Interim Review: Midnight's Children

It's like this. (With less masculine arms, admittedly.)

XOXO

Welcome to the world, baby boy!

Seth John Goldstein

    Born: 05 February 2009 at 12:20 p.m.

     Weight: 3.8 kg

    Length: 52 cm

     Parents: Radiant

     Friends and family: Beaming

    Everyone: Totally and utterly in love

Super-huge congratulations to Trace and Ev, and to the Goldstein and Raper clans.  We have a baby, y'all!

XOXO

Meet my new girlfriend.

Her name is Sarah Vowell, and I LUUUURRRRRRVVVVVE her.

So yeah.  I still haven't finished This Is Your Brain on Music, and don't even talk to me about Virginia Woolf.  She is still not a presence in my life, and we're all just going to have to make our peace with that.

But don't get me wrong, I've been reading.  I've been reading up a storm... if you consider reading Take the Cannoli three times in a month to be 'a storm.'  That's not all I've read, I hasten to add: I also got through Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans (the McSweeney's Press humour collection, which was awesome), as well as Nick Hornby's Shakespeare Wrote for Money (laugh-out-loud-to-myself-on-the-Red-Line funny).  But Take the Cannoli and Assassination Vacation brought me back to reading in a big way.

All of you who know me (which, let's face it, is all of you) will be familiar with the particular brand of ish that I went through in the last several months.  It hasn't been good, and there were a million and one ways that it reverberated through my life.  But one of the most troubling, to me, was that I found it really hard to read.  Reading has always been my #1 displacement activity: it's what I do when I'm sad, or fretful, or bored, to make me feel happy and relaxed and entertained.  I get sucked into books to the exclusion of pretty much everything else around me; when I go to someone's house for the first time, I make a beeline for the bookshelf; I get twitchy fingers when I'm deeply into a book and have to put it down.  I've been like this for as long as I can remember.  It's what I am.

So you can understand, then, why it was so unsettling for me to find myself unable to focus on print for more than a couple of minutes at a time.  I felt like (still yet another) piece of me had been suddenly and inexplicably ripped away, and I didn't know what to do about it.  I kept trying to read, retreating to old favourites like Douglas Adams and [heart] Nick Earls [heart], but I'd struggle.  The only things that seemed to hold my attention were Jacob's 'Gossip Girl' recaps from Television without Pity, but as awesome as they are (and they are - go, run, read them now.  I''ll wait), they didn't fill the hole that losing my book love had created.

This all changed when I picked up Take the Cannoli.  To be fair, the shift had started with Hornby's Shakespeare, but as that's a collection of columns, I still didn't get the feeling I was reading a single-entity book.  Take the Cannoli, while also a collection of essays, felt much more book-like to me, and I suddenly felt on much more solid ground: I was excited and moved, I laughed and cried, and I tore through it while desperately not wanting it to end.  All of this was heightened when I went on to Assassination Vacation, her story of touring sites related to the assassinations of U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley: I actually fell asleep hugging the book to my chest, and not because I had dozed off while reading it.

I like my room tidy.  This may come as a shock to anyone who has lived with me, but it's true: my decorating inclinations lean more toward minimalism than any other aesthetic; unfortunately, I also have an abiding devotion to books, stuffed animals, and Japanese kitsch, and this plays hell with my attempts at clean lines.  So I live with the conflict, mostly comfortably.  At the moment, this means that my books are migrating from my bookcase downstairs to my bedroom upstairs at an alarming rate.  Most of them end up on, in or beside my bed, even if I'm not reading them right that second.  I like having them close to me, falling asleep with them and waking up with them and knowing that they're there whenever I need them.  It's about way more than the text; it's their feel and smell and size and shape that I find comforting.  It's about the pages I fold down so I can find favourite lines quickly.  It's about the stains on the pages from sloppy laksa or suntan lotion, the sand between the pages and the weird water-marks from that time I dropped it in the bath.  I'm glad to have it back.  I feel like myself again.

Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns

(Better late than never, right?)

I finished reading this assignment a couple of weeks before Christmas and, caught up in the antics of the silly season, quickly moved onto my next (Midnight's Children if you're wondering) before posting my review. Big mistake. Big. Because it's now four-and-a-bit weeks later and I can't quite remember my initial response to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. But I do remember E saying, during my last visit in Sydney, "I'm not a fan of plotty books" and, now, I think I see her point.

As I see it, you’ve got plot, characters, and language. A novelist takes these three, simple ingredients and, if s/he’s an adequate cook, makes something perfectly palatable. Or, with a bit of culinary flair, s/he can take the same three items and whip up something absolutely delicious. It’s like… toast with tomato or bruschetta, you know?

All my favourite novels create something inspiring, delightful, magical with at least one, but usually two, of these elements. The language in Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita is so lyrical and incendiary that it's impossible, as a reader, not to get sucked into Humbert's doomed dream. Tim Winton's Cloudstreet takes the basic Australian stereotypes - Sam, the born loser at the racetrack, the clock-work efficient war widow, Oriel - and infuses them with such recognisable, conflicting, inner lives that we can't help but love them. And the oldest plotline of all – two people meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after – is unstitched and re-assembled so confidently in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife that you almost forget how simple the initial premise is.

All of which is just a way of trying to identify why A Thousand Splendid Suns has faded so quickly from my mind and here’s where I got to: Hosseini, in setting out to unveil the inner lives of women “whose suffering has been matched by very few groups in recent world history”, has created a novel overwhelmingly driven by its plot but which lacks the supporting features of either great language or really engaging characters necessary to bump it up to Great Novel status.

So, the plot (and it’s not an un-interesting plot): the intertwined lives of two Afghan women – or girls, as they are at the start of their stories – during the decades of civil war, Soviet invasion, political upheaval, and Taliban control between the early-1970s and -2000s. Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a Herat businessman, is married off to Rasheed, a widower twice her age, following her mother’s suicide. Laila is the daughter of Rasheed and Mariam’s neighbours in Kabul, who Rasheed first rescues and then marries following the destruction of her home and the death of her family during the civil war. Initially combative when Laila enters her home, Mariam slowly warms to the younger woman following the birth of Laila’s daughter, Aziza, who is, unbeknownst to Rasheed, not his child but that of Laila’s childhood friend, Tariq. I don’t want to give away too much for those who are yet to read it, but it’s probably not too major a spoiler to say that Laila’s attempts to escape the physically abusive Rasheed, find Tariq, and escape to Pakistan before the birth of her second child – taking Mariam along with her – drive the later action and, ultimately, leads to tragedy.

It's a well-constructed, if somewhat melodramatic, plot. Its foundations in actual places and historical events, about which I admittedly don’t know a great deal, give the novel real gravitas at moments, such as when medical staff turn Laila away, despite the fact that she’s in labour, because the hospital no longer treats women. The devastation caused in the bombing of Kabul is sharply drawn, as is Laila and Mariam’s fear of being arrested and beaten by the Taliban when they venture into the street unaccompanied by a man. As a story aimed at shedding light on the lives of women shrouded from common view, A Thousand Splendid Suns is perfectly readable. But without more than a plot to drive it, I can only award Two Strings.

XOXO

A belated holiday gift, from us to you.

This is how they dance 'til they DIE, y'all.

XOXO

Happy New Year!

The Lit Girls would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very lovely 2009.  We'll return to our usual nonsense once the social whirl has abated.  (By which we mean, when we've put down the Christmas candy long enough to suck the chocolate off our fingers and start typing again.)

XOXO

Interim Review: This Is Your Brain on Music

This is going to make me sound like a snob, but it has to be said: I do not understand how this book ever became a bestseller in the U.S.  Same goes for Guns, Germs, and Steel for that matter.  They are too bloody hard.

They wouldn't be too hard for most of the people I know; I mean that they'd be too hard for Joe Public, and a fair few Joe Publics have to buy a book for it to hit the New York Times bestseller list, which both of these did.  I suppose you could make the argument that people wouldn't have to read them, just buy them, and that's true.  But I can't believe that ALL of those people bought the books and NONE of them read the books.  So either people in the U.S. are much smarter than I give them credit for, or so few books are being bought that a relatively small number of science nerds can throw off one of the most important measures of English-language book success.  I'm not sure which of those ideas is more upsetting to my world view.

Look, these books aren't unfathomable, and I don't want to put anyone off reading them.  But neither of them is the 'pop science' you might expect from such big sellers.  This Is Your Brain... is easier reading than Guns..., but not substantially; I think the difference is more down to the scope of the books rather than the level of the content.  I'll talk more about this in the full review, though.

In other news, my Christmas books have all arrived, and I've had to put the box on a very high shelf to keep me from diving right into them.  Must resist!

XOXO