Homeschool Ph.D.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

2007-08-06T12:56:00.000-04:00

I have only one thing to add, really, to the enormous pile of both professional and amateur Potter-related commentary online. Plot summary at Wikipedia, many interviews where Rowling finally "tells all," and of course enduring speculation. What did the Hufflepuff common room look like? What kind of toothpaste must Snape have used in order to manage a purple Patronus? Etc.
I've read and loved all the Harry Potter books -- they are literary confection and I truly enjoyed this final episode, even if the book won't count for my home study doctorate. ;)

Here's my thought, and it doesn't even contain any spoilers. About halfway through the book, it occurred to me that Harry's mental anguish, his internal conflict, his disappointment with his past and his longing for family, will all be resolved and his life will be fixed when he becomes a father. Seeing him in this light was strange and unfamiliar, and the fact that I had this thought told me that Rowling had done something special in following this boy from childhood into what obviously had become adulthood. If I was brought to the point where I realized that redemption was possible through having kids, then I was seeing him in a much different light than I saw him in book one, and Rowling's project, showing this coming of age in multiple thousands of pages, was a success.

That impressed me -- to bring your reader to his/her own realization of the "proper" outcome, just by showing the plot happening, is the ultimate accomplishment, for a writer of any kind of fiction. I thought she did a magnificent job and I really respect her for that.

I also appreciate that she added the "years later" epilogue. I think a lot of writers would have stuck up their noses at that type of thing, and acted all mysterious and "you'll have to imagine" or "no one can say" but she went ahead and drew out the whole thing clearly for her readers, and I don't think anyone felt that such a neatly tied bow at the end of the series was anything less than appropriate and kind. Well done.

Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

2007-08-03T20:26:00.000-04:00

Months ago, I abandoned this book halfway through. I was mystified at the incredible laudits it had received, the awards, the blurbs, the iconic status. I had read other Ursula Le Guin books, finding them completely awesome and wonderful, but this one, maybe her best known and most praised, I just couldn't penetrate.

I didn't like it. It was so political. So dry. With a few exceptions, where chapters would suddenly jump into the mythology of the alien planet, it was all so trudgingly expository.

On this planet, Gethen, humans are without gender. That is, they only have a gender during a few days out of the month, when they become sexually active. During these things, they could go either way -- one month male, another month female, it just depends on who's around. The main character is an envoy to this planet from an interplanetary alliance, and he is their first contact with the outside universe. Male. All the time male. So, during the first half of the book, or so, there's a lot of palaver over what they're going to do with him, and he drifts around making little progress as a diplomat, finding out more about the planet. Nothing terribly urgent happens.

This summer, I'm trying to finish some books that I'd given up on. You may recognize some of these sentiments from the last review. So, I picked up the book and read a few more pages of politlcal this and that. THEN the second half of the book happened, and it all became magically clear, why everyone raves about the book, and loves it, and considers it so revelatory, so sublime. The envoy suddenly experiences everything you want characters in novels to experience -- danger, love, and a challenge to his intellect -- bang, bang, bang, right on through to the end. Now all the imagery makes sense. Now all the exposition pays off. It's all struck into bright definition, like a chalk drawing that's been fadoodled over with light grey strokes for hours and then instantly becomes a dragon with three bold lines of a darker shade.

Did she have to go through all that, to get to this place? Maybe she did. Obviously it worked. And for those weak souls like me who have to flog themselves through the first half, where everything seems cold and dry, and nothing seems to be moving, take heart, keep flogging, and get some sleep too, because once you get on the truck headed north, you're going to have trouble putting the book down.

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch

2007-07-31T15:39:00.000-04:00

When I acquired The Sacred and Profane Love Machine I also acquired The Black Prince, and when I was disappointed by the former I was still determined to try the latter. After all, Iris Murdoch has been so effusively praised by people I respect. Maybe the first book was an anomaly.

I read a few chapters of The Black Prince and had trouble going on. Everyone was so unsavory. Everyone had a hole in their stockings and a bit of pink marbled flesh protruding. Or greasy hair. Or was pallid and sweating. I mean everyone. With one exception, the entire cast were middle aged English people, ruthlessly portrayed in all their greying sagging glory by a middle aged English novelist, the main character, Bradley Pearson. Everyone was foul and mean and preoccupied and irritable. But not in entertaining or interesting ways -- in ugly little sour ways. Halfway through the book I was just having to force myself to continue. After all, Kate Winslet played her in the movie based on her life. I owed her at least to finish the lousy book.

I will tell you that the book improved dramatically halfway through, and continued to get better and better as it bounced along toward the ending. And then I will tell you that the ending really did redeem the whole book, made it very retroactively interesting in terms of what a writer is, what fiction is, what "truth" is, what a reliable narrator is and isn't, and other complex questions.

The book is very smart, and it does at the end pull back its scalp and reveal there is a large and whizzing brain inside, which has been there all along, under that peeling, sparse scalp. The problem here is, friends, that you have to read a whole lot about the ugly and small agendas of a lot of people you'd rather not get to know, in order to understand the point that's being made about art. As to the apparently thrilling (to critics) question about whether or not the narrator is a homosexual in denial, I don't think that's really interesting or relevant. I'd rather hear more people discussing whatever the heck happened to him at the end, and who P.L. was. All that seemed much more mysterious than the gayness. But then, discussions of whether people are gay or not don't tend to fascinate me (take note, friends, this extends to Herman M.).

The Black Prince is a book I enjoyed having read, but not a book I enjoyed reading. It is an experimental book, all the more so because it appears to be a very traditional book. Things are not always as they seem -- take heart if you are toiling through this novel by choice or on order from an educator -- there will be a payoff, and it will all end eventually.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

2007-06-13T10:37:00.000-04:00

For the first 250 pages of this book, I was wondering, so what?

The author seemed content to play with the idea of time travelling, let us know how and when it works in this book, fill in the landscape of the place and the characters, and just let the novelty of the concept pull us along. The characters, they are so sensitive, so learned, so eloquent. The scenery, it is so hip, so rich, so Chicago. And who doesn't love time travel? Especially when you don't have all those annoying scifi considerations like logic. Sure, the character can meet himself in the past. No, he doesn't change the outcome of his own life, except in small, poignant ways. Everything is convenient, this is literature, not science fiction, it doesn't have to jive like it would in a Ray Bradbury story. Time travel is so interesting, when it doesn't have to make sense. Surely that would be reason enough to keep turning pages.

Apparently, it was. But I was waiting for the engine to engage, waiting for the coconut husks to go up in a blaze, waiting for myself to start to care. There were three things that bothered me in this beginning half of the book. First, I was unable to fully digest the fact that he was visiting his wife as a six-year-old. That is, she was six. He was thirty-eight. He held her on his lap. That was weird for me. Second, there was a glancing mention that whenever he met up with himself in the past and had a spare moment, he was... somehow masturbating? With himself? Or something? It was just a suggestion, and nothing was ever shown, but it was a haunting one. Third, the suffocating elitism of the characters, their artiness, their social status, it was all so precious. As if, of course, these characters are worth caring about -- look at their travails -- and they read Borges for pleasure! Naturally they, they, these beautiful souls, must feel things more exquisitely and tragically than the rest of us fools. Imagine if time travel had been wasted on a troglodyte like me. I might not have put it in the proper literary context, given my lack of ability with French.

Then, I think it was on page 259 of my paperback, the engine engaged. 1. Henry has never come back to the past from beyond the age of forty-three. (What happens at 43? Does he die or is he cured?) 2. Henry has to stay in one place long enough to get through a wedding ceremony without blinking out of his clothes. (He can't control the time travel and he arrives naked returns naked. He leaves little piles of clothes behind him. Stress seems to activate it.) 3. Henry and Clare want to have a child. (Will they be able to? Will it be a time traveler?)

Everything after that was much much more interesting. And at the end of the book, I was very moved. And very invested. And all that stuff. After it was over, I found myself missing Henry and Clare, with all their intellectual nonsense, and all their tragedy. I moved on to another book, but I would have happily read this one for 500 more pages.

Niffenegger invented a new reason to be sad in a relationship. And illustrated it beautifully. In some ways, I guess you could say that this time traveling, meeting up in different stages of life, coming and going, sometimes synchronizing and sometimes missing each other entirely, is a metaphor for all relationships and the ups and downs thereof, but I'd rather see it as something entirely other, with different rules, different reactions. Something I could never experience. I really respect Niffenegger's bravery in tackling this complete mess of material, and her competence in organizing it into an accesible narrative. Makes me feel shame for being baffled by my much-less-complicated novel. It will be interesting to see what she tackles next.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

2007-05-23T19:14:00.000-04:00

This book is a memoir about life in Iran. Its formal structure expands from the discussions of a secret book club that meets in the author's living room in Tehran to read and discuss banned books like Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Pride and Prejudice. Beyond the book club, the author reminisces about life before, during, and after the revolution, the ascendence of the Ayatollah, and how life became so wretched for women in this country that was once so progressive.

The first fifty pages of this book I really disliked. I find the descriptions of the book club meetings overly precious and romantic, all the "magical mornings" and the "they bloomed into color" and how she dwells on their separate personalities. It all reads as very contrived, to me, since she said in the beginning that none of the characters were actually characters, that they are amalgams and distillations of actual people, renamed, combined, separated. So why dwell on each invented person's invented personality, especially in a "memoir"? I kind of liked her reading of Lolita. She is painfully aware of how her critical perspective is informed and skewed by her identification of Humbert as the Ayatollah, though. Which is good. But I'm not automatically receptive to feminism, even coming from someone in a chabor.

Then, for serious and for real, it started getting good. I think the beginning of the part that made my ears perk up was the anecdote about Nassrin (I think it was her) missing class and then coming back to report she had been jailed for 48 hours because the morality police had accused her of having "A Western attitude." And then CANED her for it? Lord. Makes me want to smack crabby academic feminists in this country in the head and say, "Dumbass, you think you've got problems?!" I realize that's probably irrational, but that's the reaction I had.

The Gatsby section I liked much better. I am flabbergasted by the way the Muslim fundamentalists and the Marxist extremists collaborated on the Islamic revolution. I had no idea that was going on -- how Marxist women in combat fatiques with shaved heads and totally, like, hardass communist ideas (communism being ideally genderless, in terms of all proletariats being equal) putting on VEILS to help the revolution, just because they wanted the Western influence out of Iran. Like, how shortsighted was THAT? Has to be one of the most idiotic political choices ever. You can just imagine some avid Marxist... and that "Adopt the veil to rid us of the West" speech must have been the last one she ever got to make in public. And the last time she got to walk down the street without her husband or father to walk behind.

The book makes a clear distinction between the people who had always been devout Muslims and those who adopted more extreme religious beliefs in order to gain political or social power. I think it's obviously necessary to separate people serving God in an honest and arduous way from people consciously using religion to oppress each other. I also, though, believe that what's corrupt at the top can be honest at the bottom -- that is, that there are people who virtuously and sincerely believe and follow oppressive rules because they genuinely believe that God wants them to, when in reality it's the people up at the top of the religion, handing down these strictures to enforce their agendas. So who to blame? There's a very blurry line between those who are conscious that it's all about power and control, and those who are blind to the human element at work, and only see God's will.

I have to believe that it's impossible for me to understand anyone in that part of the world -- totally impossible, because my cultural context is so foreign. So for me to look at those public virginity tests and say "What the hell!?" means nothing. Of course I can't understand it, it's beyond my scope and outside my experience. What's good about this book is seeing that there are people within that system for whom it is repulsive and horrifying as well. And not just those who have been to America and seen the contrast.

I stalled out reading this when I was still on the James section. I'd inadvertantly started reading about 10 books... forgetting I was already in progress on others that I'd just left lying around the house or car. I wanted to finish this, to get to the Jane Austen section, but I accidentally just read Persuasion instead.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

2007-05-15T09:38:00.000-04:00

Apparently everyone else on earth read this book in high school, and saw the movie too. Alright, well, I went to a Lutheran high school, and explaining the catheters made out of condoms (and reused!) might have given my freshman English teacher a few more questions than he was happy with. Not that he would have been thrilled about my ending a sentence with with. Twice. Actually he was really cool, and let us do Lord of the Flies as a feature video set in the hallways of our school. But I digress.

I found this book at the thrift store and bought it to read, and at the exact same moment, Veronica found it at her father's house, and took it home to read. This kind of literary synchronicity cannot be ignored. There must be significance.

Ken Kesey said he was too old to be a hippie and too young to be a beatnik, but he and his gang, the "Merry Pranksters" raised plenty of hell in their day, despite their lack of a popular category. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was his first novel, written mostly in graduate school, which gives everyone a little bit of undeserved hope.

I think the novel is brilliant for two reasons.

First, there is the narrator. The book is told, not by the main character, or by a disinterested narrator, but by a crazy person. So all the descriptions of the ward, Nurse Ratched, the crazies, are filtered through this altered consciousness. Kesey stays just on the correct side of being cute about it. Cuteness would have killed it, but as it was, Bromden's narration perfectly cranked up the feeling of being in another, twisted, horrific world. No external voice could have accomplished this. His point of view, maintained throughout, also helped us see the change in his mental state, happening so slowly that we almost don't notice it, without being told about it. So, at the end, we believe he is fully okay to go out into the world, although we witnessed the extent of his initial lunacy, because we also witnessed his progression back to functionality.

The second reason I loved this book was for its hooks. Instead of an either/or hook (will the world be saved? will the lovers unite?) there was a complicated engine. Because Bromden is pretending to be deaf and dumb, the very first page of the book presents a compelling reason to read on -- will he eventually speak, what will make him speak, and what will he say? The other question, "Will McMurphy defeat Nurse Ratched?" is also complex, beyond a yes-or-no answer, because the battle is being fought on such strange territory.

I read McMurphy as explosive humanity, glorious deviance -- the ability to see through rules and definitions to the agendas behind them. Therefore dangerous to stability and predictability that these rules and definitions provide. I read Ratched as establishment, enforcer, the hand on the lever that runs the gears. She could not suffer McMurphy because he understood her and was not afraid of her. In the book, as in life, she possessed the ultimate weapon, because even though she is an ideological fraud, she has all the physical power.

Veronica read a lot more gender issues into the book, which made a lot of sense as soon as she explained it to me. There was a viscious smart professional and a friendly stupid whore, and really no other women portrayed in the book. McMurphy could be read as the ultimate heroic male -- beyond the manipulation of the stifling woman, but ultimately brought down by her.

A few words about the movie:

Great. Brilliant. It did not have the same message as the book, and it did not have the same intensity. Having read the book just before I saw the movie, I didn't feel like a lot of the movie made sense without the stuff in the book, but taken on its own terms and without that prejudice, it was fantastic. Because of Jack Nicholson. He is an amazing actor. I mean, that's kind of retarded to say, at this point, but having just seen him in The Departed and now this, it is so interesting to me how he can play two different characters, and use all of his signature expressions, moves, inflections, etc, and still have the characters be so essentially themselves. It's a mystery!

Book Available

2007-04-11T13:05:00.000-04:00

I registered my copy of Girl Imagined by Chance by Lance Olsen at bookcrossing.com and will send it by mail to whoever would like to read it, if you promise to log your catch at the bookcrossing.com web site (free) and pass it along to another reader when you're done. Comment with your email address and I'll contact you to get your address.

Child of my Heart by Alice McDermott

2007-04-11T10:45:00.000-04:00

Wow, this book was so uplifting and hilarious, I think I'll go and kill myself now! Hey! If you ever wondered whether children get the shortest, sharpest, boringest end of the stick in life, this book if your proof. If you belligerently insist that people are essentially good; adultery, abuse, neglect, and disinterest in their children notwithstanding; then you too can cling to the adolescent narrator for comfort. She introduces fantasy and love into the lives of all the sad little children she knows, and she knows only the saddest of little children. In the end, most of them survive. Survive to continue to endure the effects of their parents' ignorance and selfishness! Hooray!

This book makes me look around and feel profound gratefulness for my big pretty house, my loving husband, and my two healthy happy children that I adore. It makes me feel lucky that I had parents who loved me and a cool nanny who played silly pretend games with me.

Here's something funny: The book itself references the maudlin sentimentality in which some books about dead children indulge. The Publisher's Weekly review of this book accuses it of indulging in maudlin sentimentality. I can't find the exact quote in the book at this moment, with my daughter sitting on my lap helping, but I remember thinking, "Hmm," at the time.

My New Process

2007-04-04T18:56:00.000-04:00

Here we are, and it's not November. So I can write with a little more breathing in between words. In November my process is to write like the fiends of hell have me by the throat, whatever words come to mind, and never look back, but now here's what I seem to be doing:

1. Write a paragrah in sort of a slow way, taking an idea or image and turning it over a few times.
2. Go back and delete most of the adjectives and as many other words as possible. Leave a few words that have specificity.
3. Add something weird or push some existing element to an extreme.
4. Make sure the last sentence is very flat.

I'm seeing each paragraph as a completely separate thing... with lines of dialogue in between the paragraphs. And I'm not putting more than two lines of dialogue together at a time. It's almost like I'm back to the insane three sections / three pages / fat paragraphs on the page compulsion, but this time I have the time to actually make it work, and now it's without the threes.

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch

2007-03-21T20:24:00.000-04:00

Everyone always says, O Iris Murdoch. Brutal, brilliant, irascible Iris Murdoch. She is so blazingly legendary. I watched the movie, "Iris," as I do slavishly watch all movies Kate Winslet graces, and I realized, I am supposed to love her. But I had never read one of her books, though I always meant to. Recently I picked up two Iris Murdoch books -- this one and The Black Prince, from a friend's book trading shelf. I was, I am sorry to confess, underwhelmed. Now I will say that I read it with great interest and at times felt very can't-put-it-down. But it did not delight me.

This book was brilliant realism. It was about a love triangle and some children were involved. One of the characters, Montague Small, was original in my experience -- I have not met a character like him before. There was a lot of anguish, and a depth of experience that was engrossing. I can't say I enjoyed reading the book. Taking a step back from the oppressive entanglements and all the emotions, I realized that the same characters and landscape, in a P.G. Wodehouse novel, would be hilarious. It is, in a way, bizarrely the same universe. P.G. Wodehouse is brutal, but so deeply cheerful. Murdoch's treatment is so close, so smothering, so dark. I was expecting more of the satire, less of the despair.

I will move on to The Black Prince -- I've already started it. It's hitting me a little like Humbert McHumbertson, so I dunno if I'm going to get the haw haw haw I'm looking for. Having read such a staggering lot of P.G. Wodehouse, since I was a little kid, and seeing the British upper class skewered in this very la-la pass-the-port way and hasn't everyone got a ridiculous name, it was maybe good for me, or something, to see this grittier and less raucous version of it. I mean, it's probably considered obscene to even compare these two writers, and I'll be met outside by a few stern feminists and beheaded for failing to appreciate Iris Murdoch. I said I would give her another shot. I have the next book in my bag. 'Kay?

Novels

2007-03-18T15:06:00.000-04:00

It's very easy and right for me to say, in my current situation, that I can't write a novel. I have two children. One is three and the other is seven and homeschooling. I also have a husband and I like to have conversations with him. I have sewing projects I want to finish. I volunteer to do things for my son's various teachers. I am supposed to be improving my brain by reading. I am supposed to be learning Spanish. Recently I learned to knit socks. Maybe I should become very good at that. Writing a novel takes a lot of time. Any time I use for writing is time taken away from something else, possibly more virtuous or urgent. Sock knitting is a bad example. A better example is the South America curriculum I have been working on for two years. That should really get finished, no joke.

I have managed to write two novels since I got pregnant with my first child. They were both written, or should I say generated, in Novembers. Neither one has my jumping out of my chair with love and loyalty.

I'm writing a new novel now. During the regular year, not during the November panic. Periodically I want to think on it or work on it but I'm in the middle of doing something else. Periodically my husband gives me a few hours without children to write and think. This way of writing is better. It takes more time and is slower, but it is producing better results.

Girl Imagined by Chance by Lance Olsen

2007-02-26T19:11:00.000-05:00

First let me say that I read this book very quickly and kind of hungrily. It has a very specific voice and a kind of ethos that was very addictive, when I was reading it. I came away thinking, wow, what a masterful control he exhibited over that mess of material. I have to stand back and sincerely congratulate him for that. This book was deliberate, measured, never even remotely hysterical, unrigorous, or disconnected. I kept examining the method he used to get there, and found myself focusing on specifics. Sentences were manipulated in consistent and repetitious ways. For example, I remember specifically the quote, "Moving is as easy as changing your mind. Changing your mind is as easy as moving." That construct recurred. The narrator kept saying that some word or other was "perhaps too strong a word." There were a variety of different language constructions that made the book feel very specific, very contained. Like repetitions of objects or behaviors, like what the characters were eating or how they moved through their house. The "Snaggy Scree" bar recurred. (Which led me to look up "scree," and it means "bunch of little rocks around the foot of a mountain.") I found myself fascinated with these little manipulations, because while it *seems* like it would become tiresome/obvious/heavy, they were sprinkled in at a wavelength that just barely allowed you to forget about them before they popped up again. So they were comfortable, like being comfortably inside the book. Very well done. I can't think when I've seen second person present tense successfully managed without being kind of hyper and indulgent. This may have been the key to it. Control. Well, imagine that.

The book is about a couple who move from urban New Jersey to extremely rural Idaho, and take advantage of their safely remote location to invent a pregnancy and a child, satisfying the folks at home who are sufficiently distant and can neither verify nor disprove their claims. Apparently the pressure to reproduce (produce?) is really really intense. The wife is a photographer. The husband is a writer and web designer. The grandmother they are placating is supposed to die soon, but will she die before they have to make a visit?

The story is told in 12 sections, each starting out with a photograph, first of the wife, then of the fake baby. The book forces its "you" character to examine questions of authenticity by examining these old photographs of his wife as a baby, now faked by him to represent the fake child. (And in a secondary (tertiary?) way faked by the author to represent this fake autobiography -- WHEW!) What are they now? What were they then? He is examining in his own work the life of Virginia Dentatia, who died making the point that a human female body cannot survive the surgeries necessary to literally look like Barbie. So there's that. Real, fake, remembered, imagined, felt, dreamed, produced, reproduced. I thought it was acutely interesting to compare photography with having babies. I thought the whole book was extremely smart, very challenging, and also very grounded.

My only difficulty probably stems from the fact that I am a mother of two small children, and yes, I used to live more the "life of the mind" and yes, I do live now more the "life of the diaper." Am I defensive about giving up my whatever for my something else? Just as the book refuses to draw clear lines between autobiography and fiction (the author is also from New Jersey, living in Idaho, married to a photographer named Andi, and has no kids), I claim the right to refuse to draw a line between my strictly literary response to the book and my personal response. You could say I'm troubled because it's all. so. true. Or you could say I have a really admirable academic distance from the topic. Either way.

The narrator indulged in a lot of whacking away at some easy targets: kids at the mall, toddlers with runny noses, idealistic new parents, etc. The loathing. The eye-rolling. The revulsion. Yes, I do understand that when I am reading a first person narrator, I am not hearing the author's private thoughts, and I do not obviously blame Lance Olsen for this narrator's lapses into this kind of minor meanness. I like Lance Olsen a whole lot. But those pot shots did color the way I read the rest of the narrator's ideas about children and "reproduction" -- the fact that the examples he chose to use were so obvious and so thin. Show me a traditionally beautiful example of parenting and point out its weakness -- I love you. Show me a hackneyed example of of weak parenting (kids at the mall: so demanding! so impatient! so irritating!) and crow over it -- not so much. If he had taken a picture of a mother reading to an attentive child, and turned it inside out, shown how it was foul, shown how it was lies, that would be something.

I think any parent reading this book would look at this narrator and say, "You just don't get it." As it was, you just come away thinking that it's like trying to explain sex to a virgin -- unless you experience it, you just don't know. I thought for a while that he was going to fall kind of in love with his fake child, and have some kind of epiphanic moment, but thank god he didn't -- that would have been tragic on the other side of the spectrum. I think that the character did have some extremely redemptive moments, and by no means did I reject him based on his feelings about kids with runny noses (who really likes them anyway). There was a character in the book who had a child, Nadie, that I think the main character didn't actively despise. Certainly the wife character managed to pet the kid's hair. Seeing the way the couple responded to this one "good" example of parenting really illuminated how deep the damage was, as manifested in some of the "broken" photographs, that led them to the state they were in. Which was Idaho. And the ability to make up a baby and then kill it. I ended up thinking that in some ways his wife was his child, and he was hers.

This book was a really engaging read, from start to finish. Ask the poor souls who reached me on the phone while reading it -- I was yakking about it to anyone who would listen. The premise is wonderful, the intellect is inspiring, and the prose is so so so right. Buy, read, and rant.

Disability by Cris Mazza

2007-01-19T15:41:00.000-05:00

What’s amazing about this book is that Mazza can unfold such a tiny piece of the world into such an interesting shape.

Her characters aren’t talking politics in Madrid, they’re not having epiphanies in the desert, and they’re not redefining cyberspace. They’re small women in a small part of the world, doing an insignificant job, governed by an insignificant boss, serving people who can’t respond. Instead of choosing, for her subject, people who usually find themselves being written about (those who are categorically superlative in some way – hidden or otherwise) she chooses two minimum wage nurse’s aides in a hospital for the severely disabled. Mazza doesn’t glorify these lives –she doesn’t give them secret insights or hidden depths. They remain, outside the book, invisible. They do not articulate their own ideas about their lives or their problems. They do not triumph and they are not destroyed. What's superlative about these women emerges in a small flower for a short time, and then fades. But it emerges in excrutiating clarity.

Part of the fascination of reading _Disability_ is in seeing “behind the scenes” in an unfamiliar setting – in this case the hospital, where the children have names like “Boardboy” and “Scooterboy” and the characters detail their experiences with the work. The administration is predictably idiotic, prescribing hearing therapy for deaf patients, and most of the aides are lazy and neglectful. This book, however, is not about how severely disabled people are treated in state hospitals. The book is about taking two women, really any women, *any women at all*, and finding a story in them, finding “enough” for a novel – proving them “worthy” of having a book written about them. It’s about taking up a hypothetical challenge – I dare you to write a book about *these two souls* and doing it in a way that had me turning pages intensely and reading at stop lights.

It may surprise you that the book is so compelling, given its small and honest scope, its lack of irony or plot twists. This is a story about women, told by a woman as only a woman could truly tell it. I think it’s exactly what we heard about in “A Room of One’s Own” – who cares about what the Prime Minister is doing – we want to hear about the girl behind the counter at the hat store. I think Virgnia Woolf would be very proud.

crismazza books reviews book+reviews novels

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

2007-01-15T19:03:00.000-05:00

I didn't know about this book but found it on a friend's bookshelf and was surprised I'd never heard of it. It is a dystopian sci-fi novel, set in the future, but written by a Russian in 1920, before Lenin died, before Stalin rose to power. It was instantly banned by the Soviets, as it is an agonizing criticism of the idea of collective identity. In the book, the people have numbers, and nature has been shut outside the city, and all walls and floors are glass, and everyone lives by a "Table of Hours" which prescribes the activities for the day.

There are plenty of plot-summarizing reviews of the book around. Also, check out the author's portrait, by Boris Kustoviev via Wikipedia. It looks like someone photoshopped his head onto an old drawing. Odd.

The book has as its obvious shelfmates Anthem by Ayn Rand and 1984 by George Orwell, but it is more lyrical, more hysterical, more stream-of-consciousness. I suppose Orwell's prose is stronger and Rand is certainly more direct, but I actually loved its dreamy and confusing style, and didn't mind not knowing what the hell was going on a lot of the time. It seemed more true that a journal entry from this future world, with its strange premises and priorities, would read as confusing and boggling to me. Sometimes I didn't know which end was up, and it almost felt like the narrator was writing blind. I think that was intentional and masterful. One of the best and most convincing aspects of the book was that the narrator didn't always seem in control.

This book begins with the narrator not only a willing part of this world without individuals, but an enthusiastic supporter of these ideas. He isn't grimy and hopeless about it all (ahem, Winston Smith?); he's a cheerleader for the system. Of course, it all goes terribly awry.

It occurred to me as I was comparing those three books that the oppressive, dystopian system never seems to break down for these people because of acquisition of material wealth. It doesn't break down because they don't like being told what pants to wear either. These characters, denied property, denied privacy, denied choice, do not rebel to get their own TV or to get their own bank account or their own window shades. They rebel to get their own girl. It's always love that breaks the system down, that sends the main character tangentially off, destroying himself to be alone with the woman he loves. Interesting. I wonder if that is really true. Maybe it just makes good books, to say that people will give up fortunes but not give up a mate. We'd have a harder time cheering for the grey little cog in the machine, who breaks out of his place so he can triumphantly and emotionally buy a Corvette. Love makes a good novel. But is that really how it would work? The characters in We are allowed to bed whoever they want -- they just have to register and receive a "pink coupon" to make it happen. Would people really bring the world down around their ears just to reinstate monogamy?

books yevgeny+zamyatin dystopian+fiction russia

The Wavering Knife by Brian Evenson

2006-12-31T08:11:00.000-05:00

One of the best things an author can do for you is to leave you with an image that you'll never forget. Short stories do this for me more than novels, I think. From novels, I mostly take away characters, or a general feeling of the novel's place or a memory of its stylistic affect. From poems, when I read them (which I try not to) I am sometimes left with a memorable line or even a word. Short stories, though, deliver a single frame -- like the ranting in the doctor's office waiting room from Flannery O'Connor. The bent translucent form over the candle from Melville. The throbbing floorboards from Poe. Recently I remember remembering the one-armed man in the tree, pruning it with a chainsaw, from Karen Brennan. (Of course there are those memorable moments I'd rather scrape from my brain, like every scene in any movie that helpfully features a person being burned alive. Thanks Hollywood!)

From Brian Evenson's collection, The Wavering Knife, I am left with a residue of images I have never seen before, and that's saying something small, but significant.

Half of these stories are brutal, relentless, and cold. The other half (and I don't mean exactly 50 percent, but *some*) present a lighter, more ridiculous fare. The latter and lighter group are about silly men and the dumb things they do and say -- from the Promisekeeper group that meets in a bar to the guy who tries to set up a church in Walmart, to the pair of redneck gravediggers who have so much trouble getting their corpse into a shallow hole in hard packed dirt that they chop him up, pee on him, eviscerate him, stomp on him, and eventually throw what's left of him into a ravine and pretend to cover up the grave. What happens next? The family and minister come over the hill, with the coffin he was supposed to go in, asking to "dig up" the body. These stories, though smart and wry, are not my cup of irony. The other half of the book, however, is priceless. Evenson's great accomplishment, his genius, lies in these other stories: "The Ex-Father," "The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette," "The Wavering Knife," "Virtual," "One Over Twelve," "The Progenitor," and my favorite, though it isn't the showiest story in the book, "House Rules." "House Rules" affected me the most, though it is quiet and drab, and the image of the velvet rope across the stairway will stick with me for sure.

Maybe these stories are evolved Kafka, or maybe they're perfect scifi. This is a fiery imagination kept rigidly contained in exacting boxes, let out in discreet units, each one perfect and with a strange serenity. These stories take you in utterly, and then truly reward you, like magic tricks that really work. I can't really give you any plot nuggets or summaries for these, because they don't work except in their own context, provided by the stern, rigorous language and the limitations of the prose. They're so strange and explosive in the ideas that drive them that they need Evenson's specific containers to make them conceivable. Story after story I would finish and then say, "That was so WEIRD. And FABULOUS." Then I'd hungrily go on to the next.

It's not surrealism -- everything is true within its own law. It's maybe alterealism. Whatever it is, it was enormously engaging and challenging to read and halfway through I was already thinking in my head of people I know who would love a book like this. Definitely read it. A small black rendering on a blank tablet, of something truly different, is more intriguing than a dense and colorful mural, six blocks long, of something we already know.

I met Evenson a long time ago at a conference in Denver, and I can't remember much about that conference, including meeting Evenson, except that I know I did and that he had kind of a wild aspect. He looked more like the book jacket photo on The Wavering Knife than he did this photo here, but I'll include this more respectable one since he's now the Director of the Literary Arts program at Brown University.

brian+evenson literature books reviews fiction

The Rest of Nanowrimo

2006-11-28T17:22:00.000-05:00

I finished. 50,000. Actually the thing ended up to be 58,000 or thereabouts. Now I tuck it tightly under my butt and pretend it doesn't exist for a couple of months. Then I wade in for edits. Or not. Depending on what it looks like when it comes out of storage. If it looks like an old dead goat, I may just politely walk away.

So Revoltingly Difficult

2006-11-16T09:09:00.000-05:00

Nanowrimo Day 16.

Last night I pushed through a bit of a wall. Really a plasterboard temporary room divider. I had come to the end of what I'd figured out already, and before I pushed off into the new stuff I had to apparently angst for a few days. The answer to getting through the problem was to violate my rule that everything has to be embedded in the scene, so I wrote some background stuff last night. Some of it had sceniness, and other bits of it had explaininess only.

Nanowrimo Day 12

2006-11-12T14:52:00.000-05:00

Here I am writing at our black round dining room table. My laptop is on the table and next to it is a bucket of tea. The baby is asleep and I'm watching the monitor with 1/10th of an eye. I'm listening to October Project in headphones. One foot is on the chair to my left, where the dog is sleeping. One foot is on the chair to my right, where the cat is sleeping. I'm resting on my tailbone. Husband is at the hardware store. Son is at Ahno's. It's raining outside. Need to get to 20K in the next hour.

Nanowrimo: Day 10

2006-11-10T08:39:00.000-05:00

Well, the noveling is going along. I need to be at about 17,000 by the end of today in order to be caught up. I think I'm at about 14,000.

Did you know that Virginia voted out a republican incumbent? That was distracting. Here is an excerpt from the chapter I was writing on Election Day:

Virginia has a long and important history. Years ago, when the earth was still very young, and fiddler crabs cornered the market on high culture, Virginia was under water. It was covered in full by the Virginian Sea. After some time and the emergence of the Eurasian continent, a contraction of the shrinking earth pushed the Appalachian mountains out of the water, and Virginia rode up on their eastern slopes. This was the first time that the mountains emerged, and after they were worn down by rain and wind and the frowns of the gods, they emerged again two more times, grinding themselves up out of their balding, flattening graves to make higher, sharper peaks. This set of mountains we’re working on now seems old but is actually young. Still capable of giving a cut. Still with their heads in the clouds. No one likes the new mountains. They are actively grinding them, shaking them down, waiting for the earth to flinch up a new set. They’ll see how they like those, when they get a chance to climb them.

Who did they name the rivers for, before they had English monarchs to memorialize? At what river did the ancients go to pray? Did any human man or woman see the original Virginia? Or did it climb up gasping and go down gulping, without any witness on its convulsing shore? Was it waiting, when the people came from the north, pushing out to the ocean, and then stopping? Was it waiting when the people came over the ocean and stopped on the shore? People who live in the water love to go exploring on the land. They love to push as far into the trees as the can, before they have to rush back. It is the same with people who live on the land but swim. All along the whole coast, swimmers dangle their feet into the water, and push out, in a little ripple. The border of the country shimmers with its people trying to extend it, one careful blind step at a time. The border of the ocean changes with every crashing wave. You can’t draw a black line on a map. People spill out. Water spreads over. Trees break up sidewalks and monuments. Tribes intermarry and become one tribe. You can’t say that what is lost is lost altogether. People are conserved like energy. That is to say, imperfectly. A group of people is lost in Roanoke. Another springs up on Hatteras Island.

In Virginia, the first colony was planted. In Virginia, the first lunatic asylum was built. Directly before declaring its independence from its mother England, the colonial collective decided to build a place to house its batshit crazies, instead of making them live out their days as the tiresome aunt, or the smelly brother, or the grandmother that keeps getting out and getting noticed. The first lunatic asylum in the New World was called the Public Hospital and it was built in 1773. The first truly important murderer of the new world was John Bullard, who killed seven people before he was discovered planting one of his victims in a secluded cemetery, right in the same coffin as another dead person. Both hands of the new dead guy were around the neck of the other, older dead guy. At this time in our country’s history, the cemeteries were not very large. It was kind of noticeable. They found the other six people in other grave sites. What with all the colonizing and starving and fighting off natives, people had not been paying attention.

I'm hoping that by this weekend I'll be out of the territory that I've already been through with a different main character, so I'll stop second-guessing myself about what's too much like the other attempt, or what. All of the words I'm counting are new, but I keep thinking of a paragraph I wrote in my first attempt at this book, and making a mental note to insert it later. It gets complicated. Anyway, by this weekend, I'll have passed that part.

Nanowrimo Day 4: Research Trip to Historic Virginia

2006-11-05T00:19:00.000-05:00

Dan very kindly took me on a trip around Yorktown, Williamsburg, and Smithfield VA today, to take pictures of possible settings for my novel in progress. Here are some of the photos that I took:

And I wrote 2800 words tonight! Obviously, something inspired me about these weirdo locations.

Nanowrimo Day 3

2006-11-03T18:04:00.000-05:00

Time: 6:00pm
Children: In care of husband.
Pan-fried Won tons: Check.
Diet Coke: Check.
Peanut sauce: Check.
Garlic sauce: Check.
Rasputina on ITunes: Check.

Going for 1000 words before 7:00.

Maps of Virginia

2006-11-03T11:09:00.000-05:00

Old map from London magazine, 1755.

Rare Maps of Colonial America.

Modern Map.

Map Links.

Nanowrimo Day 2

2006-11-02T23:10:00.000-05:00

I had no child-free time today and therefore had to take an arts-and-crafts approach to my novel in progress. Please know I am aware that this is comletely wack. I'm usually exactly this wack, but in a completely covert way. I'm worried my husband will leak this, and that my friends will organize an intervention, so I'm taking preemptive action. THIS IS WHAT I DID AND I AM NOT SORRY.

Nanowrimo: This is harder than last year. Maybe.

2006-11-01T17:15:00.000-05:00

Now I'm trying to write a more difficult book about which I actually care. That may have been a huge mistake. I don't have a lot of speed this time around. Last year I could do 1000 words in 30 minutes if I buckled down. Now, looks like maybe 500. I'm probably just rusty. But I find myself going back to revise, which is such a bad terrible problem.

I wrote the prologue and I'm into chapter 1.

Nanowrimo: Two More Days to Not Plan

2006-10-29T19:06:00.001-05:00

Several things:

1. My username on the Nanowrimo site is TinyBites. Please add me as a friend and send me saucy messages, so that I can spy on your word count and envy your purple status bar.

2. On Thursday I woke up and my disobedient vertebrae, the one that was injured when I fell off that awesome horse as a teenager, was in a rage with me. Could have been an overexuberant workout at the gym on Wednesday, or, it could have been Nano approaching. Either way, and you can write me off as a kook or not at this point, but I think that whatever nerves are coming out of that disastrous vertebrae are the same ones that are supposed to be regulating the contractions of my colon (ISN'T THIS AWESOME, TO KNOW THIS? ABOUT ME?) and so I have been having constant, raging, eye-popping trips to the bathroom for the last four days. Is it nerves, over Nano? Am I taking everything a bit too seriously? Or is it my spine, which I angered on the elliptical machine, rapid-firing the big flashing "Eject!" button? Eh?

3. I have looked around at the different official methods for outlining a novel, just to see what I'm missing, and I have to say that anything that requires you to sit down and write out character profiles including their favorite way to cook beef and what shoes they most liked in seventh grade and whatnot are just idiotic, unless you're in seventh grade yourself and really enjoy mooning over your characters like that. Look, it's about the language, people. The language and the images. Let it roll. I won't be doing the snowflake or the phase or the nutcake or whatever else there is. I'm going to just run with what I have. Which is a lot of paint chips from home depot. That's going to be my method of diagramming my novel. Go ahead, you can use it. I don't mind.

nanowrimo nano writing fiction novels