The Sparrow Review

By Mary Doria Russell

A few weeks ago in The Guardian someone wrote an article recommending five sci-fi novels for those who don't normally dig sci-fi novels.  That's me.  I picked two based on their synopsis (synopsises? synopsi?) and this was the first one I read.

All the exciting stuff (that I had a vague interest in) happened in the last two chapters but the 300 or so pages getting there was a drag.

20% of the book is a bit-interesting story of the first humans to travel to another planet (Rakhat, which I pronounced in my head as 'rack-hat' but could've been 'ra-kart') and make first contact with a sentient and advanced species.  The humans who go there are a mix of Jesuit Priests and their science-y mates.  They safely land on Rakhat and things don't go very well.  All but one of them die (that's not a spoiler by the way - we find that out in Chapter One).

35% of the book is ruminations on whether God is still with you if you travel to another planet, does God condone evil, at what point does service to God become counter-productive, what is the role of God in a priest and what is the role of God in a lay-person, and what does God want from us, generally.  Being an atheist with a total absence of belief in God this all meant nothing to me, and more to the point, being an anti-theist (opposed to anyone believing in God in the first place) meant that I did not give one holy flying fuck of a shit about any of this.  I wanted to punch them all.

35% of the book is set back on Earth where the Jesuits beg the one survivor to tell them all what really happened on Rakhat, but he doesn't want to talk about it.  "Oh please tell us," they say, and he says, "No, I don't want to," for about 150 arduous pages.  Fuck it drags.

10% of the book is non-witty 'witty' discussions between the main characters as they eat and drink.  I hated them all and was gladdened as each of them died horribly.  That's not a good sign.

Oh, there was also some 'sexual tension' meant to be happening, but it was the most chaste sexual tension one could conjure.  Desire was absent.  There were no erections. All sexuality was discussed within the framework of morality, functionality, religion, biology and love.  Not once was there a "hanging for a root".

Religious-driven science fiction is like putting raspberry jelly on a pizza.

I give it an E.  Fail!

Dangling Man Review

Dangling Man by Saul Bellow
(1944)

Saul Bellow, Nobel Laureate, is best known for his masterpieces The Adventures Of Augie March and Herzog.  Of course, I've read neither of those.  Not just because I'm a wanker who prefers the lesser known works of respected authors, but because I only had $3 on me when I wandered into Fowlers' Second-Hand Books, Lorne, and this book, at $2.50, was the only Bellow I could afford.  I did in fact read Bellow's The Victim several years ago and I recall none of it; oh, there was a scene on a subway I think, or at a train station, but that's it.  But I do remember I thought it was an okay book, and that Bellow was worth another shot.  He was certainly worth a $2.50 shot. 

Dangling Man is about a Canadian-American called Joseph.  He has enlisted in the US Army (WWII) but due to some red-tape about his Canadian citizenship there's a hold up and he is forced to wait indefinitely for the call up.  It could be tomorrow, it could be never.  He doesn't know.  Thing is but, he'd quit his job, and they couldn't take him back even as a casual, and he can hardly apply for other jobs because he could be called up the next day, and so he's just stuck at home, waiting, waiting.  His missus has a job, and she's become the bread winner.  They live in a small rooming house (Chicago).

With nothing to do, and little money, he gets a kind of cabin fever.  He reads Goethe, among other whacko things to wile away the time.  Goethe recounts the tale of an Englishman so overwhelmed with the ennui of having to get dressed and undressed every day that he kills himself.  Joseph understands this.  That's where he's at.  He's edgy.  So edgy, that in social situations, with no provocation, he becomes a cantankerous cunt.  Like an un-funny George Costanza, he ruins every social engagement (for everyone), every party, every small catch-up with friends, every interaction with neighbours - he ruins them all by being hopelessly argumentative and anti-social. 

I know people like this.  The type for who the question "How are you going?" can be answered with "What do you mean by that?"

Those with smarts, but no job, little money, no school to go to, no real reason to even get up in the morning... and weirdly lacking the drive to dig themselves out of the hole.  Idle hands make ... With so much time to spare, they tend to over-think everything, see conspiracies where there are none, feel pressed, pressured, stressed, obsess over innocuous tasks that a busy person would take in their stride.  I think it was in the movie Casablanca there was some line that ran:  If you want something important done, ask someone who is already busy.  I have found that to be anecdotally true.  And the thing is, I dislike people who are both idle and cantankerous.  I can take one or the other but not both.  They bug me.  And now I got stuck for 140 pages with one of them. 

As for why he keeps causing scenes...

"It may be that I am tired of having to identify a day as 'the day I asked for a second cup of coffee', or 'the day the waitress refused to take back the burned toast', and so want to blaze it more sharply, regardless of the consequences..."

There have been many novels written by fictional social misfits in a kind of diary-form.  It's almost like a rite of passage for white morose male authors.  Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground is the best of them (because at least he does something, eventually), and I guess Kafka's The Trial is another that works.  The very worst of them is Hell by Henri Barbusse which I read a couple of months ago (here's my rating: F.  F for Fucking Shithouse.)  Bellow's book is somewhere in the middle.  He captured the spirit of an idle man very well, but he failed to elicit any sympathy from me.  I just wanted Joseph to go to the fucking war.  Oh, and on that, I wondered why he would even want to go to a war.  He seemed too cynically erudite.  But he worded it beautifully (in a way that sums up my feelings about US aggression towards, say, Taliban): "...as between their imperialism and ours, if a full choice were possible, I would take ours." 

Also, in the end, he just wanted the regimentation.  A reason to get up in the morning.  Don't we all?

I give it a C.

A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE REVIEW

Hurry up, Fatty.

Yeah yeah, I haven't done any reviews for fucking years but because the 6,000 or so pages of George RR Martin's 'Song of Ice and Fire' (commonly known as Game of Thrones) took over my life for a few weeks I felt compelled to address it in this (now empty) forum. To get through 6000 pages I must've liked it. The start of that sentence infers the end of it. It's not like I was paid to read it. I lost sleep, obsessively checked things on Wiki so I was sure I had things right, had strong opinions on what happened and what should happen, and I became attached to characters that I loved, and loved to hate. So why do I feel so annoyed? Here's why.

* "Truth be told". If one more character said 'truth be told' just one more time I was going to hurt something. There's options. "To be honest..." is one such example. Even if he halved his usage of "truth be told" by giving equal weight to the just as banal "to be honest" it would have been a more enjoyable read. And you can't suggest it was just Westerosi idiom, because Free Cities and Wildling characters also said it. And yes, I argue I used the right word then when I called it idiom, because neither 'truth' (necessarily) nor 'telling' was at play. Also, saying 'idiom' makes me sound smarter than if I said 'figure of speech'. Fuck you. It's been a while since I've expressed myself with words. I have a baby, and I watch 'Giggle & Hoot' every day of my life.

* Did not give one flying fuck of a shit about anything that happened to Daenerys or anyone Daenerys met or where she went after Book One. Didn't care. I vagued out. By Book Five she was in some place called Meereen, and I forgot how she got there, and everyone's name had a 'Zh' in it, and there were sell-sword companies that were politically manoeuvring in and around her and I kept forgetting which was which and couldn't work out who I was supposed to be supporting. I wanted her and her dragons to just fuck off, and leave Westeros alone to have a good old fashioned war betwixt Lannisters, Starks, Greyjoys, Baratheons and young Griff (no spoilers here people), and some Others just for the lark of it. Daenerys and her fucking stupid dragons smell of deux ex machina. And she's a brat. "I want my kingdom!" And running around the desert begging strangers for armies like a junkie begs for heroin on Smith Street. She's as bad as her brother, despite the characters insisting she's not. But at least I hated her brother - that gave him dimension. Daenerys is a zero. Every time I ended a chapter I became excited about the next chapter... would it be Tyrion? Davos? Theon? Arya? Will Ramsay Bolton make an appearance? Like a kid on Christmas Day I would be overwhelmed with hope and happiness, then I'd see the name 'Daenerys' and my heart would sink. They'd start like this: "Seven Ejaculating Cows stormed into the palace wearing golden tassals above their shining armour.  Each were branded with the mark of the Zhodshxschena. Zhodrea no Fzho was breaking his fast. Truth be told, he was expecting them earlier..." and I'd think, "Who are the ejaculating cows again? Are they good guys or bad guys? Which one was Zhodrea no Fzho again? Oh fuck it, I'm going to bed..."

Both of you, FUCK OFF.

* I love books about power, sex, death, love and religion. Every book should be about those things. But no, writers insist on peddling introspective crap about ageing, or family, or longing, or duty, or 'passivity' (yes, you, David Foster Wallace - lucky I wasn't writing reviews when I read Infinte Jest because you would have been fucked. Up. (I'm sorry you're dead though - 'A Supposedly Fun Thing...' was brilliant)) or worse:  'feelings'. So finally I get a popular 6000 page epic on the very themes I demand in a book, but it's written by a guy who says 'truth be told' all the time, and he's making us wait an eternity for the next book (hurry the fuck up!) and his (arguably) main character is so boring I wish she came to life so I could have her killed. Some people were trying to kill her. Quarthians. Or Yunka'ianese. Or Ejaculating Cows. I can't remember, it was confusing, but I do remember thinking, "Oh please do it."

* I wish someone else wrote it.

** ***

But what the fuck. I loved it. I hated to love it, but I loved it. A-minus.

The Trial

by Franz Kafka



SPOILERS ABOUND!

I got to the penultimate chapter and the 'twist' that he was dead all along came to me like an angel, and after struggling through the pompousity of the book until that point, I was rapt that Kafka had tricked me thus. "Brilliant," I remarked, sucking on a Dunhill.

I put the book down, cleaned up the cat vomit, made a coffee and decided to do some post-read research on the internet. Turns out he wasn't dead. I misunderstood. I searched and searched, but nobody who knew a scrap about The Trial thought he was dead. I'm the only one, but jesus wept, Kafka died having not finished any of his novels; they exist only as weighty literary fragments with narrative ommissions and who is anyone to tell me I read it wrong? Not Kafka, not his mates, not the scholars and bookworms who reckon The Trial is all about the futility of trying to control elaborate situations, and/or some sort of abstract commentary on labyrinth-esque beauracratic structures and their accompanying architecture.

It's about death, you cunts. It's about judging one's own life, and getting into heaven, or not. It's the opposite of what everyone seems to agree it's about. It's about taking responsibility, not flailing one's arms and learning how to give up in the face of overwhelming complexity.

The advocate? An angel. The Law? God. The Frauleins and Fraus? The temptresses. The other clients? Souls, awaiting judgment of their own. Why am I the only one that saw the book like this? Am I dumb? How did I misinterpret the story so enormously?

All in all, I thought the book was, well, not bad. The main character, Joseph K, was an insufferable and pompous twat who I failed to sympathise with. I cared little for the outcome of his trial. I did enjoy the scenes when he was at work, at the Bank (always with a capital B), and his mind was wandering as his work piled up. That rang true. I've measured out my life in coffee spoons - and negelected admin. I stare at my computer screen at all the emails from clients and I often think, "Why are they emailing me? Can't they leave me alone? All these questions?", and like Joseph K, the only solace from the stresses of having to perform menial work tasks is the occassional thrill of a bosom in my palm.

But beyond that, Joseph K and I have little in common. I was happy to watch him suffer, but when the revelation that he was dead all along came I experienced a pang of guilt that I disliked him so. And in the final chapter when he was beheaded (in my interpretation, because he didn't quite understand he was dead, the guardian angels had to behead him so that he could come to grips with his purgatorive state) I decided that really, all along, on some level, I did like the dude. Hats off to Kafka at any rate. I'd avoided reading him for this long, but now I've ordered Metamporphosis from The Book Depository dot com for $2.41 (free shipping!).

I give it a B-.

**

PS: I've read heaps of books in the past year that I never bothered to review. I'm over blogging in many ways. But just want to note here that I give Bertrand Russell's 'History Of Western Philosophy' an A. Mind-numbingly awesome.

Vale, Saramago

One of my favourite living writers has passed away; Nobel Prize winning Jose Saramago.

'Blindness' is in my Top 10 novels, ever.

He has the honour of being one of only three writers to have a quote magnetised to my fridge and it is this:

"...but when all is said and done, whoever goes, goes, and whoever remains, remains."


**

In other news, I've neglected this blog for a long time; more than a year in fact. I've read some good books in that time.

I'm going to start it up again...

The Leopard

By Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa



I failed. You can keep your presents, because my War & Peace challenge collapsed under the weight of sport, alcohol, hot legs and most tellingly, a hangover. See, when I read Les Miserables in 48 hours, I was living in an underground and picayune apartment in the middle of Athens, Greece, doing my best to become a 'poet' by chain-smoking Marlboros and refusing to lower myself by holding down a decent occupation, and spending what little money I had on nothing but cigarettes, floozies and books. There was no footy, and in the darkened flat, common society could easily be shut out. Reading Les Miserables in 48 hours was no more difficult than making the bed with hospital corners.

Not so in a country town where everyone knows my door is open and the fridge is filled with beer, and where I have FOXTEL which means every footy match is accessable. I had every intention of completing the War & Peace challenge, but Friday night I just had to watch Wallace's last game as coach of Richmond.

"No matter," I thought, "I'll start War & Peace Saturday morning, and finish it Monday morning..."

Noble aims are extinguished by ignoble lusts.

I was hammering through the book with a young man's zeal, managing to keep abreast of the long Russian names (all seemingly starting with 'A' or 'B') and their nickname variations, underlining great passages, throwing myself into early 19th century politics and all the while smoking Stuyvesants and drinking so much coffee that there was more caffeine in my blood than blood.

Then The Mermaid popped in.

The Mermaid is a local girl, 19, hot, sweet and a good friend. She lives in Melbourne now and goes to Uni, but when she used to live here she would house-sit for me when I went away. We get along well because she's very bookish and is highly attracted to my book collection, and she smokes and drinks red wine, and even modelled in a mermaid outfit for one of my band's photo shoots (hence the nickname). Besides all that, we are the only two goths in the village.

She had come down for the weekend and suggested having dinner. At this point, I should have said, "No, I'm reading War and Peace in 48 hours to impress a group of people I know over the internet but have never met in real life and they are going to send me presents if I do so." But how can you say that to a mermaid goth? You can't. I actually said, "No worries. Glass o' wine?"

This then lead to hours and hours of food, alcohol and poetry reading (yes, poetry reading - she's very, very bookish) and an impromptu photo shoot around my kitchen at 1am. Arty camera wobble? No. Drunken.



With stockings like that, what was I supposed to do? Read a book? No, I made the mistake of keeping up with her drinking, and she's good at it. I walked her home at 2.30am and she kissed me on the cheek, thanking me I suspect for being the only man on Earth that she can spend time with that doesn't try to fuck her, and then I walked home and went to bed.

The hangover next day was crippling. CRIPPLING! War & Peace was put aside and the footy was turned on. Thank you to Melba for the casserole.

So anyway, I only got 350 pages into it, and I'll attempt to finish it this week, work depending, which is still pretty good. In the meantime, let me discuss this book, The Leopard.

This is one of Salman Rushdie's favourites, and he reckons it's also the best book to movie translation. A mate of mine, El Tel, also had this book in his top 3 ever. And, well, it was pretty fucking good but I'm not putting it into my Top 20. The writer di Lampedusa wrote this (his only book) just before he died and he never got to reap the benefits of the fame it brought him. It is considered in Italy especially one of the greatest, if not the greatest Italian novel of all time.

It also happens to be factual, in that it is based on the author's grandfather, the last of a long line of Sicilian Princes whose royal stature fell by the wayside under the unification of Italy in the mid 1800's. It is always fascinating... every page is mind-numbingly interesting, and he certainly captures the transition between the feudal/royal power and that of the upper middle-class aspirational bureaucrat.

Of the group taking power from the allegedly 'corrupt' lords, he writes that they were "...very like those living in the monasteries below, as fanatical, as self-absorbed, as avid for power or rather for the idleness which was, for them, the purpose of power." Cue comparisons with every other revolutionary movement, ever, from Brutus to Peru's Shining Path.

But the Prince (whose family logo is a leopard) is a realist and is one who is looked after by the unifiers as he doesn't try to fight them and in fact, uses his popularity to help them bring Sicily into the Italian fold. He understands that hundreds of years of royal lineage means nothing against the flow of democracy and unification, and they allow him to keep his prestige and wealth in return for lack of power. However, by being so friendly to the revolutionary forces, his prestige is diminished in any case. He marries his nephew off to a wealthy landowner's heiress (new money), and in one poignant scene, invites a commoner to dine at the palace which "...began the decline of his prestige."

It's the death of empire, told on a microcosmic level, and the tour we take through the Leopard's palaces with centuries' old orgy rooms, now locked, classic libraries overrun with dust, dilapidated monasteries and the last vestiges of an ageing man's lust all serve as metaphors. But what's great is that di Lampedusa, who died penniless, doesn't write with any bitterness. He doesn't lament his family's fall from royal prestige, he is just saying, "This is what happened to my family," and also, "This is what happened to Sicily."

But in one outburst by the Prince to a Roman representatitve who has come to beseech the Prince to join the Senate, he points out that no matter who is in charge, Sicily, and indeed any person anywhere in the world cannot ever be fully integrated into a far-off political machine. He says of Sicily:

"...water is either lacking altogether or has to be carried from so far that every drop is paid for by a drop of sweat; and when the rains come, they are always tempestuous and set dry torrents to frenzy, drown beasts and men on the very spot where two weeks before both had been dying of thirst. The violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from all directions, who were at once obeyed, soon detested and always misunderstood; their sole means of expression works of art we found enigmatic and taxes we found only too intelligible, and which they spent elsewhere. All these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of the mind."

The only thing I didn't like about the book was the amount of weight given to the falling in love of the Prince's nephew and the landowner's daughter. It took up half the story, whereas it should have been a little sub-plot taking up no more than a couple of pages.

Still, I recommend the book, and give it a B+.

News Of A Kidnapping

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez



(I'm still playing catchup. Coming soon, some Schopenhauer, 'The Leopard', more Bible, a science book and much much more. Stick around...)

I'm a Marquez fan. One Hundred Years Of Solitude and Love In The Time Of Cholera are both marvellous, marvellous books and I highly recommend both.

Marquez was also once a journalist and occasionally forays back into journo-land. A few years ago I read a book called The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor by Marquez where he interviewed, you know, a shipwrecked sailor, and that was pretty cool so I thought I'd give this a try.

It was okay. It was interesting, though all those Colombian names became a blur after a while. It was set in the time that Pablo Escobar the drug baron was being hunted by the US, and he knew that if he was caught they'd execute him. So, he was offering to hand himself over to the Colombian authorities in return for immunity against extradition to the US. He and his drug baron mates called themselves 'The Extraditables' and were hoping to reverse this position, but of course, the Colombians were under presuure from the US to hand him over.

Whilst the Colombian authorities were trying to deal with it constitutionally, Escobar was dealing with it by kidnapping and occasionally killing prominent people. Journalists, relatives of politicians and so on.

This book is a re-telling of the stories of those who were kidnapped and were lucky enough to get out (some after two years of captivity).

Marquez does a very good job bringing the scenario alive (he had access to all the captives, as well as former Presidents and Ministers to help write this book). We learn all about the drug trade, Colombian constitutional nuances, and most importantly, he expertly and vividly portrays the trials of being under captivity. You can smell it in the holding cells. The tedium, the good guards and bad guards, the food, the endless TV watching because there was little else to do.

The most interesting bit concerned an old celebrity Catholic priest, Father Garcia Herrero, who is clearly mentally-ill and talked gibberish, but for many years he was on Colombian TV every night delivering a one minute sermon and he was a national treasure. He made it his goal to secure the release of the prisoners, and Escobar, being a Catholic drug baron, did indeed give the Priest an audience. Even drug barons are lured by celebrity.

Also interesting is that on Colombian TV, relatives of people kidnapped aired messages to the captives, and the captives were allowed to watch!

So all in all, it was an interesting read, and if you're Colombian or a constitutional lawyer, an important read, but really, all it is is a very well written piece of journalism and my advice is: Wait for the film.

C