Scan barcode
millennial_dandy's reviews
342 reviews
The S.E.A. Write Anthology of Thai Short Stories and Poems by Matthew Grose
4.0
3.5, rounded up to 4
As with any decent anthology, there will be standouts, there will be works that drag, and there will be those that all in all are 'a'ite.'
That being said, if it would move anyone to know it, I picked this up at the Vancouver library while on vacation, and was enjoying it so much I bought a copy so I could finish it once I got home.
Being that I'm not especially a fan of poetry and have no background in how to evaluate it, I'm going to skip over the entirety of the poetry section in my feedback. I can only say that none of them gripped me, but I don't know if that's because they weren't well-translated or because I'm a poetry ignoramus. 'nuff said.
None of the stories in this 'S.E.A.' anthology really dragged the collection down as a whole for me, though some felt very middle of the road, and I liked the wide range of genres and themes covered in the 10 short stories. Some fables, some ghost(ish) stories, some slice of life, some aching investigations into grief, some that were a mix of all four. What none of these stories were (bar maybe one) was particularly uplifting, so if that's what you're on the hunt for, you're not going to find it here.
Many of the stories have a bitter cynicism at their core, which, given that this anthology was produced just a hop, skip, and a jump in time away from the political upheaval that shredded so many lives is quite understandable.
According to the introduction, the poetry tackled this political upheaval head-on, but the short stories did not. However, it's impossible that that context didn't impact the outlook of these authors.
So let's talk about a few of the standouts:
1. Nightfall on the Waterway
Starting the collection off strong is this sort-of-fable from Ussiri Thammachot. A poor fisherman on his way home finds first a doll and then the bloated corpse of its child owner floating in the river. Is it morally permissible for him to take the doll and the silver bracelet the dead child is wearing and bring them home to his own daughter? You decide.
2. The Barter
This was quite possibly my favorite story in terms of plot and execution. A rich guy bankrolls a fancy restaurant and his architect goes to a village that has a temple/pavilion that he can see was put together with impeccable craftsmanship and would look ever so lovely tacked onto the back of the restaurant. The rich guy pays for a shiny new temple/pavilion to be built in the village and they dismantle and cart off the old one despite the protests of the son of its builder.
Upon getting the temple/pavilion back to the restaurant and putting it back together, mayhem ensues. It looks great, but it might be haunted. In any event, the horrible creaking and groaning is scaring off the customers, so clearly, it's more trouble than it's worth. But what was actually wrong with it? Is it a ghost, or something else...?
Thematically, 'The Barter' was super consistent and razer-sharp with a bit of humor thrown in with its cynicism. It was a really well-done criticism of people who appropriate things that they think look cool (aesthetics, objects, etc.) without actually understanding them. Indeed, this story is a good allegory for cultural appropriation more broadly, and why, even if it isn't in and of itself harmful, it is at least something that can leave those participating in it a bit sheepish when their ignorance is laid bare.
3. Mother!
It's hard sometimes to say with translated fiction that doesn't work whether it's the fault of the author or the translator, but in 'Mother!' no such question need be raised because clearly both the writer and the translator are very talented.
In terms of the actual writing style, this was far and away the best, in my humble opinion. The voice was great, the imagery was stunning and imaginative, and the story it was wrapped around: a young child struggling to come to terms with the death of their mother, was poignant.
The other story by the author, Anchan, 'The Beggars' was also pretty good, and they clearly have great observational skills and fabulous writing chops, but where 'The Beggars' ultimately felt thematically pedestrian, 'Mother!' was all of the best things about 'The Beggars' without feeling derivative and preachy. Loved it.
4. Mid-Road Family
The most straightforwardly slice of life story in the collection, Mid-Road Family is a bleak, depressing window into life in Bangkok in the 80s (or really, any big city whether in the 80s or the 'roaring' 2020s). A husband and wife spend so much time stuck in traffic jams each day that their car slowly becomes their second home, stocked with changes of clothes, lots of snacks, a spittoon doubling as a porta-potty, and shades to lower for privacy in the backseat.
Our narrator, the husband, speaks candidly about how the rat-race of trying to climb the social ladder, the air pollution in Bangkok, and the hours spent commuting have slowly worn him and his wife down to mere husks of their former selves. Yet, he slaps on a veneer of optimism. Sure, the commute sucks, but an air-conditioned car is surely better than being smashed like human chattel on a bus, right? And hey, with just a little more money they could get an even bigger car to sprawl out in on the way to work.
This is a tale of human adaptability, but in a wholly dystopian way.
People have gotten so used to the congestion, that it's become just another quirk of life. They get out and chat with their fellow commuters, network, stretch their legs. One fellow spends the time planting banana trees in the grass in the island dividing the lanes, commenting on how much more pleasant the traffic jams would be if you got stuck sitting under the shade of his little banana plantation.
There is something to be said of making lemonade out of life's lemons, sure, but author Sila Khomchai keeps it real: traffic jams are not those kinds of lemons.
This is a complete aside, but having now read a few Thai-authored works of fiction that take place in Bangkok, I'm starting to get the impression that while there's a sort of affection that residents have for it, as is not so uncommon for people to feel towards their hometowns, they sort of recognize that it's super poorly designed and just kind of generally unpleasant to exist within.
Kind of reminds me of how New Yorkers talk about New York City. They'll be the first to complain about how terrible it is, but a plague on the house of anyone who isn't a New York native who dares to voice any criticism.
I've never been to Bangkok, and I don't actually think that the bones of NYC are bad, but, and I can't stress this enough, everything negative I've ever read in fiction about Bangkok could equally be said of Los Angeles (and should) all the way down to the fact that people there seem happy to just...accept that traffic jams and poor urban planning are fine, actually. Buses? piffle Trains? What's a train? Walkable, mixed zoning???
Sorry, clearly, 'Mid-Road Family' got me thinking. Maybe it'd get you thinking too.
All in all, a well-balanced, nice little introduction to a host of talented, late 20th century Thai writers.
As with any decent anthology, there will be standouts, there will be works that drag, and there will be those that all in all are 'a'ite.'
That being said, if it would move anyone to know it, I picked this up at the Vancouver library while on vacation, and was enjoying it so much I bought a copy so I could finish it once I got home.
Being that I'm not especially a fan of poetry and have no background in how to evaluate it, I'm going to skip over the entirety of the poetry section in my feedback. I can only say that none of them gripped me, but I don't know if that's because they weren't well-translated or because I'm a poetry ignoramus. 'nuff said.
None of the stories in this 'S.E.A.' anthology really dragged the collection down as a whole for me, though some felt very middle of the road, and I liked the wide range of genres and themes covered in the 10 short stories. Some fables, some ghost(ish) stories, some slice of life, some aching investigations into grief, some that were a mix of all four. What none of these stories were (bar maybe one) was particularly uplifting, so if that's what you're on the hunt for, you're not going to find it here.
Many of the stories have a bitter cynicism at their core, which, given that this anthology was produced just a hop, skip, and a jump in time away from the political upheaval that shredded so many lives is quite understandable.
According to the introduction, the poetry tackled this political upheaval head-on, but the short stories did not. However, it's impossible that that context didn't impact the outlook of these authors.
So let's talk about a few of the standouts:
1. Nightfall on the Waterway
Starting the collection off strong is this sort-of-fable from Ussiri Thammachot. A poor fisherman on his way home finds first a doll and then the bloated corpse of its child owner floating in the river. Is it morally permissible for him to take the doll and the silver bracelet the dead child is wearing and bring them home to his own daughter? You decide.
2. The Barter
This was quite possibly my favorite story in terms of plot and execution. A rich guy bankrolls a fancy restaurant and his architect goes to a village that has a temple/pavilion that he can see was put together with impeccable craftsmanship and would look ever so lovely tacked onto the back of the restaurant. The rich guy pays for a shiny new temple/pavilion to be built in the village and they dismantle and cart off the old one despite the protests of the son of its builder.
Upon getting the temple/pavilion back to the restaurant and putting it back together, mayhem ensues. It looks great, but it might be haunted. In any event, the horrible creaking and groaning is scaring off the customers, so clearly, it's more trouble than it's worth. But what was actually wrong with it? Is it a ghost, or something else...?
Thematically, 'The Barter' was super consistent and razer-sharp with a bit of humor thrown in with its cynicism. It was a really well-done criticism of people who appropriate things that they think look cool (aesthetics, objects, etc.) without actually understanding them. Indeed, this story is a good allegory for cultural appropriation more broadly, and why, even if it isn't in and of itself harmful, it is at least something that can leave those participating in it a bit sheepish when their ignorance is laid bare.
3. Mother!
It's hard sometimes to say with translated fiction that doesn't work whether it's the fault of the author or the translator, but in 'Mother!' no such question need be raised because clearly both the writer and the translator are very talented.
In terms of the actual writing style, this was far and away the best, in my humble opinion. The voice was great, the imagery was stunning and imaginative, and the story it was wrapped around: a young child struggling to come to terms with the death of their mother, was poignant.
The other story by the author, Anchan, 'The Beggars' was also pretty good, and they clearly have great observational skills and fabulous writing chops, but where 'The Beggars' ultimately felt thematically pedestrian, 'Mother!' was all of the best things about 'The Beggars' without feeling derivative and preachy. Loved it.
4. Mid-Road Family
The most straightforwardly slice of life story in the collection, Mid-Road Family is a bleak, depressing window into life in Bangkok in the 80s (or really, any big city whether in the 80s or the 'roaring' 2020s). A husband and wife spend so much time stuck in traffic jams each day that their car slowly becomes their second home, stocked with changes of clothes, lots of snacks, a spittoon doubling as a porta-potty, and shades to lower for privacy in the backseat.
Our narrator, the husband, speaks candidly about how the rat-race of trying to climb the social ladder, the air pollution in Bangkok, and the hours spent commuting have slowly worn him and his wife down to mere husks of their former selves. Yet, he slaps on a veneer of optimism. Sure, the commute sucks, but an air-conditioned car is surely better than being smashed like human chattel on a bus, right? And hey, with just a little more money they could get an even bigger car to sprawl out in on the way to work.
This is a tale of human adaptability, but in a wholly dystopian way.
People have gotten so used to the congestion, that it's become just another quirk of life. They get out and chat with their fellow commuters, network, stretch their legs. One fellow spends the time planting banana trees in the grass in the island dividing the lanes, commenting on how much more pleasant the traffic jams would be if you got stuck sitting under the shade of his little banana plantation.
There is something to be said of making lemonade out of life's lemons, sure, but author Sila Khomchai keeps it real: traffic jams are not those kinds of lemons.
This is a complete aside, but having now read a few Thai-authored works of fiction that take place in Bangkok, I'm starting to get the impression that while there's a sort of affection that residents have for it, as is not so uncommon for people to feel towards their hometowns, they sort of recognize that it's super poorly designed and just kind of generally unpleasant to exist within.
Kind of reminds me of how New Yorkers talk about New York City. They'll be the first to complain about how terrible it is, but a plague on the house of anyone who isn't a New York native who dares to voice any criticism.
I've never been to Bangkok, and I don't actually think that the bones of NYC are bad, but, and I can't stress this enough, everything negative I've ever read in fiction about Bangkok could equally be said of Los Angeles (and should) all the way down to the fact that people there seem happy to just...accept that traffic jams and poor urban planning are fine, actually. Buses? piffle Trains? What's a train? Walkable, mixed zoning???
Sorry, clearly, 'Mid-Road Family' got me thinking. Maybe it'd get you thinking too.
All in all, a well-balanced, nice little introduction to a host of talented, late 20th century Thai writers.
The Old Man Who Read Love Stories by Luis Sepúlveda
3.0
"The eyes of fear can see you"
'The Old Man Who Read Love Stories' is a clear-cut novella of the 'man vs. nature' variety. It's about humans wrestling against (and often losing to) the Amazon rainforest. Anyone unwilling to bow to their jungle overlord risks all manner of unpleasant death, or at the very least, discomfort and struggle.
The plot revolves around the titular love story reading old man, Antonio Jose Bolivar, who, despite never quite being fully accepted by the native population, is at least on good terms with them, and lives a comparable lifestyle, though he flits back and forth between the world of the jungle and the world of civilization.
He finds himself at loggerheads with the village mayor, a man as far removed from 'at one' with nature as one can be, a man who struggles to bring the village, and the jungle by extension, to heel.
When it's discovered that a white 'gringo' killed a litter of ocelot cubs and was subsequently killed by a now vengeful adult female, nature and man collide, and Antonio Jose Bolivar finds himself trapped between two worlds: the one to which he belongs but despises (civilization) and the one he loves and respects, but to which he'll never belong (nature).
It's a familiar folktale in which civilization --> bad, nature--> good, but author Luis Sepulveda tries to complicate it by tying civilization to colonialism in ways that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't, and it could feel a tad preachy, as folktales like this one can.
It reminded me strongly of John Steinbeck's 'The Pearl'. Similar lengths, similarly straightforward moralities, simple, easy to follow plots, but the writing chops to keep you invested.
The Raleigh News & Observer said it well: "Sepulveda writes with a keen sense of irony and humor as harsh and colorful as the jungle itself."
I picked it up rather at random at a used bookshop and got hooked by the banger of a first line: "The sky was a donkey's swollen paunch hanging threateningly low overhead."
The strange specificity and oddness of the line is exemplary of the type of writing you're in for as we follow one man's tug of war of longing for a civilized world he's known only through books, and his love of his home on the outskirts of the Amazon.
This is also a love letter to fiction, and how a love of reading can transcend almost anything. "He possessed the antidote to the deadly poison of old age. He could read." (p.52)
'The Old Man Who Read Love Stories' is a clear-cut novella of the 'man vs. nature' variety. It's about humans wrestling against (and often losing to) the Amazon rainforest. Anyone unwilling to bow to their jungle overlord risks all manner of unpleasant death, or at the very least, discomfort and struggle.
The plot revolves around the titular love story reading old man, Antonio Jose Bolivar, who, despite never quite being fully accepted by the native population, is at least on good terms with them, and lives a comparable lifestyle, though he flits back and forth between the world of the jungle and the world of civilization.
He finds himself at loggerheads with the village mayor, a man as far removed from 'at one' with nature as one can be, a man who struggles to bring the village, and the jungle by extension, to heel.
When it's discovered that a white 'gringo' killed a litter of ocelot cubs and was subsequently killed by a now vengeful adult female, nature and man collide, and Antonio Jose Bolivar finds himself trapped between two worlds: the one to which he belongs but despises (civilization) and the one he loves and respects, but to which he'll never belong (nature).
It's a familiar folktale in which civilization --> bad, nature--> good, but author Luis Sepulveda tries to complicate it by tying civilization to colonialism in ways that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't, and it could feel a tad preachy, as folktales like this one can.
It reminded me strongly of John Steinbeck's 'The Pearl'. Similar lengths, similarly straightforward moralities, simple, easy to follow plots, but the writing chops to keep you invested.
The Raleigh News & Observer said it well: "Sepulveda writes with a keen sense of irony and humor as harsh and colorful as the jungle itself."
I picked it up rather at random at a used bookshop and got hooked by the banger of a first line: "The sky was a donkey's swollen paunch hanging threateningly low overhead."
The strange specificity and oddness of the line is exemplary of the type of writing you're in for as we follow one man's tug of war of longing for a civilized world he's known only through books, and his love of his home on the outskirts of the Amazon.
This is also a love letter to fiction, and how a love of reading can transcend almost anything. "He possessed the antidote to the deadly poison of old age. He could read." (p.52)
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
4.0
Every Age Gets the 'Lolita' it Needs
I've found myself mulling over the #MeToo movement more and more over the last few years, seeing echoes of its influence in the popularity of certain books (see my review of ‘Song of Achilles’ for more hot takes!), and of course, its impact on the discourse around rape culture that exploded in its aftermath and continues up to now.
What better way to address some of that discourse in fiction than to give the world a retelling of Nabokov's 1955 novel 'Lolita', but centering Dolores rather than Humbert Humbert?
But is that what 'My Dark Vanessa' is?
Though ‘Lolita’ the novel gets referenced and quoted many times in the text, and is a tool our protagonist, Vanessa, uses to try to understand her own circumstances (and also a tool her teacher, Mr. Strain, uses as a nefarious means to tip open the door to eventually entering into a sexual relationship with her), 'My Dark Vanessa' feels more like a response to 'Lolita' the film(s) than to Nabokov's work.
Youtube video essayist, Lola Sebastian, published a video in November of 2019 (predating the publication of 'My Dark Vanessa' by just 4 months) called "we need to talk about Lolita". In this video, she opens with a question "Could another Lolita movie ever happen? More importantly: should another Lolita movie ever happen?"
A noteworthy observation Lola makes in her essay about 'Lolita' the novel is that Nabokov himself was very vocal about not wanting the image of a young girl to appear on the cover because it would reinforce the exact sexualization of young girls the novel is condemning.
Not only has that wish been completely ignored by many publishing houses, but the images of young girls on these covers tend to be sexually suggestive: a young girl's bare legs under a short skirt, a young girl making bedroom eyes while a red lollypop rests just inside her mouth, a young girl lolling in the grass in a bikini, a close-up of a young girl's lips.
Sometimes all you can do is heave a deep sigh.
She goes on to point out that in the novel Dolores is 12, yet in both film adaptations, she's been aged up and played by actresses who were 16 and 17 at the time of each film's release (in 1962 and 1997).
"In attempting to lessen the shocking age difference in 'Lolita' so that audiences will be more comfortable viewing it, we discover how comfortable we are with sexualizing teenage girls," she says.
How comfortable indeed.
I don't know the exact reason the character was aged up for the films (the age of consent in many US states is 16, so it's possible actresses of that age or slightly older were chosen because only they could legally kiss their co-stars on camera?), but it is undeniable that we have a long and storied history of sexualizing teenage girls.
I vividly remember how, just a few years back, when teenage singer Billie Eilish was starting to get big, there were websites that had clocks counting down to when she'd turn 18, the implication being 'can't wait ‘til she's legal to fuck because I'd do it right now if it wouldn't land me in jail.'
And a quick peek at PornHub (America's go-to porn site for the uninitiated) reveals that 'teen' is the second largest category on the site with 173,482 videos under that tag. Which is an insane amount of content suggesting an insane appetite for that type of content.
All of this is very much part of the peritext of 'My Dark Vanessa.' Author Kate Elizabeth Russell sprinkles many other subtle and not so subtle examples of how pervasive this was and is in our culture throughout the novel, including references to Britney Spears's 2000 music video for ...Baby One More Time in which the then 18-year-old dances provocatively in a sexified school girl uniform, and the lyrics to the 1979 hit 'My Sharona: "I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind."
While we're in the case-building section, I'd also like to enter into evidence two more things:
One, the 2010-2017 television adaptation of YA book series 'Pretty Little Liars'.
A major plot point throughout the series is that one of the teenage protagonists, Aria, is having a sexual affair with her high school English teacher (all of the girls have dalliances with adult men across the series, but this one is such an on the nose parallel that we're just going to stick to this one). This is presented as a 'forbidden romance' with little to no examination within the text of either the books or screenplay. Even though the characters verbalize the problem with the relationship (i.e. that she's his underage student), this is framed as 'high stakes', and part of what makes it sexy; 'oh no, we might get caught!'
No, this isn't 'high stakes drama' --this is illegal and morally reprehensible on the part of the teacher, who, it's revealed, sought Aria out on purpose. And yes, her parents do eventually find out, and in a truly bizarre twist, eventually accept it with a grudging: 'well, we don't like it, but we're helpless to do anything about it.' And then at the end of the series, when Aria is in her early 20s, they get married.
Not only is the writing of this relationship very 'thanks, I hate it', but the casting of the parts of Aria and her teacher does a lot to help prop up the dishonest framing of this relationship as 'ok, actually.' The actress who plays Aria was 21 when season 1 of the show aired, though her character was only 16. The actor who plays her teacher was 24, and was the same-ish age as his character in the show.
So while on paper we're talking about a sexual relationship between a 24 year old man and a 16 year old girl, we're visually seeing a 21 year old woman and a boyish 24 year old man macking on each other, which could be completely fine.
And here we encounter a strange sleight of hand at play. We live in a world that sexualizes teenage girls, but we also live in a world where the teenage girls we see in our favorite films and series are 20-somethings posing as 16 year-olds.
I actually think this makes perfect sense, and these things aren't as contradictory as they seem. After you're no longer a teenager yourself, it's likely that most of your interaction with teenagers will be via the media you consume rather than by hanging out with actual teenagers. And if in that media the teenage girls are often played by women in their 20s it's fine to view them sexually because if you saw them in any other context, finding them hot would, in principle, be appropriate (lots of caveats, but that's more than can be fully unpacked here). So there's this subconscious thing where you conflate women in their 20s with actual teenage girls, which as we're in the process of establishing, is an identity that is steeped in sexualization.
And I can see how that would (wrongly) lead a lot of men (because we're talking about men right now) to think of teenage girls as being 'basically the same' as women in their 20s, but with that super sexy taboo of 'jailbait' tacked on.
Secondly, and on a more personal note, I'd like to enter into evidence the 2008 song 'Seventeen Forever' by popular emo/alternative band Metro Station with the charming lyrics:
"We're one mistake from being together
But let's not ask why it's not right
You won't be seventeen forever
And we can get away with this tonight"
In fairness, the singer was 19 when this song was making its radio rounds, but I think the lyrics are still indicative of the pattern being discussed here. And it's more relevant to me, because I remember when it was big. I was 13, and just beginning to come into an understanding of sexuality and what it means to be viewed as a sexual object by boys, never mind men. It was also around this time that I had my own brush with the salivating men do over teenage girls.
There was a teacher and girls' swim coach at my high school who was conventionally attractive, and young enough to be considered (or at least consider himself) cool and hip. I was never his student, but he would call me over for chats in the hallways sometimes, and I remember him complimenting a rather form-fitting dress of mine once. It was the first time I had ever had the sixth sense feeling that an adult man was looking at me, at my body, and commenting on it, even though he hadn't said that directly. And I felt uncomfortable for even thinking that's what he was thinking. Why would a man look at me that way? Was I narcissistic enough to think this man thought I was hot stuff? Had I subconsciously chosen that dress to get attention?
I bumped into him one other time that I remember at a Best Buy near my house when I was with my mom. I was looking at CDs or something and he came over to say hi and have a chat, and I remember again that creeping feeling of 'I think there's some sexual undertone to what's happening, but that's so embarrassing if that's the case, and maybe just me being presumptuous?'
Just then, my mom, who must have witnessed something of this, came over and pretty firmly sent him on his way, and then turned to me and said: "he was flirting with you, you know that, right?" and I was mortified and said "no, I don't think so." But she was pretty adamant to me that that's what had happened, and that it was inappropriate. And her saying that out loud could have been the thing that prevented anything truly bad from happening. Or maybe not. The world will never know. But I'm glad that she said that, because it let me know that that feeling I'd had was based in reality, and that he, not I, had done something wrong.
Vanessa also has such a conversation with her mother in the novel. On a car ride back to her school, Vanessa reveals that a male teacher told her she had 'hair the color of maple leaves.' Her mother replies: "He shouldn't have said that to you." She demands to know who said this, and Vanessa lies and gives the name of a different teacher, who her mother spends the rest of that section giving the stink eye to on the rare occasion that she's at the school. Because this doesn't take place at a typical high school like mine-- this is a boarding school, where parents have much less regular access to their kids and the goings on in their lives.
There's a lot of implicit critique of schools in general in the novel, and how, institutionally, they don't do a very good job acting in loco parentis. This is evidenced by not only the fact that Vanessa's teacher gets away with his grooming of Vanessa, but multiple other students, and also her references to at least one other boarding school having a similar scandal attached to it.
But Russell goes beyond discussions of schools and the abuse of power and its intersection with sexualizing teenage girls -- she delves deeply into the impact of that abuse and sexualization on these girls as they start to grow into adulthood.
I'm lucky that I was never in any situation at that age that I would describe as abusive, sexually or otherwise, despite definitely having experiences of feeling like a fish getting circled by sharks, both visible and invisible. And so, I can't really speak to how authentically Russell captures PTSD or the processing of that kind of adolescent trauma. I can, however, comment on a much more subtle thread.
Vanessa in the present day timeline makes two passing remarks at different points in the novel. One, is how at twenty-two she was too old to be sexually attractive to her teacher anymore, and the second is that at thirty-two she is starting to notice signs of aging in her face--an observation she makes in disgust.
It's not, I don't think, news to anyone that we live in a youth-obsessed culture. A culture that ties youth to beauty and desirability very tightly.
But for whom?
It's been standard practice in Hollywood for years to pair 'leading men' in their 40s or even older with 'leading ladies' who are in their 20s to maybe, sometimes, their 30s. And on the odd occasion that a woman closer to that leading man in his 40s's age is cast, she is styled to look younger or has maybe even had work done to look younger, while leading men, wrinkles and all, are presented to be desirable in part because of their age and the implied experience that comes with it.
So now let's imagine what it might do to women, who have grown up in a culture that places their sexual prime and age range for mainstream desirability at 15/16-25ish, to age.
As someone who was socialized female, I have felt that clock ticking down ever since I became aware of it as a teenager. Aware of how, at twenty-two, my youth was a large part of what my employer (an English language school) found marketable about me, and that that was much more finite than what my male colleagues had.
It terrified me, and still does as I careen towards 30, even though I know that it's stupid. But how can it not terrify me in a world where, if you're viewed as a woman, your value is tied to how likely the men around you are to want to fuck you? What happens to you when they don't anymore? Do you still have value? If you’re lucky enough to have a long-term partner, will he remain faithful? Because he still has another decade and a half to be found hot by a lot of people, so why should he stick by an old hag like you?
In the novel, thirty-two year-old Vanessa notices (and envies) the youth of her teenage colleague, she notices and judges the looks of the other women around her through that aforementioned lens of 'how hot would men find you?' This, more than any of the plot specifics, hits at the heart of what is meant by 'rape culture', and 'the male gaze.'
The Mr. Strains and Harvey Weinstein's and Andrew Tates are the symptoms, the zits if you will, but they're only there, purulent and ugly, because of what's been festering underneath; the part that so many people (men and women) deny is even there.
Interestingly, none of that is why this novel was controversial, at least, not from what I can tell. Going to the one-star Goodreads reviews (a mere 1% of the nearly 34,000 reviews the novel’s amassed on the site since it’s release), there were two main things readers took issue with, and really, it’s the same thing: Vanessa.
The people who didn’t like this novel didn’t like it because they didn’t like our protagonist. This dislike fell into two camps: people who found her unsympathetic, narcissistic, and bitchy, and people who found her to be one-dimensional.
I think that to an extent both of these critiques hit on something true, but I also sense that this was by design. Vanessa is a one-dimensional miserable melt who thinks she’s always the smartest person in the room, who is ‘not like the other girls’. And she never grows beyond that, or at least, not until an inkling of character growth in the very last pages. But that arrested development is part of the tragedy. Her inability to move beyond the version of herself she was at fifteen is sad. And let’s be honest; it’s not unheard of for teenagers to be unsympathetic, narcissistic, and bitchy – whatever their gender. Did 2000s-era emo rock band My Chemical Romance not famously screech: “All teenagers scare the livin’ shit out of me” ? Like, c’mon.
Moreover, I think it is essential that Vanessa be unlikeable, just as much as it was essential for Humbert Humbert to be charismatic. If Vanessa were likeable, she’d be the perfect victim, and this would be a story that’s easy to understand: ‘a nice girl was sexually abused by a man in a position of power over her.’ But what if it’s not a nice girl that this happens to? What if her character flaws are the very things that make her susceptible to being groomed by someone like Mr. Strain?
He reinforces her belief that she’s ‘special’, ‘more mature’, ‘an old soul.’ He knows she thinks she's 'not like the other girls' and so he says: ‘you’re so right, Vanessa; you arebetter than them. You’re better than a lot of people. I love you. I worship you. Oh, Vanessa, can’t you pity how your perfection torments me so?’ That's his entire ruse.
And for it to work, she has to be exactly who she is.
Russel is asking us, the readers, to have empathy for someone she designed for us to dislike. That’s much harder to do. But it’s also a better way to understand our own morality. Are we truly principled if we only have empathy for people we like and identify with?
Now, all of this does make this book unpleasant to read. And unfortunately, it’s not so uncommon for ‘unpleasant to read/watch’ to be conflated with ‘morally bad/harmful.’
A wise man by the name of Don Powers once said: “sometimes if a thing feels uncomfortable, it's on the one feeling it.”
This book made me feel uncomfortable, and I didn’t much like Vanessa, but I can also see that that discomfort actually means, in this case, that the book is doing its job. Just like when reading ‘Lolita’ one might feel uncomfortable, not because Nabokov was promoting a bad thing (he patently wasn’t), but because he touched on something ugly about our culture that is also true. On the other hand, watching ‘Pretty Little Liars’ makes me uncomfortable because the writers were reckless in a way that plays into a narrative that causes harm. But impact matters too.
I love horror films; I think they can be creative and fun, and that the genre as a whole can be incredibly insightful. However, lots of people don’t like horror films. They think they’re unpleasant to watch, they are sensitive to violent content, whatever. They don’t want to watch them.
I think it’s just as unfair to tell someone who doesn’t want to watch a horror film that they’re being ‘too sensitive’ and that they should ‘get over it’ because the social commentary in that film is so provocative as it is for the person who finds such films upsetting to claim that them finding it upsetting makes the genre/film ‘bad.’ Alas, I think that’s what happened here. Those that loved this novel cut into those that didn’t by sniping about how anyone who couldn’t finish the book or didn’t like it ‘just didn’t get it’. Those that hated it panned it as ‘bad/harmful.’
‘My Dark Vanessa’ isn’t a perfect novel. Overwriting is its biggest crime – this lack of faith in the readers to ‘get it’ a giveaway of this being a debut novel. But it has something true and important to say, so read it. Talk about it. Argue about it. And for god’s sake, if you ever make it into a movie, learn from the mistakes that were made with ‘Lolita’ (both times) so that Nabokov, Lola Sebastian, and the rest of us can finally have that film we’ve been promised for over half a century.
I've found myself mulling over the #MeToo movement more and more over the last few years, seeing echoes of its influence in the popularity of certain books (see my review of ‘Song of Achilles’ for more hot takes!), and of course, its impact on the discourse around rape culture that exploded in its aftermath and continues up to now.
What better way to address some of that discourse in fiction than to give the world a retelling of Nabokov's 1955 novel 'Lolita', but centering Dolores rather than Humbert Humbert?
But is that what 'My Dark Vanessa' is?
Though ‘Lolita’ the novel gets referenced and quoted many times in the text, and is a tool our protagonist, Vanessa, uses to try to understand her own circumstances (and also a tool her teacher, Mr. Strain, uses as a nefarious means to tip open the door to eventually entering into a sexual relationship with her), 'My Dark Vanessa' feels more like a response to 'Lolita' the film(s) than to Nabokov's work.
Youtube video essayist, Lola Sebastian, published a video in November of 2019 (predating the publication of 'My Dark Vanessa' by just 4 months) called "we need to talk about Lolita". In this video, she opens with a question "Could another Lolita movie ever happen? More importantly: should another Lolita movie ever happen?"
A noteworthy observation Lola makes in her essay about 'Lolita' the novel is that Nabokov himself was very vocal about not wanting the image of a young girl to appear on the cover because it would reinforce the exact sexualization of young girls the novel is condemning.
Not only has that wish been completely ignored by many publishing houses, but the images of young girls on these covers tend to be sexually suggestive: a young girl's bare legs under a short skirt, a young girl making bedroom eyes while a red lollypop rests just inside her mouth, a young girl lolling in the grass in a bikini, a close-up of a young girl's lips.
Sometimes all you can do is heave a deep sigh.
She goes on to point out that in the novel Dolores is 12, yet in both film adaptations, she's been aged up and played by actresses who were 16 and 17 at the time of each film's release (in 1962 and 1997).
"In attempting to lessen the shocking age difference in 'Lolita' so that audiences will be more comfortable viewing it, we discover how comfortable we are with sexualizing teenage girls," she says.
How comfortable indeed.
I don't know the exact reason the character was aged up for the films (the age of consent in many US states is 16, so it's possible actresses of that age or slightly older were chosen because only they could legally kiss their co-stars on camera?), but it is undeniable that we have a long and storied history of sexualizing teenage girls.
I vividly remember how, just a few years back, when teenage singer Billie Eilish was starting to get big, there were websites that had clocks counting down to when she'd turn 18, the implication being 'can't wait ‘til she's legal to fuck because I'd do it right now if it wouldn't land me in jail.'
And a quick peek at PornHub (America's go-to porn site for the uninitiated) reveals that 'teen' is the second largest category on the site with 173,482 videos under that tag. Which is an insane amount of content suggesting an insane appetite for that type of content.
All of this is very much part of the peritext of 'My Dark Vanessa.' Author Kate Elizabeth Russell sprinkles many other subtle and not so subtle examples of how pervasive this was and is in our culture throughout the novel, including references to Britney Spears's 2000 music video for ...Baby One More Time in which the then 18-year-old dances provocatively in a sexified school girl uniform, and the lyrics to the 1979 hit 'My Sharona: "I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind."
While we're in the case-building section, I'd also like to enter into evidence two more things:
One, the 2010-2017 television adaptation of YA book series 'Pretty Little Liars'.
A major plot point throughout the series is that one of the teenage protagonists, Aria, is having a sexual affair with her high school English teacher (all of the girls have dalliances with adult men across the series, but this one is such an on the nose parallel that we're just going to stick to this one). This is presented as a 'forbidden romance' with little to no examination within the text of either the books or screenplay. Even though the characters verbalize the problem with the relationship (i.e. that she's his underage student), this is framed as 'high stakes', and part of what makes it sexy; 'oh no, we might get caught!'
No, this isn't 'high stakes drama' --this is illegal and morally reprehensible on the part of the teacher, who, it's revealed, sought Aria out on purpose. And yes, her parents do eventually find out, and in a truly bizarre twist, eventually accept it with a grudging: 'well, we don't like it, but we're helpless to do anything about it.' And then at the end of the series, when Aria is in her early 20s, they get married.
Not only is the writing of this relationship very 'thanks, I hate it', but the casting of the parts of Aria and her teacher does a lot to help prop up the dishonest framing of this relationship as 'ok, actually.' The actress who plays Aria was 21 when season 1 of the show aired, though her character was only 16. The actor who plays her teacher was 24, and was the same-ish age as his character in the show.
So while on paper we're talking about a sexual relationship between a 24 year old man and a 16 year old girl, we're visually seeing a 21 year old woman and a boyish 24 year old man macking on each other, which could be completely fine.
And here we encounter a strange sleight of hand at play. We live in a world that sexualizes teenage girls, but we also live in a world where the teenage girls we see in our favorite films and series are 20-somethings posing as 16 year-olds.
I actually think this makes perfect sense, and these things aren't as contradictory as they seem. After you're no longer a teenager yourself, it's likely that most of your interaction with teenagers will be via the media you consume rather than by hanging out with actual teenagers. And if in that media the teenage girls are often played by women in their 20s it's fine to view them sexually because if you saw them in any other context, finding them hot would, in principle, be appropriate (lots of caveats, but that's more than can be fully unpacked here). So there's this subconscious thing where you conflate women in their 20s with actual teenage girls, which as we're in the process of establishing, is an identity that is steeped in sexualization.
And I can see how that would (wrongly) lead a lot of men (because we're talking about men right now) to think of teenage girls as being 'basically the same' as women in their 20s, but with that super sexy taboo of 'jailbait' tacked on.
Secondly, and on a more personal note, I'd like to enter into evidence the 2008 song 'Seventeen Forever' by popular emo/alternative band Metro Station with the charming lyrics:
"We're one mistake from being together
But let's not ask why it's not right
You won't be seventeen forever
And we can get away with this tonight"
In fairness, the singer was 19 when this song was making its radio rounds, but I think the lyrics are still indicative of the pattern being discussed here. And it's more relevant to me, because I remember when it was big. I was 13, and just beginning to come into an understanding of sexuality and what it means to be viewed as a sexual object by boys, never mind men. It was also around this time that I had my own brush with the salivating men do over teenage girls.
There was a teacher and girls' swim coach at my high school who was conventionally attractive, and young enough to be considered (or at least consider himself) cool and hip. I was never his student, but he would call me over for chats in the hallways sometimes, and I remember him complimenting a rather form-fitting dress of mine once. It was the first time I had ever had the sixth sense feeling that an adult man was looking at me, at my body, and commenting on it, even though he hadn't said that directly. And I felt uncomfortable for even thinking that's what he was thinking. Why would a man look at me that way? Was I narcissistic enough to think this man thought I was hot stuff? Had I subconsciously chosen that dress to get attention?
I bumped into him one other time that I remember at a Best Buy near my house when I was with my mom. I was looking at CDs or something and he came over to say hi and have a chat, and I remember again that creeping feeling of 'I think there's some sexual undertone to what's happening, but that's so embarrassing if that's the case, and maybe just me being presumptuous?'
Just then, my mom, who must have witnessed something of this, came over and pretty firmly sent him on his way, and then turned to me and said: "he was flirting with you, you know that, right?" and I was mortified and said "no, I don't think so." But she was pretty adamant to me that that's what had happened, and that it was inappropriate. And her saying that out loud could have been the thing that prevented anything truly bad from happening. Or maybe not. The world will never know. But I'm glad that she said that, because it let me know that that feeling I'd had was based in reality, and that he, not I, had done something wrong.
Vanessa also has such a conversation with her mother in the novel. On a car ride back to her school, Vanessa reveals that a male teacher told her she had 'hair the color of maple leaves.' Her mother replies: "He shouldn't have said that to you." She demands to know who said this, and Vanessa lies and gives the name of a different teacher, who her mother spends the rest of that section giving the stink eye to on the rare occasion that she's at the school. Because this doesn't take place at a typical high school like mine-- this is a boarding school, where parents have much less regular access to their kids and the goings on in their lives.
There's a lot of implicit critique of schools in general in the novel, and how, institutionally, they don't do a very good job acting in loco parentis. This is evidenced by not only the fact that Vanessa's teacher gets away with his grooming of Vanessa, but multiple other students, and also her references to at least one other boarding school having a similar scandal attached to it.
But Russell goes beyond discussions of schools and the abuse of power and its intersection with sexualizing teenage girls -- she delves deeply into the impact of that abuse and sexualization on these girls as they start to grow into adulthood.
I'm lucky that I was never in any situation at that age that I would describe as abusive, sexually or otherwise, despite definitely having experiences of feeling like a fish getting circled by sharks, both visible and invisible. And so, I can't really speak to how authentically Russell captures PTSD or the processing of that kind of adolescent trauma. I can, however, comment on a much more subtle thread.
Vanessa in the present day timeline makes two passing remarks at different points in the novel. One, is how at twenty-two she was too old to be sexually attractive to her teacher anymore, and the second is that at thirty-two she is starting to notice signs of aging in her face--an observation she makes in disgust.
It's not, I don't think, news to anyone that we live in a youth-obsessed culture. A culture that ties youth to beauty and desirability very tightly.
But for whom?
It's been standard practice in Hollywood for years to pair 'leading men' in their 40s or even older with 'leading ladies' who are in their 20s to maybe, sometimes, their 30s. And on the odd occasion that a woman closer to that leading man in his 40s's age is cast, she is styled to look younger or has maybe even had work done to look younger, while leading men, wrinkles and all, are presented to be desirable in part because of their age and the implied experience that comes with it.
So now let's imagine what it might do to women, who have grown up in a culture that places their sexual prime and age range for mainstream desirability at 15/16-25ish, to age.
As someone who was socialized female, I have felt that clock ticking down ever since I became aware of it as a teenager. Aware of how, at twenty-two, my youth was a large part of what my employer (an English language school) found marketable about me, and that that was much more finite than what my male colleagues had.
It terrified me, and still does as I careen towards 30, even though I know that it's stupid. But how can it not terrify me in a world where, if you're viewed as a woman, your value is tied to how likely the men around you are to want to fuck you? What happens to you when they don't anymore? Do you still have value? If you’re lucky enough to have a long-term partner, will he remain faithful? Because he still has another decade and a half to be found hot by a lot of people, so why should he stick by an old hag like you?
In the novel, thirty-two year-old Vanessa notices (and envies) the youth of her teenage colleague, she notices and judges the looks of the other women around her through that aforementioned lens of 'how hot would men find you?' This, more than any of the plot specifics, hits at the heart of what is meant by 'rape culture', and 'the male gaze.'
The Mr. Strains and Harvey Weinstein's and Andrew Tates are the symptoms, the zits if you will, but they're only there, purulent and ugly, because of what's been festering underneath; the part that so many people (men and women) deny is even there.
Interestingly, none of that is why this novel was controversial, at least, not from what I can tell. Going to the one-star Goodreads reviews (a mere 1% of the nearly 34,000 reviews the novel’s amassed on the site since it’s release), there were two main things readers took issue with, and really, it’s the same thing: Vanessa.
The people who didn’t like this novel didn’t like it because they didn’t like our protagonist. This dislike fell into two camps: people who found her unsympathetic, narcissistic, and bitchy, and people who found her to be one-dimensional.
I think that to an extent both of these critiques hit on something true, but I also sense that this was by design. Vanessa is a one-dimensional miserable melt who thinks she’s always the smartest person in the room, who is ‘not like the other girls’. And she never grows beyond that, or at least, not until an inkling of character growth in the very last pages. But that arrested development is part of the tragedy. Her inability to move beyond the version of herself she was at fifteen is sad. And let’s be honest; it’s not unheard of for teenagers to be unsympathetic, narcissistic, and bitchy – whatever their gender. Did 2000s-era emo rock band My Chemical Romance not famously screech: “All teenagers scare the livin’ shit out of me” ? Like, c’mon.
Moreover, I think it is essential that Vanessa be unlikeable, just as much as it was essential for Humbert Humbert to be charismatic. If Vanessa were likeable, she’d be the perfect victim, and this would be a story that’s easy to understand: ‘a nice girl was sexually abused by a man in a position of power over her.’ But what if it’s not a nice girl that this happens to? What if her character flaws are the very things that make her susceptible to being groomed by someone like Mr. Strain?
He reinforces her belief that she’s ‘special’, ‘more mature’, ‘an old soul.’ He knows she thinks she's 'not like the other girls' and so he says: ‘you’re so right, Vanessa; you arebetter than them. You’re better than a lot of people. I love you. I worship you. Oh, Vanessa, can’t you pity how your perfection torments me so?’ That's his entire ruse.
And for it to work, she has to be exactly who she is.
Russel is asking us, the readers, to have empathy for someone she designed for us to dislike. That’s much harder to do. But it’s also a better way to understand our own morality. Are we truly principled if we only have empathy for people we like and identify with?
Now, all of this does make this book unpleasant to read. And unfortunately, it’s not so uncommon for ‘unpleasant to read/watch’ to be conflated with ‘morally bad/harmful.’
A wise man by the name of Don Powers once said: “sometimes if a thing feels uncomfortable, it's on the one feeling it.”
This book made me feel uncomfortable, and I didn’t much like Vanessa, but I can also see that that discomfort actually means, in this case, that the book is doing its job. Just like when reading ‘Lolita’ one might feel uncomfortable, not because Nabokov was promoting a bad thing (he patently wasn’t), but because he touched on something ugly about our culture that is also true. On the other hand, watching ‘Pretty Little Liars’ makes me uncomfortable because the writers were reckless in a way that plays into a narrative that causes harm. But impact matters too.
I love horror films; I think they can be creative and fun, and that the genre as a whole can be incredibly insightful. However, lots of people don’t like horror films. They think they’re unpleasant to watch, they are sensitive to violent content, whatever. They don’t want to watch them.
I think it’s just as unfair to tell someone who doesn’t want to watch a horror film that they’re being ‘too sensitive’ and that they should ‘get over it’ because the social commentary in that film is so provocative as it is for the person who finds such films upsetting to claim that them finding it upsetting makes the genre/film ‘bad.’ Alas, I think that’s what happened here. Those that loved this novel cut into those that didn’t by sniping about how anyone who couldn’t finish the book or didn’t like it ‘just didn’t get it’. Those that hated it panned it as ‘bad/harmful.’
‘My Dark Vanessa’ isn’t a perfect novel. Overwriting is its biggest crime – this lack of faith in the readers to ‘get it’ a giveaway of this being a debut novel. But it has something true and important to say, so read it. Talk about it. Argue about it. And for god’s sake, if you ever make it into a movie, learn from the mistakes that were made with ‘Lolita’ (both times) so that Nabokov, Lola Sebastian, and the rest of us can finally have that film we’ve been promised for over half a century.
Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
3.0
"Maybe this is how any religious figure gets created." (p.312)
There's probably no better way to explain this novel than to analogize it with its Goodreads review section (look at us: getting meta already!). If you read through a range of reviews, you'll get a sense of what this novel is about. Probably. Maybe. Because, just as Palahniuk points out in choosing oral biography as his weapon of choice to deliver his plot, even if two people experience the same thing, they aren't going to remember it the same way; certain aspects of what happened may be in sharp focus for one person, but blurry for another. And they could also just be wrong about what they think they remember. And even if they remember the same details, how they felt about those details could be completely different.
"You could argue that we constantly change the past, whether or not we actually go back. I close my eyes, and the Rant Casey I picture isn't the real person. The Rant I tell you about is filtered and colored and distorted through me." (p.313)
And that's the strength of 'Rant.' You read the whole thing knowing that the only things you'll know for sure at the end are a few of the broad strokes (maybe). Namely: there was (probably) a guy named Buster 'Rant' Casey, who (seemingly) was really into a variety of wacky things that may or may not have included baiting various animals to bite him--a hobby that appears to have led to a rabies epidemic because he might have gotten around a lot.
You may be surprised to know, given his positioning as the subject of interest of this oral history, that this novel is decidedly not about its titular character. Rant's bizarre life is just the excuse to talk about a ton of dense, 'big brain' topics.
We get a plague-riddled dystopia, we get 'internet bad,' we get state-sanctioned segregation along sunlight lines (the Nighttimers are the 'degenerates' and the Daytimers are the normies), we get an exploration of capitalism, of counter-culture. And then there's the time travel.
There's a lot going on.
Palahniuk definitely went into 'Rant' with something (well, as we've established, a few things) to say, but were they all equally interesting? Maybe not in their totality.
Palahniuk's take on time travel felt anticlimactic given how self-satisfied he seemed by his own conclusion of 'time is a social construct, actually.' As though this were something no one had ever thought of before. In fact, a lot of his individual threads felt a bit like that to me.
Now, there were a few that I thought worked. I don't think he had anything new to say about the inherent unreliability of memory, but I at least enjoyed the novelty of his oral history format; it served that end quite nicely.
I also enjoyed his musings about the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, etc. and how/whether they impact a child's worldview as an adult.
But he doesn't just leave it there. He goes on to have, stewing in the background and occasionally the foreground, an examination of how imagination and faith can sometimes become toxic, and he seems to indicate that this toxicity culminates in religion.
"Maybe people don't travel back in time. Maybe its lies like that, anything that smells better than the idea of death [...] it's those kind of sexy lies that set up world religions. Maybe Rant is just dead. [...] How weird is that? Instead of a biography, this story will become fiction. A factual historical artifact documenting something that never happened." (p.312-313)
Again, it's not that the process of mythologizing of real historical figures/events is some stunning new insight that no one has ever had before, but he definitely presents it in a style all his own, complete with a (quite literally) rabid Jesus. And given his legions of fans, maybe this is the format a lot of people want to get that insight from, and that's cool. Different strokes and all that.
I could have done without the used tampon sniffing, though. Try as I might, I can't make that make sense, and I'm not sure I want to.
There's probably no better way to explain this novel than to analogize it with its Goodreads review section (look at us: getting meta already!). If you read through a range of reviews, you'll get a sense of what this novel is about. Probably. Maybe. Because, just as Palahniuk points out in choosing oral biography as his weapon of choice to deliver his plot, even if two people experience the same thing, they aren't going to remember it the same way; certain aspects of what happened may be in sharp focus for one person, but blurry for another. And they could also just be wrong about what they think they remember. And even if they remember the same details, how they felt about those details could be completely different.
"You could argue that we constantly change the past, whether or not we actually go back. I close my eyes, and the Rant Casey I picture isn't the real person. The Rant I tell you about is filtered and colored and distorted through me." (p.313)
And that's the strength of 'Rant.' You read the whole thing knowing that the only things you'll know for sure at the end are a few of the broad strokes (maybe). Namely: there was (probably) a guy named Buster 'Rant' Casey, who (seemingly) was really into a variety of wacky things that may or may not have included baiting various animals to bite him--a hobby that appears to have led to a rabies epidemic because he might have gotten around a lot.
You may be surprised to know, given his positioning as the subject of interest of this oral history, that this novel is decidedly not about its titular character. Rant's bizarre life is just the excuse to talk about a ton of dense, 'big brain' topics.
We get a plague-riddled dystopia, we get 'internet bad,' we get state-sanctioned segregation along sunlight lines (the Nighttimers are the 'degenerates' and the Daytimers are the normies), we get an exploration of capitalism, of counter-culture. And then there's the time travel.
There's a lot going on.
Palahniuk definitely went into 'Rant' with something (well, as we've established, a few things) to say, but were they all equally interesting? Maybe not in their totality.
Palahniuk's take on time travel felt anticlimactic given how self-satisfied he seemed by his own conclusion of 'time is a social construct, actually.' As though this were something no one had ever thought of before. In fact, a lot of his individual threads felt a bit like that to me.
Now, there were a few that I thought worked. I don't think he had anything new to say about the inherent unreliability of memory, but I at least enjoyed the novelty of his oral history format; it served that end quite nicely.
I also enjoyed his musings about the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, etc. and how/whether they impact a child's worldview as an adult.
A child who is never coached with Santa Claus may never develop an ability to imagine. To him, nothing exists but the literal and tangible. A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything [...] To never trust or wonder. But the child who relinquishes the illusions [...] may come away with the most important skill set. That child may recognize the strength of his own imagination and faith." (p.63)
But he doesn't just leave it there. He goes on to have, stewing in the background and occasionally the foreground, an examination of how imagination and faith can sometimes become toxic, and he seems to indicate that this toxicity culminates in religion.
"Maybe people don't travel back in time. Maybe its lies like that, anything that smells better than the idea of death [...] it's those kind of sexy lies that set up world religions. Maybe Rant is just dead. [...] How weird is that? Instead of a biography, this story will become fiction. A factual historical artifact documenting something that never happened." (p.312-313)
Again, it's not that the process of mythologizing of real historical figures/events is some stunning new insight that no one has ever had before, but he definitely presents it in a style all his own, complete with a (quite literally) rabid Jesus. And given his legions of fans, maybe this is the format a lot of people want to get that insight from, and that's cool. Different strokes and all that.
I could have done without the used tampon sniffing, though. Try as I might, I can't make that make sense, and I'm not sure I want to.
The Sound and The Fury / As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
3.0
AS I Lay Dying--2.5 stars
As I Lay Dying is a strange book for me to write about. Something in its essence seemed to hide just around the corners of the pages, just out of my grasp. I got the impression that had I been raised in the South the meaning that eluded me would have shined through. Something behind the attitude of the people towards each other, their sensibilities, the interactions between characters seemed to go over my head even as I struggled to comprehend what I could sense of its significance.
I got the distinct sense that this novel, whether intentionally or not, wasn't really written for me, but rather, as part of the 'our stories' canon. There is, naturally, no rule of authorship that every work of fiction should be aimed at the widest possible demographic, and having read it as an outsider I respect it, and respectfully didn't ~get it~.
That being said, the dry but nevertheless absurdist humor was not lost on me, and it's what I'll most fondly take away from this reading experience.
From 'my mother is a fish' to the mishaps on the 'if it can go wrong, it will go wrong' plot itself, to the little peculiarities of Anse with his stubborn determination to obey his wife's wishes to be buried in her hometown, Darl and his eventual pyromania, the big reveal from Addie herself. Some of the little flourishes within the characterizations were quite delightful.
However, though there may indeed be elements I cannot judge as good or bad, some of the technical aspects left a bit to be desired. The pacing of the front half of As I Lay Dying is painfully slow--I indeed felt as though by the time I got through it would be as I lay dying.
Regarding the writing itself: Faulkner is clearly a master of words, and capable of writing stunning passages, but because the conceit of this novel hinged on his ability to write each section in-character, some of that beautiful language took me out of the story. Suddenly I wasn't reading Darl's account of something happening, but rather, I was reading Faulkner describe something.
Overall, I'm glad I read this novel, and in fact I've turned around to read The Sound and the Fury to give Faulkner a fair blow since I did enjoy his writing, just not the way that it interrupted his storytelling.
The Sound and the Fury--3.5 starsMy initial reading experience of The Sound and the Fury was greatly colored by having just read As I Lay Dying.
Here, Faulkner seems to be exploring many of the same preoccupations: the decay of family/The South. Here, though, unlike As I Lay Dying, I felt like I ~got~ it. Perhaps it was the more direct interplay of the characters with people outside of their family/class/race, but something about this made much more sense out of As I Lay Dying.
This formerly very aristocratic family attempting and failing to reconcile the decline of The South, the way certain ideologies and attitudes don't seem able to survive in the 'new' South, the place of Black folks in the 'new' South. These things all really shine through in The Sound and the Fury. So too does the micro-level family drama centered around Caddy.
Plot-wise I thought this was a nice exploration of the American, Southern family at the time, and some of the scenes, particularly in Quentin's POV section, are stunningly beautiful pieces of writing that had me racing to find my quote notebook and a pen. Faulkner's little quips and insights through the mouthpiece of the family patriarch are also worth noting:
"It used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned."
"Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."
Jason's (and to some extent Quentin's too) section brings in more of the humor we got in As I Lay Dying, this time largely tied to his mad hunt for Miss Quentin:
"So when I looked around the door the first thing I saw was this red tie he had on and I was thinking what the hell kind of a man would wear a red tie."
"And there I was, without any hat, looking like I was crazy."
We also get this great follow-up scene wherein he goes blundering into the woods after her and sets his hand on some poison ivy. Without even bothering to remove his hand, he thinks to himself that at least it wasn't a snake.
I had a really great time reading those middle two sections, but alas, those they were book-ended by left much to be desired, and are what brings my overall rating of the book to 3.5
Given the experimental nature of a stream of consciousness novel, particularly at this time, it comes as no surprise that it's divisive. I fall on the end of the spectrum that didn't derive much pleasure from the opening section led by our POV character, Benji.
Getting through those first 100 pages felt like a challenge, rather than something I looked forward to. I had the benefit of this edition placing the Appendix at the beginning rather than the ending for which I'm incredibly grateful, however, reading through Benji's eyes was a slog. I can see why there are those that admire the ambition, but I felt it was just unbearably difficult to follow, even with the help of the appendix so that I at least knew going in there were two characters name Quentin from two different generations.
Upon reflection, something that made the journey not seem worth it was the writing itself, focused largely on relaying dialogue to help the reader puzzle-piece the narrative together. Ironically, the thing that made this section ultimately more frustrating was the for all that the structure of it was very true to stream of consciousness, it was utterly lacking in voice. I had no real sense of Benji's personality or motivations by the end of this. Strange, considering how fleshed out and real everyone else feels. The ending too, felt a bit lackluster and emotionless.
Everything else in The Sound and the Fury feels incredibly, meticulously intentional, so I've no doubt Faulkner put a lot of thought into the aforementioned two sections, they just didn't work for me.
That being said: I'm glad I read both of these novels, particularly The Sound and the Fury, and Quentin, bless him, is a character I'd certainly light a candle for.
As I Lay Dying is a strange book for me to write about. Something in its essence seemed to hide just around the corners of the pages, just out of my grasp. I got the impression that had I been raised in the South the meaning that eluded me would have shined through. Something behind the attitude of the people towards each other, their sensibilities, the interactions between characters seemed to go over my head even as I struggled to comprehend what I could sense of its significance.
I got the distinct sense that this novel, whether intentionally or not, wasn't really written for me, but rather, as part of the 'our stories' canon. There is, naturally, no rule of authorship that every work of fiction should be aimed at the widest possible demographic, and having read it as an outsider I respect it, and respectfully didn't ~get it~.
That being said, the dry but nevertheless absurdist humor was not lost on me, and it's what I'll most fondly take away from this reading experience.
From 'my mother is a fish' to the mishaps on the 'if it can go wrong, it will go wrong' plot itself, to the little peculiarities of Anse with his stubborn determination to obey his wife's wishes to be buried in her hometown, Darl and his eventual pyromania, the big reveal from Addie herself. Some of the little flourishes within the characterizations were quite delightful.
However, though there may indeed be elements I cannot judge as good or bad, some of the technical aspects left a bit to be desired. The pacing of the front half of As I Lay Dying is painfully slow--I indeed felt as though by the time I got through it would be as I lay dying.
Regarding the writing itself: Faulkner is clearly a master of words, and capable of writing stunning passages, but because the conceit of this novel hinged on his ability to write each section in-character, some of that beautiful language took me out of the story. Suddenly I wasn't reading Darl's account of something happening, but rather, I was reading Faulkner describe something.
Overall, I'm glad I read this novel, and in fact I've turned around to read The Sound and the Fury to give Faulkner a fair blow since I did enjoy his writing, just not the way that it interrupted his storytelling.
The Sound and the Fury--3.5 starsMy initial reading experience of The Sound and the Fury was greatly colored by having just read As I Lay Dying.
Here, Faulkner seems to be exploring many of the same preoccupations: the decay of family/The South. Here, though, unlike As I Lay Dying, I felt like I ~got~ it. Perhaps it was the more direct interplay of the characters with people outside of their family/class/race, but something about this made much more sense out of As I Lay Dying.
This formerly very aristocratic family attempting and failing to reconcile the decline of The South, the way certain ideologies and attitudes don't seem able to survive in the 'new' South, the place of Black folks in the 'new' South. These things all really shine through in The Sound and the Fury. So too does the micro-level family drama centered around Caddy.
Plot-wise I thought this was a nice exploration of the American, Southern family at the time, and some of the scenes, particularly in Quentin's POV section, are stunningly beautiful pieces of writing that had me racing to find my quote notebook and a pen. Faulkner's little quips and insights through the mouthpiece of the family patriarch are also worth noting:
"It used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned."
"Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."
Jason's (and to some extent Quentin's too) section brings in more of the humor we got in As I Lay Dying, this time largely tied to his mad hunt for Miss Quentin:
"So when I looked around the door the first thing I saw was this red tie he had on and I was thinking what the hell kind of a man would wear a red tie."
"And there I was, without any hat, looking like I was crazy."
We also get this great follow-up scene wherein he goes blundering into the woods after her and sets his hand on some poison ivy. Without even bothering to remove his hand, he thinks to himself that at least it wasn't a snake.
I had a really great time reading those middle two sections, but alas, those they were book-ended by left much to be desired, and are what brings my overall rating of the book to 3.5
Given the experimental nature of a stream of consciousness novel, particularly at this time, it comes as no surprise that it's divisive. I fall on the end of the spectrum that didn't derive much pleasure from the opening section led by our POV character, Benji.
Getting through those first 100 pages felt like a challenge, rather than something I looked forward to. I had the benefit of this edition placing the Appendix at the beginning rather than the ending for which I'm incredibly grateful, however, reading through Benji's eyes was a slog. I can see why there are those that admire the ambition, but I felt it was just unbearably difficult to follow, even with the help of the appendix so that I at least knew going in there were two characters name Quentin from two different generations.
Upon reflection, something that made the journey not seem worth it was the writing itself, focused largely on relaying dialogue to help the reader puzzle-piece the narrative together. Ironically, the thing that made this section ultimately more frustrating was the for all that the structure of it was very true to stream of consciousness, it was utterly lacking in voice. I had no real sense of Benji's personality or motivations by the end of this. Strange, considering how fleshed out and real everyone else feels. The ending too, felt a bit lackluster and emotionless.
Everything else in The Sound and the Fury feels incredibly, meticulously intentional, so I've no doubt Faulkner put a lot of thought into the aforementioned two sections, they just didn't work for me.
That being said: I'm glad I read both of these novels, particularly The Sound and the Fury, and Quentin, bless him, is a character I'd certainly light a candle for.
The Sea-Wolf by Jack London
3.0
Sea Wolf is a difficult book for me to review because while the set-up, character development, and philosophical musings about the meaning of life are elements I found genuinely enjoyable and left me intrigued about how it would all turn out, the romance felt incredibly ham-fisted and out of place, and really detracted from my enjoyment of the third act.
Humphry's character development, which is the driving force behind how we're supposed to understand the plot, is completely undermined after the appearance of his love interest given that the gauntlet thrown by Wolf Larson in act one is for Humphrey to learn to 'stand on his own legs'. But with the introduction of Maud, all of his actions link to his love for her rather than a desire for independence.
Similarly, the ending falls flat because it does nothing to suggest that he's learned anything from his experience on the Ghost and indeed, it appears that with Maud at his side he's prepared to fall back into his old life.
Finally, I was very let down by how Wolf Larson's final moments in the story were glossed over and overshadowed by an already disappointing ending given that he is both the titular character and arguably the most interesting and complex one.
All in all, I thought Sea-Wolf would have benefited from some serious edits in the third act that sadly, never occurred and ruined, for me, what otherwise would have been a fascinating exploration of what it means to be human and the tug-of-war between instinct and valor.
Humphry's character development, which is the driving force behind how we're supposed to understand the plot, is completely undermined after the appearance of his love interest given that the gauntlet thrown by Wolf Larson in act one is for Humphrey to learn to 'stand on his own legs'. But with the introduction of Maud, all of his actions link to his love for her rather than a desire for independence.
Similarly, the ending falls flat because it does nothing to suggest that he's learned anything from his experience on the Ghost and indeed, it appears that with Maud at his side he's prepared to fall back into his old life.
Finally, I was very let down by how Wolf Larson's final moments in the story were glossed over and overshadowed by an already disappointing ending given that he is both the titular character and arguably the most interesting and complex one.
All in all, I thought Sea-Wolf would have benefited from some serious edits in the third act that sadly, never occurred and ruined, for me, what otherwise would have been a fascinating exploration of what it means to be human and the tug-of-war between instinct and valor.
Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom
3.0
'Love's Executioner' is an interesting short story collection because it reads (intentionally so according to the author) like fiction but is closely based on ten of author and psychotherapist Irvin Yalom's actual psychotherapy cases.
All ten cases seem to be from around the same time in his career (the late 1980s) and some even have direct overlap with patients from one story interacting with patients from another.
The titular story, 'Love's Executioner' is emblematic of the best and the worst of Yalom's writing tendencies. His observations as a psychotherapist are incredibly astute. Not only does he give us, the reader, some really interesting insights into the practice of psychotherapy (at least at the time), he also is able to reveal much of himself and his struggles to help his patient as he wrestles with his own biases and what he calls 'countertransference.'
However, though the bones of the story are very strong, Yalom has a tendency to overwrite. 'Love's Executioner' is (in the audiobook edition) over two hours long and could easily have been cut down by half an hour. There's a lot of back and forth between him and the patient that doesn't lead anywhere nor meaningfully develop their relationship.
This is a problem that plagues the entire collection. There are a few stories that he manages to keep compact, but this issue really makes the reading process drag, especially towards the middle.
Speaking of the middle. I ran across the fashion advice somewhere that when you think you're finished putting together an outfit you should take off one accessory, and I think that very much applies here too.
Perhaps the temptation to hit exactly 10 stories was just too strong for either Yalom or his editor to resist, but they simply weren't all equally as good. There are some very obvious standouts: 'If Rape Were Legal,' 'The Fat Lady,' and 'The Wrong One Died.' Some of the others rather bleed together and/or lack the harmony of being both interesting stories with interesting observations.
Ironically, though Yalom claims in the introduction that his aim is to explore the philosophical backdrop to psychotherapy, I personally found those insights infinitely less compelling and sometimes even rather forced when compared to everything around the 'plot.'
But when it's good, it's good.
The main criticism of the collection seems to be twofold: one, that it is exploitative, and two, that Yalom shows his ass just a bit too much.
To the first criticism I would say that if he did indeed do his due diligence to both protect the patients' identities and get their permission to tell their stories, no harm no foul.
To the second...it's a book just as much about the pitfalls of being a psychotherapist as it is about the issues facing psychotherapy patients--perhaps even more so. To that end, I think it was successful. It's true that Yalom is incredibly open about his sometimes very ugly thoughts about his patients. His feelings of disgust towards fat people, his attraction to a female patient, how boring he finds some of his patients, his, at times, unprofessional curiosity. In a lot of ways, that IS what 'Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy' is about: how impossible it can be for a therapist to be completely objective when they are just as human as their patients. How to compartmentalize, how to prevent your own biases and curiosity from driving a session, how to recognize your own limitations and learn from failure.
As an educator of adults, I face many of the same issues he raises: the temptation to give the answer rather than foster inductive reasoning skills, liking certain students more than others but having to treat them all equally, feeling bored, feeling burnt out but having to keep up the façade of interest and vitality.
My advice: don't read it straight through like I did; get a sense of what each of the stories is about and cherry-pick those which seem the most interesting, especially if you're reading it as a layperson like I was.
All ten cases seem to be from around the same time in his career (the late 1980s) and some even have direct overlap with patients from one story interacting with patients from another.
The titular story, 'Love's Executioner' is emblematic of the best and the worst of Yalom's writing tendencies. His observations as a psychotherapist are incredibly astute. Not only does he give us, the reader, some really interesting insights into the practice of psychotherapy (at least at the time), he also is able to reveal much of himself and his struggles to help his patient as he wrestles with his own biases and what he calls 'countertransference.'
However, though the bones of the story are very strong, Yalom has a tendency to overwrite. 'Love's Executioner' is (in the audiobook edition) over two hours long and could easily have been cut down by half an hour. There's a lot of back and forth between him and the patient that doesn't lead anywhere nor meaningfully develop their relationship.
This is a problem that plagues the entire collection. There are a few stories that he manages to keep compact, but this issue really makes the reading process drag, especially towards the middle.
Speaking of the middle. I ran across the fashion advice somewhere that when you think you're finished putting together an outfit you should take off one accessory, and I think that very much applies here too.
Perhaps the temptation to hit exactly 10 stories was just too strong for either Yalom or his editor to resist, but they simply weren't all equally as good. There are some very obvious standouts: 'If Rape Were Legal,' 'The Fat Lady,' and 'The Wrong One Died.' Some of the others rather bleed together and/or lack the harmony of being both interesting stories with interesting observations.
Ironically, though Yalom claims in the introduction that his aim is to explore the philosophical backdrop to psychotherapy, I personally found those insights infinitely less compelling and sometimes even rather forced when compared to everything around the 'plot.'
But when it's good, it's good.
The main criticism of the collection seems to be twofold: one, that it is exploitative, and two, that Yalom shows his ass just a bit too much.
To the first criticism I would say that if he did indeed do his due diligence to both protect the patients' identities and get their permission to tell their stories, no harm no foul.
To the second...it's a book just as much about the pitfalls of being a psychotherapist as it is about the issues facing psychotherapy patients--perhaps even more so. To that end, I think it was successful. It's true that Yalom is incredibly open about his sometimes very ugly thoughts about his patients. His feelings of disgust towards fat people, his attraction to a female patient, how boring he finds some of his patients, his, at times, unprofessional curiosity. In a lot of ways, that IS what 'Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy' is about: how impossible it can be for a therapist to be completely objective when they are just as human as their patients. How to compartmentalize, how to prevent your own biases and curiosity from driving a session, how to recognize your own limitations and learn from failure.
As an educator of adults, I face many of the same issues he raises: the temptation to give the answer rather than foster inductive reasoning skills, liking certain students more than others but having to treat them all equally, feeling bored, feeling burnt out but having to keep up the façade of interest and vitality.
My advice: don't read it straight through like I did; get a sense of what each of the stories is about and cherry-pick those which seem the most interesting, especially if you're reading it as a layperson like I was.
Grendel by John Gardner
5.0
Was Grendel a 'Softboi' Actually?
A blurb from the Christian Science Monitor on the first page of this edition lauds 'Grendel' as deserving "a place on the same shelf as Lord of the Flies, Cat's Cradle, and The Catcher in the Rye."
The similarity to 'Lord of the Flies' I can see, not because the reading experience is at all similar, but because both stories are brutally nihilistic.
I haven't read 'Cat's Cradle,' but from skimming a brief review, it seems that this comparison stems from the fact that both employ the use of black humor.
'The Catcher in the Rye' is probably the best comparison of the three: immature, unreliable first person narrator who struggles to self-actualize and generally oozes 'doomer' energy wanders around unhappily and learns very little. That being said, I loathe 'The Catcher in the Rye,' so I wouldn't place 'Grendel' on the same shelf in any case.
A more fruitful comparison is to 'Lolita.'
Holdan Caulfield, for all that he's a miserable melt, is not the villain of his story. True, he may make some questionable decisions, but he never sets out to hurt anyone, and indeed, we know that he, in his way, wanted to believe the world could be better than it was. In other words, everything is framed as: good person slowly becomes disillusioned as bad things happen around him. At its core, it's a story of how depression colors the sufferer's worldview in muddy, muted shades so that anything positive fades away, and everything negative is magnified one-hundred fold.
That is not at all what is happening in 'Grendel.'
As in 'Lolita,' wherein our narrator (Humbert Humbert) is also our villain, so too is Grendel a 'bad guy.' Like, canonically: Grendel is the first monster Beowulf defeats in the epic poem.
Also, like Humbert Humbert, Grendel is an incredibly charming character. Certainly, he's not as sophisticated, and in fact is incredibly child-like ("I make a face, uplift a defiant middle finger, and give an obscene little kick. The sky ignores me, forever unimpressed." p.2). Nevertheless, something in that absurd immaturity renders Grendel harmless, gets the reader to drop their guard (for God's sake, at one point, he reaches for a vine, realizes it's a snake, gets startled, and falls over). You like him, he's pitiable, perhaps even relatable. He's clumsy, he cries out for his mother when he gets hurt, he bleeds, he feels pain.
He also regularly goes out and murders people.
To be fair, we don't really know these people, and through Grendel's eyes we know that the Thanes are a relative monolith who go around killing each other anyway. So is Grendel killing and eating them really any different from when he or the Thanes kill and eat a sheep? Meh.
Maybe if Grendel weren't so witty we'd feel differently, but come on; this is the same Grendel who described Unferth's nose as a "black, deformed potato" (p.140). The same Grendel who got stuck dangling upside down from a tree after getting chased by a bull. Sure, he kills some Thanes from time to time, but no one's perfect.
I find myself always coming back to the word 'charming' to describe characters like Humbert Humbert, like Grendel, because their very brand of it evokes for me comparison to bewitchment; the lulling into a state of complacency by a dangerous entity. Think: Ka's song 'Trust in Me' from Disney's 'Junglebook.'
"Trust in me, just in me."
It's creepy stuff.
Now, 'Lolita' is pretty much universally accepted in literary circles as Very Good. The well-placed references, the technical writing skill that went into it, the disturbing but impressively immersive characterization of Humbert Humbert.
Far be it from me to contradict any of that, and indeed I agree with it all. And most of all, I think 'Lolita' is Very Good because it suceeds in giving us a protagonist so charming, so convincing, that even going into the reading experience knowing that he's a pedophile who grooms and rapes a young girl, you still find yourself struggling to reconcile that that incredibly bad guy is the same character you've come to sympathize with. And that's what makes it not only Very Good, but also Incredibly Scary.
'Grendel' hits very similar notes. But instead of Grendel charming us through his intellect and inner torment as Humbert Humbert does, he charms us through his apparent harmlessness (he is often the butt of his own observations, and often relays self-depreciating anecdotes)...and also his inner turmoil--in that sense both characters are similar.
As in 'Lolita,' in 'Grendel,' author John Gardner forces the reader to feel that jolt as the spell is broken and we feel horror at having been so manipulated. In 'Lolita,' Humbert Humbert comes to the realization at the very end of the novel that he was the bad guy, actually.
Granted, as we can see, despite calling himself a monster,Humbert Humbert still sees himself as somewhat of a tragic figure.
Grendel as well sees himself as tragic figure. He calls himself 'wretched' and talks constantly of "the unfairness of everything" (p.3)
Towards the midpoint of the novella, he meets with a dragon (the very same dragon who would later meet his match in Beowulf). The dragon is a great character as well. Imagine the Mad Hatter but if he was the size of a building and had the capacity to breathe fire. The dragon is crazy, is what I'm getting at, and teeters back and forth between patting Grendel on the head, and saying things like "fiddlesticks," to rearing up and shooting out jets of flame and showing his fangs at the slightest provocation.
--The dragon smiled. Horrible, debauched, mouth limp and cracked, loose against the teeth like an ancient dog's. "Now you know how they feel when they see you, eh?" (p.50) --
The dragon pontificates (rather around his own rambling philosophical musings) about what place in the world such monsters as they occupy. Ultimately, he convinces Grendel that fate is sealed;
Later on, Grendel uses this rather apathetic take on destiny to justify his own treatment of the Thanes:
Thereafter, he ceases to feel sorry for himself, and the charm he placed on us, the reader, begins to wear off as his decision to double down on his own wickedness becomes impossible to gloss over with jokes.
The jolt that breaks the charm completely comes when Grendel decides to enter Hrothgar's hall and murder the Queen (with whom he himself has become somewhat infatuated). Normally, his raids are painted in absurd terms; lifting up screaming Thanes by their feet, or snapping their necks with complete uninterest and usually accompanied by some clever little observation. But this time, that veneer is stripped back, and we're left with the horrific details of him yanking the queen out of bed, and announcing to us what he wants to do to her:
"I decided to kill her. I firmly committed myself to killing her, slowly, horribly. I would begin by holding her over the fire and cooking the ugly hole between her legs. I laughed harder at that." (p.94).
By this point, he has embraced his 'fate' as the villain of his own story, just as Humbert Humbert does. And just like Humbert Humbert, he believes that he is a victim of fate; they do evil because they never had any other choice.
Debatable.
Certainly Gardner leaves this open-ended. True, the dragon, who claims to know everything, tells Grendel that he exists to live in opposition to humans, and Grendel thinks to himself: "He could lie. He was evil enough." to which the dragon cackles and replies: "You'll never know" (p.61).
At its heart, what makes 'Grendel' so compelling is not the apathy and nihilism dripping off every letter on every page, but the finesse with which Gardner sinks his readers deeper and deeper into the psyche of a creature who claims to want to be 'good' but believes that he is intrinsically incompatable with goodness, and that he should be pitied for it. And we do, until the bewitchment is broken. Or maybe it isn't. Maybe the scariest part is knowing how many people will read 'Grendel' and believe it all.
Was Grendel a 'softboi' actually? No. No, he was not.
There are so many lenses 'Grendel' could be analyzed though that this just barely scratches the surface.
For instance, there's a hefty thread throughout about the roles of religion and art in society:
Another point of analysis could certainly be the interplay between the existance of heroes and monsters. In quite possibly my favorite plot thread (in terms of entertainment value), Unferth makes it down to Grendel's lair and confronts him even though he knows Grendel could easily kill him. Grendel muses to himself:
And then he just...refuses to kill him. Instead, he carries him back to Hrothgar's hall, sets him gently down, and walks away. Unferth becomes increasingly desperate and puts on disguises, trying to force Grendel to fight and kill him so that he can die a hero, and Grendel will not play ball, just for the satisfaction of taking away the thing that gives the lives of the Thanes meaning.
None of this even touches on the writing itself. Even if you have no particular interest in the story of Beowulf, much less the story of Grendel, some of the writing, in and out of context, is a stunning triumph of prose. Here is one of my favorite examples:
A blurb from the Christian Science Monitor on the first page of this edition lauds 'Grendel' as deserving "a place on the same shelf as Lord of the Flies, Cat's Cradle, and The Catcher in the Rye."
The similarity to 'Lord of the Flies' I can see, not because the reading experience is at all similar, but because both stories are brutally nihilistic.
I haven't read 'Cat's Cradle,' but from skimming a brief review, it seems that this comparison stems from the fact that both employ the use of black humor.
'The Catcher in the Rye' is probably the best comparison of the three: immature, unreliable first person narrator who struggles to self-actualize and generally oozes 'doomer' energy wanders around unhappily and learns very little. That being said, I loathe 'The Catcher in the Rye,' so I wouldn't place 'Grendel' on the same shelf in any case.
A more fruitful comparison is to 'Lolita.'
Holdan Caulfield, for all that he's a miserable melt, is not the villain of his story. True, he may make some questionable decisions, but he never sets out to hurt anyone, and indeed, we know that he, in his way, wanted to believe the world could be better than it was. In other words, everything is framed as: good person slowly becomes disillusioned as bad things happen around him. At its core, it's a story of how depression colors the sufferer's worldview in muddy, muted shades so that anything positive fades away, and everything negative is magnified one-hundred fold.
That is not at all what is happening in 'Grendel.'
As in 'Lolita,' wherein our narrator (Humbert Humbert) is also our villain, so too is Grendel a 'bad guy.' Like, canonically: Grendel is the first monster Beowulf defeats in the epic poem.
Also, like Humbert Humbert, Grendel is an incredibly charming character. Certainly, he's not as sophisticated, and in fact is incredibly child-like ("I make a face, uplift a defiant middle finger, and give an obscene little kick. The sky ignores me, forever unimpressed." p.2). Nevertheless, something in that absurd immaturity renders Grendel harmless, gets the reader to drop their guard (for God's sake, at one point, he reaches for a vine, realizes it's a snake, gets startled, and falls over). You like him, he's pitiable, perhaps even relatable. He's clumsy, he cries out for his mother when he gets hurt, he bleeds, he feels pain.
He also regularly goes out and murders people.
To be fair, we don't really know these people, and through Grendel's eyes we know that the Thanes are a relative monolith who go around killing each other anyway. So is Grendel killing and eating them really any different from when he or the Thanes kill and eat a sheep? Meh.
Maybe if Grendel weren't so witty we'd feel differently, but come on; this is the same Grendel who described Unferth's nose as a "black, deformed potato" (p.140). The same Grendel who got stuck dangling upside down from a tree after getting chased by a bull. Sure, he kills some Thanes from time to time, but no one's perfect.
I find myself always coming back to the word 'charming' to describe characters like Humbert Humbert, like Grendel, because their very brand of it evokes for me comparison to bewitchment; the lulling into a state of complacency by a dangerous entity. Think: Ka's song 'Trust in Me' from Disney's 'Junglebook.'
"Trust in me, just in me."
It's creepy stuff.
Now, 'Lolita' is pretty much universally accepted in literary circles as Very Good. The well-placed references, the technical writing skill that went into it, the disturbing but impressively immersive characterization of Humbert Humbert.
Far be it from me to contradict any of that, and indeed I agree with it all. And most of all, I think 'Lolita' is Very Good because it suceeds in giving us a protagonist so charming, so convincing, that even going into the reading experience knowing that he's a pedophile who grooms and rapes a young girl, you still find yourself struggling to reconcile that that incredibly bad guy is the same character you've come to sympathize with. And that's what makes it not only Very Good, but also Incredibly Scary.
'Grendel' hits very similar notes. But instead of Grendel charming us through his intellect and inner torment as Humbert Humbert does, he charms us through his apparent harmlessness (he is often the butt of his own observations, and often relays self-depreciating anecdotes)...and also his inner turmoil--in that sense both characters are similar.
As in 'Lolita,' in 'Grendel,' author John Gardner forces the reader to feel that jolt as the spell is broken and we feel horror at having been so manipulated. In 'Lolita,' Humbert Humbert comes to the realization at the very end of the novel that he was the bad guy, actually.
“I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one."
Granted, as we can see, despite calling himself a monster,Humbert Humbert still sees himself as somewhat of a tragic figure.
Grendel as well sees himself as tragic figure. He calls himself 'wretched' and talks constantly of "the unfairness of everything" (p.3)
Towards the midpoint of the novella, he meets with a dragon (the very same dragon who would later meet his match in Beowulf). The dragon is a great character as well. Imagine the Mad Hatter but if he was the size of a building and had the capacity to breathe fire. The dragon is crazy, is what I'm getting at, and teeters back and forth between patting Grendel on the head, and saying things like "fiddlesticks," to rearing up and shooting out jets of flame and showing his fangs at the slightest provocation.
--The dragon smiled. Horrible, debauched, mouth limp and cracked, loose against the teeth like an ancient dog's. "Now you know how they feel when they see you, eh?" (p.50) --
The dragon pontificates (rather around his own rambling philosophical musings) about what place in the world such monsters as they occupy. Ultimately, he convinces Grendel that fate is sealed;
My knowledge of the future does not cause the future, it merely sees it [...] and even if, say, I interfere [...] even then I do not change the future, I merely do what I saw from the beginning. [...] so much for free will. (p.54)
Later on, Grendel uses this rather apathetic take on destiny to justify his own treatment of the Thanes:
My enemies define themselves (as the dragon told me) on me. As for myself, I could finish them off in a single night […] yet I hold back. I am hardly blind to the absurdity. Form is function. What will we call the Hrothgar-Wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked? (p.79)
Thereafter, he ceases to feel sorry for himself, and the charm he placed on us, the reader, begins to wear off as his decision to double down on his own wickedness becomes impossible to gloss over with jokes.
The jolt that breaks the charm completely comes when Grendel decides to enter Hrothgar's hall and murder the Queen (with whom he himself has become somewhat infatuated). Normally, his raids are painted in absurd terms; lifting up screaming Thanes by their feet, or snapping their necks with complete uninterest and usually accompanied by some clever little observation. But this time, that veneer is stripped back, and we're left with the horrific details of him yanking the queen out of bed, and announcing to us what he wants to do to her:
"I decided to kill her. I firmly committed myself to killing her, slowly, horribly. I would begin by holding her over the fire and cooking the ugly hole between her legs. I laughed harder at that." (p.94).
By this point, he has embraced his 'fate' as the villain of his own story, just as Humbert Humbert does. And just like Humbert Humbert, he believes that he is a victim of fate; they do evil because they never had any other choice.
Debatable.
Certainly Gardner leaves this open-ended. True, the dragon, who claims to know everything, tells Grendel that he exists to live in opposition to humans, and Grendel thinks to himself: "He could lie. He was evil enough." to which the dragon cackles and replies: "You'll never know" (p.61).
At its heart, what makes 'Grendel' so compelling is not the apathy and nihilism dripping off every letter on every page, but the finesse with which Gardner sinks his readers deeper and deeper into the psyche of a creature who claims to want to be 'good' but believes that he is intrinsically incompatable with goodness, and that he should be pitied for it. And we do, until the bewitchment is broken. Or maybe it isn't. Maybe the scariest part is knowing how many people will read 'Grendel' and believe it all.
Was Grendel a 'softboi' actually? No. No, he was not.
“They were doomed, I knew, and I was glad."
* * * *
There are so many lenses 'Grendel' could be analyzed though that this just barely scratches the surface.
For instance, there's a hefty thread throughout about the roles of religion and art in society:
Theology does not thrive in the world of action and reaction, change: it grows on calm, like the scum on a stagnant pool. And it flourishes, it prospers, on decline. Only in a world that is patently being lost can a priest stir men's hearts as a poet would by maintaining that nothing is in vain.
Another point of analysis could certainly be the interplay between the existance of heroes and monsters. In quite possibly my favorite plot thread (in terms of entertainment value), Unferth makes it down to Grendel's lair and confronts him even though he knows Grendel could easily kill him. Grendel muses to himself:
Except in the life of a hero, the whole world's meaningless. The hero sees the value beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero. It kills him of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile. (p.77)
And then he just...refuses to kill him. Instead, he carries him back to Hrothgar's hall, sets him gently down, and walks away. Unferth becomes increasingly desperate and puts on disguises, trying to force Grendel to fight and kill him so that he can die a hero, and Grendel will not play ball, just for the satisfaction of taking away the thing that gives the lives of the Thanes meaning.
None of this even touches on the writing itself. Even if you have no particular interest in the story of Beowulf, much less the story of Grendel, some of the writing, in and out of context, is a stunning triumph of prose. Here is one of my favorite examples:
December, approaching the year's darkest night, and the only way of the dream is down and through it. The trees are dead. The days are an arrow in a dead man's chest. Snowlight blinds me; heatless fire; pale, apocolyptic [...] The trees are dead, and only the deepest religion can break through time and believe they'll revive. Against the snow, black cuts on a white, white hand. (p.109)
Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens
5.0
Did Charles Dickens Predict Jan 6?
The mantle of religion, assumed to cover the ugliest deformities, threatened to become the shroud of all that was good and peaceful in society.
'Barnaby Rudge' was first published in book form in 1841 and tells the fictionalized story of the very real riots that occurred in London in June of 1780. Then member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, described the events thusly:
"Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the name of reform.... A sort of national convention ... nosed parliament in the very seat of its authority; sat with a sort of superintendence over it; and little less than dictated to it, not only laws, but the very form and essence of legislature itself.
Hmmm...The idea of political extremism coming out of the woodworks to try and violently force a governing institution to submit to its whims by attacking symbols of that governing institution, ultimately failing, but causing mayhem... Sure sounds familiar, doesn't it?
But what was all of this even about?
Ostensibly, the riots were a response to a bill which proposed officially ending discrimination against Roman Catholics (specifically, the bill would allow them to join the British military without having to take a Protestant oath), the fear being that if Catholics were allowed in the military, they'd turn on Britain from within (Catholics being famously duplicitous, I guess?).
Ok, so riots over an out-group being legally integrated into the majority group.
But how did it get to that point? Surely, thousands of people didn't just wake up one morning and choose violence.
Enter Lord George Gordon, president of the Protestant Association. In the year leading up to the 'riots of '80', Gordon had successfully prevented the 'Papist's Act' from coming into effect in Scotland, and high (I assume) off of this success, he moseyed over to England, met several times with King George (yes, that King George), but failed to get the King to take his side re: the whole 'Catholics are dangerous, actually, and should not in fact be allowed to enjoy the same social privileges as decent Protestant folk' thing.
He's very loud about this, and stirs up a lot of support for protesting the bill, and this all comes to a head when he calls a meeting of the Protestant Association, puts together a petition to stop the bill from passing, and then, get this, over 50,000 of hisfollowers supporters march on the House of Commons and try to break in, physically threaten the members of the House of Lords as they arrive including vandalizing their carriages, and then riot and loot for another seven days, attack Newgate Prison and the Bank of England, destroy a number of chapels, and carried on wreaking havoc until the government summoned the army to finally put a stop to it.
As per a Wikipedia article on the subject:
The just line by line comparisons of the Gordon Riots to Jan 6 are, on their own, pretty astonishing, but no, that doesn't make Charles Dickens a prophet, not least because the Gordon Riots happened a good sixty years before he was writing about them.
What does feel prophetic, however, or at the very least incredibly predictive, is the way that in 'Barnaby Rudge' the riots come about. The answer, in 600 pages, is: slowly but surely.
Though 'Barnaby Rudge' seems to fly under the radar compared to many of Dickens's other works, I found it to be supremely insightful.
Here, Dickens clearly outlines how extremist movements gain traction, and which types of people swell their ranks.
How exactly does a mob form, and whose fault is it when that mob inevitably gets violent? Who gets punished, and who gets away with it?
Because this is fiction, Dickens is able to lay out the layers of the onion while still giving us good, interpersonal drama.
In the center of it all, we have a 'pied piper' type individual. Charismatic and alarmist, they fear monger about something vague ('the Catholics are going to...do bad stuff...probably. Maybe. Whatever, they suck.') and then tie it to something concrete (the Papist's Act) with enough conviction that the validity of the claim starts to trickle down to the general populace. The idea is that if this one specific threat can be dealt with, the vague threat will also be brought to heel. This central figure may even believe what they're spouting. Lord George Gordon seems to have.
We have the 'true believers' who follow the pied piper because they become convinced he's right, either due to some pre-existing bias (this seems to have been the case with Mrs. Varden) or because, even if they don't understand the specifics, the pied piper seems like a trustworthy guy, so he must be right about...whatever the thing is (this is the group Barnaby falls into). Some, like Barnaby, lack the critical thinking necessary to be easily 'deprogrammed' when things turn nasty. Others, like Mrs. Varden, don't realize they're tacitly endorsing something malevolent, and are more surprised than anyone when it blows up.
Next are the ones who belong to some type of out-group or disenfranchised underclass--just not the one currently being thrown under the bus. These people may or may not believe what the pied piper is piping about, but that's less important than getting the chance to belong to the in-group. This is where characters like Hugh and Simon Tappertit fit in. But for the sudden brotherhood and elevated (sort of) social status granted them by joining up with Lord Gordo, they're outcasts: an illiterate gopher for the local pub and a locksmith's apprentice respectively.
But these two, though in the same category, are still representatives of two different types.
Let's start with Mr. Tappertit:
Says Tappertit:
It's the Simon Tappertits of the world that have always been, to me, the saddest victims of reactionary movements. Online, such people are often branded as having 'main character syndrome'; the idea being that such a person lives an ordinary to lackluster life, but believes that it shouldn’t be that way; that fabulous wealth and success and herodom are being kept from them by an outside force (this force is often personified as the ominous 'them').
Though it's easy when you meet one of these guys to have a chuckle at their expense because of how pathetic such delusions of stolen grandeur are, they are onto something, even if they got that 'something' wrong, or bury it under a bunch of puffed-up nonsense.
You'll notice that in his little speech, Tappertit namedrops a couple of things that all relate back to his rage at being seen as some nebbish little nobody, under someone else's thumb. That has nothing to do with the Catholics, or any group of people; it's a systemic issue he's actually talking about. Being a 'prentice, he really didn't have agency over his life and was at the mercy of the whims of whoever he was apprenticed to, and that does suck and reek of social injustice.
Returning to the Wikipedia article for the real Gordon Riots, it is noted that the rioters represented, much like the Jan 6 insurrectionists, a wide range of (sometimes overlapping, sometimes not) grievances that, again, were rarely aimed at people, and mostly aimed at systems (economic, political, etc.).
The thing about systems, though, is that they're slippery, invisible, intangible, and hopelessly complex, whereas The Catholics or The Democrats (or, to be super concrete: Mr. Haredale, whose house is looted and burned down, or Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was the target of a failed kidnapping plot) are people, and people are easy to hate, and can be easily dealt with. And if these people, who already feel malcontent and frustrated, get told by someone with authority that there's someone they can blame for all of their feelings of struggle, of inadequacy and stunted success it can be mighty tempting to conformation bias their way into joining a reactionary movement.
Suddenly, instead of being just a poor 'prentice who gets bossed around, you get to be the "healer of the wounds of this unhappy country" -- you get to be the hero you always knew you were meant to be.
However, you're also the one most likely to take the fall on the off-chance that the revolution doesn't work out. And well, that's pretty much what happens to everyone in this category in Dicken's novelization.
Next up, we have what nowadays would be classified as 'black-pilled' individuals; people who have donned the mantal of some questionable 'isms', but most importantly, nihilism. Enter Hugh.
Hugh is given the most tragic backstory in the novel. He's (as far as he knows) orphaned after his mother is hanged for stealing, gets raised literally in a barn, gets bossed around a lot by his employer, and represents the absolute lowest of the low of society, lacking all prospects of upward social mobility, and seemingly without a friend in the world. And he really leans into this image of himself. He develops a brutish and violent nature that he unleashes whenever the opportunity arises. And what better excuse for getting back at a society that summarily rejected you than by destroying it with your bare hands? What does it matter to Hugh what the pretext is; he just wants to kick ass and feel a sense of belonging, something immediately taken advantage of by the next group of people that need talking about.
"No Popery, brother!" cried the hangman [Dennis].
"No property, brother!" responded Hugh.
"Popery, Popery," said the secretary with his usual mildness.
"It's all the same!" cried Dennis. "[...] Down with everybody, down with everything! Hurrah for the Protestant religion!" (p.297)
Here, Dennis has illustrated nicely that while there were those with genuine grievances that got horribly disfigured along the way, there were also those who latched onto the cause because for one reason or another it was advantageous for them to do so. In Dennis the hangman's case, he was looking for permission to sow chaos and hurt people (the state-sanctioned executions not being enough to satiate his thirst for the kill). But you know what they say about those that live by the sword...
Also in this category we hit upon the man of the hour: Sir John Chester. Chester is easily the most entertaining character in the tale (aside from the talking raven, Grip, of course). He's deliciously villainous with the air about him of a classic Disney baddie (think Jafar from Aladdin or Scar from The Lion King). He's dripping in class and affectation, and full of dramatic quips worthy of Oscar Wilde.
And that's kind of the paradox of such villains: you enjoy them so much that no matter how evil, how poisonous they might be, you kind of like them.
A lot of early Trump supporters would say as much; 'yeah, the guy's not very PC, and he says some off-color stuff, but he's funny, he's real; I'd have a beer with him.'
There's the other side to this too, for those who see beyond the charm and charisma to the stinger, the knife waiting to be plunged into an unsuspecting back, but rather than be repelled by it, they flock to these people with a scared shrug of 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.'
Dickens explains the phenomenon well: "He [Chester] was one of those who are received and cherished in society (as the phrase is) by scores who individually would shrink from and be repelled by the object of their lavish regard." (p.192)
In 'Barnaby Rudge', John Chester has big plans, and they don't involve his son marrying the daughter of his social rival. Conveniently, his social rival is a Catholic and Catholics in 1780 just so happen to be on the social chopping block, so what does he do? He throws his not inconsiderable influence behind the anti-Catholic movement and plots to have his rival's daughter kidnapped and probably raped just to get them both out of the way once and for all -- all from a safe distance, of course.
"Men of your capacity plot in secret and safety, and leave exposed posts to the duller wits." (p.337) Too right, Haredale, too right.
So there we have the broad strokes of the type groupings that, when brought together under just the right circumstances, when shaken and stirred in just the right way, can result in a folie a deux-esque explosion of violence and destruction perpetrated almost entirely by people who think of themselves as the 'good guy with a gun', and urged on by people who, if that civil unrest gets quashed, can raise their palms and declare: 'Riot? Me? I didn't do anything.'
In the case of January 6, things played out much in this fashion, to the exasperation of many who, while they might agree that the people who physically broke into the Capitol building probably deserved a time out, would have liked to have seen the ones in positions of power who fanned the flames of 'The Big Lie' get their comeuppance too.
In the real Gordon Riots, Lord George Gordon was initially arrested for high treason, but ultimately acquitted. In Dickens's fictionalized version, the punishments doled out by officials are stratified by social class: the lower the social class, the higher the price paid for participating in the riots. That is to say, things don't end well for the Hughs of the movement, marginally better for the Tappertits, and, officially, the Chesters get to just walk away.
It's a pretty bleak, but unfortunately realistic depiction of the justice system (one of those institutions we were talking about before) and how it is harshest on those already downtrodden before turning to mayhem and crime.
So did Dickens predict Jan 6? No. But he did lay out a handy road map for how to spot a brewing reactionary movement, and how to identify those most likely to get sucked into one.
Tackling the genesis and evolution of a reactionary movement was a dense undertaking, even for Dickens, and it's amazing how well he managed to capture something so complex while remaining supremely readable. The way he let things simmer in the background for the first several hundred pages to focus on the interpersonal drama before bringing it roaring to the forefront and producing some of the most horrific scenes in anything of his I've read was a masterclass in plotting that culminates in a mob that "never reasoned or thought at all, but were stimulated by their own headlong passion, by poverty, by ignorance, by the love of mischief, and the hope of plunder." (p.410)
Truly phenomenal stuff.
It's true that the plot takes a while to fully kick in, and much of the first several hundred pages comprise small slice-of-life style scenes and seemingly petty drama including a double romance, one Romeo and Juliet-style, the other more Lady and the Tramp. There are family squabbles, seething servants, the ever-joyous, titular Barnaby Rudge and his delightful raven companion, and old men telling yarns in front of the Maypole fire. But underneath the mundanity, sinister things are lurking, and this seemingly sleepy community is about to get rocked, and we the reader with it.
So kick your shoes off, sit in your favorite reading chair, and give Dicken's most neglectd work a chance, because unlike the claim made in a weirdly hostile introduction that "the details [of the novel] are of the sort that only a certified public accountant is likely to find interesting" (p.3), this is a rich and complex novel wrapped in a quintessentially Dickensian bow.
Justice for "Barnaby Rudge"!
'Barnaby Rudge' was first published in book form in 1841 and tells the fictionalized story of the very real riots that occurred in London in June of 1780. Then member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, described the events thusly:
"Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the name of reform.... A sort of national convention ... nosed parliament in the very seat of its authority; sat with a sort of superintendence over it; and little less than dictated to it, not only laws, but the very form and essence of legislature itself.
Hmmm...The idea of political extremism coming out of the woodworks to try and violently force a governing institution to submit to its whims by attacking symbols of that governing institution, ultimately failing, but causing mayhem... Sure sounds familiar, doesn't it?
But what was all of this even about?
Ostensibly, the riots were a response to a bill which proposed officially ending discrimination against Roman Catholics (specifically, the bill would allow them to join the British military without having to take a Protestant oath), the fear being that if Catholics were allowed in the military, they'd turn on Britain from within (Catholics being famously duplicitous, I guess?).
Ok, so riots over an out-group being legally integrated into the majority group.
But how did it get to that point? Surely, thousands of people didn't just wake up one morning and choose violence.
Enter Lord George Gordon, president of the Protestant Association. In the year leading up to the 'riots of '80', Gordon had successfully prevented the 'Papist's Act' from coming into effect in Scotland, and high (I assume) off of this success, he moseyed over to England, met several times with King George (yes, that King George), but failed to get the King to take his side re: the whole 'Catholics are dangerous, actually, and should not in fact be allowed to enjoy the same social privileges as decent Protestant folk' thing.
He's very loud about this, and stirs up a lot of support for protesting the bill, and this all comes to a head when he calls a meeting of the Protestant Association, puts together a petition to stop the bill from passing, and then, get this, over 50,000 of his
As per a Wikipedia article on the subject:
Despite being aware of the possibility of trouble, the authorities had failed to take steps to prevent violence breaking out. [...] Those that were present in the House of Commons were not strong enough to take on the angry mob. Eventually a detachment of soldiers was summoned, and they dispersed the crowd without violence. Inside the House of Commons, the petition was overwhelmingly dismissed by a vote of 192 to 6.
The just line by line comparisons of the Gordon Riots to Jan 6 are, on their own, pretty astonishing, but no, that doesn't make Charles Dickens a prophet, not least because the Gordon Riots happened a good sixty years before he was writing about them.
What does feel prophetic, however, or at the very least incredibly predictive, is the way that in 'Barnaby Rudge' the riots come about. The answer, in 600 pages, is: slowly but surely.
Though 'Barnaby Rudge' seems to fly under the radar compared to many of Dickens's other works, I found it to be supremely insightful.
Here, Dickens clearly outlines how extremist movements gain traction, and which types of people swell their ranks.
How exactly does a mob form, and whose fault is it when that mob inevitably gets violent? Who gets punished, and who gets away with it?
Because this is fiction, Dickens is able to lay out the layers of the onion while still giving us good, interpersonal drama.
In the center of it all, we have a 'pied piper' type individual. Charismatic and alarmist, they fear monger about something vague ('the Catholics are going to...do bad stuff...probably. Maybe. Whatever, they suck.') and then tie it to something concrete (the Papist's Act) with enough conviction that the validity of the claim starts to trickle down to the general populace. The idea is that if this one specific threat can be dealt with, the vague threat will also be brought to heel. This central figure may even believe what they're spouting. Lord George Gordon seems to have.
We have the 'true believers' who follow the pied piper because they become convinced he's right, either due to some pre-existing bias (this seems to have been the case with Mrs. Varden) or because, even if they don't understand the specifics, the pied piper seems like a trustworthy guy, so he must be right about...whatever the thing is (this is the group Barnaby falls into). Some, like Barnaby, lack the critical thinking necessary to be easily 'deprogrammed' when things turn nasty. Others, like Mrs. Varden, don't realize they're tacitly endorsing something malevolent, and are more surprised than anyone when it blows up.
Now Mrs. Varden [...] was impressed by a secret misgiving that she had done wrong; that she had, to the utmost of her small means, aided and abetted the growth of disturbances, the end of which it was impossible to foresee; that she had led remotely to the scene which had just passed. (p.401)
Next are the ones who belong to some type of out-group or disenfranchised underclass--just not the one currently being thrown under the bus. These people may or may not believe what the pied piper is piping about, but that's less important than getting the chance to belong to the in-group. This is where characters like Hugh and Simon Tappertit fit in. But for the sudden brotherhood and elevated (sort of) social status granted them by joining up with Lord Gordo, they're outcasts: an illiterate gopher for the local pub and a locksmith's apprentice respectively.
But these two, though in the same category, are still representatives of two different types.
Let's start with Mr. Tappertit:
Says Tappertit:
You meet in me not a 'prentice, not a workman, not a slave, not the victim of your father's tyrannical behavior, but the leader of a great people, the captain of a noble band [...] You behold in me, not a private individual, but a public character; not a mender of locks, but a healer of the wounds of this unhappy country. (p.461)
It's the Simon Tappertits of the world that have always been, to me, the saddest victims of reactionary movements. Online, such people are often branded as having 'main character syndrome'; the idea being that such a person lives an ordinary to lackluster life, but believes that it shouldn’t be that way; that fabulous wealth and success and herodom are being kept from them by an outside force (this force is often personified as the ominous 'them').
Though it's easy when you meet one of these guys to have a chuckle at their expense because of how pathetic such delusions of stolen grandeur are, they are onto something, even if they got that 'something' wrong, or bury it under a bunch of puffed-up nonsense.
You'll notice that in his little speech, Tappertit namedrops a couple of things that all relate back to his rage at being seen as some nebbish little nobody, under someone else's thumb. That has nothing to do with the Catholics, or any group of people; it's a systemic issue he's actually talking about. Being a 'prentice, he really didn't have agency over his life and was at the mercy of the whims of whoever he was apprenticed to, and that does suck and reek of social injustice.
Returning to the Wikipedia article for the real Gordon Riots, it is noted that the rioters represented, much like the Jan 6 insurrectionists, a wide range of (sometimes overlapping, sometimes not) grievances that, again, were rarely aimed at people, and mostly aimed at systems (economic, political, etc.).
The thing about systems, though, is that they're slippery, invisible, intangible, and hopelessly complex, whereas The Catholics or The Democrats (or, to be super concrete: Mr. Haredale, whose house is looted and burned down, or Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was the target of a failed kidnapping plot) are people, and people are easy to hate, and can be easily dealt with. And if these people, who already feel malcontent and frustrated, get told by someone with authority that there's someone they can blame for all of their feelings of struggle, of inadequacy and stunted success it can be mighty tempting to conformation bias their way into joining a reactionary movement.
Suddenly, instead of being just a poor 'prentice who gets bossed around, you get to be the "healer of the wounds of this unhappy country" -- you get to be the hero you always knew you were meant to be.
However, you're also the one most likely to take the fall on the off-chance that the revolution doesn't work out. And well, that's pretty much what happens to everyone in this category in Dicken's novelization.
Next up, we have what nowadays would be classified as 'black-pilled' individuals; people who have donned the mantal of some questionable 'isms', but most importantly, nihilism. Enter Hugh.
Hugh is given the most tragic backstory in the novel. He's (as far as he knows) orphaned after his mother is hanged for stealing, gets raised literally in a barn, gets bossed around a lot by his employer, and represents the absolute lowest of the low of society, lacking all prospects of upward social mobility, and seemingly without a friend in the world. And he really leans into this image of himself. He develops a brutish and violent nature that he unleashes whenever the opportunity arises. And what better excuse for getting back at a society that summarily rejected you than by destroying it with your bare hands? What does it matter to Hugh what the pretext is; he just wants to kick ass and feel a sense of belonging, something immediately taken advantage of by the next group of people that need talking about.
"No Popery, brother!" cried the hangman [Dennis].
"No property, brother!" responded Hugh.
"Popery, Popery," said the secretary with his usual mildness.
"It's all the same!" cried Dennis. "[...] Down with everybody, down with everything! Hurrah for the Protestant religion!" (p.297)
Here, Dennis has illustrated nicely that while there were those with genuine grievances that got horribly disfigured along the way, there were also those who latched onto the cause because for one reason or another it was advantageous for them to do so. In Dennis the hangman's case, he was looking for permission to sow chaos and hurt people (the state-sanctioned executions not being enough to satiate his thirst for the kill). But you know what they say about those that live by the sword...
Also in this category we hit upon the man of the hour: Sir John Chester. Chester is easily the most entertaining character in the tale (aside from the talking raven, Grip, of course). He's deliciously villainous with the air about him of a classic Disney baddie (think Jafar from Aladdin or Scar from The Lion King). He's dripping in class and affectation, and full of dramatic quips worthy of Oscar Wilde.
"Ah, father!" cried his son, "if--"
"My good fellow," interposed the parent hastily, as he set down his glass and raised his eyebrows with a startled and horrified expression, "for Heaven's sake don't call me by that obsolete and ancient name. Have some regard for delicacy. Am I gray, or wrinkled, do I go on crutches, have I lost my teeth, that you adopt such a mode of address? Good god, how very course!" (p.252)
And that's kind of the paradox of such villains: you enjoy them so much that no matter how evil, how poisonous they might be, you kind of like them.
A lot of early Trump supporters would say as much; 'yeah, the guy's not very PC, and he says some off-color stuff, but he's funny, he's real; I'd have a beer with him.'
There's the other side to this too, for those who see beyond the charm and charisma to the stinger, the knife waiting to be plunged into an unsuspecting back, but rather than be repelled by it, they flock to these people with a scared shrug of 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.'
Dickens explains the phenomenon well: "He [Chester] was one of those who are received and cherished in society (as the phrase is) by scores who individually would shrink from and be repelled by the object of their lavish regard." (p.192)
In 'Barnaby Rudge', John Chester has big plans, and they don't involve his son marrying the daughter of his social rival. Conveniently, his social rival is a Catholic and Catholics in 1780 just so happen to be on the social chopping block, so what does he do? He throws his not inconsiderable influence behind the anti-Catholic movement and plots to have his rival's daughter kidnapped and probably raped just to get them both out of the way once and for all -- all from a safe distance, of course.
"Men of your capacity plot in secret and safety, and leave exposed posts to the duller wits." (p.337) Too right, Haredale, too right.
So there we have the broad strokes of the type groupings that, when brought together under just the right circumstances, when shaken and stirred in just the right way, can result in a folie a deux-esque explosion of violence and destruction perpetrated almost entirely by people who think of themselves as the 'good guy with a gun', and urged on by people who, if that civil unrest gets quashed, can raise their palms and declare: 'Riot? Me? I didn't do anything.'
In the case of January 6, things played out much in this fashion, to the exasperation of many who, while they might agree that the people who physically broke into the Capitol building probably deserved a time out, would have liked to have seen the ones in positions of power who fanned the flames of 'The Big Lie' get their comeuppance too.
In the real Gordon Riots, Lord George Gordon was initially arrested for high treason, but ultimately acquitted. In Dickens's fictionalized version, the punishments doled out by officials are stratified by social class: the lower the social class, the higher the price paid for participating in the riots. That is to say, things don't end well for the Hughs of the movement, marginally better for the Tappertits, and, officially, the Chesters get to just walk away.
It's a pretty bleak, but unfortunately realistic depiction of the justice system (one of those institutions we were talking about before) and how it is harshest on those already downtrodden before turning to mayhem and crime.
So did Dickens predict Jan 6? No. But he did lay out a handy road map for how to spot a brewing reactionary movement, and how to identify those most likely to get sucked into one.
Tackling the genesis and evolution of a reactionary movement was a dense undertaking, even for Dickens, and it's amazing how well he managed to capture something so complex while remaining supremely readable. The way he let things simmer in the background for the first several hundred pages to focus on the interpersonal drama before bringing it roaring to the forefront and producing some of the most horrific scenes in anything of his I've read was a masterclass in plotting that culminates in a mob that "never reasoned or thought at all, but were stimulated by their own headlong passion, by poverty, by ignorance, by the love of mischief, and the hope of plunder." (p.410)
Truly phenomenal stuff.
It's true that the plot takes a while to fully kick in, and much of the first several hundred pages comprise small slice-of-life style scenes and seemingly petty drama including a double romance, one Romeo and Juliet-style, the other more Lady and the Tramp. There are family squabbles, seething servants, the ever-joyous, titular Barnaby Rudge and his delightful raven companion, and old men telling yarns in front of the Maypole fire. But underneath the mundanity, sinister things are lurking, and this seemingly sleepy community is about to get rocked, and we the reader with it.
So kick your shoes off, sit in your favorite reading chair, and give Dicken's most neglectd work a chance, because unlike the claim made in a weirdly hostile introduction that "the details [of the novel] are of the sort that only a certified public accountant is likely to find interesting" (p.3), this is a rich and complex novel wrapped in a quintessentially Dickensian bow.
Justice for "Barnaby Rudge"!
How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall
5.0
‘Do not be afraid to paint the reverse side of the sunflower’
I'm fairly good at picking books that I know I'll at least like, even if they aren't books I'd necessarily think about again. As a result, my general ratings for books tend to hover between 3/5 and the ocassional 4/5.
For me, a 5 star book isn't necessarily a book where I loved the characters or a book that I found especially exciting. A 5 star book for me is a book that even while I'm in the middle of it, I know I'll be reading again. A 5 star book is one that makes me feel like reading it again will reveal something I missed but know is there, or, more rarely, that I understood completely the first time but can't stop thinking about.
'How to Paint a Dead Man' falls into the former category. By about the fifty page mark, I knew I needed my own copy because I'd be coming back to it.
As all the best books are, 'How to Paint a Dead Man' is very hard to summarize. It's a nesting doll of four stories, each told from a different point of view: first person, third person limited, third person omniscient, and even second person. At first I rolled my eyes a little; it seemed like a gimmick. And some readers may well feel that indeed it is-- just a means for author Sarah Hall to show off her writing skills. But given the incredibly tight reveal of information, and the care taken in developing each story, each character, I'm not convinced it wasn't an incredibly deliberate choice. That Hall very carefully crafted each narrative around each of the POV styles, that she really thought about which POV would be best suited to each story.
At least on this read-through I wasn't able to come to a conclusion as to what exactly the significance of this or that character having this or that POV was, but it's something I'll be thinking about upon re-read.
Thematically, 'How to Paint a Dead Man' is very much an exploration of loss and grief. A lot of death.
Though each character is fully fleshed out, there is a clear division between the active and passive characters: the passive characters are designed to be overall more likeable and 'pure' whereas the active characters make many choices that, while some are understandable, are much easier to criticize and judge. These two roles are equally split with the oldest and youngest characters being passive, and the middle-aged characters being active. It's also curious that the two 'pure' characters are Italian (a teacher and student), and the two morally grey characters are British (a father and daughter).
These are things I'd like to get into more the next time I read the novel, but the exploration of loss and grief are what stood out to me on the surface level this time.
Hall seems to want to show us that while loss is a painful, traumatic experience, it's still possible to be optimistic about our capacity to survive it, even unto our own further tragedies and eventually, our own deaths.
Suzi and Giorgio, one grieving the death of her twin brother and one dying of cancer, both wrestle and make peace with their grief.
For much of the novel, Suzi drowns her pain at losing her beloved twin in a self-destructive and all-consuming affair with a colleague. And every moment not spent in his embrace is spent on mourning, on crying, on reminiscing in ways that leave her incapable of moving on. But when in the end she has a 'coming to Jesus moment' as a result of the affair, she has two important realizations:
She realizes that in order to make peace with death and dying, she might need to be more like her brother was and focus on living. In the end, this seems to set her free.
Giorgio tackles the life/death dichotemy from the other side. He, who is dying, encourages one of his students, saying: "‘Do not be afraid to paint the reverse side of the sunflower,’” P.73. Unlike Suzi, who must learn that it is ok to live on after someone close to you dies, Giorgio ruminates on what it means to be the one to die. He has to accept a series of losses on that journey as his health and his strength fail him, and he has to put his affairs in order. He talks often of a favorite dog he had; lame in both of his back legs but nonetheless, according to Giorgio, an incredibly loving, faithful companion. This dog had died years before Giorgio learned of his terminal cancer, but he seems to consider the dog a representation of sorts of how we go on and do what we can to be happy and content until the end. Though by his final chapter, Giorgio barely has the strength to get out of bed and is increasingly in pain, he comments: "the view from the veranda is marvellous, and I linger." (p.107)
Hall seems to be saying with these two narratives that we ought to remember that life and death are two sides of the same coin, and that as long as one has lived fully, death shouldn't scare us (if we are the dying) and shouldn't paralyze us (if we are the survivors), though in both cases we may have some regrets. But these regrets oughtn't be the sum of our lives (or deaths).
It's a message that isn't unique by any means to this novel, but it is presented here in such a beautiful way that it hardly feels redundant, and given that death and loss are still things that frighten most people (they certainly frighten me), tackling this subject is by no means beating a dead horse.
That being said, in focusing on the philosophical side of death and dying, Hall steps slightly outside the realism found in much of the rest of the novel in Giorgio's chapters. Because we are reading his words as written in his journal, she can conveniently side-step the suffering that so often accompanies dying by having her character choose not to dwell on this. I think this in some ways does a disservice to her message.
While the aforementioned narratives contain a lot of optimism about the capacity of people to overcome the fear and trauma around death, Hall is careful to complicate the simplistic take that accepting loss will make everything better. We leave Suzy on a high philosophical note, but her life choices as she's prossessing her grief have consequences.
Moreover, we have the tragic story of Giorgio's student, Annette, who, after losing her sight to illness as a teenager, rises to the challenges of her blindness despite her mother's incredibly grating certainty that her daughter's life is now both ruined and meaningless. Annette accepts the loss of her sight with grace. Rather than complaining, she relishes the memories she has of being able to see, but chooses not to think of not being able to create more of those memories as a tragedy. Instead, she learns to 'see' the world through touch and continues to assist in her family's flower-selling business with the help of her uncle.
Hall could have left the story here, but she chooses to instead highlight the very real ways in which bad faith actors and people with nefarious intentions can take advantage of situations like Annette's. In a better world, she would be able to exist as a blind person without the real handicap of other people being able to use that condition to take advantage of and hurt her. We rejoice with her at her discovery that the people to whom she sells flowers don't short-change her, but as a reader it's heartbreaking to discover alongside her that optimism and thinking the best of people doesn't keep you safe.
The cruel irony of Annette's ultimate fate is that for the entire narrative her mother insisted that she be kept at home out of a religously-induced mania about the dangers of the outside world and how the Devil would be after her poor, defenceless daughter. Some of that fear did seep into Annette, though not to the degree that she was willing to give up her independence. And unfortunately, when the worst happens, her mother's superstition and religious conservatism leave Annette without the tools or wherewithal to defend herself.
Importantly, nowhere in the text does Hall seem to suggest that what happens to her is in any way Annette's fault or in some way a punishment for her naivety. It's made very clear that the blame for bad actions lies with the people who commit them.
The harsh lesson here seems to be: live fully despite hardship, but stay vigilant to how our hardships can make us vulnerable.
And also, let's please heed the wise words of Shakespeare: 'hell is empty and all the devils are here.'
As a person who lives, will experience loss, and will die, stories like 'How to Paint a Dead Man' are important. It is trite but it is true that these are things every person must in some manner come to terms with, and Hall does a great job sparking a dialogue on how to do that.
This is a book that is a joy to read. The mundane, and even the most horrific, unpleasant topics become these gorgeous butterflies of prose under Sarah Hall's pen.
To cite a few examples that run the spectrum:
"The writer might opt to be nocturnal — he with his dark pupils and his head full of owls.” –p.27
"The artistic efforts of men are indicative of our human openness, our inquisitiveness, I think. When we attempt to evaluate, or to obviate, we seldom guess correctly. Our minds are born nervous, in darkness. We are subterranean beings. We must learn by the senses and continue to be instinctual, to use the antennae. […] We must look at the reality, and then look again at the illusion. We must see beyond. For what shakes the eye but the invisible?” p. 107
"It came out of nowhere, the rage. Suddenly you wanted to slap her so hard. You felt such anger towards her. Her apathy, her indecision, her refusal to wake, get up and reclaim her life, or once and for all shut off. Surely there was some choice she could make, you thought, some flickering pilot light in her brain, that could be turned up, that could take charge, rousing her wasted limbs? All the years of stand-by, her visitors held like hostages in this room, ransomed by the slimmest of hopes, and equal to her in their impotency. All the years of dependency and money, waiting for her second coming.” P. 75
An absolutely stunning novel. I've only managed to scratch the absolute surface with this initial analysis.
Can't wait to read it again.
I'm fairly good at picking books that I know I'll at least like, even if they aren't books I'd necessarily think about again. As a result, my general ratings for books tend to hover between 3/5 and the ocassional 4/5.
For me, a 5 star book isn't necessarily a book where I loved the characters or a book that I found especially exciting. A 5 star book for me is a book that even while I'm in the middle of it, I know I'll be reading again. A 5 star book is one that makes me feel like reading it again will reveal something I missed but know is there, or, more rarely, that I understood completely the first time but can't stop thinking about.
'How to Paint a Dead Man' falls into the former category. By about the fifty page mark, I knew I needed my own copy because I'd be coming back to it.
As all the best books are, 'How to Paint a Dead Man' is very hard to summarize. It's a nesting doll of four stories, each told from a different point of view: first person, third person limited, third person omniscient, and even second person. At first I rolled my eyes a little; it seemed like a gimmick. And some readers may well feel that indeed it is-- just a means for author Sarah Hall to show off her writing skills. But given the incredibly tight reveal of information, and the care taken in developing each story, each character, I'm not convinced it wasn't an incredibly deliberate choice. That Hall very carefully crafted each narrative around each of the POV styles, that she really thought about which POV would be best suited to each story.
At least on this read-through I wasn't able to come to a conclusion as to what exactly the significance of this or that character having this or that POV was, but it's something I'll be thinking about upon re-read.
Thematically, 'How to Paint a Dead Man' is very much an exploration of loss and grief. A lot of death.
Though each character is fully fleshed out, there is a clear division between the active and passive characters: the passive characters are designed to be overall more likeable and 'pure' whereas the active characters make many choices that, while some are understandable, are much easier to criticize and judge. These two roles are equally split with the oldest and youngest characters being passive, and the middle-aged characters being active. It's also curious that the two 'pure' characters are Italian (a teacher and student), and the two morally grey characters are British (a father and daughter).
These are things I'd like to get into more the next time I read the novel, but the exploration of loss and grief are what stood out to me on the surface level this time.
Hall seems to want to show us that while loss is a painful, traumatic experience, it's still possible to be optimistic about our capacity to survive it, even unto our own further tragedies and eventually, our own deaths.
Suzi and Giorgio, one grieving the death of her twin brother and one dying of cancer, both wrestle and make peace with their grief.
For much of the novel, Suzi drowns her pain at losing her beloved twin in a self-destructive and all-consuming affair with a colleague. And every moment not spent in his embrace is spent on mourning, on crying, on reminiscing in ways that leave her incapable of moving on. But when in the end she has a 'coming to Jesus moment' as a result of the affair, she has two important realizations:
Poor Danny, people said, why did it have to be him? Life is so cruel. He got such a raw deal. [...]No. Danny wasn’t unlucky to be killed. The world was unlucky to lose him.” P.54
“The funny thing is, you’ve been thinking so long and hard about death that you’ve lost sight of its fraternal twin, its obverse pole. This is the prerogative of grief you suppose. […] You have been so consumed that you’ve almost forgotten about the other side, the affirmation, the positive stroke. Life.” P.107
She realizes that in order to make peace with death and dying, she might need to be more like her brother was and focus on living. In the end, this seems to set her free.
Giorgio tackles the life/death dichotemy from the other side. He, who is dying, encourages one of his students, saying: "‘Do not be afraid to paint the reverse side of the sunflower,’” P.73. Unlike Suzi, who must learn that it is ok to live on after someone close to you dies, Giorgio ruminates on what it means to be the one to die. He has to accept a series of losses on that journey as his health and his strength fail him, and he has to put his affairs in order. He talks often of a favorite dog he had; lame in both of his back legs but nonetheless, according to Giorgio, an incredibly loving, faithful companion. This dog had died years before Giorgio learned of his terminal cancer, but he seems to consider the dog a representation of sorts of how we go on and do what we can to be happy and content until the end. Though by his final chapter, Giorgio barely has the strength to get out of bed and is increasingly in pain, he comments: "the view from the veranda is marvellous, and I linger." (p.107)
Hall seems to be saying with these two narratives that we ought to remember that life and death are two sides of the same coin, and that as long as one has lived fully, death shouldn't scare us (if we are the dying) and shouldn't paralyze us (if we are the survivors), though in both cases we may have some regrets. But these regrets oughtn't be the sum of our lives (or deaths).
It's a message that isn't unique by any means to this novel, but it is presented here in such a beautiful way that it hardly feels redundant, and given that death and loss are still things that frighten most people (they certainly frighten me), tackling this subject is by no means beating a dead horse.
That being said, in focusing on the philosophical side of death and dying, Hall steps slightly outside the realism found in much of the rest of the novel in Giorgio's chapters. Because we are reading his words as written in his journal, she can conveniently side-step the suffering that so often accompanies dying by having her character choose not to dwell on this. I think this in some ways does a disservice to her message.
While the aforementioned narratives contain a lot of optimism about the capacity of people to overcome the fear and trauma around death, Hall is careful to complicate the simplistic take that accepting loss will make everything better. We leave Suzy on a high philosophical note, but her life choices as she's prossessing her grief have consequences.
Moreover, we have the tragic story of Giorgio's student, Annette, who, after losing her sight to illness as a teenager, rises to the challenges of her blindness despite her mother's incredibly grating certainty that her daughter's life is now both ruined and meaningless. Annette accepts the loss of her sight with grace. Rather than complaining, she relishes the memories she has of being able to see, but chooses not to think of not being able to create more of those memories as a tragedy. Instead, she learns to 'see' the world through touch and continues to assist in her family's flower-selling business with the help of her uncle.
Hall could have left the story here, but she chooses to instead highlight the very real ways in which bad faith actors and people with nefarious intentions can take advantage of situations like Annette's. In a better world, she would be able to exist as a blind person without the real handicap of other people being able to use that condition to take advantage of and hurt her. We rejoice with her at her discovery that the people to whom she sells flowers don't short-change her, but as a reader it's heartbreaking to discover alongside her that optimism and thinking the best of people doesn't keep you safe.
The cruel irony of Annette's ultimate fate is that for the entire narrative her mother insisted that she be kept at home out of a religously-induced mania about the dangers of the outside world and how the Devil would be after her poor, defenceless daughter. Some of that fear did seep into Annette, though not to the degree that she was willing to give up her independence. And unfortunately, when the worst happens, her mother's superstition and religious conservatism leave Annette without the tools or wherewithal to defend herself.
Importantly, nowhere in the text does Hall seem to suggest that what happens to her is in any way Annette's fault or in some way a punishment for her naivety. It's made very clear that the blame for bad actions lies with the people who commit them.
The harsh lesson here seems to be: live fully despite hardship, but stay vigilant to how our hardships can make us vulnerable.
And also, let's please heed the wise words of Shakespeare: 'hell is empty and all the devils are here.'
As a person who lives, will experience loss, and will die, stories like 'How to Paint a Dead Man' are important. It is trite but it is true that these are things every person must in some manner come to terms with, and Hall does a great job sparking a dialogue on how to do that.
This is a book that is a joy to read. The mundane, and even the most horrific, unpleasant topics become these gorgeous butterflies of prose under Sarah Hall's pen.
To cite a few examples that run the spectrum:
"The writer might opt to be nocturnal — he with his dark pupils and his head full of owls.” –p.27
"The artistic efforts of men are indicative of our human openness, our inquisitiveness, I think. When we attempt to evaluate, or to obviate, we seldom guess correctly. Our minds are born nervous, in darkness. We are subterranean beings. We must learn by the senses and continue to be instinctual, to use the antennae. […] We must look at the reality, and then look again at the illusion. We must see beyond. For what shakes the eye but the invisible?” p. 107
"It came out of nowhere, the rage. Suddenly you wanted to slap her so hard. You felt such anger towards her. Her apathy, her indecision, her refusal to wake, get up and reclaim her life, or once and for all shut off. Surely there was some choice she could make, you thought, some flickering pilot light in her brain, that could be turned up, that could take charge, rousing her wasted limbs? All the years of stand-by, her visitors held like hostages in this room, ransomed by the slimmest of hopes, and equal to her in their impotency. All the years of dependency and money, waiting for her second coming.” P. 75
An absolutely stunning novel. I've only managed to scratch the absolute surface with this initial analysis.
Can't wait to read it again.