Book Review

I See No Cat, I See No Cradle

/ Rebecca Demarest / 4 Comments

So, I guess I was on a bit of a surrealist bent this past week because after Saunders I picked up Vonnegut. And that man is just plain weird sometimes. I’d only ever read Slaughterhouse 5 before, but I’d always heard that Cat’s Cradle was one of his best. So I ventured into the world of Ice-Nine and was properly unsettled.

In Cat’s Cradle, we follow the an author on his quest to write a biography of Felix Hoenikker, a (fake) father to the atomic bomb. He’s trying to get the story of the man, not the bomb-maker, and has such contacted his children in an effort to hear their stories. Through all of this he (spoilers!) ends up on a tiny tropical island, is named president, and–through a series of unfortunate accidents–manages to freeze all the water on the surface of the planet with a polymorph crystal called Ice-Nine.

This novel is presented in classic Vonnegut form, with distinct small sections working in concert with each other. Perhaps a lot more small sections (90 some to less than 200 pages) than usual, but still broken up so the stream of consciousness-ness of the novel doesn’t become overwhelming.

There were two aspects of the book though that I found quite interesting and engaging. The first of which is the reason it has the title of Cat’s Cradle. Hoenikker was said to have been playing with a cat’s cradle when the bomb went off, and there are several references to the fact that the game looks nothing like a cat and nothing like a cradle. I think of it as applied to things like Separation of Church and State. I see no cat, I see no cradle, meaning that the separation is a joke and there really is no such thing.

A step in the string game called cat's cradleThe other concept of interest in this novel is the fake religion, Bokononism. Bokononism is an admittedly fake religion developed by one of the patriarchs of the island to provide their starving and depressed people with a constant struggle between good (the religion) with bad (the government). Through it, however, we are given an interesting look at some theories on the interconnectedness of the universe, and constructs such as karasses which, in themselves, resemble enormous Cat’s Cradle type connections between groups of people. Now, here’s the question, how many hipsters claim to be Bokononists? How many people have decided that this interconnected theory of religion is their thing and seriously adopted it? I know there’s got to at last be a few…

The last concept in the book that actually had to go do a little research on was the Ice-Nine polymorph crystal. I was a little bit freaked out by it and had to reassure myself that nothing of the kind exists. And while nothing of the potency of Vonnegut’s Ice-Nine exists, there are such things as polymorph crystals. No, we can’t freeze over the entire world unless we significantly changed the pressure and temperature of said world, but we can force crystals to form differently during manufacturing and lab work with the introduction of a differently formed seed crystal. So…less freaked out by the possibility of freezing over the earth by accident, and more intrigued by an aspect of physics I was unaware of. It really is too cool.

If you’re already a fan of Vonnegut, I say pick this one up, it’s worth a read. And if you’ve never read Vonnegut and are not used to his style, you may be better off starting with a different one, as I feel this one requires a bit of experience with him before jumping in feet first. But it is quite an excellent short read.

 
Cover of Cat's Cradle

Persuade Me

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So, I decided I was in a surrealist mood and picked up George Saunders’ collection In Persuasion Nation. Needless to say, it was more than a bit odd. For those of you who are unfamiliar with his work, it frequently involves macabre images including zombie grandmothers, ghosts who die over and over, monsters you’re not quite sure are real and disoriented humanity. It’s the kind of work that makes you laugh and then go, “Oh, that’s a little too close for comfort.”

This book was an interesting collection of shorts ranging in topic from a grandfather trying to foster his gay grandson’s love of the theater to the lives of the characters in commercials. And the common theme running throughout is a biting commentary on commercialism, and in particular the advertising side of our society.

Arranged in four sections, each prefaced with a thought-provoking quote, this book really made you stop and think about certain subjects, like trendsetters. Who do we look to for the trends in our lives? What if we took in one step further and had designated trendsetters with collectable trading cards and everything? What kind of life would they have?

Or, what if the characters in our commercials had to do the same thing over and over all day long, trapped in their little violent world? That was what the title piece was all about. It followed some of the characters that tried to rise above the pat and painful roles they had been given.  Again, it made you laugh and wince all at once.

My favorite stories in this collection were “My Flamboyant Grandson”, “The Red Bow”, “Brad Carrigan, American”, and “Bohemians.” The first was the story about the grandson who wanted to go into theater. His grandfather just wants to take his son to a show so he can see what it’s all about and finds himself in trouble with the regulatory agency who controls how much advertising you see in a day because he inadvertently disabled their tracking system while in the city.

“The Red Bow” was an odd story about some sort of infection that was traveling among the pets of a particular town that caused them to turn against humans, and ended up killing a little girl. The girl’s family rallied around the image of her red hair bow, grossly enlarged and distorted, in order to get the town to help them kill of all of the animals.

“Brad Carrigan, American” was a bit harder to figure out what was going on, maybe because Brad himself seemed uncertain and lost as to what his role had become. He seemed to be a character on a reality TV show that was changing and becoming more and more shallow and commercial until he’s kicked off because he can’t play along any more.

And then “Bohemians” was a wonderful little vignette about two old women who lived in this town and the children’s perception of them based around what they’d been told about each of them respectively. I think this one may have been my favorite for the simple fact that it seemed to be the least gruesome tale of the collection.

And, as with all of his collections, there was on story I just didn’t quite get: “93990.” This seemed to be a dispassionate lab report on the toxicity test of a new drug done in chimps. All of them died quite horribly except for one, who, despite the fact that he had been given the highest doses, just didn’t seem to have the same negative effect that the other chimps experienced. I kind of secretly wanted some sort of explosion of intelligence from the creature or something, but the story just seemed to end and leave you at the same place you started. I just didn’t really have anything to take away from that one other than a shrug.

Overall, if you’re looking for an excellent and slightly gruesome satire of our advertising and commercial culture, this is an excellent read, as always. Saunders’ mastery of images and language immerses you entirely in his stories and leaves you feeling unsettled, as they rightly should.

Cover of In Persuasion Nation

Dragon Tattoo Book vs. Movie vs. Movie

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A phenomenon swept the nation a while ago–a fascination with the works of Stieg Larsson in the form of a spunky young woman named Elsbeth and Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist and researcher. Now, I avoided them for a long time because they just didn’t sound like my cup of tea. I finally gave in and read the first two pretty much only for market research (and only because someone lent them to me in paperback and I had a holiday weekend with nothing better to do).

While the plot itself is interesting and engaging, the book is a soap opera with a lot of extraneous details and characters that Larsson could very well do away with and halve the length of the book to no ill effect. But his characters are well rounded and engaging and the plot well structured. So, all in all, and enjoyable diversion but not enough so for me to actually track down the third book.

And then something interesting happened. Because it was a book published originally in Sweden, they actually got first crack at a movie adaptation. Once it had migrated over here and I could get a copy that had been dubbed (Netflix instant play totally failed me on that end), I happily sat down to watch. Of course, it had been a while since I had read the books and so I had forgotten just how violent and disturbing certain rape scenes were.

*SPOILERS AFTER HERE*

I found it very interesting how the adaptation handled these and other aspects of the novel. Most of it was verbatim, with a lot of the extraneous details gone because they just weren’t necessary in the first place, but the heterosexual rape scenes were violent. And I’m not talking a little violent, I’m talking “Oh, god, I think I’m going to have to skip this scene” violent. I’m not THAT squeamish, unless there’s a lot of viscera flying around, so this is unusual for me. A male roommate of mine who had sat down to watch promptly bailed and never came back. And the second one was no better. They were true to the book, I was just unprepared for them to not pull any punches and just go for it in those scenes.

But, at the climax of the movie, Mikael ends up in the dungeon of the bad guy and the book becomes very homoerotic, with overtones of rape. Mikael is strung up, in his birthday suit, while the baddie tries to decide what to do with him because he’s “never had a man down here before.” But in the Swedish movie, every last homoerotic overtones were completely gone. Just *pft* gone. My brain immediately started saying, “So, it’s okay to show a woman get horribly raped, and then her getting her brutal revenge, but you can’t even show the suggestion of man on man rape? Interesting.” I’m not sure if it’s a cultural thing, or what, but it just struck me as odd that it was okay when it was heterosexual, but not homosexual.

And then the movie made another change that I just plain didn’t like. In the book, Lisbeth chases the bad guy out, he gets in his car and speeds away and she gets on her bike. As the high-speed chase commences, they zig zag along until the baddie commits suicide by ramming a truck head on. Dead bad guy. In the Swedish film, he accidentally runs off the road, she climbs down the embankment, and he begs her to help him out of the mangled car. Instead, she very calmly lights up the car and walk away.

Now, this changes her personality and character development quite a bit. Yes, she has lit a person on fire before (with very good reason) but that is not her now. And yet, the movie makes the very deliberate move to have her kill the bad guy. While it sets up a nice little segue to the next story (titled The Girl Who Played With Fire) I think it took away some wonderful nuances to her character. It made her a bit too hard edged.

And now, a few years later, Hollywood just HAD to take a go at the film.

Now, I was very interested to see how the American version decided to handle the scenes that were changed for the Swedish film. They left out even more of the details of the novel (this time somewhat detrimentally. If you hadn’t read the book, there was no way you’d understand some of it.) But I was more interested in how it handled the rape scenes and the climax.

First, the heterosexual rape scenes  were just as graphic and disturbing as in the Swedish film. I almost thought for a moment that they might tone them down due to a cinematographic technique used but no…no.

But when you got to the climax in the dungeon, it struck some sort of balance between the book and the Swedish film. That really disturbing line about having a man in the dungeon is definitely there, and the baddie partially undress Mikael, but it’s not as complete a humiliation as there is in the book. Which I for one was kind of happy about as I really wasn’t up for seeing Daniel Craig’s junk flapping in the wind, but I kind of wish they had toned down the heterosexual rape scenes as well. But at least they didn’t skip over the homoerotic nature of that scene altogether.

And the death of our baddie was again a sort of middle ground. The man does not commit deliberate suicide, but nor does Lisbeth kill him. After he loses control and crashes, Lisbeth is completely intent on going up to the car and shooting him, but the car explodes before she can get there. I can do without the suicide, I was just happy that they didn’t pollute Lisbeth’s character with a deliberate murder. I do really like that they made her capable of it, but she doesn’t actually follow through on it.

Now, what could these differences tell us? Is it simply a matter of cultural differences? I wouldn’t think so, because the book sold incredibly well in both Sweden and the U.S. and that dungeon scene is very sexually charged. Is it just more acceptable to show on screen here than there? Or was it simply a matter of the person who did the adaptation?

I think the more important change was in Lisbeth’s characterization in the crash scene. Regardless of whether the guy dies by suicide or not, I think it’s vitally important to stay true to Lisbeth’s character that she NOT kill him. Ever other time she has been wronged in the book, she’s taken a rather harsh revenge, but she’s left them alive. And for her to make the change and deliberately kill this man was just too large a leap for the character.

Anyway, those are my thoughts, feel free to leave yours below as to why you think the differences exist from book to movie to movie…

Here’s to Freedom and Dignity

/ Rebecca Demarest / 1 Comment

So, after immersing myself in such a fantastical world as 1Q84, I decided to go and read one of the classic psychological texts I’d been putting off. So I picked up B.F. Skinner‘s Beyond Freedom and Dignity. I’ve always loved reading his work, whether it’s part of his memoirs or other psychological tracts such as Walden 2 (which you should totally read, btws). This one was a rather more dry compilation of his views on the training of man and culture.

For those of you who don’t know what Skinner was all about, he basically felt that man could be trained to anything, using similar conditioning tricks that work on your dog. He’s totally right in some respects, a little far gone in others. Regardless, he has some very interesting ideas about the fallacy of trying to create a utopia that is larger than a small group (small enough that everyone knows everyone else) and trying to change and shape cultures deliberately to ensure that they continue on in the future.

And as usual, I found Skinner’s writing style to be open and accessible. He’s not one for obscure language or high-falutin’ terminology. He wanted his work to be understood by the lay person, so he did his best to ensure that anyone reading it would be able to understand and take away his central message about training ourselves to be stronger and better people.

If you have any interest in how humanity as a larger unit might be shaped by behavioral sciences, this would probably be worth a read.

Picture of Skinner

 

Count the Moons

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1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is quite the novel. While being incredibly lengthy, it also does justice to that length. There isn’t a single word, character, or subplot that the book could do without; they all carry their weight. I will be the first to admit that around the beginning to section 3, I was ready to throw something at Murakami in frustration. I couldn’t understand why he just kept drawing out waiting for the meeting between Aomame and Tengo. But when they finally do meet, it’s entirely the right moment.

Murakami is a mastermind of magical realism, but I will argue that this novel is a straight up fantasy. On page 462, one of the characters informs Aomame that, “You’ve been reading too much science fiction.” because of her conjectures about dropping into a world with two moons. And I agree, this isn’t science fiction. It’s not some far flung future, with crazy advanced technology. No, this takes place in the recent past and deals with little magical people who build air chrysalises that create some kind of doppelganger. And they way you can tell you’re in the world of the little people (some call is 1Q84, some call it the Cat Town) is that there is a second moon–smaller, malformed, and greenish. Fantasy, straight up.

I don’t want to talk too much about the plot since there are a ton of twists and turns that I really don’t want to give away, but I do want to talk briefly on the structure of it. The chapters alternate between Aomame and Tengo’s point of views and their two discreet storylines. This is sometimes a hard feat to pull off because one storyline will end up more compelling than the other. Murakami somehow managed to make both lines just as compelling, which is interesting because the content of those separate lines would seem to lend themselves to an interest disparity. No, I’m not going to tell you what they are, that would be doing you a disservice. Pick it up and read it!

And for all that the book is enormous (925 pages of narrative alone without counting front and back matter) it’s got an interesting design. I love the cover, it uses an onionskin book jacket with transparent sections that spell 1Q84 allowing the girl and boy on the covers to peek through on the front and back. And the spine alternates where the letters are. Half are on the onionskin, the other half printed on the spine of the book. It just makes for a unique and engaging cover design which speaks to the dual and uncertain nature of the text itself. Inside however, I have one qualm with the designer. There are no running headers or footers, but a side bar with 1Q84 in a square and the page number…well, the page number appears in random places along that sidebar, sometimes backwards, and it changes from chapter to chapter. For someone like me who likes to know where in the book I am incase my bookmark falls out, it drove me a little bit crazy. But I’m sure very few people even notice it.

But all told, definitely worth the time it takes to make it through this opus. When you finish it, you’ll put it down and go to the window–just to make sure there is only one moon floating in the sky.

Cover of 1Q84

A Tree of Heaven

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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith was another fabulous blast from the past. I saw an early printing of it sitting on my boyfriend’s shelf, got curious, and stole it for a couple weeks until I finally got around to reading it. This is a complex coming of age story of a young girl named Francie growing up below the poverty line in Brooklyn just prior to World War I. A lot of it is most likely autobiographical from Smith’s own experiences growing up as the daughter of immigrants in Brooklyn during that time, but not all.

The book gets its title from a particular species of invasive plant that has taken root in Brooklyn, called a Tree of Heaven. There is one tree in particular that has grown up and around the fire escape that Francie will escape to and read on for hours at a time.

A view of brooklyn filled with trees of heaven.

Split into five books, this novel starts with a set of scenes from early in the girl’s life, then jumps back even further to focus on her parents and how they met. It then progresses through her early childhood, school years, graduating from the lower grades and skipping high school to help her family out by working in the city, finagling her way into college courses and we finally end the story as she is getting ready to leave for college out of state and is contemplating a possible marriage.

Smith’s writing is simple and poignant. It’s stripped-down nature is at times its most powerful tool, making scenes that could be overwrought and sentimental instead brutally efficient. If you want an example, read it through until you get to the scene where they have to buy her father’s funeral plot. There is a simple small section about the star bank they have to empty to buy the plot that literally felt like a blow. If this section had been gussied up, it would have been saccharine and terrible, but it’s simplicity is what gives it its incredible power.

I can see why this novel has become a standard of literary fiction. It draws you in and makes you cheer on the protagonist. Rarely do you feel pity or guilt or any of those other somewhat negative emotions, regardless of the circumstances of this family. Instead, they are so strong and so beautiful that you as a reader are left feeling warm and empowered. They accomplish so much with so little that it is a truly inspiring tale.

Cover of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Hardly a Romantic Romance

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Core: A Romance by Kassten Alonso is a self-titled romance. And, in a sense, it does deal with relationships and love, but it may be more accurate to say that the subtitle of this book places it squarely into the Romantic period of literary influence, alongside authors such as Edgar Allen Poe.

This is a very disturbing tale of a man’s descent into madness and violence due to his obsession over a woman. Now, granted, as you flash backwards and forwards in his life, you come to feel that he is not entirely responsible for his actions due to circumstances beyond his control and traumas he has suffered, but still. This is one disturbed gentleman. I’d give you his name, but you don’t get to know that as a reader. Instead, you sit in his psyche and bite your nails as you watch his sanity degrade farther and farther until he is lost.

Now a book like this could easily fall prey to the imitative fallacy and at first I was worried that it would do so. But it settled out nicely within the first chapter and was fairly easy to follow. The writing is very stream-of-consciousness, as you are inside the main character’s head, and you are jumping back and forth between a single present moment, his early childhood, late adolescences and mid 20’s. It was an interesting and well transitioned frame for the story. Overall, I think Alonso managed the mechanics of a challenging form quite well.

Core did bring to mind another novel I read a couple years ago, Lux by Maria Flook. I had the privilege of working with Flook my first term at Emerson and so I read her novel before the workshop so I had a sense of her style. Lux is another novel about a deeply disturbed love affair, handled quite differently, but I am fairly confident that a person who enjoys one of these books will enjoy the other.

Cover of Core: A Romance

“It was probably my fault…”

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Wrack & Ruin by Don Lee was quite the ride. You start with the fairly innocent scene of an organic Brussels sprouts farmer having a string of bad luck. But as the story progresses and you find out he was once a famous sculptor, things just keep getting worse and worse. Between a developer trying to get his farm for the 18th hole on a new gold course cum resort and his brother’s failing movie project starlet seducing his best friend, he barely has time to deal with his ex girlfriend putting nails in his tires and the local pot dealer taking offense at his personal plants.

This book was a fun and poignant view into the life of an artist who found fame and didn’t like it and tried instead to retreat into the calm obscurity of a Brussels sprout farmer. The writing is absolutely phenomenal and the characters are fresh and complex.

One aspect I found very interesting is the reason that the main character left the art world was not only that he found the constant creative pressure and critiquing painful, but that he was slotted into the label of Asian American artist and everyone tried to keep forcing his work into an interpretation based upon that. As a reader, you definitely draw parallels at this point between Lee and his character. It makes you think twice about whether pigeon-holing artists and authors with a race label is helpful or harmful. Are all those classes based around African-American or Asian-American literature doing justice to those authors? Or is it forcing their work to fit an archetype and we get disappointed when they don’t deal explicitly with issues of race or even gender? And can any author cross the line and write about another race? Or is that going to be a problem? All questions that I think the educational hegemony are going to have to start asking themselves in the near future.

But the whole book is not about this. It’s about man struggling to find his place in the world and get along with everyone else. The race issue is simply one aspect of that. Wrack & Ruin is a fabulous book that I definitely recommend reading. It also left me craving Brussels Sprouts, so I made a batch sauteed in garlic, oil, salt, and pepper and smothered them in Hollandaise sauce. Yum…

Cover of Wrack and Ruin

A Book about Heroines

/ Rebecca Demarest / 2 Comments

No, not heroine, heroines, the female version of heroes. You’d think we could come up with a better name. Anyway, The Supergirls by Mike Madrid is all about those fabulous females that populate the super-hero world: their fashion, feminist leanings, and history throughout the industry. This was a fascinating read for me, as I have long been a fan of the super-women, having been infected at a young age by a brother addicted to comics. The book follows the history of the female hero in comics from their inception in the 30’s through today (well, 2009 when it was published, but it’s pretty damn close).

Cover of The Supergirls

My favorite tid-bit of information? Wonder Woman was actually the brainchild of a psychologist who was in in an open polygamous relationship in the 40’s (the 40’s!) and who eventually laid the ground work for the polygraph lie detector test (Lasso of Truth anyone?). I am also now committed to going back and finding some of the Golden Age Heroines who sounded simply awesome. My main target is Phantom Lady. I have also determined that I really need to read She by Haggard.

Phantom Lady from the Golden Age

But beyond the tidbits of fascination, this book is incredibly well researched and detailed. Madrid certainly spent a lot of time with the genre and its various components and then more trying to distill all of it down to a concise and interesting book. His organization was at times questionable (he tries to organize the book chronologically, by subject, AND by prominent characters all at once and that doesn’t necessarily flow well) but overall, his writing and presentation was engaging and thoughtful.

I definitely recommend this book for anyone who would like to delve into the feminine side of comics. It is fairly comprehensive and definitely engaging. The topic comes alive under Madrid’s pen and you can tell just how passionate he is about these women and the lack of representation they have had in the industry. That being said, it avoids being preachy, simply presenting the information for the reader so they can learn and enjoy the fantasy that is the super heroine.

Also, Madrid makes the most amazingly beautiful figurines of these women, one of which gets auctioned off for charity each year at the Women of Wonder Day. Go check it out…

Wonder Woman Statue

A Rat Like No Other

/ Rebecca Demarest / 2 Comments

Firmin by Sam Savage is an odd little book, almost small enough to be called a novella. In it, Firmin is the runt of a litter of rats born into the basement of a bookstore on a bed of shredded books. Through eating the pages under him to quell his rumbling stomach, he acquires the ability to read and philosophize with the best of humanity, though he still finds it incredibly difficult to communicate with us.

The novel follows Firmin from the time of his birth through to his death, which was a remarkably long time for a rat in Scollay Square, Boston. He spends his days watching the square slowly crumble from the bookshop and his evenings reading, foraging and watching his Lovelies in the pornographic movies at the movie theater down the street.

It was an engaging novel, though by the end you are unsure of how much is him just making up stories and what is actually happening. The writing is crisp and clean, and well placed in Firmin’s point of view. I love the phrenology references that Firmin relies upon to judge human behavior, even if that is a crackpot science. It seems to work well for the rat.

Overall, this is a story about a person who just fails to fit in. Anyone can identify with Firmin and his struggle to communicate with and socialize with the intellectual creature, man. Especially those of us who were labeled a book worm in elementary school. There was the constant companionship of the books, but you really just wanted to be asked to the cool kid’s birthday party. Firmin evokes all of those emotions and more.

A rat reading a book--just how many drugs did you take last night?