Mar

21

Props to Me

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I finished the first volume of my Graham Greene biography!  This may not sound impressive, but given my bad track record with nonfiction and the incredible size of this massive tome, it was definitely not a foregone conclusion.  It does make me think the Kindle may have been the way to go, especially since I can no longer rest a book that weighs so much on my stomach.

I still have my issues with the way the whole thing is put together.  Sometimes it feels as though the biographer feels the need to mention everything possible that ever happened.  And I still feel like maybe he’s taking a bit too much out of some sketchy incident from Greene’s childhood.  At the end of the book, which was around the time of the writing of both The Power and the Glory and Brighton Rock (so getting into the prime early works), he claims that this same incident informed both books heavily.  To me, the fact that betrayal is a regular theme of Greene’s is not really that indicative.  Especially since the idea of a Jesus figure and a Judas figure would be very consistent with his newly-found Catholicism and the religion that starts to come through in his works.

I enjoyed it much more in the latter third when he was writing professionally and traveling.  Though the dichotomy between his first big trip to Liberia, where he really roughed it with hardly any knowledge of what he was getting into and seems to have highly enjoyed the whole affair, and his next big trip to Mexico, where he appears to have been so completely miserable that his hatred for the Mexican people permeates all his letters, is quite strange.  The Mexico trip doesn’t seem consistent with what little I know of his later traveling ventures, but that’s kind of the point of my reading the biographies.  I will go on to Volume 2, because of the library’s weird filing system, I have to have it reserved by a staff member instead of doing it myself, but it shouldn’t take long to get the next one.

I also just finished another really big book, The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald.  I’d heard her recommended by a blog I occasionally read, but I wasn’t a huge fan.  The story itself, at its heart, was a good one and well-thought.  However, it felt so unnecessarily bogged down in daily minutiae, in long pieces of set-up, that I didn’t feel like anything was really happening until I was around halfway through.  And then, after the plot finally started to play out and things got interesting, instead of a good resolution, she just fast-forwarded twenty years and started the process over again.  A nice chapter or epilogue of moderate length could have given all the resolution necessary without the neverending feel.  Plus, it was quite strange to go from a young girl to suddenly a famous adult lesbian stand-up comic that I felt less connected instead of more connected.  Still, I liked what parts of the story I found useful.  I just share a very different philosophy from MacDonald and her editor.

With those big books behind me, I’m happy to get on to more reading.  Shorter reading.

Mar

15

The Influx Arrives

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My huge influx of books is here.   Which means my Graham Greene biography won’t be done for a while yet.  And that I’ll inevitably read the easiest ones first, leaving me with a pile of daunting material which I probably won’t finish.

I do have some motivation to read the books from the previously mentioned Tournament.  I finished Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri.  I liked it quite a lot, though I felt like the last set of interconnected stories weren’t necessarily as strong as the first set of unconnected stories.  (The last one, in particular, felt forced.)  If Lahiri wasn’t as good as she is, it would be easy to get bored in the similarities between her stories.  But instead, her characters always feel so fully fleshed out and different that you always feel like you’re someplace very different when you turn from one story to another.  This doesn’t mean, however, that I wouldn’t like to see something different from her.  So far the Bengali characters have so dominated her writing that I wonder what her future plans are.

I also finished My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru.  I feel like I deserve a medal for deciding to read it, since I have an aversion to novels on 60’s radicals.  But reading it was its own reward.  Kunzru is a good writer and keeps you plowing forward through his story, which flashes back and forth between the modern day man-in-hiding to the younger fighting radical.  (In fact, one of my chief complaints is that the changes come so suddenly that you often don’t realize you’ve shifted 35 years between sentences.)  I did like the modern plot, I felt that the scenes from the protagonist’s radical days were enlightening but ultimately unsatisfying.  At one point, it feels as though it is running through a quick narrative.  And then this happened, and then this happened, and then this, and then this… and on and on.  The major risk these books take is that if they dwell too heavily on the ideas behind the actions the book gets tedious, but if they dwell too much on the actions without the ideas the book gets tedious.  I feel like for some distance the balancing act worked, but about halfway through it started to teeter more towards action.  I didn’t really feel as if I understood why the main character did what he did and what he really believed.  Still, I don’t want to come down on it too harshly, I still enjoyed the book and went through it pretty quickly.

That leaves only one tournament book left that I’ve decided to read, The Northern Clemency.  I am 10th in line at the library, so I don’t expect to have it before the tournament is over.  As for the tournament itself, it is going much as expected.  The big cool books are dominating, the big not-cool-enough books are getting destroyed.  The later rounds should be more interesting.  Lahiri is already out, although it looks like she had pretty stiff competition.  My favorite has not been the actual rounds but the commentary, mostly because the commentators freely admit that they don’t see the big deal with Roberto Bolaño but are willing to stick up for this year’s much-maligned Booker winner.  (Plus, they completely got Frankie Landau-Banks, whereas the reviewer seemed to miss the mark.)  I feel better about myself knowing I’m not the only one who just isn’t interested in Bolaño.  (Especially with habits like this one, as pointed out by Kevin Guilfoile: “Virtually every time two or more people have sex Bolaño is compelled, like a fetishist Rain Man, to mark the minutes and seconds.”)  The man may be in love with poetry, but the poetry never seemed to get much attention in what I read.  (In all fairness, I haven’t cracked open 2666 and could not finish The Savage Detectives.)

In non-tournament reading, I just read Ruth Rendell’s new book under her pen name Barbara Vine, The Birthday Present.  I had forgotten it was actually Rendell so I was thinking I was discovering a new writer only to turn to the final page and see that it had been Rendell all along.  I liked the book well enough, though at its heart it’s such a simple story that I’m surprised she manages to make it last as long as she does.  The structure has its problems as well, but I got over them once I figured it out.  At heart, blackmail is blackmail, and a novel where the promise of blackmail hangs over several hundred pages could use a bit more to back it up.

Next up?  No clue.  I have a book about Mennonites and Wide Sargasso Sea, which I’ve never read.  If either grabs me, I’ll go with it.  I’ve got a few new ones on hold, although the library hasn’t yet acquired Zoe Heller’s new book, which I’d like to check out.

As for movies, last night Eric and I watched Little Children, adapted from Tom Perrotta’s novel.  I’d seen it before, and I suggested it since it has both Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earle Haley, who were both in Watchmen, which we saw the week before.  Especially since Eric didn’t recall having ever seen Wilson in one of his more typical “hunky” roles.  (It makes him much more surprising as the schlub in Watchmen, I think.)  I read the novel a few years ago and liked it very much.  Perrotta manages to take the darkness-in-suburbia novel and make it feel new and fresh.  But the first time I saw the film I remember being quite disappointed.  Perhaps this was because I’d read the novel more recently and had all the things that got left out still in my head.  I haven’t read the book in the years since and so I could watch the movie with fresher eyes this time, even though I remembered almost all of the plot.  I liked it significantly more and find myself wondering why it didn’t get more attention in ‘06.  Especially in a year where Little Miss Sunshine was in the running for Best Picture.  (I’ve never liked it.  Not even a little.)  It did get much-deserved acting nominations for Winslet and Haley and for screenplay, but still.  (And all three lost, btw.  Screenplay lost to The Departed, which is depressing.  Can someone fix Oscar voting, please?)  It holds up very very well.  (Also holding up well?  Brokeback Mountain, which I re-watched this week after I’d been thinking about it for a while.  I wasn’t sure it would work again, and there are bits that don’t.  I think Gyllenhaal is miscast and just too pretty, he’s distracting.  But overall, a lovely film.  Should have won Best Picture.)

Lots of good stuff came out on DVD recently, so hopefully I’ll have more of those to talk about.  And maybe one of these days I’ll take my free movie pass over to the theater and see Doubt or The Class.

Mar

7

Getting Some Reading Done

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My reading has finally picked up a little.  I am only 150 pages or so from finishing the first volume of my Greene biography.  (For those of you paying attention, I have to admit that my affection for Graham Greene had at least some role in choosing to name our child Graham.)  It is much better now that he’s doing something.  He’s just finished a rather bizarre tour through Liberia.  He had no real reason to go and no idea what he was doing and it makes you wonder what kind of person does that.  Mostly what surprises me about the book now that it’s moved past childhood and isn’t guessing quite so much is how little it looks beyond actual events.

At one point while a fairly young adult, Greene is so snooty and upper-crust that you have a hard time believing that within a decade he would write Brighton Rock, which is so rooted in the lower classes.  Somewhere between his first published novel and the fourth he seems to have changed his perspective on class.  There’s no real analysis of this thus far in the book, which I find strange.  But my guess is that it’s tied to his own rather serious financial crisis after he starts writing full time.  You also wonder what kind of man leaves his wife and new baby to jaunt through Africa, especially since he was heading to places where no white man had ever been before.  This is the Greene I’m curious about and I’m wondering if this will ever become more than a travelogue.  Not that the travelogue isn’t interesting.  The trip through Liberia was crazy and really fun to read about.  I’d just like a little more introspection, I guess.

I just finished my first book from the Tournament I wrote about a couple entries ago: A Partisan’s Daughter by Louis de Bernieres.  Apparently he’s the guy who wrote Corelli’s Mandolin, which I never actually read.  I’m not sure what to think about the book.  It’s not that it’s not well written.  It definitely is.  It’s just that certain books tend to strike a chord in me that rubs me wrong and this was one of them.  I read it and I just can’t help but think, “Do we really need another book about a middle-aged man bored with his life and lusting after a young, mysterious woman?”  Because I don’t think we do.  I feel like the 20th century literary canon is made up almost entirely of this kind of book and I’m tired of them.  There were other things that bothered me.  I suppose the main character’s complete lack of feelings for his wife may have been some kind of rationalization for his poor behavior, but I have trouble believing that one can feel utterly emotionless about a person one has lived with for a few decades.  And maybe, as a woman, reading about male lust tends to make me roll my eyes.

I also think that the male character in these books always ends up seeming not just pathetic but boring.  He never becomes much more than an everyman, while the young woman never gets fleshed out enough to be a real person.  In this book, as well as others like it, I was much more interested in the young woman.  Is she lying?  Why?  What about her past makes her do what she’s doing?  And why on earth does she give this man the time of day?  Leaving these questions unanswered may leave the novel all mysterious and ambiguous (something I usually like) but I also feel like it ends up lacking depth and leaving you with more questions than answers.

I have already started my next tournament book, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri.  I’m always a little slow to get around to story collections, which is why I haven’t read this earlier.  Which is funny since I can’t think of a story collection I’ve liked more than Interpreter of Maladies, also by Lahiri.  I’m also a bit into my Cambodia book, Sideshow by William Shawcross.  I have a huge influx of books coming in (finally!) so I’ll have to make sure I do plenty of reading to keep up.