Girl Detective

The Unwritten: Orpheus in the Underground is the 8th volume in the Unwritten comic book series about a boy named Tom Taylor, whose father wrote a popular series of books starring a boy wizard named Tommy Taylor. This volume featured the return of many favorite previous characters, and satisfying redemption of one particularly nasty one. If you like graphic novels like Sandman or Lucifer or Fables, you should be reading this series.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri is being praised as her best yet, so I was hopeful for a good read after being perhaps the only person disappointed by her collection Unaccustomed Earth. It is a contender in this year’s The Morning News Tournament of Books. Alas, I had the same trouble with this longer work that I did with her stories: emotional distance from middle-class characters who I didn’t find that interesting. It’s a multi-generational story, and is set in an interesting point in time the Naxalbari rebellion in India. One brother is a rebel, the other a scholar. The story moves between India and the US, and back and forth in time. I thought about abandoning the book a few times, but there were parts that were written in beautiful prose, and others that did go below an emotional surface, particularly in the character Gauri, and her ambivalence to motherhood. Ultimately, though, I could feel the writing taking place, could detect Lahiri’s strategy for placing segments out of time, and for the unfolding events, but they didn’t serve their purpose with me to engage, maintain tension, and make me care throughout.

If you have liked her previous work, which many do, then you may like this. It mostly didn’t work for me, and I hope it goes down to Eleanor and Park in the tournament, which was emotionally vivid and very compelling to me, if not so luminously written.

I am in 3 book groups, and moderate one of them, which means I get to pick the books. We read books with themes of myth and religion, mostly fiction, since I love stories, and find they give interesting pathways to understanding truth. The group celebrates its third anniversary this month with our discussion this weekend of Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory.

I’d not read this yet, though I enjoyed both the novel and the movie of Greene’s The End of the Affair, and The Third Man, for which Greene wrote the screenplay, is perhaps my favorite movie. It’s the tale of a whisky priest (spelled whisky in the book but whiskey on the back cover), an alcoholic on the run from the communist police who will kill him. It’s a beautifully written, emotionally rich portrait of a time and place, along with a deeply conflicted, oh-so-human and yet always striving toward the divine. He is running away, but also running towards, and story proceeds in chunks of time that reflect his bumpy journey. It begins with one person he encounters, and is told in stories of the others as he goes. It’s about him, but also about them, so really, about all of us.

Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr Tench’s heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly towards them. One rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea. It wouldn’t find anything there: the sharks looked after the carrion on that side. Mr Tench went on across the plaza.

I loved this, and look forward to discussing it with our group this weekend.

Yet another contender in this year’s Tournament of Books. I’m off to a roaring start because there are a couple doorstops, and because I wisely chose a short book for one of my book groups this month,and the other book groups are reading ToB contenders. Woo! Geekjoy!

So, The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara is the memoir of a scientist who went to the tropics and discovered a tribe who’d learned how to cheat death. The scientist is a fascinating, flawed character, and the tale of the search for immortality, and the spectacular immoralities that go along with it, kept me tied up until the end.

Not for you if you don’t like books with characters you can’t be friends with. But if bat$hit crazy fictional monsters are up your alley, this book might be for you.

Another contender in The Tournament of Books, I knew I was going to read The Dinner by Herman Koch because friends had said good things about it. But I was intruiged by …

OMG, I have GOT to come up with a new word for intriugued because I canNOT seem to spell it and I am not going to try and keep going back and correct intriuged.. It’s like my spelling kryptonite.

Anyhoo. I found it interesting that The Dinner had a relatively low rating. Lots of hate for the book. Who was right, my friends, or the people of Goodreads?

Well, duh. You people, of course.

Please, forgive the pun, but I devoured The Dinner. It starts off and a guy’s going out to dinner with some other guy and he doesn’t want to go, and the other guy sounds like a jerk, and slowly, oh so slowly the story unspools and you find out how they’re connected, what the dinner’s about, what all the bajillion undercurrents are, and what truly horrible people these people are, and I had to wonder if I’m horrible for having been fascinated by horrible people. Certainly I can see why there’s a lot of hate for the book, because the characters and what they do are hateful. This is a great example of a book that a lot of people hate because the characters aren’t likable. But oh, are they mesmerizing. I was fascinated by this one.

Y’all know it’s that most wonderful time of the year, right? No, it’s not national dairy month. Or Christmas. It _is_ almost my birthday. But what I mean is, The Tournament of Books. Yayyyyy!

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid is a fascinating little book. Written in the second person, in a self-help-y style but really telling a boy and girl love story, but one set in the slums of India, so the course of true love doesn’t exactly run true.

Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre.

The book’s brevity means that its strange conceit doesn’t wear thin, and the passage of time in the nameless hero’s life move along at a fast clip. This was a weird fictional take on some of the realities from Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Smart, intriguing, different.

It is not an exaggeration to say Possession by A.S. Byatt changed my life, and for the better, after I read it in the winter of December 94/January 95. I was working unhappily in marketing for a company I no longer believed in, and realized (again, in the way of so many epiphanies, I have to have them multiple times for them to stick) that I needed to find a way to get religion and literature in my life.

Over the years, I’ve been trepidatious to read it again. What if I didn’t care for it, or The Suck Fairy had visited? I’m happy to say that a second reading only affirmed this book as one of favorites, if not perhaps The Favorite. I’ve often described this book as having everything: history, mystery, poetry, religion, science, romance and adventure. It’s like the Indiana Jones of novels, or The DaVinci Code if written well by an academic.

I dragged my feet on researching the book before a discussion I’ll be leading today. Again, that was silly. Here are a few of the best articles I found. And having dipped into them, I am now interested to go haring off in other literary directions, which is what my favorite books do to me.

If you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it lately, it stands up, and is more timely than ever in this age of atheism Hitch/Dawkins et al.

The Wikipedia entry on Possession

Wikipedia on Christina Rossetti, the model for Christabel LaMotte

NYT article on Byatt after Possession won the Booker, “What Possessed A.S. Byatt?”

“On Possession” at The Poet’s Forum

A re-evaluation of Byatt by a former skeptic, at the Guardian’s Book Blog.

Another take on it at the Guardian’s Book Club

The Reading Group Guide for Possession

Helloooo. Is anyone still out there? I was flooded with spam, so decided to take a break. And Google reader went down and that kind of threw my online habits into a tailspin. I set it up so comments would have to be verified, but don’t know if anyone has tried to comment? I haven’t seen any comments, so if you’ve tried and haven’t seen yours, email me at girldetective (at) girldetective (dot) net.

And so, here I am months later, not sure still about whether and how to keep up the blog. I started it in 2002 (!) to develop a writing practice. It worked! So well, now, that the other writing has usurped the time and energy of the blog–not necessarily a bad thing. But I found myself, after having read the Murakami, wanting to write a bit more than I could on Facebook, Good Reads, and Twitter (on all of which I can be found if you know where to look.)

So, the Murakami was a choice for one of my 3 book groups. I’d never yet read Murakami, and felt I was missing out on a lit-geek equivalent of a Girl Scout reading badge. I had another long book to read for one of my other books (Possession by AS Byatt, which I hope to write about here, soon), and I wasn’t sure the Murakami would be my thing. I gave it the 50 page Nancy Pearl audition. At that point, I didn’t care for the wishy-washy, emasculated main character but I was drawn in by the WTF-ness of the bizarre world of the book. So I kept reading. And I kept reading.

The main character, Toru Okada, never gets very likable, and he has that unfortunate quality in a noir-ish protagonist to be irresistible to women around him. But he has a character arc, and while I didn’t like him, I was intrigued and frequently amused by sentences like any of the following:

Newly unemployed, I found this kind of life refreshing…And best of all, I could read any book I wanted. (25)

I developed no appetite at all, as I watched the hands of the clock in this quiet house, waiting for something to happen. And soon the thought crossed my mind that my failure to develop an appetite might be owing to the lack within me of this kind of literary reality. I felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel, that someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal. And perhaps it was true. (181)

I washed myself off in the shower and laundered my semen-stained underwear by hand. Terrific, I thought. Why did I have to be having wet dreams at such a difficult time in my life? (191)

it’s kind of impossible for anybody to do that stuff, like, ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new world’ or OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new self.’ That’s what I think. You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, an if something happens, it’ll stick its head out and say ‘Hi.’ (261)

I found it hard to guess her age, but I supposed she was in her mid-forties. She looked younger than that at first glance, but the lines beside her nose had a special kind of weariness about them. (330)

My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought. (382)

He was engaged in a serious search for the meaning of his own existence. And he was hoping to find it by looking into the events that had preceded his birth. (524) (This is very like a theme in Possession.)

Meandering and jazz-like, with a noir-like mood but a coming-of-age and adventure story arc, it has some troubling stereotypes of women, especially those who are drawn to Okada. I had especial trouble with a prostitute character. I don’t care for authors who use prostitutes as stock characters, or portray them as sexy, or knowing, or with a heart of gold. But it also has intertwined stories that go forward and back, tied up with Japan’s history in WWII.

The book is fascinating, frustrating, perhaps overlong, but as soon as I was done, I went online to look up things about the book, always a good sign that I’ve been mentally engaged by it. In spite of the things I didn’t like about it, I’m glad I read it, and would read Murakami again. But his short stories or one of the shorter works. I think this is about as much of him and his themes that I can take in one book.