Nana - Emile Zola (trans. George Holden) (Penguin Books, 1972 [1880])
Once upon a time (college) a friend recommended this novel. She was a great reader of classic literature, and while I forget the details, this was among her very favorite.
Nana is a courtesan. Or more than a courtesan, rather a force of nature. She takes Paris by storm, attracting lovers and riches. And spending both just as freely. And around her, constellations of other courtesans and the well-born men who keep them, constantly trading places in some whirling dance. And anyone who ascends from the gutter to rise as high as Nana does... can her end come with anything other than a fall?
This novel is highly readable. It's well-paced and rarely bogs the reader. I confess that a lot of French literature makes me very sleepy - this did not. On the other hand, I can't tell if Zola hated women, or just hated sex. Nana is less a person than a creature, almost like an exquisite tiger kept by a prince. She acts according to her whims, pouting and smiling and changing moods on a dime. She gives up her body for money, or for laughs, or out of pity, or... Zola's descriptions often verge on the grotesque. And the sights and (especially) smells of anywhere that women gather... those go well past the tipping point.
These two qualities made for an unsettling reading experience. I enjoyed reading, and I was curious about the fates of the characters, and yet I found them all reprehensible (Zola's intent) and found Zola himself fairly repugnant. Why so hateful?
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Monday, July 22, 2013
Sunday, April 28, 2013
A Glittering Void
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst (Bloomsbury, 2004)
...and the last in my trilogy of Sunday posts. This was the book I started reading first, and the one that I finally just finished this morning. And I can't decide what that says about the book itself.
First, let me set the scene. Nick is a young gay man in early 1980s London, an Oxbridge grad who is living with an upper-class friend's family. The father has just been elected to Parliament, right as Thatcher was re-elected (I think). "The Lady" is an enormous figure in the book, although she herself appears only briefly, and it was a (lucky?) coincidence that she died while I was reading the book, and I got to see why she loomed so controversially larger than life in the minds of Britons. Meanwhile, the inexperienced Nick gets his first taste of sex and reciprocated love, which spirals out of control in the way only the '80s really could.
The prose was beautiful. So lovely and readable. Once I picked up the book, I tended to read in great big chunks. But I wasn't compelled to sneak in reading time, which is how it lingered while I snuck in two (lesser) books.
...and the last in my trilogy of Sunday posts. This was the book I started reading first, and the one that I finally just finished this morning. And I can't decide what that says about the book itself.
First, let me set the scene. Nick is a young gay man in early 1980s London, an Oxbridge grad who is living with an upper-class friend's family. The father has just been elected to Parliament, right as Thatcher was re-elected (I think). "The Lady" is an enormous figure in the book, although she herself appears only briefly, and it was a (lucky?) coincidence that she died while I was reading the book, and I got to see why she loomed so controversially larger than life in the minds of Britons. Meanwhile, the inexperienced Nick gets his first taste of sex and reciprocated love, which spirals out of control in the way only the '80s really could.
The prose was beautiful. So lovely and readable. Once I picked up the book, I tended to read in great big chunks. But I wasn't compelled to sneak in reading time, which is how it lingered while I snuck in two (lesser) books.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
10 days, 100 stories
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio (trans. G.H. McWilliam (Penguin 1972, orig. 13??)
It may have struck you that I've been reading a lot of lighter fare recently (although now that I have discovered Hart of Dixie on Netflix all my soapy attention may be placed there) but in addition to whatever other books have passed over my nightstand, since around Thanksgiving I've also been working through a "big book."
Yes, nothing says holiday season reading like a fourteenth-century collection of stories themed around a group of young people trying not to succumb to the Black Death. Wooooo!
And yet, I forgot for hundreds of pages at a time that plague lurked around every page of this book. In some respects, this may have been the lightest reading of all. Ten young folk (plus servants) set out from Florence to escape not only the disease itself, but the obsession with it that has struck everyone. To amuse themselves, they wander and frolic, sing and dance, eat... and tell stories. Each day, each member of the party shares a story. Ten days, ten people = one hundred tales.
Most days have a theme. And this is when you learn that Italy in the 1300s was a pretty rocking place. My lingering cold makes me too lazy to go through and count statistics, but stories generally involved one or more of the following: wives and husbands cheating on each other (usually wives); corrupt priests, nuns, or other members of the clergy; people scheming to steal and play tricks on one another; individuals pinballing wildly between extreme wealth and fortune and abject poverty. But really mainly sex. So much sex. And described in such hilariously euphemistic ways.
For the first several (3?) "days" I was utterly enthralled by this, and recounted each story to my indulgent boyfriend. But after a while, I grew accustomed to the return of these same topics, and the remaining days passed by in a strangely soothing rhythm. (This girl likes structure.)
A couple points. Just because I'm not going into the details of the stories doesn't mean that many of them weren't awfully enjoyable. (I have told the First Day, Second Story to probably 10 different people.) And just because it took over a month to get through the 830 pages doesn't mean it was dull or slogging. It was actually a surprisingly quick read. But with holiday stuff and my desire to jump around and experience other stories, it just got spread out across a longer period of time. Anyway, recommended with more enthusiasm than I might have expected. Good work Boccaccio :)
It may have struck you that I've been reading a lot of lighter fare recently (although now that I have discovered Hart of Dixie on Netflix all my soapy attention may be placed there) but in addition to whatever other books have passed over my nightstand, since around Thanksgiving I've also been working through a "big book."
Yes, nothing says holiday season reading like a fourteenth-century collection of stories themed around a group of young people trying not to succumb to the Black Death. Wooooo!
And yet, I forgot for hundreds of pages at a time that plague lurked around every page of this book. In some respects, this may have been the lightest reading of all. Ten young folk (plus servants) set out from Florence to escape not only the disease itself, but the obsession with it that has struck everyone. To amuse themselves, they wander and frolic, sing and dance, eat... and tell stories. Each day, each member of the party shares a story. Ten days, ten people = one hundred tales.
Most days have a theme. And this is when you learn that Italy in the 1300s was a pretty rocking place. My lingering cold makes me too lazy to go through and count statistics, but stories generally involved one or more of the following: wives and husbands cheating on each other (usually wives); corrupt priests, nuns, or other members of the clergy; people scheming to steal and play tricks on one another; individuals pinballing wildly between extreme wealth and fortune and abject poverty. But really mainly sex. So much sex. And described in such hilariously euphemistic ways.
For the first several (3?) "days" I was utterly enthralled by this, and recounted each story to my indulgent boyfriend. But after a while, I grew accustomed to the return of these same topics, and the remaining days passed by in a strangely soothing rhythm. (This girl likes structure.)
A couple points. Just because I'm not going into the details of the stories doesn't mean that many of them weren't awfully enjoyable. (I have told the First Day, Second Story to probably 10 different people.) And just because it took over a month to get through the 830 pages doesn't mean it was dull or slogging. It was actually a surprisingly quick read. But with holiday stuff and my desire to jump around and experience other stories, it just got spread out across a longer period of time. Anyway, recommended with more enthusiasm than I might have expected. Good work Boccaccio :)
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Lyricism
Handwriting - Michael Ondaatje (Vintage International, 2000, c1998)
Damn I love Michael Ondaatje. (Note to self: must read/watch English Patient again.) I just wish I loved poetry as much. I am learning things about poetry, like that you can't (well, I can't) just sit and read it where you might read a book or magazine. Poetry requires some level of solitude, and the ability to speak it aloud, to feel the words on your tongue. Poetry also excels at intimacy, and I've been aware of the way my voice changes when sharing verse with a lover.
See folks? This is what Ondaatje does to me. I meant to tell you about how frustrated I felt at my difficulty entering the poems, and instead I went down some wholly other road. So back to this slim volume of poems, set mostly in Sri Lanka, or at least the feeling of Sri Lanka. (They written both there and in Canada.) Like his prose, they are lush and rich. But so challenging.
I found myself captivated by the second part (of three) - a single poem cycle (?) called "The Nine Sentiments," as sexy as most of his writing tends to be. And a line from the final poem, "Last Ink":
Damn I love Michael Ondaatje. (Note to self: must read/watch English Patient again.) I just wish I loved poetry as much. I am learning things about poetry, like that you can't (well, I can't) just sit and read it where you might read a book or magazine. Poetry requires some level of solitude, and the ability to speak it aloud, to feel the words on your tongue. Poetry also excels at intimacy, and I've been aware of the way my voice changes when sharing verse with a lover.
See folks? This is what Ondaatje does to me. I meant to tell you about how frustrated I felt at my difficulty entering the poems, and instead I went down some wholly other road. So back to this slim volume of poems, set mostly in Sri Lanka, or at least the feeling of Sri Lanka. (They written both there and in Canada.) Like his prose, they are lush and rich. But so challenging.
I found myself captivated by the second part (of three) - a single poem cycle (?) called "The Nine Sentiments," as sexy as most of his writing tends to be. And a line from the final poem, "Last Ink":
I want to die on your chest but not yet,Sometime in the 13th century of our love....
she wrote, sometime in the 13th century
of our love
Monday, December 05, 2011
Sex and hockey in DeLillo's America
Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League - Cleo Birdwell (better known as Don DeLillo) (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980)
Apparently DeLillo has pretty much disowned this book, omitting it from official bibliographies and blocking its republication. (As a result, this book was tough to track down in a library.) I'm not entirely sure why. I mean, it's not great literature, but it brings in much of the absurdity that I found in White Noise (and one of the same characters, for that matter).
But I didn't read it because of DeLillo. In fact, if I remember correctly, I heard about the book well before I found out Birdwell was a pseudonym. You know me, I'm a sucker for hockey books. And for complaining about how unrealistic they are. And this one offers ample opportunity.
Cleo is a rookie for the Rangers. And the first woman to play in the NHL. So she gets a lot of attention, naturally. But apparently she is like Taylor Hall or something, the rate at which she seems to score. And speaking of scoring, there is plenty of that off the ice. It seems like everyone circling the team eventually succumbs to the belief that sex with her will ... I don't know, do something. And despite assertions that make her seem sorta meh about most, if not all these men, she is usually a willing participant. In some of the weirdest sex scenes I've read in a while.
And then there is the former player who shares her apartment, a man suffering from some bizarre affliction and whose search (aided by Cleo) ends with him spending months asleep in a machine. The way in which this whole scenario is normalized is what I remember best about DeLillo from past forays into his work. And it hints at something deeper than "Cleo plays hockey and has lots of sex." But I just couldn't get my finger on it.
Apparently DeLillo has pretty much disowned this book, omitting it from official bibliographies and blocking its republication. (As a result, this book was tough to track down in a library.) I'm not entirely sure why. I mean, it's not great literature, but it brings in much of the absurdity that I found in White Noise (and one of the same characters, for that matter).
But I didn't read it because of DeLillo. In fact, if I remember correctly, I heard about the book well before I found out Birdwell was a pseudonym. You know me, I'm a sucker for hockey books. And for complaining about how unrealistic they are. And this one offers ample opportunity.
Cleo is a rookie for the Rangers. And the first woman to play in the NHL. So she gets a lot of attention, naturally. But apparently she is like Taylor Hall or something, the rate at which she seems to score. And speaking of scoring, there is plenty of that off the ice. It seems like everyone circling the team eventually succumbs to the belief that sex with her will ... I don't know, do something. And despite assertions that make her seem sorta meh about most, if not all these men, she is usually a willing participant. In some of the weirdest sex scenes I've read in a while.
And then there is the former player who shares her apartment, a man suffering from some bizarre affliction and whose search (aided by Cleo) ends with him spending months asleep in a machine. The way in which this whole scenario is normalized is what I remember best about DeLillo from past forays into his work. And it hints at something deeper than "Cleo plays hockey and has lots of sex." But I just couldn't get my finger on it.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Things Fall Apart
Lima Nights - Marie Arana (Dial Press, 2009)
This slim novel is about one man - Carlos Bluhm - and two relationship crises, separated by twenty years. It's nicer to think of the first half as actually the coming together, the initiation of a relationship. But in light of the second part, Carlos and Maria twenty years later, the first starts to feel more like the dissolution of his marriage to Sophie.
Our cast: Carlos is of German descent, as is his wife and his group of friends, but he has fallen from the heights of wealth that his family once enjoyed. Maria is the young teen who beguiles him with her skin color, her dancing, her strange combination of innocence and knowingness. But there is also the wife, Sophie; the mother, Dorothea; the sons Fritz and Rudy; the men: Oscar, Willy, and Marco. And Maria's family. Arana keeps the book spare and focused, but the minor characters actually beg for more space - another author would have created a sprawling saga. (Yes, I still have Tolstoy on my mind.) And I might have preferred that book. This one - tight, sad - left me feeling as much hopeless as anything.
This slim novel is about one man - Carlos Bluhm - and two relationship crises, separated by twenty years. It's nicer to think of the first half as actually the coming together, the initiation of a relationship. But in light of the second part, Carlos and Maria twenty years later, the first starts to feel more like the dissolution of his marriage to Sophie.
Our cast: Carlos is of German descent, as is his wife and his group of friends, but he has fallen from the heights of wealth that his family once enjoyed. Maria is the young teen who beguiles him with her skin color, her dancing, her strange combination of innocence and knowingness. But there is also the wife, Sophie; the mother, Dorothea; the sons Fritz and Rudy; the men: Oscar, Willy, and Marco. And Maria's family. Arana keeps the book spare and focused, but the minor characters actually beg for more space - another author would have created a sprawling saga. (Yes, I still have Tolstoy on my mind.) And I might have preferred that book. This one - tight, sad - left me feeling as much hopeless as anything.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Paranormal Romance
Kiss & Hell - Dakota Cassidy (Berkeley Publishing, 2009)
The post title refers to the official genre designation that Penguin gives for this book, according to the back cover. I've been writing a paper on genre classification - and whether libraries should shelve books separately by genre - so this sort of thing is on my mind. For example, paranormal romance is quite possible the right classification for Ms. Sookie, although maybe paranormal suspence w/ lots o' sex is more accurate.
Anyway. Somehow this book made it into my book list. I hate this. Sometimes I remember exactly when I heard about a book and it stuck well enough to make me get out my little notebook and pencil. But sometimes I clearly am acting on whim and titles just seem to appear in there. K&H is chick lit with ghosts. Or demons. Well, both. Delaney is a medium, who has dedicated the last several years to helping the newly departed clear up whatever's going on so that they can go into the light (instead of getting swayed to hell by demons out to collect souls). Except her best friend is a demon. And she doesn't have much of a social life, unless you count her motley crew of dogs.
So when a sexy nerdy demon shows up and tells her he's been assigned to seduce her and take her back to hell, except he's not really going to do that because he ended up in hell by mistake, she proceeds to let him go right ahead with the first part of his plan. Because he's hot. Anyway, the plot twist holding this whole thing together is beyond ridiculous, but the set-up is kinda fantastic. Lots of adorable humor.
Cassidy has a couple stylistic tics that I both like and find utterly frustrating about chick lit. The one that leans more toward the like is her tendency to end sections/chapters with incomplete sentences, usually laced with sarcasm. Like "And that meant hard core" or "End of." This is part of a broader trend toward highly idiosyncratic, contemporary slang. It felt awkward and sloppy rather than natural, and I think that Cassidy fully capable of a more interesting writer. Maybe I'm not representative of her target readers, but I think they could handle some more sophisticated prose.
Totally fun, breezy, and often sexy. It was in my beach bag for a barbecue, and I found myself recommending it to the ladies. How could I resist?
The post title refers to the official genre designation that Penguin gives for this book, according to the back cover. I've been writing a paper on genre classification - and whether libraries should shelve books separately by genre - so this sort of thing is on my mind. For example, paranormal romance is quite possible the right classification for Ms. Sookie, although maybe paranormal suspence w/ lots o' sex is more accurate.
Anyway. Somehow this book made it into my book list. I hate this. Sometimes I remember exactly when I heard about a book and it stuck well enough to make me get out my little notebook and pencil. But sometimes I clearly am acting on whim and titles just seem to appear in there. K&H is chick lit with ghosts. Or demons. Well, both. Delaney is a medium, who has dedicated the last several years to helping the newly departed clear up whatever's going on so that they can go into the light (instead of getting swayed to hell by demons out to collect souls). Except her best friend is a demon. And she doesn't have much of a social life, unless you count her motley crew of dogs.
So when a sexy nerdy demon shows up and tells her he's been assigned to seduce her and take her back to hell, except he's not really going to do that because he ended up in hell by mistake, she proceeds to let him go right ahead with the first part of his plan. Because he's hot. Anyway, the plot twist holding this whole thing together is beyond ridiculous, but the set-up is kinda fantastic. Lots of adorable humor.
Cassidy has a couple stylistic tics that I both like and find utterly frustrating about chick lit. The one that leans more toward the like is her tendency to end sections/chapters with incomplete sentences, usually laced with sarcasm. Like "And that meant hard core" or "End of." This is part of a broader trend toward highly idiosyncratic, contemporary slang. It felt awkward and sloppy rather than natural, and I think that Cassidy fully capable of a more interesting writer. Maybe I'm not representative of her target readers, but I think they could handle some more sophisticated prose.
Totally fun, breezy, and often sexy. It was in my beach bag for a barbecue, and I found myself recommending it to the ladies. How could I resist?
Monday, June 28, 2010
I Was Told There'd Be Cake - Sloane Crosley (Riverhead Books, 2008)
Sloane Crosley has a new book out. Thus it seemed like an appropriate time to actually get around to reading the first collection of essays, which has been on my To Do list for awhile. (It also helped that I was at the library, weeding books just 2 aisles away from this one.)
I'm not feeling very review-y right now, but in short: very funny, slightly neurotic essays from a highly educated young woman, covering terrible jobs, bridezillas, sex and love, moving, friends, oh and that Oregon Trail game that we played computer-free in our fifth-grade classroom while everyone else in the world my age apparently played at home on ancient Apples.
I was utterly enchanted with Crosley's search for a legitimate one-night stand, as documented in the essay "One-Night Bounce." While waiting at the vet, I actually read most of the first several pages aloud to my mother, who was amused, but not nearly as much as I was. I kind of want to block quote the first three pages. I won't. But here's a peek:
And it goes on from there.
People who are about my age who are more fabulous than me can be depressing, and I wasn't completely immune to this with Crosley, but she's awfully disarming. So thumbs up.
Sloane Crosley has a new book out. Thus it seemed like an appropriate time to actually get around to reading the first collection of essays, which has been on my To Do list for awhile. (It also helped that I was at the library, weeding books just 2 aisles away from this one.)
I'm not feeling very review-y right now, but in short: very funny, slightly neurotic essays from a highly educated young woman, covering terrible jobs, bridezillas, sex and love, moving, friends, oh and that Oregon Trail game that we played computer-free in our fifth-grade classroom while everyone else in the world my age apparently played at home on ancient Apples.
I was utterly enchanted with Crosley's search for a legitimate one-night stand, as documented in the essay "One-Night Bounce." While waiting at the vet, I actually read most of the first several pages aloud to my mother, who was amused, but not nearly as much as I was. I kind of want to block quote the first three pages. I won't. But here's a peek:
The second I was old enough to know what sex was, I knew I wanted to have a one-night stand. [...] I wanted to do it immediately. Largely because I had no idea what it entailed. I figured a one-night stand happened when two people, one of whom was a woman, went to a man's apartment for martinis and stood on the bed the whole time, trying not to spill them.
And it goes on from there.
People who are about my age who are more fabulous than me can be depressing, and I wasn't completely immune to this with Crosley, but she's awfully disarming. So thumbs up.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
I'm so glad I missed the 70s
The Ebony Towers - John Fowles
New York: Signet, 1974
I'm not sure how I ended up owning this book. But once upon a time I read The French Lieutenant's Woman and liked it. And more recently (well, 8 years ago, but still...) I read The Collector, which I found incredibly disturbing.
This collection of works is kind of sexy, in the way that I now imagine English sexiness to be, a little awkward, far more matter-of-fact than sex today, and awkward again for good measure. Too long to be short stories, but too short to be novellas, they are something in between. And they are meditations that take place at least as much in the characters' heads than in any action. What action occurs is mediated by thinking and overthinking. And each one turns on a mystery which is left unresolved, because Fowles is trying to tell us... what?
Anyway, for the first 100 pages, I had missed that this was a collection and not a novel. Which was a little disappointing, because I had already charted the path of the title story's "novel," and felt a little cheated when it ended abruptly. On the other hand, I was glad it ended, but I found the characters so annoying, so self-indulgent. There's a bit near the end where David, the married man who had decided he is IN LOVE, has an existential crisis because the girl wouldn't sleep with him. (Oops, spoiler.) Anyway, I was going to quote parts of it, but I just can't.
I'm dwelling on the negative. There was lots to like in the reading. Had I come across these stories in The New Yorker, one at a time, and in that NewYorkershortstorycontext that I don't know how to define but changes my readiness to accept certain conventions, I would have enjoyed myself a lot more. As it is though, I just found myself glad to have made it through another book that I can now remove from my shelf.
New York: Signet, 1974
I'm not sure how I ended up owning this book. But once upon a time I read The French Lieutenant's Woman and liked it. And more recently (well, 8 years ago, but still...) I read The Collector, which I found incredibly disturbing.
This collection of works is kind of sexy, in the way that I now imagine English sexiness to be, a little awkward, far more matter-of-fact than sex today, and awkward again for good measure. Too long to be short stories, but too short to be novellas, they are something in between. And they are meditations that take place at least as much in the characters' heads than in any action. What action occurs is mediated by thinking and overthinking. And each one turns on a mystery which is left unresolved, because Fowles is trying to tell us... what?
Anyway, for the first 100 pages, I had missed that this was a collection and not a novel. Which was a little disappointing, because I had already charted the path of the title story's "novel," and felt a little cheated when it ended abruptly. On the other hand, I was glad it ended, but I found the characters so annoying, so self-indulgent. There's a bit near the end where David, the married man who had decided he is IN LOVE, has an existential crisis because the girl wouldn't sleep with him. (Oops, spoiler.) Anyway, I was going to quote parts of it, but I just can't.
I'm dwelling on the negative. There was lots to like in the reading. Had I come across these stories in The New Yorker, one at a time, and in that NewYorkershortstorycontext that I don't know how to define but changes my readiness to accept certain conventions, I would have enjoyed myself a lot more. As it is though, I just found myself glad to have made it through another book that I can now remove from my shelf.
Monday, April 20, 2009
When sex isn't sexy
The Rachel Papers - Martin Amis
Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984 (originally published 1973)
I went back and checked. It doesn't actually say "romp" on any of the cover blurbs. That was my imagination. But still, I feel like I was misled to expect a sort of screwball sexy comedy, British-style. Plus, I really liked Time's Arrow (spoiler alert on the link).
So. Charles is about to turn 20, about to go to Oxford, probably. He was sickly and effeminate growing up, and has decided to prove his virility by being almost monomaniacally focused on sex. Which I guess isn't that unusual for young men. But it's a scary look into their minds.
I guess I just found him troubling, and sad. His notebooks and careful over-thinking prevent him from really experiencing life as it happens. And really seeing himself and other people. He is a (very) little like Chuck Bass, although I am only making that comparison because I just finished watching Gossip Girl.
Anyway, romp it was not. Slightly painful journey into the mind of a neurotic young man? That's more like it.
Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984 (originally published 1973)
I went back and checked. It doesn't actually say "romp" on any of the cover blurbs. That was my imagination. But still, I feel like I was misled to expect a sort of screwball sexy comedy, British-style. Plus, I really liked Time's Arrow (spoiler alert on the link).
So. Charles is about to turn 20, about to go to Oxford, probably. He was sickly and effeminate growing up, and has decided to prove his virility by being almost monomaniacally focused on sex. Which I guess isn't that unusual for young men. But it's a scary look into their minds.
I guess I just found him troubling, and sad. His notebooks and careful over-thinking prevent him from really experiencing life as it happens. And really seeing himself and other people. He is a (very) little like Chuck Bass, although I am only making that comparison because I just finished watching Gossip Girl.
Anyway, romp it was not. Slightly painful journey into the mind of a neurotic young man? That's more like it.
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Oh dear lord
From My Name is Will:
Lovely. Just lovely. Anyone wondering how I came to exist, there's your answer right there.
He probably would get laid at the Faire. He'd been to a Renaissance Faire once before, near L.A., a few month ago - May, was it? - and he'd gotten lucky, way lucky. Jesus, he'd fantasized about it dozens of times since. There was this game, Drench-a-Wench, that involved sling-shotting a wet sponge at an array of wanton maids sitting on a little bleacher of hay bales. If you hit one, you got a kiss. He'd wondered how long that game could possibly last with a new STD being discovered every day. Just for fun, he'd played. [He hits and kisses some blonde, and that was fine and then notices an exotic brunette checking him out, and she says...] "Truly, I am shocked, sir. Paying for thy kisses when thou couldst surely get them free."
Lovely. Just lovely. Anyone wondering how I came to exist, there's your answer right there.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Charlotte
On my mom's advice, I read Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and did a term paper on Ken Kesey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. When I was in 11th grade. I'm not really sure I was ready for the Merry Pranksters. But I really enjoyed it. And I got a big kick out of Tom Wolfe's style.
And The Right Stuff became one of my favorite books of all time. Despite being more "masculine" in style than most things I like, it was just so powerful and evocative - and history! - and I loved it.
But Wolfe's social commentary fiction? Not so much. Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy Bonfire of the Vanities or A Man in Full. Because I did. But man, Wolfe can come off as so judgmental. It can be a little much.
Which brings me to I am Charlotte Simmons. I was afraid of this book, b/c Wolfe spent a semester at Stanford while I was there, walking around in his white suit and clearly researching such important terms as "hooking up" and "dormcest." And even though talking heads kept comparing his fictional Dupont College to Duke, I knew that it had a whole lot of Stanford in there. And I wasn't in the mood to be judged. Not on my alma mater.
And speaking of my alma mater, I felt as though Wolfe laid me totally bare within 10 pages, when a drunken frat boy expounds on the "exaltation" of being recognized as a Dupont student:
And that's it exactly.
I was able to forgive the plot implausibilities and fixation on the word "rutting" and annoying self-pity throughout the rest of the novel (which is a fun read btw, in a very longguilty pleasure sort of way) because Wolfe had captured that feeling so completely.
And The Right Stuff became one of my favorite books of all time. Despite being more "masculine" in style than most things I like, it was just so powerful and evocative - and history! - and I loved it.
But Wolfe's social commentary fiction? Not so much. Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy Bonfire of the Vanities or A Man in Full. Because I did. But man, Wolfe can come off as so judgmental. It can be a little much.
Which brings me to I am Charlotte Simmons. I was afraid of this book, b/c Wolfe spent a semester at Stanford while I was there, walking around in his white suit and clearly researching such important terms as "hooking up" and "dormcest." And even though talking heads kept comparing his fictional Dupont College to Duke, I knew that it had a whole lot of Stanford in there. And I wasn't in the mood to be judged. Not on my alma mater.
And speaking of my alma mater, I felt as though Wolfe laid me totally bare within 10 pages, when a drunken frat boy expounds on the "exaltation" of being recognized as a Dupont student:
Everyone, male or female, who was right now, as he was, in the undergraduate division, Dupont College, or had ever graduated from Dupont College knew that feeling, treasured that feeling, sought one way or another to enjoy that feeling daily if at all possible, now and for the rest of his life - yet nobody had ever captured that feeling in words, and God knows no Dupont man, or Dupont woman, for that matter, had ever tried to describe it out loud to a living soul, not even to others within this charming aristocracy. They weren't fools, after all.
And that's it exactly.
I was able to forgive the plot implausibilities and fixation on the word "rutting" and annoying self-pity throughout the rest of the novel (which is a fun read btw, in a very longguilty pleasure sort of way) because Wolfe had captured that feeling so completely.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Mostly melodrama
I've read two books in the last little while. One is Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes, a collection of short stories that mostly fits into his general vein, so I won't say too much about that. The other is Keys to Happiness, a Russian Silver Age novel by Anastasya Verbitskaya, which is book two for the Russian Reading Challenge. This book was a serendipitous $1 find at Dutton's some time ago, and I bought it mainly because its title was the genesis for Laura Engelstein's The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia. The latter book was an extremely useful source for my undergraduate thesis, so when I saw the original, I grabbed it.
Fortunately, this translation is abridged, and at just under 300 pages is somewhere around 1/3 of the original serialized novel. The translators, both academics, felt that the novel could be a little repetitive, and so chopped it down to the essence. To which I say thank god, because I know I couldn't have made it through an extra 800 pages of the same. KTH was a sensation, full of free love and revolutionary ideals and art and anti-semitism, and I don't even know what else. It's quite a product of its time.
Manya, our heroine, has "eyes like stars" and more dancing ability than Isadora Duncan, and captivates a series of archetypal men. She is capricious as all get out, and never has one emotion when she can have five instead. Keeping up with her is exhausting. I'm not going to even try to recount the plot, but suffice it to say it is quite the early 20th-century telenovela.
So while the book itself isn't all that fantastic, it's got a lot of historical value. Its huge popularity is a reflection of the changing values of the period, where some men and women threw off the social mores regarding love and sex. Most did not, but they lived vicariously through such vibrant characters as Manya.
cross-posted at Russian Reading Challenge
Fortunately, this translation is abridged, and at just under 300 pages is somewhere around 1/3 of the original serialized novel. The translators, both academics, felt that the novel could be a little repetitive, and so chopped it down to the essence. To which I say thank god, because I know I couldn't have made it through an extra 800 pages of the same. KTH was a sensation, full of free love and revolutionary ideals and art and anti-semitism, and I don't even know what else. It's quite a product of its time.
Manya, our heroine, has "eyes like stars" and more dancing ability than Isadora Duncan, and captivates a series of archetypal men. She is capricious as all get out, and never has one emotion when she can have five instead. Keeping up with her is exhausting. I'm not going to even try to recount the plot, but suffice it to say it is quite the early 20th-century telenovela.
So while the book itself isn't all that fantastic, it's got a lot of historical value. Its huge popularity is a reflection of the changing values of the period, where some men and women threw off the social mores regarding love and sex. Most did not, but they lived vicariously through such vibrant characters as Manya.
cross-posted at Russian Reading Challenge
Monday, January 28, 2008
The Journal of Dora Damage
I can't decide whether or not author Belinda Starling's tale outshines her heroine's. A young mother, Starling had just finished The Journal of Dora Damage when a routine operation went awry and she died from septic shock. Her brother wrote an afterword to eulogize her, an author who did not live to see her book bound.
But for over 400 pages, Dora succeeds in taking the reader's attention away from Starling's tragic death. Dora is a London housewife in 1860 whose family faces ruin, and takes salvation upon her shoulders by manning her husband's bookbindery. Except it's a bitch to keep the creditors at bay, deal with a sick husband and daughter, and have time to ply a trade that women weren't supposed to do. Until she gets in with a crowd of aristocratic men with porno- and ethnographic tastes, whose secrets she keeps in exchange for them keeping her own.
And then things get more heated, in all sorts of senses of the term. But throughout it, Dora exudes a pretty impressive sense of calm. This is what (lower)middle-class women did; they shouldered what came at them, and kept households and communities afloat.
It's a bit embarrassing to be an avid reader who has never really thought about how books are made. Once you move past Book of Kells inscriptions and the tedium of typesetting, I'm entirely out of my realm. How do the pages all stick together? Dunno. Which provided another bright point in Dora Damage - the descriptions of the workshop, and of the binding process, were illuminating. And the individual attention taken, to match leather and border design with text.... Now, if only I knew how they made those trade paperbacks I love so much.
But for over 400 pages, Dora succeeds in taking the reader's attention away from Starling's tragic death. Dora is a London housewife in 1860 whose family faces ruin, and takes salvation upon her shoulders by manning her husband's bookbindery. Except it's a bitch to keep the creditors at bay, deal with a sick husband and daughter, and have time to ply a trade that women weren't supposed to do. Until she gets in with a crowd of aristocratic men with porno- and ethnographic tastes, whose secrets she keeps in exchange for them keeping her own.
And then things get more heated, in all sorts of senses of the term. But throughout it, Dora exudes a pretty impressive sense of calm. This is what (lower)middle-class women did; they shouldered what came at them, and kept households and communities afloat.
It's a bit embarrassing to be an avid reader who has never really thought about how books are made. Once you move past Book of Kells inscriptions and the tedium of typesetting, I'm entirely out of my realm. How do the pages all stick together? Dunno. Which provided another bright point in Dora Damage - the descriptions of the workshop, and of the binding process, were illuminating. And the individual attention taken, to match leather and border design with text.... Now, if only I knew how they made those trade paperbacks I love so much.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Suburban Sex Ed: The Abstinence Teacher
I LOVED The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. I first heard about it sometime in October, after finally seeing Little Children sometime in the summer.
There were so many times this book made me laugh aloud at the sheer ridiculous of the human situation, and just as many times I cringed in sympathetic embarrassment. And there are passages I marked down, but they all seem awfully risque for this blog. So you will just have to trust me, and hopefully go read it yourself.
I haven't read many reviews of this book besides Kellogg's, which I cited above and had forgotten by the time I started reading. But somehow I just decided everyone would like this book and was a big chagrined when I updated my books on Facebook and discovered that lots of other people were underwhelmed.
Anyway, I haven't said too much about the book yet. It's a culture clash b/t an emerging megachurch and the New England social liberalism embodied by sex ed teacher Ruth Ramsey. And while Ruth works to be a warrior and yet not entirely alienate her tween daughters, the clash is best exemplified by her foil Tim, the ex-addict rocker who found salvation in Jesus and in coaching her daughter's soccer team.
You really root for Ruth and Tim. At least I did. And while I, the former sex ed counselor, found myself quite clearly on one side of the issues, I still felt that Perrotta was both sympathetic and skewering on all sides. For a satirist, he's so nice. (Maybe a little like Jane Austen?) Anyway, I've gushed verbally and in e-mails to so many people in the past week that now I find myself all gushed out. Sigh. So read it for yourself, and decide for yourself. Making your own decisions, after all, might be the moral of The Abstinence Teacher.
There were so many times this book made me laugh aloud at the sheer ridiculous of the human situation, and just as many times I cringed in sympathetic embarrassment. And there are passages I marked down, but they all seem awfully risque for this blog. So you will just have to trust me, and hopefully go read it yourself.
I haven't read many reviews of this book besides Kellogg's, which I cited above and had forgotten by the time I started reading. But somehow I just decided everyone would like this book and was a big chagrined when I updated my books on Facebook and discovered that lots of other people were underwhelmed.
Anyway, I haven't said too much about the book yet. It's a culture clash b/t an emerging megachurch and the New England social liberalism embodied by sex ed teacher Ruth Ramsey. And while Ruth works to be a warrior and yet not entirely alienate her tween daughters, the clash is best exemplified by her foil Tim, the ex-addict rocker who found salvation in Jesus and in coaching her daughter's soccer team.
You really root for Ruth and Tim. At least I did. And while I, the former sex ed counselor, found myself quite clearly on one side of the issues, I still felt that Perrotta was both sympathetic and skewering on all sides. For a satirist, he's so nice. (Maybe a little like Jane Austen?) Anyway, I've gushed verbally and in e-mails to so many people in the past week that now I find myself all gushed out. Sigh. So read it for yourself, and decide for yourself. Making your own decisions, after all, might be the moral of The Abstinence Teacher.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Memories
In my last post, oh so long ago, I wrote about England - where I was making memories, to sound cheesy - and Peter Nadas - whose novel was about memories.
Returning to real life in Los Angeles meant that it was difficult to get through the last 200 pages, much harder than it was on an airplane. And because A Book of Memories is so disjointed, reading catch as catch can just made it even more confusing. But I finally succeeded. (The "I'm not going to sleep until it's finished" proclamation helped.)
What struck me about the three narrators is how well (and yet how poorly) they read other people. How everyday occurrences were charged with meaning. How openly they stated their flaws, and yet so often told something less than the truth. It's the kind of book that seems designed to come from a place like Communist Hungary, with a confused and complicated history, and where people were never quite in charge of their own destiny.
Some passages, beginning with a evocative depiction of falling in love:
and more:
Returning to real life in Los Angeles meant that it was difficult to get through the last 200 pages, much harder than it was on an airplane. And because A Book of Memories is so disjointed, reading catch as catch can just made it even more confusing. But I finally succeeded. (The "I'm not going to sleep until it's finished" proclamation helped.)
What struck me about the three narrators is how well (and yet how poorly) they read other people. How everyday occurrences were charged with meaning. How openly they stated their flaws, and yet so often told something less than the truth. It's the kind of book that seems designed to come from a place like Communist Hungary, with a confused and complicated history, and where people were never quite in charge of their own destiny.
Some passages, beginning with a evocative depiction of falling in love:
We told each other stories, and even that would not be an accurate description of the feverish urging to relate and the eager curiosity to listen to each other's words with which we tried to complement the contact of our bodies, our constant physical presence in each other
and more:
Lovers walk around wearing each other's body, and they wear and radiate into the world their common physicality.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Greetings from Merrie Olde England!
First and foremost, helloooo from London. I have spent the week wandering about, doing a mix of touristy and non-touristy things. (Where does shopping at H&M fit in?) This morning, however, is about finding a coffee shop and reading my book.
What is my vacation book, you ask? Well, it's a tome: A Book of Memories, by Peter Nadas, a Hungarian writer. Originally published in the mid-1980s, it has that strange Eastern European intellectual coming to terms with a totalitarian regime by avoiding it sort of vibe. (See: Milan Kundera) Also like Kundera, Nadas is a very sensual and sexual writer. Memories is a mix of memoirs, which mix and intertwine until I sometimes am not sure who is talking. His main character, to this point, is a young writer who grew up in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Hungary, and is lately of East Berlin. He is beautiful and seductive, and emotional and sensitive and yet manipulative and almost sadistic. And sexually, it seems he is drawn to most everyone, and most everyone is drawn to him. Yet this doesn't come off as crude, as it might in other hands.
Nadas is a beautiful stylist, yet the prose can be difficult for an English-speaking reader. It is flowery, and looooong, which sentences extending for lines and lines, and paragraphs for pages. Plus, while not quite stream-of-consciousness, the narrators will break off on detailed tangents, and then return to their central narrative without missing a beat. (Whether the reader can do so remains to be seen.)
I marked a few passages from the first third of the novel, but most of them are either so long, or so unclear out of context, that I will limit myself to sharing just one:
Like every moment we want to be significant, this one, too, turns out to be insignificant; we have to remind ourselves afterward that what we have been waiting for so eagerly is actually here, has finally come, and nothing has changed, everything is the same, it's simply here, the waiting is over.
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