Well, after writing all that last time, I just sat down and read through another chunk of The Inheritance of Loss with true fascination. This last part was incredibly involving and shied away from the bothersome axiom-focused segments I was writing about last time. At last, the plot seems to be taking off. After only 230 pages.
I'm now heading into the home stretch, and hoping this momentum continues.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Sunday, April 29, 2007
The trouble with truths
I think I've figured out what it is about The Inheritance of Loss that's keeping me from a) reading it faster and b) enjoying it more fully. It's not something necessarily specific to this novel, because once I recognized it, I realized that I've seen this in a lot of more contemporary novels ... The story is built around axioms.
This is very troubling to me. Especially since, as I've said, it seems to be sort of a contemporary trend in fiction writing. Come to think of it, most of the books that I've strongly disliked lately have shared this same flaw.
Let me give you some examples; the following are quotes from a single 3-page selection of the novel:
"When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you."
"A new language provided distance and kept the heart intact."
"The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind."
All of these statements are the type that force you to pause and think, "Yes, that's true." And then you underline them, dutifully, feeling that Desai has just told you something that is very important. And if you're me, you find yourself becoming bored by this pattern - a spurt of narrative, a nice little axiom to sum it up. An axiom, a spurt of narrative to prove its point. Etcetera. Each of the tiny little sections that the chapters are broken into, in fact, can be read as a sort of parable.
Now, I'm not saying that Kiran Desai's insights are not valid. They are, absolutely so; and if I were just given a list of all of these little "truths" that she's sprinkled throughout the book, they would provide much fascinating fodder for philosophical musings. The problem is that I don't think it is valid to use a fictional narrative as merely a vehical for adagia, as it were. It cheapens the literature. And it keeps you from truly being able to care about the trajectory of the story, because the point is not the story, after all - it's the morals one is supposed to draw from the story.
This is exactly the same problem I had with the movie "Crash" - it seemed like the moral came first ("Let's make a movie showing how racism affects people in Los Angeles!") and the story and character development came second, forced to contort into unnatural alignments in order to support the writers' agendas. I have nothing against the agenda of tolerance and acceptance - but I do have something against using an art form merely as a soapbox for political or moral beliefs. Art should speak to the quality of the human in all of us, and in order to do that, it must come from a place of subconscious truth. The place Kiran Desai is coming from is very conscious. Again, that is not to say that she has nothing important to impart to a readership - but I'm not sure that literature is the best way to do that.
Perhaps that is why I love Faulkner so much - there are certainly no easy adages to be found in his works. And, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the same holds true for Hemingway. He may have thought of the axioms in his head, but he purposefully omits them from his writing.
In any case, I'm still pushing through this book - maybe now that I know why it bothers me, I'll be able to finish it faster.
This is very troubling to me. Especially since, as I've said, it seems to be sort of a contemporary trend in fiction writing. Come to think of it, most of the books that I've strongly disliked lately have shared this same flaw.
Let me give you some examples; the following are quotes from a single 3-page selection of the novel:
"When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you."
"A new language provided distance and kept the heart intact."
"The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind."
All of these statements are the type that force you to pause and think, "Yes, that's true." And then you underline them, dutifully, feeling that Desai has just told you something that is very important. And if you're me, you find yourself becoming bored by this pattern - a spurt of narrative, a nice little axiom to sum it up. An axiom, a spurt of narrative to prove its point. Etcetera. Each of the tiny little sections that the chapters are broken into, in fact, can be read as a sort of parable.
Now, I'm not saying that Kiran Desai's insights are not valid. They are, absolutely so; and if I were just given a list of all of these little "truths" that she's sprinkled throughout the book, they would provide much fascinating fodder for philosophical musings. The problem is that I don't think it is valid to use a fictional narrative as merely a vehical for adagia, as it were. It cheapens the literature. And it keeps you from truly being able to care about the trajectory of the story, because the point is not the story, after all - it's the morals one is supposed to draw from the story.
This is exactly the same problem I had with the movie "Crash" - it seemed like the moral came first ("Let's make a movie showing how racism affects people in Los Angeles!") and the story and character development came second, forced to contort into unnatural alignments in order to support the writers' agendas. I have nothing against the agenda of tolerance and acceptance - but I do have something against using an art form merely as a soapbox for political or moral beliefs. Art should speak to the quality of the human in all of us, and in order to do that, it must come from a place of subconscious truth. The place Kiran Desai is coming from is very conscious. Again, that is not to say that she has nothing important to impart to a readership - but I'm not sure that literature is the best way to do that.
Perhaps that is why I love Faulkner so much - there are certainly no easy adages to be found in his works. And, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the same holds true for Hemingway. He may have thought of the axioms in his head, but he purposefully omits them from his writing.
In any case, I'm still pushing through this book - maybe now that I know why it bothers me, I'll be able to finish it faster.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Eh.
So, I'm almost halfway through The Inheritance of Loss ... I know, I'm going very, very slowly. Why did I think that being an English teacher was a good idea? The world will never know. In any case, the piles of yet-to-be-graded papers always seem to take precedence over any sort of TBR list.
I find that I tend to like books better when I can devour them in one fell swoop, allowing me to more completely lose myself in the world that the author has created. So perhaps it's the forced slow reading of the book that's not allowing me to get as wrapped up in it as I'd like. But I can't help feeling a sense of disappointment. The pacing of the book feels off to me, and I'm not very interested in any character's story line, really. I suppose I want to know what happens to Biju (the cook's son, trying desperately to make a living in the New York restaurant world), but as for the rest of them, I could take them or leave them. Sai bores me. I'd like to like Gyan, but I haven't been let into his head enough to know what he's about. The neighbors (Mrs. Sen, Lola, Noni, etc.) seem rather like caricatures.
I also take issue with the heavy-handed way Desai deals with politics here. Don't get me wrong, I love a book with some good political meatiness to it. Hell, I loved Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, and Midnight's Children, of course, and those are both chock full of politics. But Rushdie and Mistry create characters whose lives and development are inseparable from politics, so everything seems to flow from one point, and the reader never feels as though political thoughts are being forced down his throat because the arc of the political thoughts coincides in a perfect parabola with the characters' arc of motion.
Kiran Desai, as much as I hate to say it, is not Rushdie.
Her characters' lives ARE separable from the politics surrounded them, as perhaps is best exemplified by Sai and Gyan, living in a world of their own romance, oblivious to everything passing by them. Even Biju's struggles relate more to identity issues than politics, and his residence in America does not revolve around political barriers as much as personal ones. The political references feel out of place, artificial.
Perhaps my opinion will change as I delve into the second half of the novel, but Desai has yet to convince me that she's bringing something new to the table in a genre so populated with monumental works.
I find that I tend to like books better when I can devour them in one fell swoop, allowing me to more completely lose myself in the world that the author has created. So perhaps it's the forced slow reading of the book that's not allowing me to get as wrapped up in it as I'd like. But I can't help feeling a sense of disappointment. The pacing of the book feels off to me, and I'm not very interested in any character's story line, really. I suppose I want to know what happens to Biju (the cook's son, trying desperately to make a living in the New York restaurant world), but as for the rest of them, I could take them or leave them. Sai bores me. I'd like to like Gyan, but I haven't been let into his head enough to know what he's about. The neighbors (Mrs. Sen, Lola, Noni, etc.) seem rather like caricatures.
I also take issue with the heavy-handed way Desai deals with politics here. Don't get me wrong, I love a book with some good political meatiness to it. Hell, I loved Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, and Midnight's Children, of course, and those are both chock full of politics. But Rushdie and Mistry create characters whose lives and development are inseparable from politics, so everything seems to flow from one point, and the reader never feels as though political thoughts are being forced down his throat because the arc of the political thoughts coincides in a perfect parabola with the characters' arc of motion.
Kiran Desai, as much as I hate to say it, is not Rushdie.
Her characters' lives ARE separable from the politics surrounded them, as perhaps is best exemplified by Sai and Gyan, living in a world of their own romance, oblivious to everything passing by them. Even Biju's struggles relate more to identity issues than politics, and his residence in America does not revolve around political barriers as much as personal ones. The political references feel out of place, artificial.
Perhaps my opinion will change as I delve into the second half of the novel, but Desai has yet to convince me that she's bringing something new to the table in a genre so populated with monumental works.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Delving into yet another Indian novel
Ever since I took a class in college on South Asian Contemporary Fiction, I've been hooked on Indian literature. Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul ... and the list goes on. There's something about the historically saturated writing style and the deeply ingrained sense of place that really draws me to these novels. I also feel like there's a very similar strain of dry humor that runs through them.
Come to think of it, Indian fiction and Irish fiction occupy very similar categories in the literature part of my brain, which is interesting because both countries have undergone great internal strife and partitioning. Likely not a coincidence.
Anyway, I've started reading The Inheritance of Loss, which, so far, is living up to its praise. I really enjoy the fact that it's partitioned into very small scenes, even within each relatively short chapter; it feels like the kind of novel I'd want to write, in that sense; a novel made up of poetic tableaus. More updates to follow.
Come to think of it, Indian fiction and Irish fiction occupy very similar categories in the literature part of my brain, which is interesting because both countries have undergone great internal strife and partitioning. Likely not a coincidence.
Anyway, I've started reading The Inheritance of Loss, which, so far, is living up to its praise. I really enjoy the fact that it's partitioned into very small scenes, even within each relatively short chapter; it feels like the kind of novel I'd want to write, in that sense; a novel made up of poetic tableaus. More updates to follow.
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Twilight of the Superheroes
Just finished Twilight of the Superheroes. I feel as I almost always feel after reading a collection of short stories – a bit confused, definitely intrigued, and compelled to go back and look some of the stories over again. I can never really digest everything that’s going on in a short story collection on the first read-through. Some of these stories I don’t think I liked very much. Some of them I think I liked quite a lot. But I’m not entirely sure yet.
I went back and read some of the glowing reviews for the book that came out last year; I know it’s hard to actually think for yourself about something like this once you’ve sullied your mind with other people’s opinions, but sometimes I need that to get a better focus on what I’ve just read. Several reviews (most notably Entertainment Weekly’s and Salon’s) point out fundamental weaknesses in the title story, and I’m tempted to side with them, because out of all the stories, “Twilight of the Superheroes” is the one that hangs the least neatly in my memory. Too many characters, too clear a confrontation with 9/11, perhaps … It seems obvious to me that something as huge and horrible and unfathomable as 9/11 is most properly evoked by insinuation, a tactic which allows the hugeness and horribleness and unfathomableness to grow to the specific dimensions that each reader’s mind has allotted for it. And Eisenberg does insinuation incredibly well. It’s perhaps at its best in “Revenge of the Dinosaurs,” where Nana sits silently on the couch in front of a muted television showing the carnage in (presumably) Iraq, and the willfully self-deluded narrator throws out perfectly-pitched, random soundbites like the following:
… Last week when I’d called my old friend Juliette and said I was coming to the city to see Nana, she said sure I could stay at her place and naturally I assumed I’d be hanging out there a bit when I got in from the airport and we’d catch up and so on. But when I arrived, some guy, Juliette’s newish boyfriend, evidently – Wendall, I think his name might be – whom she’d sort of mentioned on the phone, turned out to be there, too. Sure, let’s just kill them, why not just kill them all, he was shouting. Juliette was peeling an orange. I’m not saying kill extra people, she said. I’m just frightened; there are a lot of crazy, angry maniacs out there who want to kill us, and I’m frightened. You’re frightened, he yelled. No one else in the world is frightened? Juliette raised her eyebrows at me and shrugged. The orange smelled fantastic. I was completely dehydrated from the flight because they hardly even bring you water anymore, though when I was little it was all so fun and special, with the pretty stewardesses and trays of little wrapped things, and I was just dying to tear open Juliette’s fridge and see if there was another orange in there …
In moments like this, Eisenberg shows us how we have all become so acclimated to the new culture of fear and terror and anti-terror that when the important questions are actually raised, the ones that we have to confront before we can figure out how to survive in this cowardly new world we’re living in, they sound to us like nothing more than background chatter or idle futility; they are easily drowned out by superficial bodily needs or created distractions.
In the same way, the narrator in “The Flaw in the Design” allows the supreme distraction of sexual gratification to take precedence over her slowly disintegrating family life, spurred by the increasingly severe bouts of depression taking over her son’s mind. Bouts of depression that seem, pointedly, politically driven. It’s no accident that the story takes place in Washington, D.C. The narrator even hints that Oliver’s mental problems may stem from his youthful experiences as the child of an American diplomat in these xenophobic millennial years; “Oliver spent his early childhood in places where there was a certain amount of hostility towards us – not us personally, of course, but toward our culture, I suppose, as it was perceived.”
Writing all of this has made me decide that I really did love many of the moments woven into this book. It’s worth another read through, at some point. Perhaps I enjoy it most for its affirmation that literature about the post-9/11 American landscape doesn’t have to be so self-consciously post-post-modern all the time.
I went back and read some of the glowing reviews for the book that came out last year; I know it’s hard to actually think for yourself about something like this once you’ve sullied your mind with other people’s opinions, but sometimes I need that to get a better focus on what I’ve just read. Several reviews (most notably Entertainment Weekly’s and Salon’s) point out fundamental weaknesses in the title story, and I’m tempted to side with them, because out of all the stories, “Twilight of the Superheroes” is the one that hangs the least neatly in my memory. Too many characters, too clear a confrontation with 9/11, perhaps … It seems obvious to me that something as huge and horrible and unfathomable as 9/11 is most properly evoked by insinuation, a tactic which allows the hugeness and horribleness and unfathomableness to grow to the specific dimensions that each reader’s mind has allotted for it. And Eisenberg does insinuation incredibly well. It’s perhaps at its best in “Revenge of the Dinosaurs,” where Nana sits silently on the couch in front of a muted television showing the carnage in (presumably) Iraq, and the willfully self-deluded narrator throws out perfectly-pitched, random soundbites like the following:
… Last week when I’d called my old friend Juliette and said I was coming to the city to see Nana, she said sure I could stay at her place and naturally I assumed I’d be hanging out there a bit when I got in from the airport and we’d catch up and so on. But when I arrived, some guy, Juliette’s newish boyfriend, evidently – Wendall, I think his name might be – whom she’d sort of mentioned on the phone, turned out to be there, too. Sure, let’s just kill them, why not just kill them all, he was shouting. Juliette was peeling an orange. I’m not saying kill extra people, she said. I’m just frightened; there are a lot of crazy, angry maniacs out there who want to kill us, and I’m frightened. You’re frightened, he yelled. No one else in the world is frightened? Juliette raised her eyebrows at me and shrugged. The orange smelled fantastic. I was completely dehydrated from the flight because they hardly even bring you water anymore, though when I was little it was all so fun and special, with the pretty stewardesses and trays of little wrapped things, and I was just dying to tear open Juliette’s fridge and see if there was another orange in there …
In moments like this, Eisenberg shows us how we have all become so acclimated to the new culture of fear and terror and anti-terror that when the important questions are actually raised, the ones that we have to confront before we can figure out how to survive in this cowardly new world we’re living in, they sound to us like nothing more than background chatter or idle futility; they are easily drowned out by superficial bodily needs or created distractions.
In the same way, the narrator in “The Flaw in the Design” allows the supreme distraction of sexual gratification to take precedence over her slowly disintegrating family life, spurred by the increasingly severe bouts of depression taking over her son’s mind. Bouts of depression that seem, pointedly, politically driven. It’s no accident that the story takes place in Washington, D.C. The narrator even hints that Oliver’s mental problems may stem from his youthful experiences as the child of an American diplomat in these xenophobic millennial years; “Oliver spent his early childhood in places where there was a certain amount of hostility towards us – not us personally, of course, but toward our culture, I suppose, as it was perceived.”
Writing all of this has made me decide that I really did love many of the moments woven into this book. It’s worth another read through, at some point. Perhaps I enjoy it most for its affirmation that literature about the post-9/11 American landscape doesn’t have to be so self-consciously post-post-modern all the time.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Ugh
Well, that was a horribly long pause in posting. I don't think I was cut out to be a blogger. Anyway, 108 outlines and another 108 rough drafts later, my students have finally turned in their big final papers, and I have all of Spring Break to sift my way through them. Which means I also have some time to actually read. And write a little, too. And look for jobs as I weasel my way out of the teaching field, because reading and writing for myself are the two things that I value most in this world, and they seem to be impossible to sustain on a regular basis when you're reading and writing things against your will for work every day.
So. Am about 50 pages away from finishing Twilight of the Superheroes. Posts to follow.
(p.s.: I gave up putting off Lolita. It deserves to not be put off. So I'm going to recycle it back down my TBR list and hopefully cough it up during the summer.)
So. Am about 50 pages away from finishing Twilight of the Superheroes. Posts to follow.
(p.s.: I gave up putting off Lolita. It deserves to not be put off. So I'm going to recycle it back down my TBR list and hopefully cough it up during the summer.)
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