classics, many of the books I've lied about having read really weren't all that great. I was underwhelmed by authors and books I have previously trumpeted to the heavens in attempts to save (or gain) face - Adiche, Zusak, Bulgakov and, at the risk of doing the blog equivalent of when Jerry Seinfeld made out during a screening of Schindler's List, Anne Frank's diary. I don't intend to review them all here, but for what it's worth I want to wrap up a month of inactive blogging with a few brief thoughts on some books I now can truthfully say that I have read.
Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
Forgive me Eric Arthur Blair, for I have sinned. Although I did rather enjoy your quackingly good fable of despotic swine I, for no reason I can rightly identify, always avoided your much-heralded speculative masterpiece. Indeed, I even went so far as to read the Russian precursor that you are said to have plagiarised and then, finding it frightfully boring, proclaimed at every possible opportunity a haughty certainty that I possessed some sort of hidden key to your creative inadequacy. Whenever I whinged about Zamyatin, I was invariably met with the question, "Yeah but have you read Orwell?". At which point, to my everlasting shame I would lie. "Yes, and Zamyatin was better." By the time that stupid TV show came and stole your name, I knew the snowball had reached avalanche proportions. I could not in good conscience walk into any bookstore and purchase the novel without feeling like a teenager in a porno store buying pictures of four-legged loving. All the while I was decrying the shameless commodification and misappropriation of the title - it was like portraits of Kafka on crockery in Prague or Che Guevara t-shirts hanging in the windows of designer stores. But I was wrong and, I will go so far as to say, an idiot. Nineteen Eighty Four is amazing. Sure, you might have pilfered the idea from a Russian sci-fi hack but you were so much the better writer that he almost ought to be apologising to you. Zamatyn has all the flair of a Siberian sleet storm. You took his unrelenting drudgery and taught us all a lesson. And that ending... genius! This book, more than any other I read during the March challenge taught me that not only can pride sometimes be swallowed, but on the rarest of occasions it even taste good!
The Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger
A few weeks after Salinger died, I wrote about the hullabaloo surrounding the contents of his safe. I pondered the possibility of a lost novel or some more short stories, trumpeting the superiority of the latter over the one example we have of the former. I implied I had read all his meagre published works. It was something I was to do time and again over the weeks that followed, in all sorts of situations. During rehearsals for a play I was in, one of the other cast members came up to me and asked whether I had read Catcher In The Rye. I said that I had. "Isn't it the greatest book ever?," she followed. "Well, it's alright. Good. But hardly the best ever," I replied. God forbid anyone might have read an iconic book that I have not! Especially one that was suddenly back in the headlines. So much has been written and said about Catcher in The Rye that I assumed I knew enough simply through cultural osmosis. Now, having actually read the book I wish I could go back in time to when that fellow cast member proclaimed it the best ever and reply, "No!" It's pretty good. It's perfectly readable. And I'm sure it was dynamite at the time of its publication. But let's face it, Holden isn't some poster boy for disaffected youth. He's an annoying whinger, running away from a serious family tragedy who needs a good slap in the face with a wet, flaccid mullet. Take me to the fishmonger, Salinger acolytes!
The Dirt by Motley Crue
In my touring days, while everyone else was smoking weed, getting drunk or snorting blow off any available shiny surface, I would always be sitting in the corner reading. Sure, I had my vices, but my addiction was strictly of a literary kind. Occasionally, when supplies had run low and some poor schmuck was sent off to the bottleshop/pimp/dealer for a top up, people would try to make conversation with me to pass the time. I learned very early on in the piece that punk rock musicians as a whole had only ever read one book and that book was The Dirt by Motley Crue. Almost every conversation which began with "Whatchareeden?" turned to the glam rockers' exploits within three minutes. Now, if I was embarrassed that non-readers had read Catcher in The Rye and I hadn't, imagine my crushing shame whenever some drunken idiot with snot dribbling down their nose, pants half-fallen down and breath reeking of so many spirits that I suspected their mouth might have contained one of Dante's rings of Hell, could rattle off episode after memorable episode from the glorious rock n' roller's bible which I had never even bothered to skim. Thankfully these recurrent conversations caused me to know most of the stories and so pretty soon I could hold my own in any conversation that arose. But nothing prepared me for actually reading this testament to depravity. The Dirt is every bit as jaw-droppingly disgusting as legend would have it. And I mean that in the best possible way. How the members of that band are still alive is nothing short of astonishing. And I can safely say to everyone who I ever shared a backstage area with, we were all pretenders. And nobody else will ever be able to rise to the throne because Motley Crue well and truly trashed the palace. It may not be literature, but The Dirt is a true revelation.
Books I've Always Lied About Having Read: The March Challenge
on Monday, March 1, 2010
A pinch and a punch, it's the first of the month but more importantly I need a serious jolt to wake me from the literary coma that was February's book challenge. Now that it's over, I can admit that I had an ulterior motive for churning through the various Books I Swore I'd Never Read. Somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of my mind, I kind of hoped that I would enjoy a couple of them! I needed a way to justify reading these tomes that have captivated the masses to my lit-snobby self. I also needed to have an excuse at the ready whenever one of my bookish friends asked why on Earth I was reading, say, Twilight. So, for those who emailed me accusingly in the last twenty eight days, not only did I go in with an open mind, but one perhaps predisposed to enjoying all that twaddle. Alas, the best laid plans etc etc. I did learn a few things about the art (and I use that term ever so loosely) of making a best seller. Sure, it might sound like oversimplification, but all the books seemed to have co-opted populist religious doctrines, challenged them in a very superficial way, recast them through the prism of alternative or new age beliefs and then, ultimately, wrestled back and reaffirmed the original concepts as a 'take that!' to the nay-sayers. And that holds true whether we're talking about vampires, seagulls or annoying spoilt city slickers (not looking at anyone Elizabeth Gilbert). It also helps if it is written in a way that any high school drop out can imagine having written - the old fashioned principle of Why Didn't I Think of That? Ironically, the only book that I did enjoy last month was The Da Vinci Code, because it wore its religious motif very plainly on its shoulder. There was nothing duplicitous about it. And there's always a place for stories of rogue monks. Just ask Umberto Eco.
So where to from here? I got a lot of great feedback about the February challenge and wanted to come up with another concept that would have me debasing myself for your entertainment but perhaps not while suffering through a quagmire of crap. The answer came to me in a round about way, through my parents. Or, rather, through a very funny story about their courtship. Sometime in the late sixties, when mum and dad were in the early stages of dating, Mum mentioned that she had just read and loved Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Dad had not read it. Rather than getting himself a copy he soaked up all the bits and pieces - plot details, themes, the big moral questions - and managed to carry on quite an intelligent conversation about the book and how yes, he too loved it. Mum was suitably impressed by this well-read and cultured young man. It was a definite tick in the 'good future partner' column. Now I suspect there are some raised eyebrows out there. But let's face it, Dad was only doing something that we all do a heck of a lot more often that we'd care to admit. We lie about what we've read. I know I do, and I consider myself a pretty well-read person. I have carried on countless conversations with friends, colleagues and complete strangers about books I've never read. In many cases, enough details have seeped into the cultural ether such that we can all confidently bullshit about them and I, for one, have availed myself of any opportunity to do so. Hell, I've even blogged about a couple of books (in a round about way) that I've never so much as owned. God forbid I should be shown up for never having read a classic. Like Orwell's 1984. Oops, did I just let that slip?
My March challenge, therefore, is Book I've Always Lied About Having Read. I figure it is even more embarrassing than reading the ones I swore I never would, because at least going into February's challenge I could hold my head up high. No such luck this time. And so with apologies to anyone to whom I have given one of these as a present, those to whom I have so strongly yet blindly recommended them and to all my friends in the music community with whom I have discussed Motley Crue's The Dirt ("The greatest rock n' roll book ever.. yes, that scene was amazing... I can't believe they did that!), I give you my reading list for March:
The Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger
1984 by George Orwell
Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamnda Ngozi Adichie
The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
The Dirt by Motley Crue
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
In closing, I ought to mention in Dad's defence that he did read Crime and Punishment years later. And yes, he did enjoy it. JD Salinger, here I come!
So where to from here? I got a lot of great feedback about the February challenge and wanted to come up with another concept that would have me debasing myself for your entertainment but perhaps not while suffering through a quagmire of crap. The answer came to me in a round about way, through my parents. Or, rather, through a very funny story about their courtship. Sometime in the late sixties, when mum and dad were in the early stages of dating, Mum mentioned that she had just read and loved Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Dad had not read it. Rather than getting himself a copy he soaked up all the bits and pieces - plot details, themes, the big moral questions - and managed to carry on quite an intelligent conversation about the book and how yes, he too loved it. Mum was suitably impressed by this well-read and cultured young man. It was a definite tick in the 'good future partner' column. Now I suspect there are some raised eyebrows out there. But let's face it, Dad was only doing something that we all do a heck of a lot more often that we'd care to admit. We lie about what we've read. I know I do, and I consider myself a pretty well-read person. I have carried on countless conversations with friends, colleagues and complete strangers about books I've never read. In many cases, enough details have seeped into the cultural ether such that we can all confidently bullshit about them and I, for one, have availed myself of any opportunity to do so. Hell, I've even blogged about a couple of books (in a round about way) that I've never so much as owned. God forbid I should be shown up for never having read a classic. Like Orwell's 1984. Oops, did I just let that slip?
My March challenge, therefore, is Book I've Always Lied About Having Read. I figure it is even more embarrassing than reading the ones I swore I never would, because at least going into February's challenge I could hold my head up high. No such luck this time. And so with apologies to anyone to whom I have given one of these as a present, those to whom I have so strongly yet blindly recommended them and to all my friends in the music community with whom I have discussed Motley Crue's The Dirt ("The greatest rock n' roll book ever.. yes, that scene was amazing... I can't believe they did that!), I give you my reading list for March:
The Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger
1984 by George Orwell
Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamnda Ngozi Adichie
The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
The Dirt by Motley Crue
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
In closing, I ought to mention in Dad's defence that he did read Crime and Punishment years later. And yes, he did enjoy it. JD Salinger, here I come!
Microviews Vol. 7: Yet More Books I Swore I'd Never Read
on Friday, February 26, 2010
Well, it looks like I left the best two until last. The month of February draws to a close and I give you the last reviews in my "Books I Swore I'd Never Read" challenge. March is next. Prepare for some closing reflections on what I learnt this month (particularly if you want to become a massive international best-selling author of absolutely no substance), as well as a new, arguably even more embarrassing challenge. Oh the lengths to which I will go for your amusement...
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
Great, just what the world needs. A mormon who knows how to get into your house and shove their dogma down your throat without having to knock at your door. This tribute to teen abstinence and female disempowerment is so tedious that, if you will pardon the pun, it positively sucks the life out of the whole vampire genre. Well done to Meyer (I hate writing her first name - it seems intentionally misspelt to appeal to annoying emo zombies) for getting an entire generation to swallow this codswallop. She even convinced publishers to put out a new edition of Wuthering Heights with Twilight inspired cover art. I, however, am perplexed. Where is the appeal? I've read plenty of horror novels. I've read romances. I've read books aimed at teen girls. I get why many of them are popular. Twilight, however, is just lame. I didn't hate it. It just bored me. I mean, consider the plot. Awkward city girl comes to town and wants in with the popular crowd. She falls under the spell of the mysterious, rebellious loner who causes her to reconsider her aspirations for popularity and gets her to wreak revenge on her tormentors. Oh, wait on. That was the plot of the cool 80's film Heathers with Christian Slater and Winona Ryder. This one is about some clumsy, try-hard goth girl who falls in love with an Efron-esque vampire and realises that she cannot live without him. Literally. She wants to be bitten (read: have sex). He would love to bite her (read: have sex). Indeed, as a vampire (read: man), he is physically wired to need to bite her (read: have lots of sex). But because he loves her so much, he refrains, even when lying next to her in a state of semi-undress. No biteys. Not even with some sort of latex capping on his teeth. In the meantime, they all play happy Addams Family. Some rubbish happens with baseball. And then good vampire Eddie must save poor, powerless Bella from a bad vampire. Very scary. And let's not forget the positive lifestyle undercurrent. Meyer wields her religious message like a sledgehammer, even going so far as to endorse Creationism in a particularly odious passage. She sets back women's liberation and emancipation at least fifty years, suggesting that the fairer sex literally can't survive without a powerful man, and even if she could she would not want to. Hell, I suspect this book is printed with the ashes of all those bras that were burnt in the sixties. Hmmm... Zombie bras... Now there's an idea for Meyer's next series.
Review in Haiku: Teen idol with fangs/ Resists great desires because /Emos taste like crap
I actually put this one out to some friends for their haiku reviews. The results were much better than mine!
Hannah's Haiku: As long as they shine/ Stalking creeps are real hot stuff/ Dexter needs glitter
Rachel's Haiku: Goodbye Dracula/ Vamps die when Edward glitters/ Horney wolf should win
And last, but not least, CJ's Haiku: Twilight makes me sad/ Twilight is completely shit/ Twilight gave me AIDS
The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
P.T. Barnum might have wittily lampooned the idiocy of the majority, but I suspect even he would have been in awe of Rhonda Byrne. The Secret is the most distasteful, deceitful and downright dangerous piece of solipsist wankerism that has ever polluted the Earth. By now you all know the rub: If you want it, and believe it, just ask for it and feel the good vibes and presto(!!!!) it is yours. That's The Secret. Wealth, health, love, a cup of coffee. Only your ingrained fear and negativity are preventing you from having them all. Indeed, it is you - centre of the Universe - who brings about all that is good and invites anything bad that happens to you. Like cancer, for instance. You got it 'cos you asked for it. If you lose the battle, it is because you didn't really want to survive. Poverty. You deserve it. This is victim blaming at its most vile. The solutions are equally offensive. "Food cannot cause you to put on weight unless you think it can". That's a choral symphony for all those middle-American fatsos who want an excuse to eat that extra piece of cake. Or the whole cake. Wow, I can't imagine why Oprah waddled onto this bandwagon. "You cannot catch anything unless you think you can". Great advice in a world of AIDS epidemics and other such health crises. Byrne is either an idiot or a criminally dangerous manipulator. She pretty much ignores anything related to science or common sense, and instead impliedly advocates unsafe sex, suggests that parents need not immunise their children and says that you can use The Secret's methods to cure yourself of 'incurable' diseases. She offers the example of a breast cancer survivor who healed herself in just three months without chemo, radio or any other medical intervention. She just pictured herself healthy and the Universe provided. I went to school with a girl who had the same approach to her Type 1 Diabetes. Guess what? She's dead. Seriously, even purveyors of alternative medicine recommend that their wares be used in conjunction with conventional methods. Byrne suggests ignoring both. Her irresponsibility is truly staggering and I hope that anyone whose health suffers as a result (or the families of those who die) sues her ass off. If the message wasn't horrid enough, Byrne's method is equally suspect. She gives quacks high falootin' titles, invokes (and quotes out of context) great thinkers like Plato, Shakespeare and Einstein, and even carts out the Bible (though only the sequel) to provide doctrinal support for her message. Lest I be accused of unfounded scepticism, I am currently visualising a big mansion with a sexy library and several winning lottery tickets. Plus a world free of poverty, hunger and disease. While I'm waiting for it all to materialise, I'll let you in on a few Secrets of my own. This book is spectacularly bad. It ignores perfectly rational explanations for everyday 'miracles' and forces believers to recast ordinary experiences as extraordinary. It claims a wishy-washy theory - The Law of Attraction - to have the same scientific veracity as real theories like the Law of Gravity. It mentions 'quantum physics' an awful lot to make you think it is smart and scientific. It even paraphrases a Mariah Carey song ("There can be miracles when you believe"). But here's the big Secret Rhonda Byrne doesn't want you to know. She is a bully who will resort to all kinds of negative activity to protect her interests. She diddled co-creators of the original DVD out of millions of dollars. Indeed, she stole the company and moved it offshore. When they tried to sue her for the money, she launched countersuits in weird jurisdictions that judges have labelled "vexatious" and "harassing". She has fallen out with a bunch of the 'gurus' she championed in the book. Some of the others have themselves been the subject of malpractice suits. Everything about and around this book positively stinks, although it does speak volumes about the power of viral marketing (it is probably the greatest example thus far, even bigger than Oprah's other great cause, the Free Hugs campaign). If you still believe in this book, please come speak to me. I have some swamp land in New Jersey that you might be interested in buying. Apparently the waters are regenerative. It will change your life!
The Review in Haiku: Crappy TV hack/ Rehashes worst kept Secret/ That Barnum was right
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
Great, just what the world needs. A mormon who knows how to get into your house and shove their dogma down your throat without having to knock at your door. This tribute to teen abstinence and female disempowerment is so tedious that, if you will pardon the pun, it positively sucks the life out of the whole vampire genre. Well done to Meyer (I hate writing her first name - it seems intentionally misspelt to appeal to annoying emo zombies) for getting an entire generation to swallow this codswallop. She even convinced publishers to put out a new edition of Wuthering Heights with Twilight inspired cover art. I, however, am perplexed. Where is the appeal? I've read plenty of horror novels. I've read romances. I've read books aimed at teen girls. I get why many of them are popular. Twilight, however, is just lame. I didn't hate it. It just bored me. I mean, consider the plot. Awkward city girl comes to town and wants in with the popular crowd. She falls under the spell of the mysterious, rebellious loner who causes her to reconsider her aspirations for popularity and gets her to wreak revenge on her tormentors. Oh, wait on. That was the plot of the cool 80's film Heathers with Christian Slater and Winona Ryder. This one is about some clumsy, try-hard goth girl who falls in love with an Efron-esque vampire and realises that she cannot live without him. Literally. She wants to be bitten (read: have sex). He would love to bite her (read: have sex). Indeed, as a vampire (read: man), he is physically wired to need to bite her (read: have lots of sex). But because he loves her so much, he refrains, even when lying next to her in a state of semi-undress. No biteys. Not even with some sort of latex capping on his teeth. In the meantime, they all play happy Addams Family. Some rubbish happens with baseball. And then good vampire Eddie must save poor, powerless Bella from a bad vampire. Very scary. And let's not forget the positive lifestyle undercurrent. Meyer wields her religious message like a sledgehammer, even going so far as to endorse Creationism in a particularly odious passage. She sets back women's liberation and emancipation at least fifty years, suggesting that the fairer sex literally can't survive without a powerful man, and even if she could she would not want to. Hell, I suspect this book is printed with the ashes of all those bras that were burnt in the sixties. Hmmm... Zombie bras... Now there's an idea for Meyer's next series.
Review in Haiku: Teen idol with fangs/ Resists great desires because /Emos taste like crap
I actually put this one out to some friends for their haiku reviews. The results were much better than mine!
Hannah's Haiku: As long as they shine/ Stalking creeps are real hot stuff/ Dexter needs glitter
Rachel's Haiku: Goodbye Dracula/ Vamps die when Edward glitters/ Horney wolf should win
And last, but not least, CJ's Haiku: Twilight makes me sad/ Twilight is completely shit/ Twilight gave me AIDS
The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
P.T. Barnum might have wittily lampooned the idiocy of the majority, but I suspect even he would have been in awe of Rhonda Byrne. The Secret is the most distasteful, deceitful and downright dangerous piece of solipsist wankerism that has ever polluted the Earth. By now you all know the rub: If you want it, and believe it, just ask for it and feel the good vibes and presto(!!!!) it is yours. That's The Secret. Wealth, health, love, a cup of coffee. Only your ingrained fear and negativity are preventing you from having them all. Indeed, it is you - centre of the Universe - who brings about all that is good and invites anything bad that happens to you. Like cancer, for instance. You got it 'cos you asked for it. If you lose the battle, it is because you didn't really want to survive. Poverty. You deserve it. This is victim blaming at its most vile. The solutions are equally offensive. "Food cannot cause you to put on weight unless you think it can". That's a choral symphony for all those middle-American fatsos who want an excuse to eat that extra piece of cake. Or the whole cake. Wow, I can't imagine why Oprah waddled onto this bandwagon. "You cannot catch anything unless you think you can". Great advice in a world of AIDS epidemics and other such health crises. Byrne is either an idiot or a criminally dangerous manipulator. She pretty much ignores anything related to science or common sense, and instead impliedly advocates unsafe sex, suggests that parents need not immunise their children and says that you can use The Secret's methods to cure yourself of 'incurable' diseases. She offers the example of a breast cancer survivor who healed herself in just three months without chemo, radio or any other medical intervention. She just pictured herself healthy and the Universe provided. I went to school with a girl who had the same approach to her Type 1 Diabetes. Guess what? She's dead. Seriously, even purveyors of alternative medicine recommend that their wares be used in conjunction with conventional methods. Byrne suggests ignoring both. Her irresponsibility is truly staggering and I hope that anyone whose health suffers as a result (or the families of those who die) sues her ass off. If the message wasn't horrid enough, Byrne's method is equally suspect. She gives quacks high falootin' titles, invokes (and quotes out of context) great thinkers like Plato, Shakespeare and Einstein, and even carts out the Bible (though only the sequel) to provide doctrinal support for her message. Lest I be accused of unfounded scepticism, I am currently visualising a big mansion with a sexy library and several winning lottery tickets. Plus a world free of poverty, hunger and disease. While I'm waiting for it all to materialise, I'll let you in on a few Secrets of my own. This book is spectacularly bad. It ignores perfectly rational explanations for everyday 'miracles' and forces believers to recast ordinary experiences as extraordinary. It claims a wishy-washy theory - The Law of Attraction - to have the same scientific veracity as real theories like the Law of Gravity. It mentions 'quantum physics' an awful lot to make you think it is smart and scientific. It even paraphrases a Mariah Carey song ("There can be miracles when you believe"). But here's the big Secret Rhonda Byrne doesn't want you to know. She is a bully who will resort to all kinds of negative activity to protect her interests. She diddled co-creators of the original DVD out of millions of dollars. Indeed, she stole the company and moved it offshore. When they tried to sue her for the money, she launched countersuits in weird jurisdictions that judges have labelled "vexatious" and "harassing". She has fallen out with a bunch of the 'gurus' she championed in the book. Some of the others have themselves been the subject of malpractice suits. Everything about and around this book positively stinks, although it does speak volumes about the power of viral marketing (it is probably the greatest example thus far, even bigger than Oprah's other great cause, the Free Hugs campaign). If you still believe in this book, please come speak to me. I have some swamp land in New Jersey that you might be interested in buying. Apparently the waters are regenerative. It will change your life!
The Review in Haiku: Crappy TV hack/ Rehashes worst kept Secret/ That Barnum was right
The Safe and the Suitcase: Salinger, Kafka and the Search for Lost Literary Treasures
on Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Call me morbid but I've rather enjoyed the saliva storm that has been whipped up in the wake of JD Salinger's death. The much-loved local grandpa, church bingo fanatic and incessant scribbler might have walked away from the limelight following the phenomenal success of Catcher in The Rye, but now that he's carked it the literary vultures seem intent on giving him a sky burial, with various chunks of his carrion being lifted up on high for all to see. I particularly had to smirk at the photos that have recently emerged in which the startled old codger (if it was really him and not, say, Thomas Pynchon) looked like a cross between Jed Clampett and the serial killer Ed Gein. Supposing for a moment it was Salinger, the guy in those pictures exuded an air of sensibility, clearly unwilling to buy into any cult of personality even if by doing so he might well have been be feeding it. The reclusive lifestyle, it seems, was nothing if not a further investment in literary immortality. Salinger surely knew the legacy he was leaving. Chances are he was at pains to control its construction, even from beyond the grave. Now, as I suspect he might have hoped, many have gone positively giddy at the prospect of an entire body of unpublished work, wondering what he left behind in his safe. The guy supposedly never gave up writing so one can only ponder the vast expanses of forest that have been felled over 60 years to service his typewriter. Add to that the fact that his later published works were infinitely better than Catcher (even if some pre-dated it), and there might well be something about which to get excited. The next few months will no doubt prove interesting as publishers descend on Salinger's kids with, I would wager, blank chequebooks, especially if dear old dad left instructions to destroy any manuscripts. Can they possibly resist the temptation that claimed the souls of Dmitri Nabokov and Max Brod?
When it comes to lost literary treasures, or at least the hope of finding some, Salinger's safe pales next to the contents of a humble, tattered suitcase recently the subject of a bitter legal dispute in Tel Aviv. For quite a while now, many have wondered what Franz Kafka's literary executor stuffed inside the case before gifting it to his secretary Esther Hoffe. When Max Brod died, Hoffe essentially became de facto executor. According to Brod's will she was supposed to make the necessary arrangements to have the contents catalogued and properly stored. Instead, she let them languish in her humid, cat-infested apartment (except the bits she tried to sell, of course) pretty much until her death in 2008. As if to slap old Max in the face one last time, she left it to her daughters who immediately saw fit to stuff whatever they could in various bank vaults around the world. Now, following a case that had almost nothing to do with Kafka but a lot to do with the Israeli laws of inheritance (think of it as an old fashioned custody battle perhaps), Hoffe's daughters have been ordered by the court to reach some deal with the National Library of Israel or have the suitcase (metaphorically speaking - I'm not sure the actual suitcase still exists) opened and catalogued without their consent. The Library successfully argued that Hoffe Snr had no right to gift the case to her daughters and it seems that whatever was inside will, one way or another, finally be set free. I'm not sure whether to be excited or mortified.
It is a sad fact that today's publishers are not averse to printing any piece of crap that Kafka committed to paper. He is an industry, a Che Guevara for the literary minded. Just spend a day in Prague and you'll see what I mean. Not that I can talk. On my Czech Literature shelf I have any number of volumes of pointless apocrypha, including a rather gorgeous edition of Kafka's professional legal writings. More the fool am I for treasuring it. See, even we cynics can't get enough, which means whoever gets ultimate possession of the suitcase (and we should probably be thankful that none of the players ever just threw out the papers and used it for travel or as a kitty litter tray) will have a pack of salivating hordes ready to lap up the remaining morsels. Speculation as to the contents has ranged anywhere from diaries, to correspondence to as-yet unpublished stories and novels. Personally, I'm rooting for shopping lists. Naturally, for the most part, all this imaginative sleuthwork is nonsense. Brod had those papers during his lifetime and, I am sure, went through them with a fine-toothed comb hoping to find anything he could salvage. Nothing escaped him. He even went so far as to finish works himself (Amerika being a prime example) if it meant he could squeeze one last drop of blood from the writer's gravestone. That said, and here comes my nugget of inside information, there were at least three short stories rejected by publisher Kurt Wolff before he accepted A Country Doctor which have still yet to surface. Wolff says so in his unpublished diaries. Even Saint Franz, it would seem, was fallible. Please don't stone me.
I dread to think then what is in the suitcase if it was rejected by both Wolff and Brod. I know there certainly once were items of importance. Hoffe was arrested numerous times for trying to smuggle or sell the odd bit. She even offloaded the original manuscript for The Trial to the German government for a measly 1.1 million pounds. Which means we can add Hoffe to the list of people who rejected the remainder. If that is the case, let's just hope that in some sort of homage to Gregor Samsa, nature saw fit to allow the silverfish to get to whatever is left before any Koruna-eyed publisher can. Either way, any treasure hunters will have to wait a little longer. The daughters intend on appealing the decision. Take that, literary futures market!
When it comes to lost literary treasures, or at least the hope of finding some, Salinger's safe pales next to the contents of a humble, tattered suitcase recently the subject of a bitter legal dispute in Tel Aviv. For quite a while now, many have wondered what Franz Kafka's literary executor stuffed inside the case before gifting it to his secretary Esther Hoffe. When Max Brod died, Hoffe essentially became de facto executor. According to Brod's will she was supposed to make the necessary arrangements to have the contents catalogued and properly stored. Instead, she let them languish in her humid, cat-infested apartment (except the bits she tried to sell, of course) pretty much until her death in 2008. As if to slap old Max in the face one last time, she left it to her daughters who immediately saw fit to stuff whatever they could in various bank vaults around the world. Now, following a case that had almost nothing to do with Kafka but a lot to do with the Israeli laws of inheritance (think of it as an old fashioned custody battle perhaps), Hoffe's daughters have been ordered by the court to reach some deal with the National Library of Israel or have the suitcase (metaphorically speaking - I'm not sure the actual suitcase still exists) opened and catalogued without their consent. The Library successfully argued that Hoffe Snr had no right to gift the case to her daughters and it seems that whatever was inside will, one way or another, finally be set free. I'm not sure whether to be excited or mortified.
It is a sad fact that today's publishers are not averse to printing any piece of crap that Kafka committed to paper. He is an industry, a Che Guevara for the literary minded. Just spend a day in Prague and you'll see what I mean. Not that I can talk. On my Czech Literature shelf I have any number of volumes of pointless apocrypha, including a rather gorgeous edition of Kafka's professional legal writings. More the fool am I for treasuring it. See, even we cynics can't get enough, which means whoever gets ultimate possession of the suitcase (and we should probably be thankful that none of the players ever just threw out the papers and used it for travel or as a kitty litter tray) will have a pack of salivating hordes ready to lap up the remaining morsels. Speculation as to the contents has ranged anywhere from diaries, to correspondence to as-yet unpublished stories and novels. Personally, I'm rooting for shopping lists. Naturally, for the most part, all this imaginative sleuthwork is nonsense. Brod had those papers during his lifetime and, I am sure, went through them with a fine-toothed comb hoping to find anything he could salvage. Nothing escaped him. He even went so far as to finish works himself (Amerika being a prime example) if it meant he could squeeze one last drop of blood from the writer's gravestone. That said, and here comes my nugget of inside information, there were at least three short stories rejected by publisher Kurt Wolff before he accepted A Country Doctor which have still yet to surface. Wolff says so in his unpublished diaries. Even Saint Franz, it would seem, was fallible. Please don't stone me.
I dread to think then what is in the suitcase if it was rejected by both Wolff and Brod. I know there certainly once were items of importance. Hoffe was arrested numerous times for trying to smuggle or sell the odd bit. She even offloaded the original manuscript for The Trial to the German government for a measly 1.1 million pounds. Which means we can add Hoffe to the list of people who rejected the remainder. If that is the case, let's just hope that in some sort of homage to Gregor Samsa, nature saw fit to allow the silverfish to get to whatever is left before any Koruna-eyed publisher can. Either way, any treasure hunters will have to wait a little longer. The daughters intend on appealing the decision. Take that, literary futures market!
Microviews Vol. 6: Even More Books I Swore I'd Never Read
on Friday, February 12, 2010
Dear Penny Syber,
I have long been a customer at your fantastic secondhand bookstore. Indeed, you are my one exception to the obsessive compulsion I have about owning only new books. I'm sure Jung would make a great deal of that. Anyway, I hope that my years of custom have caused you to think highly of my taste in literature and that my visit last week did nothing to alter that. As I said at the time, it was for a greater good. With that in mind, I dedicate these reviews to you.
Your loving and usually discerning customer,
Bram
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
So I guess you're ready for my big hatchet job on the Dan Brown monolith. I have spent this month rallying against the blockbusters that have, for the most part, proven to be as terrible as I had anticipated. I have also spewed plenty of bile against religious motifs being used as the common hook to draw in the masses. But here we go. I can't believe I'm going to say this. I kind of enjoyed The Da Vinci Code. Sure, it's horribly written. Dan Brown should almost be forbidden from writing his own name. But he tells a great story and doesn't preach any sort of religious message. Who cares if the 'revelation' of a bloodline of Christ is as old as the hills? Brown doesn't pretend that it isn't. He even cites his sources (which, interestingly for the lawyers in the audience, included Holy Blood, Holy Grail). Taken for what it is, The Da Vinci Code is a fun, fast-paced nonsense adventure which might not change the course of literature, but is certainly a fun way to pass a long train ride. The characters are cardboard, the denouement is stupidly improbable and Brown's attempts to tie up the loose ends in logistically impossible ways is laughable. But who cares? I had fun the whole time. Consider it literary sorbet, to be consumed between more substantial offerings.
Review in Haiku (with apologies to the one person on Earth who hasn't read the book): Someone once told me/ Albinos can't be trusted/ No, it's the British!
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
Wow, so it took me a whole fifteen minutes to find a book that is more appallingly written than The Da Vinci Code. Well done James Redfield. You make Dan Brown look like Nabokov. And, in terms of profundity and authenticity, you thrust Elizabeth Gilbert into the stratosphere along with such luminaries as Sartre and Descartes. I remember being in high school when this book hit. People went nuts, as if it had ushered in some kind of Messianic age. Seriously, Redfield was giving Hubbard a real run for his money in terms of kickstarting a new religion (by that time people had tired of living by the Rhinehart Dice Theory which, in my humble opinion, is a far more sensible way of living one's life than either Dianetics or Celestine). Luckily, I was already happy and secure with my path in life so I didn't see any point in reading it. Now, almost twenty years later, I kind of wish I had, so that I could have thumbed my nose in scorn at the new believers. I call the biggest case of shenanigans on Redfield. He is a massive fraud. Although many people have claimed that he found a way to synthesise new age mysticism (and a whole heap of other plagiarised concepts) with conventional religion, the reality is almost the opposite. Redfield is a proselytising Christian, who sought to draw those exploring alternate paths back to the Church. He hid it in a terrible adventure that any eight year old special school student could have concocted (and seriously, I can't quite get across how spectacularly bad it is). Yep, it's got Mayans, pyramids, car chases, shootouts, evil priests [insert your own list of bad adventure cliches here, I'm bored of naming them]. And, of course, it has good priests who show you how the Insights are completely in sync with traditional, mainly Christian, doctrines. Now, I'm all for helping people find themselves. I get there's a need and an industry that services it. I also, contrary to popular belief, have no problem with conventional religion for those who wish to subscribe. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, The Force, whatever! They're all good to me. But don't preach a traditional dogma and doll it up as a new solution. That's just cruel and disingenuous. This hokey load of crap made my blood boil so much that it ought to come with a sticker on the front that screams, in embossed capital letters, "Not suitable for Jainists". Though, if I had my way I'd throw in the words "or anyone!" after that.
Review in Haiku: And now an Insight/ Great fraud perpetuated/ Until next trend strikes!
I'm off to read the newies by Delillo, Rhodes and Rachman now. Very excited.
I have long been a customer at your fantastic secondhand bookstore. Indeed, you are my one exception to the obsessive compulsion I have about owning only new books. I'm sure Jung would make a great deal of that. Anyway, I hope that my years of custom have caused you to think highly of my taste in literature and that my visit last week did nothing to alter that. As I said at the time, it was for a greater good. With that in mind, I dedicate these reviews to you.
Your loving and usually discerning customer,
Bram
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
So I guess you're ready for my big hatchet job on the Dan Brown monolith. I have spent this month rallying against the blockbusters that have, for the most part, proven to be as terrible as I had anticipated. I have also spewed plenty of bile against religious motifs being used as the common hook to draw in the masses. But here we go. I can't believe I'm going to say this. I kind of enjoyed The Da Vinci Code. Sure, it's horribly written. Dan Brown should almost be forbidden from writing his own name. But he tells a great story and doesn't preach any sort of religious message. Who cares if the 'revelation' of a bloodline of Christ is as old as the hills? Brown doesn't pretend that it isn't. He even cites his sources (which, interestingly for the lawyers in the audience, included Holy Blood, Holy Grail). Taken for what it is, The Da Vinci Code is a fun, fast-paced nonsense adventure which might not change the course of literature, but is certainly a fun way to pass a long train ride. The characters are cardboard, the denouement is stupidly improbable and Brown's attempts to tie up the loose ends in logistically impossible ways is laughable. But who cares? I had fun the whole time. Consider it literary sorbet, to be consumed between more substantial offerings.
Review in Haiku (with apologies to the one person on Earth who hasn't read the book): Someone once told me/ Albinos can't be trusted/ No, it's the British!
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
Wow, so it took me a whole fifteen minutes to find a book that is more appallingly written than The Da Vinci Code. Well done James Redfield. You make Dan Brown look like Nabokov. And, in terms of profundity and authenticity, you thrust Elizabeth Gilbert into the stratosphere along with such luminaries as Sartre and Descartes. I remember being in high school when this book hit. People went nuts, as if it had ushered in some kind of Messianic age. Seriously, Redfield was giving Hubbard a real run for his money in terms of kickstarting a new religion (by that time people had tired of living by the Rhinehart Dice Theory which, in my humble opinion, is a far more sensible way of living one's life than either Dianetics or Celestine). Luckily, I was already happy and secure with my path in life so I didn't see any point in reading it. Now, almost twenty years later, I kind of wish I had, so that I could have thumbed my nose in scorn at the new believers. I call the biggest case of shenanigans on Redfield. He is a massive fraud. Although many people have claimed that he found a way to synthesise new age mysticism (and a whole heap of other plagiarised concepts) with conventional religion, the reality is almost the opposite. Redfield is a proselytising Christian, who sought to draw those exploring alternate paths back to the Church. He hid it in a terrible adventure that any eight year old special school student could have concocted (and seriously, I can't quite get across how spectacularly bad it is). Yep, it's got Mayans, pyramids, car chases, shootouts, evil priests [insert your own list of bad adventure cliches here, I'm bored of naming them]. And, of course, it has good priests who show you how the Insights are completely in sync with traditional, mainly Christian, doctrines. Now, I'm all for helping people find themselves. I get there's a need and an industry that services it. I also, contrary to popular belief, have no problem with conventional religion for those who wish to subscribe. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, The Force, whatever! They're all good to me. But don't preach a traditional dogma and doll it up as a new solution. That's just cruel and disingenuous. This hokey load of crap made my blood boil so much that it ought to come with a sticker on the front that screams, in embossed capital letters, "Not suitable for Jainists". Though, if I had my way I'd throw in the words "or anyone!" after that.
Review in Haiku: And now an Insight/ Great fraud perpetuated/ Until next trend strikes!
I'm off to read the newies by Delillo, Rhodes and Rachman now. Very excited.
Microviews Vol. 5: Some More Books I Swore I'd Never Read
on Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Daily I sink further into the abyss. At my local secondhand bookstore, stares. Buying the Da Vinci Code, The Celestine Prophecy and Jonathan Livingstone Seagull in one blast? I tried to excuse my way out of it like a teenager in a porno store. Back home, in the garage of my apartment building, I walk with them tucked under my arm, lest a neighbour see me. Perhaps I should take a leaf out of my grandfather's book and wrap the incriminating items in paisley paper. For him, of course, said items included genuine classics such as Portnoy's Complaint, Lady Chatterly's Lover and Lolita. Mine are cheaper, grubbier... I own something by Dan Brown! What have I become?
But remember, open mind. Open mind.
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach
Before reading this much loved classic, I never thought I would relate to a stupid seagull. Now, having read it, I can quite unequivocally say I will never relate to a stupid seagull. Self-empowering mumbo jumbo really reached new heights with this one, if you'll pardon the pun. Fly, humble birdy, fly. Dare to be different. If you just believe in yourself and disregard your limitations you will soar beyond the flock. Those millions who, on the back of this book, dared to be different were just like the massive crowd gathered outside their saviour's window in Monty Python's Life of Brian, cheering in gleeful chorus that "We are all individuals". So here... Let me dare to be different and go against the flock. Wake up! This book is simplistic rubbish, repackaging stoicism and commercialised Eastern philosophy (of the Grasshopper variety), and laying it at the feet of some conventional Messianic deity. Son of the Great Gull indeed. George Lucas did it way better when he made Star Wars, and he at least had the courtesy to throw in some nifty explosions. Bach (who, from what I gather, might have done us a favour by following in the footsteps of his fellow aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery) could have achieved the same with a simple packet of aspirin, but who am I to tell him to suck gull eggs?
Review in Haiku: Dare to soar beyond/ And you will find yourself too/ Watch out for that cliff!
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Doesn't anyone read the bible just for laughs anymore? The Old Testament, the sequel, the fan fiction appendices? I mean, seriously, does 'the greatest story ever told' now only exist as a source for clues in thriller novels and a barrel of quotable apples in which new age fabulists and self-empowerment gurus can bob? Here I was enjoying a seemingly sassy old-fashioned crime thriller when THWAK... I was blindsided by biblical garbage yet again. Please. The world has been seduced by the Stieg Larsson phenomenon, what with the whole dying before his genius was recognised schtick. But who are we kidding? This guy ain't John Kennedy Toole. He was an obsessive workaholic who quite literally wrote himself to death. Luckily, beforehand he happened upon the cliche checklist to help him strike literary gold (well, for his beneficiaries at least). To be fair, I must admit that this book was fun for the first two hundred pages while the religious undertones remained subtle. I mean, I enjoy a violent anal rape scene as much as the next Catholic. And those allusions to the Vanger family's Nazi past... Wow, it had me thinking how much I loved the way Indiana Jones whipped, shot and propellor-chopped his way through those cool films (that does not include The Last Crusade, sorry Leo). Oh and I totally liked the heroine that reminded me of half the goth try-hards I dated at university (and a little of myself). But I draw the line at encoded religious messages as keys to solving the mystery. I hated it when that pile of horse manure The Bible Code was doing the rounds and, frankly, it doesn't stink any less now. In this month of "Books I Swore I'd Never Read", can I just have one that doesn't use the bible as a plot device or thematic crutch? Hmmm, I wonder what this next one on my pile has in store... The Da Vinci Code. Ooooh, that looks like it's about art! I'm saved... in the non-religious sense, of course!
Review in Haiku: Apocryphal tidings/ In some middle aged wet dream/ What would Jesus do?
But remember, open mind. Open mind.
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach
Before reading this much loved classic, I never thought I would relate to a stupid seagull. Now, having read it, I can quite unequivocally say I will never relate to a stupid seagull. Self-empowering mumbo jumbo really reached new heights with this one, if you'll pardon the pun. Fly, humble birdy, fly. Dare to be different. If you just believe in yourself and disregard your limitations you will soar beyond the flock. Those millions who, on the back of this book, dared to be different were just like the massive crowd gathered outside their saviour's window in Monty Python's Life of Brian, cheering in gleeful chorus that "We are all individuals". So here... Let me dare to be different and go against the flock. Wake up! This book is simplistic rubbish, repackaging stoicism and commercialised Eastern philosophy (of the Grasshopper variety), and laying it at the feet of some conventional Messianic deity. Son of the Great Gull indeed. George Lucas did it way better when he made Star Wars, and he at least had the courtesy to throw in some nifty explosions. Bach (who, from what I gather, might have done us a favour by following in the footsteps of his fellow aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery) could have achieved the same with a simple packet of aspirin, but who am I to tell him to suck gull eggs?
Review in Haiku: Dare to soar beyond/ And you will find yourself too/ Watch out for that cliff!
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Doesn't anyone read the bible just for laughs anymore? The Old Testament, the sequel, the fan fiction appendices? I mean, seriously, does 'the greatest story ever told' now only exist as a source for clues in thriller novels and a barrel of quotable apples in which new age fabulists and self-empowerment gurus can bob? Here I was enjoying a seemingly sassy old-fashioned crime thriller when THWAK... I was blindsided by biblical garbage yet again. Please. The world has been seduced by the Stieg Larsson phenomenon, what with the whole dying before his genius was recognised schtick. But who are we kidding? This guy ain't John Kennedy Toole. He was an obsessive workaholic who quite literally wrote himself to death. Luckily, beforehand he happened upon the cliche checklist to help him strike literary gold (well, for his beneficiaries at least). To be fair, I must admit that this book was fun for the first two hundred pages while the religious undertones remained subtle. I mean, I enjoy a violent anal rape scene as much as the next Catholic. And those allusions to the Vanger family's Nazi past... Wow, it had me thinking how much I loved the way Indiana Jones whipped, shot and propellor-chopped his way through those cool films (that does not include The Last Crusade, sorry Leo). Oh and I totally liked the heroine that reminded me of half the goth try-hards I dated at university (and a little of myself). But I draw the line at encoded religious messages as keys to solving the mystery. I hated it when that pile of horse manure The Bible Code was doing the rounds and, frankly, it doesn't stink any less now. In this month of "Books I Swore I'd Never Read", can I just have one that doesn't use the bible as a plot device or thematic crutch? Hmmm, I wonder what this next one on my pile has in store... The Da Vinci Code. Ooooh, that looks like it's about art! I'm saved... in the non-religious sense, of course!
Review in Haiku: Apocryphal tidings/ In some middle aged wet dream/ What would Jesus do?
Microviews Vol. 4: Some Books I Swore I'd Never Read
on Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Two books in and I'm beginning to regret choosing this theme for February. I could spew bile here, but what the heck... I'll let these reviews speak for themselves. As promised, I've done brief summaries in haiku. If nothing else, that was fun!
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
No written form speaks so honestly to me as the fable. It is the chosen vehicle of many of the great writers of olden times, and the backbone of my favourite single body of literature, Yiddish. I therefore approached Coelho's blockbuster debut with a certain degree of hope. Perhaps he would turn out to be a throwback in the best possible sense, and I had been unnecessarily pigheaded about not reading him. For the first few pages I was ready to fall on my sword and admit that arrogance had triumphed over sense. But then it all went awry. It is not hard to see why this has remained so popular since its publication. Hiding behind the facade of classical storytelling is a grab-bag of borrowed religious concepts that most likely affirmed beliefs already held by the book's countless readers, combined with a few 'mystical' new age concepts for the suckers in the audience. To be fair, it is a perfectly pleasant read (aside from the times I found myself swallowing the chunks of vomit that had crept up my gullet). However, if you are one of the three people left in the world who hasn't read this, let me give you some time saving advice. Pick up your copy of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and spend a few minutes listening to "All You Need Is Love". At the end of each chorus line scream out "And Jesus!!!", and you will have pretty much experienced, in thematic terms, The Alchemist. No need to thank me.
The Review in Haiku: Boy rides on donkey/ Affirms pre-existing faith/ Now who's the donkey?
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Ok so I get that I don't exactly fall within Elizabeth Gilbert's target demographic but I really tried to approach this book with an open mind. Lest you think there was never any chance I might succumb to Gilbertmania, I'm even willing to admit at the outset that I have, at times, enjoyed some of the chick-lit foisted upon me by sadistic editors. But right now I am positively furious and not just because I will never get back the few hours I spent on this steaming pile of bourgeoise self-indulgence. No, I am furious because Gilbert is nothing more than a yuppie snake oil saleswoman and the world has bought it by the gallon. Eat Pray Love is essentially a recovery memoir, where the affliction is not depression or drug addiction, but simple middle class ennui. From a position of exceptional privilege, Gilbert offers a most innovative cure: escape your shitty life by dropping everything and whizzing off on a whirlwind tour of Italy and exotic South East Asia where enlightenment is surely awaiting you. It is an amazingly arrogant act of preaching. Most people don't have the luxury of just putting their lives on hold and running away from their problems. Most don't have the advantage of a massive book advance that allows them to do that sort of thing (a detail Gilbert disingenuously fails to mention). Indeed, the closest most of her readers will ever come is sitting in front of the television with a tub of Neopolitan ice cream while watching the National Geographic or Discovery Channel (assuming, of course, that they can even afford cable). Eat Pray Love is also a rather embarrassing testament to American insularity. Gilbert is constantly amazed by all the exotic wonders the world has to offer, be it pizza in Naples, an Ashram in India or the touching simplicity of Balinese life. Slap after slap after patronising slap in the face. And to think, Americans worship at the Gilbert shrine. Speaking of which, there is a constant barrage of hack philosophising on religion and God here, particularly of the Christian kind. Like with The Alchemist, it is camouflaged amongst grabs from new age mumbo jumbo crap and some typical middle-American kowtowing to all things Yogic but it still shines through in all its dogmatic glory. Hopefully the world will soon tire of Elizabeth Gilbert so we can fold her into a little package, stuff her in a suitcase and leave her at the back of a cupboard somewhere. At least then her yoga training won't have been totally pointless!
The Review in Haiku: Problems can be solved/ With extra mozzarella/ Oprah will love this
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
No written form speaks so honestly to me as the fable. It is the chosen vehicle of many of the great writers of olden times, and the backbone of my favourite single body of literature, Yiddish. I therefore approached Coelho's blockbuster debut with a certain degree of hope. Perhaps he would turn out to be a throwback in the best possible sense, and I had been unnecessarily pigheaded about not reading him. For the first few pages I was ready to fall on my sword and admit that arrogance had triumphed over sense. But then it all went awry. It is not hard to see why this has remained so popular since its publication. Hiding behind the facade of classical storytelling is a grab-bag of borrowed religious concepts that most likely affirmed beliefs already held by the book's countless readers, combined with a few 'mystical' new age concepts for the suckers in the audience. To be fair, it is a perfectly pleasant read (aside from the times I found myself swallowing the chunks of vomit that had crept up my gullet). However, if you are one of the three people left in the world who hasn't read this, let me give you some time saving advice. Pick up your copy of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and spend a few minutes listening to "All You Need Is Love". At the end of each chorus line scream out "And Jesus!!!", and you will have pretty much experienced, in thematic terms, The Alchemist. No need to thank me.
The Review in Haiku: Boy rides on donkey/ Affirms pre-existing faith/ Now who's the donkey?
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Ok so I get that I don't exactly fall within Elizabeth Gilbert's target demographic but I really tried to approach this book with an open mind. Lest you think there was never any chance I might succumb to Gilbertmania, I'm even willing to admit at the outset that I have, at times, enjoyed some of the chick-lit foisted upon me by sadistic editors. But right now I am positively furious and not just because I will never get back the few hours I spent on this steaming pile of bourgeoise self-indulgence. No, I am furious because Gilbert is nothing more than a yuppie snake oil saleswoman and the world has bought it by the gallon. Eat Pray Love is essentially a recovery memoir, where the affliction is not depression or drug addiction, but simple middle class ennui. From a position of exceptional privilege, Gilbert offers a most innovative cure: escape your shitty life by dropping everything and whizzing off on a whirlwind tour of Italy and exotic South East Asia where enlightenment is surely awaiting you. It is an amazingly arrogant act of preaching. Most people don't have the luxury of just putting their lives on hold and running away from their problems. Most don't have the advantage of a massive book advance that allows them to do that sort of thing (a detail Gilbert disingenuously fails to mention). Indeed, the closest most of her readers will ever come is sitting in front of the television with a tub of Neopolitan ice cream while watching the National Geographic or Discovery Channel (assuming, of course, that they can even afford cable). Eat Pray Love is also a rather embarrassing testament to American insularity. Gilbert is constantly amazed by all the exotic wonders the world has to offer, be it pizza in Naples, an Ashram in India or the touching simplicity of Balinese life. Slap after slap after patronising slap in the face. And to think, Americans worship at the Gilbert shrine. Speaking of which, there is a constant barrage of hack philosophising on religion and God here, particularly of the Christian kind. Like with The Alchemist, it is camouflaged amongst grabs from new age mumbo jumbo crap and some typical middle-American kowtowing to all things Yogic but it still shines through in all its dogmatic glory. Hopefully the world will soon tire of Elizabeth Gilbert so we can fold her into a little package, stuff her in a suitcase and leave her at the back of a cupboard somewhere. At least then her yoga training won't have been totally pointless!
The Review in Haiku: Problems can be solved/ With extra mozzarella/ Oprah will love this
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