Currently actually physically on my nightstand:
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Honestly, this has been on my reading list since I worked at the UConn Co-op and would make lists of what my friends taught in their composition classes. Reading Pynchon is not solely RDC-induced. I might never join him under Gravity's Rainbow, but this I can manage. Of course Pynchon himself supposedly hates this, as it's too obvious. I have fifty pages left and I still don't know what W.A.S.T.E. stands for, shoot me. Defensive because intimidated? Not I.
My first reaction to this was "Why is Oedipa having an affair?"
because Metzger is cute? RDC reminded
me not to respond to it emotionally. And that I shouldn't expect closure.
I knew reacting that way to Oedipa was provincial of me, and I had known
not to expect closure. So I ended up liking it, the clues and the layers.
RDC also warned me not to expect closure,
but I didn't find it so very open-ended.
28 June-1 July 1997
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Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Unless screenwriters suddenly became a lot brighter round about the time they collaborated on the cinematization of The English Patient, I figure this is another movie I just won't see. I didn't see Kip in any of the trailers, nor Caravaggio, and nowhere in the book does Katharine Clifton say anything as woeful and laughable as "Come back to me" or whatever, for all the world like Jane Seymour (?) in that stupid made-for-tv Christopher Reeve movie I was forced to see one summer. If I saw it (which, frankly, we all know I will), I would do nothing but complain of it, and as I am doing plenty of that already, I shouldn't encourage myself.
That said, the book was lovely. I have developed a new appreciation for
the wrist as an erogenous zone. It felt as if Ondaatje swoops you (the reader)
through the layers of happening and of feeling, dropping clues of possibility.
Closure is not an option for him (good preparation for Pynchon: I'm reading
The Crying of Lot 49 now). He subscribes to the iceberg theory, narrating
only a fraction of what's going on, but unlike Hemingway, who never hints
what that other 90% is (you're supposed simply to understand, if you're
the right kind of person), Ondaatje does.
23-27 June 1997
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Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses
Entirely different from The Kitchen God's Wife. Both good, but
I don't remember any magical realism in The Kitchen God's Wife. What
happened to Kwan? Is there a limit on how many different ways you can interpret
what happens to Kwan's town? All those unanswered questions Olivia is left
with: very realistic, because life is like that.
20-25 June 1997
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Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of the Hills
I saw "Remains of the Day," then I read Remains of the Day, and this fall I slogged through a great part of The Unconsoled. About to emerge victorious (kind of) from my struggle with Lemprière's Dictionary, I looked for The Unconsoled again. That was out so I took this. In the two and a part of a third of his novels I have read, a single tone runs like a cord throughout, binding the reader to Ishiguro. This is slightly different: it is inescapable but it holds you at a distance.
And I think it is Ishiguro's intent and not my having been unobservant
that leaves me uncertain about A Pale View of the Hills. I'm looking
for reviews and information, though. This is his first (published) novel.
14-16 June 1997
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Lawrence Norfolk, Lemprière's Dictionary
I began this novel in 1995, I think soon after I bought it. It was my
always-with-me book, which meant I read it in snatches at work, on the bus,
while queuing; and I think that was major cause of its abandonment. It takes
close attention in dedicated reading. In talking about it with RDC I think Norfolk might write like Pynchon,
but I've never read even The Crying of Lot 49 and he's not read Norfolk.
Norfolk might be Pynchonesque in his requiring his readers' knowledge to
fill in the gaps he does not fill in. There is not the tiniest bit of spoon-feeding
here. I call my struggle kind of victorious because I did finish it and
I understood most of it, but either I didn't read closely enough or Norfolk
deliberately left holes. (With A Pale View of the Hills, I am much
more certain the uncertainties are Ishiguro's intent). I don't know if Norfolk
would sneer at the parallel (I doubt it, though snootier readers might do),
but I think of Douglas Adams at UConn
at a reading of Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and how frustrated
he was at someone's question about what the reader thought was a loose end.
I'd got it and was gladder to have when Adams Britishly emoted frustration
at how obvious the necessary connections had been. Of course I read most
things many more times than once anyway, and Lemprière's Dictionary
will probably not be an exception. I hope I'll make my own connections next
time round. This is his first published novel.
May-13 June 1997
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Feh. I saw a reference to this on the web somewhere and borrowed it from
the library because I've been looking for books about deliberately not having
children. If you've been wanting the same thing, don't bother. It's psychological
and confessional and not helpful. I wanted a book about women who've chosen
not to have children; Without Child examines the older parallel
of not marrying (when childbirth was the usual result of matrimony), sets
up the virgin Greek goddesses as role models, and deals overmuch with the
particular and qualitative experience of the author. "Yeah whatever"
was my response. I'm still looking for books or articles that address my
choice. I don't suppose I'll find any such in Parenting magazine.
May 1997
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Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth
I didn't get very far into it. It failed to compel me, but I think it
could at another time. I think I came to it through Alice Walker, who wrote
its introduction.
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Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
I have just finished Cry the Beloved Country. I do not weep, because I am at work and too controlled for that. I ought to weep and not mind where I am. It is beautiful. It is a saving grace. It is redemptive.
Yesterday evening on the bus I listened to it, and when I came to my own door, the judge was about the lay down the sentence on the first accused, having already acquitted the other two (which is almost more than I can believe, but perhaps I equate it too much with the U.S. South). I could not wait for morning to find out. I could not wait for the other bus commutes to discover what would happen. I read.
I read of the verdict and the aftermath, of the small laughing boy with the brightness inside him, of the agricultural demonstrator who was an angel of god, of the rain coming to the valley of Ndotsheni. And this morning on the bus I continued to listen to the tape but I also read, registering in the background words that had gone well before the point I was now up to in print. I read and perhaps I read with such concentration that I forgot to get a headache by reading on the bus or perhaps what I read was so beautiful just reading it healed the headache.
As the bus entered the dark station I read and even remembered to lift away my sunglasses so I could read. I read disbarking from the bus, and through the station, and along the sidewalk, and up the stairs and the elevator, and along the passage; I read as I have not often read for many years: by allowing my feet, not my eyes, to find their way, as a man with a trusted horse lets it find the way home after darkness has fallen. And I finished the book; perhaps even now I would not have read so if I had not been so close to the end.
The last paragraph:
Yes, it is the dawn that has come. The titihoya wakes from sleep, and goes about
its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains of Ingeli
and East Griqualand. The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness,
but the light will come there. Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light
will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a
thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation,
from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.
Alan Paton. Cry, the Beloved Country (City: Press, 1947)
16 May 1997
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E.L. Konigsburg, The View from Saturday
This was super and I would have given it the Newbery. Konigsburg usually
writes in the same voice: sardonic, with innovatively mixed metaphors (done
deliberately and well and humorously), and with vocabularies advanced beyond
the average for the age of the character (unless the character is an adult,
in which case the level is standard or even dull). Sometimes she restrains herself,
as with Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler in Konigsburg's earlier Newbery winner, From
the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Sometimes it's quite fitting,
as in Father's Arcane Daughter. Sometimes the technique becomes too clumsy
and muddles the characters, as in All Together, One at a Time. In this
novel, Konigsburg balances everything perfectly among the four main characters.
What is the best about Konigsburg is how appealing she makes her intelligent
characters.
13 May 1997
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Susan Cushman, The Midwife's Apprentice
This was okay but I wouldn't've given it the Newbery. The author needed to
communicate some crucial information to the protagonist so she made another
character act completely out of character to impart said information.
And that was only the most glaring inconsistency that I, Ms. Unanalytical Reader
of 1968-1997, noticed.
May 1997
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Robert Schultz, The Madhouse Nudes
The first book in a long time I picked up browsing instead of through someone's
recommendation. Since the epistolary novel has gone out of style, I am glad
that this author made the attempt, but the letters were from only one person
to only one other person, and the writer's style was too consistent throughout,
not varying with his life circumstance. Also, it felt like an "As told
to," like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Frankenstein, and Wuthering
Heights. Not surprisingly, the title did the catching of my eye.
May 1997
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Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Marcovaldo, Cosmicomics,
Mr. Palomar, Under the Jaguar Sun
Considering how short these books are, each one takes a considerable time for
me to wade through, particularly If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. My
first exposure to Calvino was UConn professor Tom Roberts reading a micro short
story from Invisible Cities. I savored each of those stories, short enough
to be tidbits but way too substantial for that word. Then Difficult Loves.
The stories of Cosmicomics have been my favorite of this most recent
Calvino binge; while If on a Winter's Night has been most impressive
stylistically. Impressive, ha. She says superiorly. Challenging, mind-bending,
more like. Throughout April 1997
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I love Tintin. I love Snowy more. RJH
recently bought me a shirt from a Tintin shop in London (where, sensibly, they
seem to occur more frequently than Disney stores) and I have just discovered
that Stuart knows about Tintin too; both of which happy events put me in mind
to reread him. The Seven Crystals Balls and Prisoners of the Sun,
The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure, and The
Black Island are my favorites. Any time Snowy has a speaking part is the
best. I have to explore some Tintin sites and find out what Snowy's name is
in Flemish and French (aha! Milou, but it doesn't mean anything) and Italian
and German...
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