I’m linking to a couple of interesting articles (here and here) about creating gender-neutral pronouns, for those who like a side of grammar nerdiness with their radical feminism entree.
Torture
Now Racquel, I see you offering yourself up to read another few hundred pages of Ms. Desai’s tripe if she promises it will end as it began. You can firmly count me out of that equation.
From the very start I was unconvinced. I tend to mark up books quite heavily and while ‘The Rachel Papers’ was full of star shapes and excited ‘ha!’s when I look over the first chapter of this, I see such commentary as ‘ugh’, ‘double ugh’, ‘lazy and shit’ and next to her description of a wine-stain on the Judge’s tablecloth as ‘garnet’, ‘factually untrue’. Now perhaps I’m making too much of that but it really is a lie. Garnet is most commonly a hard, deep, slightly brazen red colour. Stains from red wine are an ugly washed out purple. From this point on, how much can you trust Desai? Does the woman even drink? Garnet’s a pretty and wholly inaccurate word so how many of her other descriptions of trees, of plants, of fruits and mists that I have (and probably will) never seen are fictional? There’s a great deal of time put into descriptions of setting (particularly the mountain) but part of me thinks this is a just lush padding that takes us nowhere.
But let’s not get hung up on my hunch that Desai is lying descriptively left, right and centre when there’s so much else to criticise here. Like perhaps the complete failure of characterisation. No offence to you Rachel but I suspect that the Sai/Gyan romance might have come to you at a particular romance-needy time. Desai took advantage of you when you’d had one too many Appletinis like the cheap shyster she is. Sai is a good girl who falls in love with the only thing she ever gets to lay eyes on. Gyan (up until the whole selling them down the river with the guns thing) is a good boy who also falls in love with the only thing he ever gets to lay eyes on. There’s no comparison here. The two seem to be the only young people in the whole area (except of course the youthful Gorkhaland supporters who rush on and off stage like the butchers, bakers, candlestickmakers etc. of the ‘Consider Yourself’ crowd-musical number in ‘Oliver Twist’ – revolution? bring on the Gorkhas – it all just feels so fucking mechanical) and there is nothing about their love that could not be acted out by two moderately friendly rocks. They have no interiority, Desai just occasionally leans one against the other.
And the judge… oh the judge. Now I love an unpleasant character but really, must we suffer through such a tedious backstory? Oh Kiran, I can’t believe you’re telling me that the bitter and wizened old man is only so bitter and wizened because he was treated badly himself! I can scarcely the depth of your psychological reasoning! Bravo! Sure he takes things too far with that wife he beats half to death but then you throw in a memory of that wonderful motor-cycle ride they took and all the bruises just wash away…
I could go on. Father Booty, Uncle Potty, Lola, Noni, Biju, the Cook – all irritating non-people. Perhaps even worse are the characters we only glimpse in the peripheral vision of the novel such as the woman who runs the fish stall who has the hunchback, the retard son and the insatiable appetite for clamato juice. Okay, she’s not actually in the novel but she might as well be. Nobody is allowed simply to exist here, they must all be all-singing, all-dancing madhouse candidates. It’s tempting at times to cry racism and there is something patronising and demoralising about her portrayal of Pithit as a circus of buffoons, but in fact I suspect this comes back to the garnet-stain and Desai’s attempts to inject colour and excitement all over the shop to mask the fact that, as Rachel rightly points out, as a novelist, she’s not doing her job very well.
There’s so much more to complain about here (have you ever encountered a writer so senselessly intrigued by shit? – bear in mind we’re reading this on the back of ‘The Rachel Papers’ which is full of excretions and secretions but there it makes sense, it adds to Charles and the whole grossness of adolescence, here Desai just can’t stop herself from telling you the stool consistency of each of her characters) but even sitting down thinking about the novel feels like yet more time stolen from my life by Desai. It took me a long time to finish the novel because, having got within fifty pages of the end, I just couldn’t be bothered. Nothing that happened in those fifty pages could have made me feel any differently about it: the characters all die in a landslide – blah, the characters all live happily ever after in farting, shitting, rural bliss – blah, an orgy erupts in which Father Booty rides Lola while she blows Biju transatlantically while the talking insects (yes, there are, albeit ever so briefly, talking insects) tickle the scrotum of the chef who is fisting the Judge etc. etc. – blah. In fact the only thing that could have redeemed it would have been a long apology letter from Desai, stating the reasons, financial and emotional that she felt compelled to not only write but submit for publication and eventually publish the novel. “…I just bought a new Aga and you wouldn’t believe how… at night I still cry thinking of the shit that I wrote… the Booker Prize money will go directly to starving orphans, I promise… please write to the following address and I will send you a personal cheque for £50 as a gesture of compensation for what you have suffered in reading this piece of shit…”.
Well, at least we’re done with it. Onward to ‘The History of Love’ by Nicole Krauss.
Disappointed
The Inheritance of Loss was so promising! I loved the blurb on the back; I loved the colorful cover; I loved the first 300 pages. And then it ended, without wrapping up any major plot points. I am not a happy-ending girl. I don’t need for every character to be entering into a promising and happy love affair at the book’s end, or for every conflict to be resolved such that the good guys win and the bad guys lose. But plot, as I understand it, consists of a conflict that begins, escalates, and is somehow resolved. This book just stops.
This is unfortunate, because I thought lots of things were really well done here. The story of Sai and Gian falling in love was very beautiful and, I thought, very well-rendered. The old man in the crumbling house with the dog – you know I loved every bit of it. The bits about Bijou making his way in the US, finding himself becoming best friends with a Muslim and having to work out whether he hates all Muslims, or just Pakistanis, or just certain kinds of individuals in either group, or both – you KNOW i loved. I also very much enjoyed the sections describing the mountain and its vegetation – very Old English Novel – (please excuse me for not being able to give you a genre/author name here, but you know the ones…) where each chapter begins with a description of the wind blowing across the heather on the moor and then the author finally zooms in on the character, some lovely girl sitting in the window looking out over the gray and purple heath. Only this was better, because the land being described was a tropical mountain complete with dense clouds and dripping tendrils. Sweet.
But then the book just ended, and I am left wondering what happened to the dog? to the Gorkaland Army (which was never adequately explained in the first place)? to the family that stole the dog? to the old man? to the old sisters? to the cook and his son? Do Sai and Gian get back together? Does the town come under Nepali control?
At the end of the day, this book had great details. The eating scenes, the National Geographics, the Indian restaurant, the cook’s shed, the judge before he was old and mean sitting in a boarding house in London not talking to anyone…. yes. Excellent. Bring it on. This was all great. Details are hard to do well. But in writing all these gorgeous little details it just seems that Kiran forget to take care of some huge plot issues. I love books with big ensemble casts, where there are a whole slew of main characters and their lives are all tangled together in some way that you don’t fully understand until the last 75 pages (On Beauty, The Corrections, Purple America…). But I don’t like reading about 25 people, some of whom (Father Booty, the dog-stealers, the judge’s wife…) are never fully developed, and who are being written about in tandem only because they all hail from the same town.
Disappointed as a was at the end of this book, I did read the whole thing in 2 days because I really liked the beginning and middle – actually I liked it very much until the last page when it became clear that it was just going to stop for no reason. I would gladly have read another several hundred pages, if I had Kiran’s word that my questions were eventually going to be answered.
Holden Caufield – whatevs. Charles Highway – a legend
Well played, Devans. That is the literary criticism quote of the decade.
Obviously I had no choice but to love this book, as Martin was kind enough to name it after me. But that aside, it is just too funny not to love. And so on point. With all the grossness of the teenage years, reminding you of just how awful and stupid and self-centered teenagers are. But still, you have to love them. Or maybe Martin just got to us at exactly the right time, a wizened 24 being the perfect age to still clearly remember being 19 but with enough distance that you can laugh at the hijinks.
Things I loved most:
1. Charles’ hyperverbal discussion of… everything. He can’t talk about female anatomy without referring to Tropic of Cancer, can’t go to the museum without writing a speech about Blake (to be delivered as the sun sets glimmerinly over the Thames out the window), is citing Larkin and lots of other presumably famous British male authors.
2. The hacking cough. Never has a bodily function been described in such disgusting detail while also making the hero somehow endearing. Mucous as motif. I like it.
3. [SPOILER ALERT] Rachel wetting the bed and refusing to give Charles a blowjob. I’m sorry, that is pure comedy. And the sour, straightforward way it is described… I nearly cried from laughing.
Dave, you’re totally right. Martin is obviously a big misogynist. But not having read anything else he has written, I was willink to chalk that up to him having created a misogynistic character. And I love that Charles is so confused by/ disgusted by women. The only part where I thought the lady-hating got in the way of the story was in the Jenny/Norman plotline, where Norman beats Jenny up and Charles not only doesn’t have a normal brotherly reaction but becomes card-playing buddiers with Norman. Maybe this is my two X chromosomes talking, but that was a detail that I didn’t find believable. Now, I am more than willing to put this aside in the face of gems like, (I don’t have my book with me so I’m paraphrasing) “As I took Rachel into my room it smelled to me of every sock I had every taken off, every clump of ear wax I had smeared until the desk, every booger I had flicked onto the wall.”
As for Inheritance of Loss. Oh heavens. It’s a good’un. Started it Sunday and am nearly through. Is it terribly politically incorrect of me to note that Indians seem to consistently write excellent fiction about globalization and colonialism? Roy, Rushdie, Naipaul… Ok that’s only three. But so far this Desai lady is earning her keep on the list.
A swimming-pool of cock-camembert
The title here is a quote from ‘The Rachel Papers’ and is about the revolting dick-cheesy smell of superglue. I am utterly enchanted but then Amis had me on the first page with the crushing truth that “Twenty may not be the start of maturity but, in all conscience, it’s the end of youth.” I remember my own twentieth birthday with nothing but bitterness and a slight wince at the thought of the handle of $9 Iceberg vodka I took to bed with me at around 4p.m. that dreadful day.
Now I have a shifty past with Martin Amis. When I was 12 or 13, Amis was all the rage – sort of the literary equivalent to BritPop – and everyone with an airline bag and a copy of Pulp’s ‘Different Class’ had a copy of either ‘Money’ or ‘London Fields’ strewn around their room. I greedily had both and made a number of abortive attempts to read through them but remember finding them so back-slappingly irritating and snide that both were eventually assigned to the shelf for show and nothing more (hello Tibor Fischer, Somerset Maugham, the first copy of the still-as-yet-unread-Proust I ever foolishly bought). Somebody I fancied at 14 urged me to read ‘Dead Babies’ and much as I find coked-up yuppies torturing dwarves an entertaining conceit it just didn’t really penetrate any further than a second-rate freak show. Somewhere around there, to my enormous relief, ‘The Information’ was published to mass critical savaging and with the exception of his memoir ‘Experience’, Amis remains unable to get back on the horse after that. Everyone mocks him, it’s almost expected. I feel validated in my pubescent choices.
All of that shit said, this is really pretty amazing. Rachel will beat me for not mentioning ‘Catcher in the Rye’ here but to be perfectly honest, having never managed to get through it I can only make arch and vague allusions to the type of book I know that is. Holden Caulfield – whatevs. Charles Highway – a legend. Flicking through the book now, almost every page is marked with my stupid star symbol and even the occasional embarassingly redundant ‘ha!’. It is reassuringly vile about the self-centredness of being teenaged (mentally, if not physically) while recognizing how important, how tempting and how lovely that gross state of being can be. I adore this and yearn for all of my friends to procreate so I can shamelessly distribute copies of this to their fifteen year old offspring.
It’s worth mentioning that Charles is nothing if not misogynistic but this in and of itself is nothing to be put off by. Amis’ own repugnant personality makes it hard to ignore the suggestion (and actual acknowledgment) that much of the material and sentiment are autobiographical and yet you can’t help but cheer Charles’ innate and unshakeable awfulness. The conclusion allows the possibility of some silly redemptive change but then pisses all over that in a delightfully satisfying way.
Ditching the Cuckoo’s Nest for this was the very best of ideas, Rachel. I am not so convinced the same will be true of your next choice (Kiran Desai’s ‘The Inheritance of Loss’) but I look forward to a good fight about magical realism. I am only 50 pages in and already a dog has been compared to Audrey Hepburn and an overly gloomy cat has made an appearance.
Take care,
Dave
Forget Ken Kesey and the Random Number Generator
Fairly self-explanatory. As both Rachel and myself have failed to make any progress with ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and are relentlessly non-plussed by the 1001 list (one more time with feeling – Paulo fucking Coehlo?) we’re just going to make this up as it goes along.
Rachel has egotistically declared that the first book will be “The Rachel Papers” by Martin Amis. Onward and upward.
Dave
red or dead
hello fellow ninjas,
so mcmurphy might have a hint of red to his hair. but there’s nothing in there to suggest he’s an out and out carrot top. i imagined a more rugged auburn hue to mcmurphy’s do. and isn’t part of the joy of reading to use your imagination? (even though jack nicholson might be running through your mind’s eye). if this is causing a problem beware as Kesey refers to it again and again throughout the book. There may be some personal significance for him attached to red hair as I don’t think I’ve read anything else that makes such a point of haircolour. Especially in a male character. it might help to decide on a shade more pleasing to your tastes before continuing. the following link may be helpful
http://www.wiggoddess.com/margucolors.html
On the whole, I quite enjoyed this one. It was a slow start but once it got moving it was easier going. I preferred the film.
Ball. Rolling.
So yes, just to start this all off, I’m only thirty pages in and feel terribly ashamed. I will rectify the situation soon enough but have been glued to the tragic/glam world of ‘The Mitford Sisters’ by Mary S. Lovell and unable to make myself read about the insane asylum just yet. One thing that alarms me from the little I have read however is McMurphy’s red-headedness. Dangerous, edgy, fuck you/kill you Jack Nicholson is simply a Hollywood makeover. The real McMurphy is the type to burn to a crisp in the January sun. Gingers…
Davina
Our Quest
Hello all,
Welcome to Book Ninjas where, over the course of several agonising years, we will attempt to work out way through this:
http://www.listology.com/content_show.cfm/content_id.22845/Books
It is a list of the “1001 Books You Should Read Before You Die”. It is predictably not necessarily the most trustworthy of things (Paulo fucking Coehlo?) but that’s the point of our little online book group/bitchfest/orgy. Each book will be chosen using a random number generator (http://www.random.org/nform.html) and then we will read it and chat back and forth about our feelings of love/loathing/apathy. That is all, nothing clever, nothing very special, just some fun.
The first book is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, a high-school classic that I for one have not read anywhere near recently enough.
If you want to join, contact us at bookninjas@gmail.com and we’ll give you the log-in information so you can post properly.
So yes, that is all. Time to hit the books…
Take care all,
Dave
