Book 7 – Breakfast At Tiffany’s

By Truman Capote

Never read any Capote before, so this famous little novella made a nice introduction.

It’s a light, straightforward tale about a young woman who transforms herself from a country hick to a Manhattan party girl. She’s constantly trying to run away from her past while struggling to find her own life. Written in 1958 yet set in the late 1940’s, the novel really encapsulated a feeling, time and place. Capote also brings to life the upper east side area where the characters live a particular modern lifestyle that probably doesn’t exist anymore.

I think I would’ve loved this book as a girl, as it’s a bit like a post-war Sex and the City. But reading it at this point in my life, I can see how Holly Golightly, as a young woman with an unconventional lifestyle and lack of options, represent some of the social hurdles Capote had to probably contend with, while at the same time, Holly’s desire for freedom and independence embodies some of his ideals as well.

Although much as been made about the narrator, I really did not have the sense that “Fred” was gay. Whatever I missed it was probably very subtle. I mean the guy seems obsessed about Holly, keeping tabs of her comings and goings, and at least a couple times reveals that he’s in love with her. He seems like a typically introverted straight guy to me! But then again, one could also say that Andy Warhol actually fell head over heels for Edie Sedgewick, in his own kind of way!

A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet. ~Truman Capote

Book 6 – Wuthering Heights

By Emily Brontë

When I was in university, I studied Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, loved it, then sought out sister Emily’s famous novel, but ended up losing interest about a third way through. Now more than a dozen years later, I’m finally able to get through this ‘Slough of Despond’. Although I can’t say I like it more than I would have, I did end up having some appreciation for this rather remarkable novel.

Wuthering Heights is the name of the Yorkshire manor built upon the moorlands and home of the Earnshaw family. Isolated and far from the stir of society, the land is described by one of the narrators as the “perfect misanthropist’s Heaven”. The novel can also be described as such. For one thing, it’s far from a traditional love story, and rather, more like an anti-love story. Here you have Catherine and Heathcliff, two very emotionally imbalanced people, falling into an all-encompassing codependent relationship, yet you never see them declare their love for each other. All the romantic action is peripheral. Their thwarted love has dire consequences for their immediate family. Even their descendants fall into the same trap and suffer from the ridiculously foolish choices they make.

What bothered me at first about Wuthering Heights was how the main characters are so prone to their human follies. The men and women both are emotionally immature, manipulative, vindictive and given to histrionics. In some ways, I was glad there were barely any passages with Heathcliff and Catherine together because my eyes would’ve rolled out of their sockets!

At that earnest appeal he turned to her, looking absolutely desperate. His eyes wide, and wet at last, flashed fiercely on her; his breast heaved convulsively. An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive: in fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy.

What Brontë is really good at is the clever dissection of social niceties. With the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights and neighbouring Thrushcross Grange removed from society and given free reign to develop anti-social tendencies galore, there is plenty of opportunity for misanthropic humour. Take the fascinatingly wicked Heathcliff, who becomes misanthropy incarnate once he thinks Catherine has rejected him, and is called by various characters such names as monster, devil, and fiend. He even tricks the nubile and naïve neighbour, Isabella, into marrying him, yet you feel it was really her fault for being so foolishly gullible when he tells the narrator:

She abandoned them under a delusion… picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character, and acting on the false impressions she cherished.

Brontë pulls no punches in portraying Heathcliff as anti-christ and villain, ‘notable for savage sullenness and ferocity’. The guy gets downright emotionally and physically abusive after he takes over Wuthering Heights and its inhabitants, which apparently shocked readers at the time. I wouldn’t say that Brontë’s portrayal of Heathcliff is very three-dimensional, yet somehow he still comes across as a complex and sympathetic character.

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the strapping and masculine self-made landowner ends up having a son who is a complete pansy. But it could also be the very unusual narrative structure, which is non-linear, involving multiple flashbacks and two narrators—Mr. Lockwood, who is renting Thrushcross Grange, and Ellen "Nelly" Dean, the ever so patient housekeeper. It is probably a conscious decision that the narrators are mentally and emotionally stable, so the reader can identify with them as a cool spectator, since all the other characters, past and present, seem so preoccupied in making their own train wrecks!

All in all, I can’t say I totally enjoyed the novel, as I couldn’t lose myself in the story as I did with Jane Eyre, and I was too busy rolling my eyes at every stupid decision and emotional outburst. It was still a very interesting read and I'm glad I finally read it.

Book 5 – The Music of Chance

By Paul Auster

Another weird and wonderful story from Paul Auster. My last encounter was The New York Trilogy, and I’m definitely seeing some recurring themes in his work, which is not necessarily a bad thing since Auster’s got the po-mo deconstruction of genre fiction down pat and he does it quite well.

Jim Nashe, an ordinary everyman kinda guy suddenly inherits some money from his father, whom he hasn’t seen since he was a boy. He leaves his job as a fireman, buys a new car and drives all over America, succumbing to a solipsistic addiction to long-distance driving. After several months, he realizes he’s going to run out of money soon if he doesn't do something about it. On a quiet road, he comes across a young card shark named Jack Pozzi who got away from a poker game gone sour. For Nashe it’s like a match made in heaven:

He would play the old man to Pozzi’s upstart, using the advantage he had in size and age to give off an aura of hard-earned wisdom, a steadiness that would counterbalance the kid’s nervous, impulsive manner.

Soon enough, Nashe offers to bankroll Pozzi’s next game with two wealthy eccentrics named Flower and Stone, who love poker, but are amateur players -- easy money. When Nashe and Pozzi arrive at the mansion, they learn that Flower and Stone became millionaires by winning the lottery. The card game becomes a contest of luck, and the outcome has very dire consequences for Nashe and Pozzi.

Like The NY Trilogy’s po-mo take on the detective genre, TMoC starts off with very familiar narrative motifs - man running away from his past, gambling buddies-on-the-road, poker game gone wrong – then at some point switches to something surreal and scary well after you’re suckered into what seems like an amusing and conventional story. Auster can also take a well-worn cliché, like a budding yet unlikely friendship, and make it work with solid thoughtful writing:

All during Pozzi’s reminiscences, Nashe had inevitably thought about his own boyhood, and the curious correspondence he found between their two lives had struck a chord in him: the early abandonment, the unexpected gift of money, the abiding anger. Once a man begins to recognize himself in another, he can no longer look on that person as a stranger. Like it or not, a bond is formed. Nashe understood the potential trap of such thinking, but at that point there was little he could do to prevent himself from feeling drawn to this lost and emaciated creature. The distance between them had suddenly narrowed.

Nothing's perfect however. There are times where Auster resorts to heavy-handed symbolism and trite existentialism, but for the most part, I found The Music of Chance quite a mesmerizing read. And I like the deceptively simple writing. There’s always this dreamy sense of foreboding, which compels me to keep reading, even though I know something meaningless and terrible is going to happen to the protagonist. Although his characters tend to be rather archetypal and cipher-like, Auster is also really good at making you immediately identify with them. When he describes Nashe on the road in his car, it just makes me want to jump in a car and drive to the hills:

He was a fixed point in a whirl of changes, a body poised in utter stillness as the world rushed through him and disappeared. The car became a sanctum of invulnerability, a refuge in which nothing could hurt him anymore. As long as he was driving, he carried no burdens, was unencumbered by even the slightest particle of his former life… After three or four months, he had only to enter the car to feel that he was coming loose from his body, that once he put his foot down on the gas and started driving, the music would carry him into a realm of weightlessness.
Empty roads were always preferable to crowded roads. They demanded fewer slackenings and decelerations, and because he did not have to pay attention to other cars, he could drive with the assurance that his thoughts would not be interrupted.

A good solid satisfying read! Apparently there is also a film adaptation from the mid-90's starring Mandy Patinkin and James Spader, two of the last actors I would picture playing the role of Nashe and Pozzi respectively, so I'm a little wary of check it out... unless it's really good, of course!

Book 4 - The Nature of Monsters

By Clare Clark

Master and Commander gave me a taste for British historical fiction, so I thought I’d experience a more female perspective via Clark’s tale of a pregnant village girl who becomes an apothecary’s maid in the teeming metropolis of 18th century London.

Much darker and far less humorous, TNoM is more of a gothic horror story, and quite Dickensian in its account of Eliza Tally’s bleak existence: getting whored out to a landowner’s son by her mother, dealing with an unwanted pregnancy, being sent to London to become a servant at an apothecary, and enduring the cold and rather demeaning treatment from the apothecary’s wife, Mrs. Black, and the lecherous the shop assistant, Edgar.

Although sullen and defiant by nature, Eliza is still a poor outsider stuck in an unknown city without family or commendation. She has very few options but to remain confined in the claustrophobic Black household, and share her duties and sleeping area with Mary, the idiot maidservant. She is also naturally wary of and fascinated by her mysterious master, the oddly disfigured apothecary, Grayson Black:

My master was as present and yet as invisible in the house in Swan-street as God Himself was in church, except that, as Mrs. Black and the frog-voiced parson like to instruct me, God was the one true Light. My master, on the other hand, seemed to me to be composed of darkness, of shadows and locked doors and windowless stairwells and the sour black smoke of extinguished candles.

Since the narrative is interspersed with fragments of Black’s journal entries and letters, you get a pretty clear idea that Grayson Black is a ego-maniacal man whose deep-seated misogyny informs the core of his beliefs and area of study:

My work with the parish women has shown me clearly that the low faculty of imagination that so dominates women is brought most effectively to the fore by the cultivation of such fear. It weakens the solids & fibres of the body, already so much feebler than those of the male, so that they are at their most receptive to impression.

Not to mention whose delusions of grandeur allow him to bully those around him, most especially Mrs.Black:

”Madam, I stand at the threshold of greatness and you threaten me with a debtors’ gaol? I will not be goaded so, do you hear me? Was Mr. Sydenham assailed with petty concerns such as yours? Was Hippocrates?”

At first Eliza thinks that Black will help restore her wayward reputation by getting rid of her child, but little does she know the mad apothecary has other designs, such as subjecting her and Mary to horrifying experiments! When Eliza is sent out to run errands, she slowly befriends the bookseller Mr. Honfleur, and eventually summons the courage to ask him the nature of her master’s work (warning: spoiler ahead!):

“Ah, it is hardly a secret. Your esteemed master writes a treatise… the notion of maternal impression of something close… the effects of strong emotions, fear, desire, and such like, upon the physical form of a foetus… the eminent gentlemen of the Royal Society have long been fascinated with monsters…"

Overall the story is quite compelling and complex without being too dense and over-laden with period detail. Indeed, the prose can be a little overly expository at times as typical of this type of fiction, and Eliza’s articulate inner dialogue doesn’t quite mesh with how an uneducated yet intelligent village girl would think in her head.

Even though the details of Eliza’s living situation can get a bit bogged down with bleak pessimism where most of the characters are motivated by greed, status and/or cruelty, Clark keeps it balanced with enough action, suspense and itty bit of hope to keep me gripped throughout the depressing sections. Plus, the character arc of Eliza starting off as an illiterate, self-centred maidservant who hates the idiot maid Mary and ending up as a sympathetic, street-smart heroine who ends up loving the idiot maid after all was a gradual and convincing enough transition to pull me through to the end. A flawed but satisfying read!

Book 3 – Master and Commander

By Patrick O’Brian

It’s too bad this wasn’t considered a book club pick since four 50-bookers have read it this year so far, and it’s an awesome book. Perhaps it should, mmm?

Despite the common complaint from readers of the constant looking up of nautical terms that filled up the book, I didn’t mind this so much. First, I didn’t bother looking up anything at all, and I still managed to enjoy and appreciate the adventures of Captain Aubrey and his merry 80-odd member crew. Besides I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know what a cunt-splice was anyway. And yet the attentive description of ships, especially the lovingly imperfect Sophie, who is like a character in herself, didn’t seem fetishistic at all!

So anyway, since Olman has read it. And June23 has read it. And last but not least, Buzby has read it -- and since we all know M & C has the action, adventure, naval politics and male-bonding that has already won die-hard fans the world over -- I thought instead of writing a standard review, lemme tell you some of my favourite little moments from Master & Commander:

• When Captain Jack Aubrey was just promoted, given charge of the Sophie and made the realization that his new life as master & commander would be a lonely one:

he was no longer one of ‘us’: he was ‘they’. Indeed, he was the immediately-present incarnation of ‘them’. In his tour of the brig he had been surrounded with deference – a respect different in kind from that accorded to a lieutenant, different in kind from that accorded to a fellow human-being: it had surrounded him like a glass bell, quite shutting him off from the ship’s company…

• When Jack was having a bad day, experiencing a non-stop “series of disappointments”, which included

Ellis’ horrible parents had not yet left the island, and he and Stephen had been obliged to undergo their hospitality – the only occasion in his life he had ever seen a half bottle of small white wine divided between four. Disappointments.

• Stephen Maturin not able to lose his frugal habits due to his period of poverty:

With intense mortification he saw that the piece of meat he had hidden at yesterday’s dinner had oozed grease through his handkerchief and his pocket. ‘How wonderfully strange,’ he thought, ‘to be upset by this trifle; yet I am upset.’ He sat down and ate his piece of meat (the eye of mutton chop)…

• Dr Maturin’s various idiosyncratic thoughts and quips about…

…older men of authority:

James Dillon was a delightful being. Now he is closing in. It is odd – will I say heart-breaking? – how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is its great enemy – the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority. The senior post-captains here; Admiral Warne. Shrivelled men (shriveled in essence: not, alas, in belly).

… whether the progeny of an annoying, upper class couple will take after them:

’And having seen the parents I am impatient to see this youth, the fruit of their strangely unattractive loins: will he be a wretched mammothrept? A little corporal?…’

… Captain Aubrey and Lieutenant James Dillon (JA and JD) not quite getting along:

’But I confess that much as I love them, I could wish them both to the Devil, with their high-flown, egocentrical points of honour and their purblind spurring one another to remarkable exploits that may very well end in unnecessary death… There is a systemic flocci-nauci-nihili-pilification of all other aspects of existence that angers me… I have no patience for them. They are strangely immature for men of their age and their position: though, indeed, it is supposed that if they were not, they would not be here – the mature, the ponderate mind does not embark itself upon a man-of-war – is not to be found wandering about the face of the ocean in quest of violence.’

Finally, the many small moments of humour are harder to quantify. But I did get a very good chuckle when JA had to deal with the “infernal bore” of the report of a lowly seaman who committed the unnatural crime of sodomy on a goat. And then Stephen politely declined the offer of goat’s milk for his tea.

Capital! Just capital! A truly excellent book. And to think there are at least 20 more of them in the entire series!

Book 2 – King Suckerman

By George P. Pelecanos

It’s been a long time coming getting back to the Washington Quartet. I reviewed the first, The Big Blowdown, in 2007, as did Olman (note he’s also reviewed King Suckerman here, so I’ll keep it short).

It’s the summer of 1976. Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay are best friends who, through random events, clash with a motley crew of psychotic criminals and hillbillies. All you need to know is that the novel delivers on this premise.

Pelecanos has an excellent ear for the colloquial rhythms of the period he sets his story in. You read some of the sharp dialogue in The Big Blowdown and you’re instantly transported back in the 1940s. The same for King Suckerman’s breezy laid-back slang and the bountiful pop cultural references. You can totally tell Pelecanos came of age as a young man in the 70’s. That he's listened to all the soul and rock albums mentioned in Marcus' record store, and watched all the bad-ass movies that played at the drive-ins and B-houses.

My only complaint was the over-repetition of the King Suckerman reference. The title of the book is the name of the much-anticipated blaxploitation flick that opens up in Washington just before all the shit goes down. It seems that whenever we’re introduced to a new male character, the movie invariably gets brought up, and someone else always goes: “the one about the pimp?” Ta da bam ta da boom. I was quite surprised that someone of Pelecanos’ stature would resort to such a schticky device.

Then you read one of the character’s rundown of the fictional flick he just watched, and all is forgiven:

King Suckerman started out exactly that way, though from the beginning the audience sensed that there was something unsettling going on in the film. For one thing, Ron St. John, who played the title role, he was one stone ugly motherfucker, scarred in the face and narrow of shoulder and chest. Cooper had liked The Mack, thought it was more authentic than most, but in truth Max Julien as the pimp had always bothered him. Julien could be tough, but with his smooth skin, too-easy smile, and deep dimples, he was way too pretty to be believable as the hard man a pimp had to be. You needed someone tougher in the face and body to make the story true. But Ron St. John? He went all the way in the other direction.

Ugly as he was, though, Ron St. John was cool. Cool and bad. No one could fuck with King Suckerman, ‘cause the man feared no one and had all the bitches in his stable.

Book 1 - Breaking Dawn

By Stephanie Meyer

The final book of the Twlight quartet. I forgot to mention that in the previous installment, Eclipse, Edward asks for Bella's hand in marriage. It’s kinda like, well, if I’m going to damn your soul to hell then the least you can be is my virtuous vamp. Despite their differences, they both have one thing in common, the mark of the V, and it has nothing to do with vampirism! The only catch is, Bella wants to consummate their love while she’s still human.

So Breaking Dawn starts off with Bella and Edward getting hitched, then going off to their Caribbean honeymoon in fantasy Isle Esme. This is probably what every faithful follower has been waiting for since Twilight - to see these two finally get it on! Meyer definitely spares no expense in depicting the corny PG-rated love scenes with, I kid you not, ripped-up feather-down pillows a-flying and destroyed headboards a-plenty.

Of course we all know that the honeymoon is going to end abruptly. I really should have seen it coming, with Bella's weird dreams about blood-suckling babies. Before I could even say “noooo… they’re not gonna have….they can’t possibly have….” Wham! Bella gets knocked up with vampire spawn! Nobody saw it coming, not even Edward’s foster dad, the eminent Dr Carlisle! This is where Meyer’s absurd attempt at a ‘scientific’ explanation doesn’t quite satisfy the WTF? reaction. Anyway, I’ve already made it this far with this preposterous love story, I can suspend my disbelief a little more!

So here we go. Bella and Edward return to Forks, where in the sanctity of the Cullen home, Bella undergoes an accelerated pregnancy (human-vampire hybrids being so rare, they simply can’t wait to come out and show themselves off). There is a surprisingly Cronenberg-esque segment where demon-spawn is practically torturing Mommy from the inside with its super bone-breaking fetal powers. When the big B-day occurs, Meyer delivers the ultimate birth/death motif: Bella dies giving birth and is reborn again as an immortal bloodsucker.

And during this whole ordeal, Jacob the werewolf has been hanging around like a sad masochistic puppy, even forsaking his beloved pack in order to protect Bella from them. When he finally sets eyes on hybrid-baby Renesmee, he discovers his true calling (you’ll have to read the books to find out about the imprinting thing -- it’s not quite as gross as it sounds). At least he finally gets over Bella and he becomes the leader of this own pack of motley mutineers!

So yes, many wonderful things happen to Bella in her new and improved life as a beautified vampire (immortality suits her so well, it’s no wonder she felt so dull being a drab human!). The once distant, difficult Rosalie is now Bella’s best friend through their love of cute demonic babies and motherhood. Bella’s prodigious self-control as a newborn allows her to keep in touch with her still human dad, while also inspiring vampires who have difficulty in weaning off humans to remain strong – if Bella can do it, you can too! Most importantly, being a vampire has greatly improved her and Edward’s sex life – they can both play rough now!

But life ain’t always wine n’ roses, even for vampires. A betrayal triggers the Volturi to come calling as they’re lead to believe that wee Renesmee is a full-blown vampire baby, which is totally forbidden. Since Alice can foresee their arrival, the Cullen family rush to assemble all the vampires of the world in -gulp- the wee town of Forks, in order to bear witness that Renesmee is unique. The vampires of the world can be a pretty fascinating and exotic bunch. There are human-friendly and nonhuman-friendly covens, nomads, and the ancient yet persecuted Romanians. Having an extra-sensory talent is rare and prized. So the original 7-member Cullen family with Edward, Jasper and Alice having special gifts is rather exceptional (and envied by the Volturi). So it comes as no surprise that Bella soon discovers that she has a rather unique power too. She can shield herself and others from malicious psychic attacks.

So in a very remote yet open field somewhere in the Olympic Peninsula, the Volturi finally come head to head against the Cullen clan, the assembled vampires, plus the Quileute shape-shifters (we learn finally that they’re not really true werewolves, aka Children of the Moon). Unlike the ending of Eclipse, we disappointingly don’t get delivered on much physical action and carnage, thought there’s a bit of psychic strategy at play.

What we do get is the message that even diabolical creatures like vampires can indeed rise above their bestial natures and become more civilized by abstaining from human blood. If they keep it up long enough, by jove, they can even forge bonds of love! One of the nomadic vampires named Garrett is so impressed, he makes a moving speech to the assembly:

I have witnessed the bonds within this family—I say family and not coven. These strange golden-eyed ones deny their very natures. But in return have they found something worth even more, perhaps, than mere gratification of desire? I’ve made a little study of them in my time here, and it seems to me that intrinsic to this intense family binding—that which makes them possible at all—is the peaceful character of this life of sacrifice. There is no aggression here like we all saw in the large southern clans that grew and diminished so quickly in their wild feuds. There is no thought for domination… Are the Volturi here to protect the safety of our secrecy, or to protect their own power? Did they come to destroy an illegal creation, or a way of life?

So love and respect all Mormons! Oops, did just I say that? Ultimately the Twilight Saga is one big modernized fairy tale and Meyer makes no pretension that it is anything else. The series ends so happily, you either want to hurl the book across the room, or cry tears of joy. I wanted to do both!

It was a place where anyone could believe magic existed. A place where you just expected Snow White to walk right in with her apple in hand, or a unicorn to stop and nibble at the rosebushes. Edward had always thought that he belonged to the world of horror stories. Of course, I’d known he was dead wrong. It was obvious that he belonged here. In a fairy tale. And now I was in the story with him.

I was caught between the awareness of reading something completely ridiculous, yet unable to stop myself in wanting to read more. That is the power of competently crafted populist fiction!

2008 Wrap Up!

With 27 under my belt, this was my best year ever! Don’t think I’ve ever read this many in one year before in my entire life. Definitely surpassed my original goal of 24 (roughly 2 books per month).

This was mostly due to the spur of sudden reading activity in December, like consuming the 1st three 600-page Twilight tomes in quick succession! 2008 also represented more varied and exploratory reading, with a mixture of classics, sci fi, graphic novels, high brow & low brow. All fiction, however. It’s still difficult for me to read non-fiction of anything longer than magazine article length.

Perhaps I’ll try to endeavor for 2009!

Still… a stellar year for Meezly!

Book 27 – Curse of the Spellmans

By Lisa Lutz

Yay, my final book for 2008! I seem to be closing the year with some worthwhile chick lit. This was actually consumed in between Books 1 and 2 of the Twilight saga, but in the interest of keeping the series together and saving the best for last, I hereby present Lisa Lutz's delightful sequel to The Spellman Files.

The past year I had the good fortune of experiencing many great books, but the Spellman books were undoubtedly my faves, only because they were simply the most fun to read. Olman can attest as he heard me chuckle out loud many times while we were reading in bed, which I don’t often do even when I’m reading something that’s supposed to be humorous!

In The Spellman Files, Isabel had to reassess how her lifestyle as a twenty-something was affecting her very impressionable adolescent sister Rae. Now at 31 years old, Isabel tries to impart some wisdom to now fifteen year old Rae as they walk to the corner store to get more snacks for their Dr Who marathon:

“The whole grown up thing is a myth. Whatever is wrong with you now will probably be wrong with you in twenty years.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me now,” Rae said.

“If people really grew up, there would be no crime, no divorce, no Civil War reenactors. Think about it. Was Uncle Ray a grown-up? Does Dad always behave like a grown-up? It’s all bullshit. I can’t tell you what Mom’s been doing lately, but I will say, not grown-up.”

For me it’s hard not to like a caper comedy featuring a street-smart screwball but still lovable heroine, and Lutz balances the hard-boiled and the farcical with finesse. The repeated arrests do get a little over-the-top, as Isabel can’t stop her obsessive-compulsive need to uncover the truth once she’s on the case. But there are little moments of vulnerability with Isabel and her relationship to her family that imbues the novel with some emotion and depth.

And her sparkling conversations with her octogenarian lawyer, Mort Schilling, and possible love interest and almost unflappable police detective, Henry Stone, are an absolute delight.

Book 26 – Eclipse

By Stephanie Meyer

IMHO, Eclipse is the most exciting installment of the Twilight Saga. You’ve got the primal hostilities between vampires and werewolves, the still human and danger-prone Bella caught in between, the Volturi making an unexpected appearance and a vengeful vamp raising an army of newborn bloodsuckers and terrorizing the citizens of Seattle.

There's also more development and backstory from the minor characters. Jasper, with his origins as a Civil War veteran and subsequent initiation into the Monterrey vampire coven to train newborns, gets the best account of all. While Rosalie’s story, although a bit weak, explains why she's the only Cullen member opposed to Bella’s ardent desire to become a vampire. The Quileute wolf pack also grows with younger members as the increase in vampire activity in the La Push/Forks area seems to trigger the protective instinct among the Black/Uley/Clearwater bloodlines.

Of course, there’s the continuing love triangle between Edward, Bella and Jacob. Like fire and ice, Jake n' Eddie cannot be any more diametrical, and neither can their respective clans, despite the fragile truce between the Cullens and Quileutes. Like the metaphor of bringing together two opposing magnets, Bella acts as the human bridge between the age-old antipathies between vampire and werewolf. Eventually, the coming of the newborn vampire army from Seattle forces an alliance between the Cullens and Quileutes.

In Eclipse, Meyer’s Mormon beliefs become more apparent, and mostly embodied by Edward, who with his old-fashioned chasteness, has –ahem- retained much of his Edwardian values, much to Bella’s hormonally-charged chagrin. By the same token, the erotic tension of abstinence always make for more exciting romance, especially if you want to maintain audience interest. Look at Mulder and Scully in the X-Files, or David Addison & Maddie Hayes in Moonlighting (yep I’m that old). As soon as the guy and gal do it… that’s it, the thrill is gone!

Based on the various online forums that he often peruses, Olman mentioned that geeks (mostly male) generally diss the Twilight series on the basis that they’re teen romances disguised as thin-skinned fantasy. Not sure if these fellas had bothered even reading any of the books in the first place, but this is a rather snobby attitude to have. Meyer’s work isn’t exactly in the same league as His Dark Materials trilogy (Philip Pullman) in darkness and complexity, but the Twilight books ain’t bad either in terms of entertainment.

I'd probably compare Meyer more with Charles De Lint, as she juggles the worlds of mythic fantasy with the banalities of reality quite competently, and often with much humour. The vampire world of the Volturi is complex enough to illicit the creep factor and the fabricated Quileute legends about how the spirit warriors became the wolfen protectors are quite well thought out and told. Despite the obsessive attention of detail over Edward and Bella’s relationship, the supporting characters are well-developed and charismatic in their own right. Most importantly, Meyer’s books are inspiring hordes of teenage girls who wouldn’t normally touch the fantasy genre with a 10-foot jousting lance to read an adventure-romance about vampires and werewolves!

Perhaps the most disturbing thing I found with the series so far, is how indifferent Bella is to the Cullens regular hunting of wild grizzly bear and mountain lion. If Meyer really wanted them to be good vegetarian vampires (hence ethical consumers), she should’ve made a plug about the Cullens being rather generous supporters of conversation societies, like the WWF. But alas, Meyer is a Mormon, not an environmentalist!

Book 25 – New Moon

By Stephanie Meyer

The sequel to Twilight begins happily enough with Edward inviting the reluctant yet still very human Bella to celebrate her 18th birthday with the Cullen clan at their swanky yet isolated lair. Birthday girl is disgruntled she’s now older than her boyfriend, who’s been frozen at 17 for almost a century, but that’s the least of her worries. The party comes to a crashing end when Edward realizes what a dangerous predicament he’s put his human girlfriend in by having her associate with his family of vampires, some still prone to weakness at the sight of human blood.

Edward decides that the best thing to do is to leave Bella – for good. A few months after his abandonment, we spend a good chunk of the first third of New Moon dealing with our heroine putting up a brave face despite her catatonic depression. In her struggle with vampire withdrawal, Bella renews her friendship with Jacob, the teenage son of Billy Black.

There were hints dropped in the previous installment about Jacob’s possible supernatural Quileute heritage, but before you can say “love triangle”, Jacob discovers he’s turned into a teenage werewolf! Sounds ridiculous, but Meyer somehow manages to spin out a rather captivating yarn behind Jacob’s transformation. He’s one of the direct descendents of shape-shifting ancestors who protect the tribe against the evil Cold Ones, since bloodsuckers are part of the Quileute legends too.

Things get rolling when one of the bad vamps from the previous book is back looking for vengeance. Learning that her mate James was eliminated by the Cullens, Victoria seeks to destroy Bella, who was James' original prize. Since Edward’s stepsister has the gift of seeing into the future, Alice returns to Forks thinking that Bella is dead. Due to some catastrophic misunderstanding, Alice and Bella then race to Italy to rescue Edward from the ancient and formidable vampire coven, the Volturi.

The Volturi keep all the vampires of the world in check and their guards have deadly vampire abilities of their own. Aro, the Volturi leader, covets the gifts of the Cullen coven, and discovers that Bella is impervious to their psychic attacks. He decides to release Edward out of respect to Carlisle and with the promise that Bella will one day be turned into a vampire. Bella is thus reunited with her beloved Edward, and she learns that he truly loves her after all. Bella, Edward and his family return to Forks to resume their lives, but now there is the complication with Jacob and the Quileute werewolves!

Like the past book, Meyer does a great job describing the gloomy beauty of the rainy Pacific Northwest and the geography of the Olympic Peninsula. It seems to be a pattern now where Meyer starts off the first chunk of the story with a near-banal lull with Bella entrenched in her all-too-real and all-too-ordinary small town existence. Then she suddenly turns on the action switch, ramps up the conflict and delivers on the fun and fantastic. There’s a reason why the saga has become such a popular phenomenon.

Of course, there’s the romance between Bella and Edward that sends young hearts racing, although their love for each other is so totally unreal. These two spend almost every waking and sleeping moment together! The hyper-romantic codependent relationship between human and supernatural being does not exactly make a healthy influence on teenage girls! The copious cliches of two souls intertwined and words describing the pain of heart-wrenching separation were enough to make me gag. The positive part is that Bella and Edward are still compelling protagonists, if you can get past their self-deprecating declarations of love.

Plus, the interesting backstories on the other vampires, such as Carlisle and Alice, and the Quileute characters who are tied to Jacob, like Sam Uley and Leah Clearwater, also enrich the narrative. There is definitely enough there to move on to the next installment!

Book 24 – Twilight

By Stephanie Meyer

Thanks to a coworker who generously lent me the entire Twilight saga, December became the month for gratuitous self-indulgence!

If I was a teenager today I don't think I'd be able to resist the whole Twilight phenomenon (having read a fair number of Sweet Dreams books and young adult fantasy at that tender age). Now as an adult in pre-holiday mode, I can allow myself to be swept up again in pure flights of fancy... albeit with a slightly more, ahem, mature perspective.

The rather unremarkable heroine, Bella Swan, is the perfect cipher for the young adult reader of the female persuasion. Plagued by the usual teen foibles -- shyness, extreme awkwardness and low self-esteem -- she's ordinary enough to make her identifiable, but pretty enough to make her appealing to the boys in her new high school. Bella is mature beyond her years for a 17-year-old, which sets her apart as a kind of loner, but she’s compassionate and loves those who are close to her, so she remains connected to humanity. When Bella moves from sunny Arizona to rainy small-town Forks to live with her Dad, she becomes the new girl in town, the one who’d rather be a wallflower than the centre of attention.

Not surprisingly, Edward Cullen is a preternaturally gorgeous youth with perfectly tousled bronze hair, brooding intelligence and the kind of mysterious qualities that make him wholly unattainable for the average teenage girl. It's obvious from the get-go that what really sets Edward and his siblings apart from the regular crowd is their secret vampire identities. And the reason why they even attend high school and coexist with human society in the first place is because they are civilized and humane bloodsuckers: they don’t believe in killing people for food (instead preferring to hunt large, and let's hope, non-endangered animals in the wild expanse of the Pacific Northwest), thus distinguishing the Cullen family as kind of, well, unconventional vampires.

Edward’s immortal zen gets totally thrown when he gets a whiff of the enticing blood coursing through Bella’s veins and is sent into a state of barely controlled frenzy. When he gets over his baser instincts of objectifying Bella as tasty game (he is a deep and conscientious vamp, after all), he sees past her ordinariness and recognizes a potential soul mate, aka The One he’s been searching for, like, the past 90 years of his brief immortal existence.

Though the first meeting is a twist on the “attraction” at first sight, the first half of Twilight is disappointingly on the banal side. Edward’s rescue of Bella from a car accident and then assault from Port Angeles rednecks felt rather contrived and Bella’s discovery of Edward’s true identity is rather ho-hum. And the courtship between the young lovers develops quite normally: they converse over dinner at a restaurant, e.g. what’s it like to be Bella, the vulnerable self-effacing human? What’s it like to be Edward, the sulky hunky teenage vampire with a heart of gold? They talk and talk some more while driving in the car, over lunch at the school cafeteria, and walking to class together, etc etc. Bella learns that Edward can read minds, but the only mind he can’t read is Bella’s. Big Whoop. Things get hot n’ heavy when Edward shows Bella his special place in the woods. But oh, they can’t go all the way because Edward is afraid he might lose all self-control and kill his one true love by drinking all her blood!

I was getting highly skeptical that this was going to be anything more than a hyped-up teen romance disguised as a vapid vampire story. Where was the friggin’ action? And I don’t mean action in the sense of the heavy petting variety, but action in the form of adventure, physical violence and carnage! Finally about halfway through, the plot gets more interesting when Bella meets Edward’s “family”, which is actually more like a coven of vampires comprised of 3 couples: Carlisle and Esme, Rosalie and Emmett, and Alice and Jasper. Since Edward is the odd one out, his family members are mostly accepting of Edward’s rather unorthodox choice for a mate.

Carlisle and Esme appear the oldest, so their ‘official’ story is of a couple who have adopted the others into a kind of extended family. In vampire terms, Carlisle is the leader who established his ‘humane’ coven out of years of loneliness as an eccentric vampire who wishes not to murder. The Cullens only drink human blood when ‘rescuing’ those who are going to die anyway, and transform them into immortal companions. Interestingly enough, Edward has no wish to turn Bella into a vampire for reasons of his own, despite Bella’s desire to love him forever and forever.

Then real conflict arises during a fateful Cullen family baseball game in the form of three visiting vampires. Laurent, James and Victoria are vampires of the typical variety who feed on humans: they tend to be nomadic, avoid human society as much as possible and travel in small groups out of practicality. Although Laurent expresses interest in the Cullen’s unconventional lifestyle, James and Victoria are ‘trackers’, amoral hunters who are obsessed with the challenge of a chase, be it human or otherwise. And the challenge of a strong vampire clan protecting their only vulnerability, a frail human, proves too much to resist. Things then actually get quite exciting and suspenseful when the Cullen Clan strategize like pieces on a chess board to protect their human queen while, at the same time, try to eliminate their threat.

It’s just too bad all this action and excitement is rushed through the last third of the novel. Twilight is primarily a romance, after all, about an ordinary heroine thrown into a set up extraordinary circumstances. So when Meyer decides to turn on the action switch, the story falls into fantastic mode seamlessly and compellingly. There is definitely enough interest sustained in the story development and characters for me to read the next installment. My only complaint is how much is made of Edward’s youthful beauty, his dazzling this and his perfect that. I know vampires are supposed to be seductively pulchritudinous but does almost every member of the Cullen family has to be described looking either like supermodels or movie stars? The constant worship of mainstream beauty gets a little tiresome (alas this isn't about being clever) but I guess this stokes the bland imaginations of the Seventeen or Teen Vogue set just fine!

I’m also a little suspicious about Bella’s association with Billy Black, one of the elders of the Quileute Indian reservation outside the town of Forks, who's close friends with her father, Charlie. Billy still believes in the ‘old legends’ and seems to be the only person who knows of the Cullens’ true nature. Through his son Jacob, Billy makes a few attempts to warn Bella of the dangers of associating with such creatures. Although the Quileutes is a real tribe based in the coastal region of Washington state, I’m highly suspicious of the creative license Meyer will make riffing on First Nations culture, which may likely happen the next book, so let’s just see what happens next…

Book 23 - The Icarus Girl

By Helen Oyeyemi

When I heard that Oyeyemi was a hot young British writer whose debut novel, about a little girl wrestling with the supernatural, was garnering critical attention, I had to check it out.

Jessamy Wuraola Harrison is a quiet, precocious 8-year-old girl living in a London suburb. Half Nigerian and half British, she’s caught between two worlds in more ways than one. Somewhat introverted and strange, Jess prefers spending time alone talking to herself in a closet, or personally annotating published books, rather than playing with friends. The turning point is when her parents bring Jess along to visit her mother’s family in Nigeria. In the abandoned servants quarters on her grandfather’s property, Jess meets a mysterious young girl named Titiola. Since Jess has trouble pronouncing it, she calls her TillyTilly, and the two girls become fast friends. Not only does TillyTilly like Jess just the way she is, she has a knack for sneaking into places that are locked or forbidden, like Jess’ grandfather’s library or an abandoned playground. One day, Tilly asks Jess:

‘Would you like to be like me? Like, be able to do the things I do, I mean?’
Jess nodded so hard she felt as if her brains were bouncing about inside her head. Tilly nodded too, and Jess briefly got that odd feeling again that her actions were being mirrored…
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘You’ll see me again.’

Eventually Jess has to return to London and says a tearful goodbye to TillyTilly, thinking she’ll never see her again. But a few weeks later, her faraway friend magically shows up at her doorstep. Sure enough, this TillyTilly isn't quite who she appears to be, being more than just an ordinary ‘imaginary’ friend. The mixed heritage coming-of-age portrait of a girl gradually morphs into a ghost story, but since this is supposed to be a modern Penguin novel, the narrative gets quite creepy, but never really downright scary. But still, having a supernatural friend eventually takes a psychological toll, and Jess soon becomes a problem child. She always had difficulty making friends, but now she’s getting into fights and having screaming tantrums at school. As TillyTilly gradually insinuates herself into Jess’ life, Jess slowly realizes how little control she has over her so-called friend, and most importantly, her own life.

She had just realized with stunning clarity that she was the only person who saw TillyTilly. She put a hand to her mouth as she tried to sort this out in her mind. She didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her before. TillyTilly had not met anyone in her family, no one had met her, and she refused to meet anyone. And even when Jess was with TillyTilly, never mind that people couldn’t see Jess; the most noticeable thing was that they couldn’t see TillyTilly. She suddenly felt very small and a little bit scared. Is TillyTilly… real?

Finally TillyTilly confesses to Jess who she really is… sort of. It has to do with a long buried family secret, and when Jess reveals to her mother what she knows, yet shouldn't know, she freaks out big time:

Sarah began rambling, her voice trembling: ‘Three worlds! Jess lives in three worlds. She lives in this world, and she lives in the spirit world, and she lives in the Bush. She’s abiku, she always would have known! The spirits tell her things, Fern tells her things. We should’ve… oh, oh… Mama! Mummy-mi, help me…’

Not realizing that Tilly is trying to set her against her mother, Jess realizes too late what TillyTilly is really after…. This is where the story gets creepy. Like when Jess starts hiding in bed because a strange creature with very long arms keeps visiting her at night. Or when TillyTilly tells Jess she’s going to ‘get’ anybody that tries to get in 'their' way, or how she coyly suggests to Jess that they swap places: ‘you’ll be me for a little bit, Jessy, and I’m going to be you!’. Or when Jess convinces her only human friend Siobhan to ‘meet’ TillyTilly: ‘from the moment that Tilly had come into the room, Shivs had felt a … badness. It was the only way to describe it; it was like being sick and hearing rattling in her head as well, slowly building in pressure.’

Though the novel was very good and had many captivating and disturbing moments, at times it did come across as if it was written by a young writer (I believe Oyeyemi was only 20 when the book was published). The world of young girlhood is realistically portrayed, but the precociously gifted child, mature and articulate beyond her years, is such an over-abused theme, and there were several moments where I questioned the credibility of Jess’ thoughts and dialogue. The second trip to Nigeria felt very rushed, and there wasn’t enough time spent with the Nigerian family stepping in to deal with the restless spirit of TillyTilly. The ending also lacked a satisfying resolution, like a much-needed symbolic exorcism, and seemed to cop out with a deliberately ambiguous ending. This could have been a truly exciting story of possession if it didn't have such lofty ambitions of being a 'serious' novel. This is still quite an accomplished story for a young writer, and overall is worth checking out.

Book 22 - Everyone’s Pretty

By Lydia Millet

I heard Millet was a funny writer to watch out for, so I picked up a used copy for a read n’ see. It was amusing for sure, but it mostly felt like the novel was trying to be a quirky indie film (perhaps directed by David O. Russell) about a bunch of disparate oddballs n' freaks in L.A. who humorously intersect in one way or another. The main character, Dean Decetes, a porn flick reviewer (as well as chronic masturbator and loser), reminded me too much of Ignatius Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, with his unkempt appearance, penchant for lofty language and delusional god complex.

And Dean’s living and freeloading off of his devout spinster sister, Bucella, is a setup very similar to Ignatius’ relationship with his poor, Irene. Dean is always getting himself into trouble and/or embarrassing her with his drunken rampages, and Bucella is getting tired of looking after her younger brother. There’s only one little tender exchange between Dean and Bucella, where he tries to convince her to bail him out one more time by reminding her of how, when they were little, he used ro sneak food to her when their abusive father locked her in the bathroom for two weeks. That was one of few genuine emotional moments in the novel.

But overlooking the somewhat hackneyed setup and borrowed influences, Everyone’s Pretty is a light quick entertaining read with some genuinely funny moments. Dean Decetes may talk like Ignatius Reilly but the words that spew from his mouth are pretty clever. Take the scene where he’s arrested for drunk driving, and while sitting in the back of the police car, he attempts to converse with the rookie about value systems:

-Are you of the Pentecostal persuasion? he asked. –Your brother or father handle snakes? Snake-handling in the family? I handle one myself. Frequently.

Millet also loves to poke fun at religious ignoramuses, such as Philip Kreuz, Bucella’s coworker at Statistical Diagnostics. A misguided Christian Scientist who married a dim-wit for the purpose of converting her, Phil has some very laughable views about Catholics (notoriously flighty and given to weeping and gruesome depictions of the Crucifixion), the Three Tenors (he would not be surprised if the one with the beard soiled innocent children on a regular basis… too fruity even for the other Sodomites), and Murder She Wrote (a virtual Gomorrah of prime-time indecency in which females far past their prime rudely rejected appropriate modes of behavior and seldom if ever acknowledged their spiritual debt to the savior).

I read in an interview that it was Millet’s desire to make Dean Decetes sympathetic despite his outrageous defective character traits. The problem is that I failed to identify with any of the characters. All in all, it made for an amusing but ultimately forgettable read.

Book 21 – The Sun Also Rises

By Ernest Hemingway

“You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.”

“It sounds like a swell life,” I said. “When do I work?”

A couple of years ago, a friend, downsizing his collection, gave this book to me when I was over for a visit. It became my “commute” book over the winter, but my metro rides were usually too short and/or too crowded to read more than a couple of pages at a time. Then winter was over and I was cycling, and this book got left under a pile of other books, forgotten. More than a year later, I picked it up again, but had to skim over the first third again since it’s been so long!

I haven’t done this book much service as a reader, but it’s actually quite a terrific book. I mean, it’s Hemingway, so quality writing and literary merit are a given. The only other Hemingway I’ve ever read was his memoir, A Movable Feast, which I don’t remember much except that it had great atmosphere, in that Paris-was-yesterday kinda way. The Sun Also Rises is very similar in that respect, except it’s a fictionalized story of a group of American expatriates who pilgrimage to the Spanish town of Pamplona for the annual fiesta and bull fights. The story is told from the POV of Jake Barnes, an American WWI veteran and now a writer living in Paris.

Although I knew that Jake was injured from the War, I didn’t realize until much later that he actually lost his manhood as a result! The reference to Jake’s unfortunate injury is quite subtle if you’re not paying attention, which was what happened to me. If I had figured this out earlier, I would’ve understood better why Jake and Lady Brett Ashley have such an interesting, but complicated friendship. Brett is beautiful, narcissistic, self-destructive and destined to a series of failed relationships, while Jake is doomed to a life of celibacy, and unconsummated love for Brett. Sure this may sound clichéd and stupid, even back in the day, but with Hemingway, it works. It helps that the main characters are sympathetic and so goddamned likable. Like Brett’s talent as a quick wit and social catalyst, or Jake’s high-powered observations about his friends’ strengths and foibles, and his willingness to overlook gibes if a good repartee is going.

There is still a very modern and sophisticated quality about The Sun Also Rises, while at the same time, the novel truly encapsulates its own zeitgeist. There are fine and funny moments in 1920’s Paris when the characters go out on the town, wandering from café to café, or meeting up for a nice meal...

We ate dinner at Madame Lecomte’s restaurant on the far side of the island. It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place. Someone had put it in the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table.

Most of the key characters have been directly, or indirectly, affected by the War, having lost their purpose in some way (hence the “Lost Generation”). Since the majority of these early day slackers are full-fledged adults in their late-twenties or early thirties, they may lack direction in life, but they still appreciate good company, lively conversation and drink. The dialogue among these colourful people is constantly amusing – they exchange pleasantries, they gossip, they rib on each other. But above all, they imbibe.

There is a lovely moment when Jake and his friend Bill take a side trip to a remote Spanish village and go trout fishing. They pack a picnic and a couple of bottles of wine and have a great time. They get along with the locals and they drink more bottles of wine. They meet a British fellow named Harris and they get along well with him too. They find a pub and he buys each of them a bottle of wine apiece. Harris confesses to Jake and Bill that he hasn’t had this much fun since the war.

There are definitely undercurrents of loss and emptiness, and lots of post-modern aimlessness, but for me, it’s this awareness combined with the many little moments of humanity that makes this novel a memorable and enjoyable read.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

Book 20 – The Chrysalids

By John Wyndham

I’ve had this sweet 1965 Penguin paperback edition for years and years. And for some unfathomable reason, I never bothered to read this 1955 sci fi classic… until now.

I guess I’ve always been a bit picky about which books I want to read. But I think being part of the 50-Books blog-circle the past 3 years has really opened my mind to exploring books I’ve always been curious about, but never felt a strong enough compulsion to indulge. Recent examples have been Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The Watchmen, and Animal Farm. And hey, I already broke last year's record of reading 19 books!

But out of all of these golden oldies, The Chrysalids is my favourite so far, mostly because the confluence of elements that make an excellent novel are all there: a simple yet effective story, first-rate narration, well-developed characters, formidable foes, oodles of tension, conflict, loss and sacrifice, powerfully enduring and relevant themes, and a satisfying resolution. There is a timelessness to The Chrysalids that does not feel dated for the most part, even when dealing with male-female relationships or ideas about the future. Not bad for a novel that was written in the 1950s, and this is a real tribute to Wyndham’s writing talents.

I believe most of you are familiar with the premise of The Chrysalids. It’s a classic post-apocalyptic tale about the survival of the human race after the planet is devastated by nuclear holocaust. Thousands of years later, where the land hasn’t been scorched black, vegetation and wildlife return (and reproduce to some degree of normalcy), and human civilization starts anew. Although genetic mutations run less rampant, they still exist, and the fear of deviations among these frontier societies proliferates into an institutionalized fanaticism to keep strains of livestock and agriculture “pure” like they were in times before the “Tribulation”. Any plant or animal species that deviates from the norm are called “Offences”, and thus promptly destroyed.

Nowhere is this practiced more zealously than in the farming villages of Labrador (yeah, Canada!), where the culture seems to be modeled after orthodox Christian communities of the 19th century. And human deviations, known as “Blasphemies”, are feared the most (what is done to these Blasphemers are not revealed until later in the novel ;-) Although it is easy enough to spot a physical deformity, like an extra finger or toe, unbeknownst to the villagers of Waknuk, a small group of young people soon discover they have the ability to silently communicate with one another across distances with their minds…

There is so much more going on, however, that I’d rather not ruin with summarizing. In any case, there are already many things written online about The Chrysalids. As it’s a compact novel, you’re better off just reading this for yourself (or re-reading if it’s been a long time, as in the case for Olman).

What I also appreciate about The Chrysalids are Wyndham’s Darwinist ideas ("But life is change, that is how it differs from rocks, change is its very nature") and his uncompromising stance against fundamentalist religious views, ie. Christianity, which are almost always based on fear of change and/or fear of the unknown. Wyndham does a bang-up job portraying the stranglehold of frightful oppressiveness that surrounds the village of Waknuk, and the constant vigilance the invisible minority of mutants must maintain on a daily basis in order to protect themselves. The panel inscriptions that decorate the God-fearing home of the Strorm family are priceless in themselves:

ONLY THE IMAGE OF GOD IS MAN
KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD
IN PURITY OUR SALVATION
WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT!
THE NORM IS THE WILL OF GOD
THE DEVIL IS THE FATHER OF DEVIATION

Change is what’s needed most for the most dominant and self-delusional species on Earth. Wyndham seems to be saying that human beings are, not just tragically flawed, but totally fucked, and if we don't end up destroying ourselves and our environment, the only hope we have is the remote possibility of evolving into something better.


< WARNING -- SPOILER >


In the end, the discovery of a telepathically-evolved race of human beings and their advanced society in faraway Sealand (yeah, New Zealand!) gives hope to the persecuted mutants of Labrador.


< END OF SPOILER >


Another good thing about reading John Wyndham for the first time is the pleasure of looking forward to reading his other classics. Yay!

Book 19 – Max & The Cats

By Moacyr Scliar

Although Moacyr Scliar is a distinguished Brazilian author, his compact novella is perhaps more famous as being the inspiration for Yann Martel’s Booker prize-winning, Life of Pi. Since I haven’t read Martel’s book, and Scliar’s being quite a bit slimmer, I figured this would be a quick, light read. I had the original impression that Max & The Cats was a story for young adults, with the magic realist premise of a boy adrift at sea with a wild jaguar.

It’s actually an allegorical tale for grown-ups (there is adultery and violence) which spans the life of Max: from his boyhood in Berlin in the 1920’s to his death in Brazil in 1977. Max grows up working at his father’s fur shop, The Bengal Tiger, named after the prominently displayed stuffed tiger that Max's father had shot in India. Although fearful of the watchful gaze of this immobilized animal, Max is afraid of his father even more. During this period, Germany is in the grip of political instability, but Max is too caught up in his own life as a university student and his ongoing affair with a married woman to really pay attention. He even ingratiates himself to Professor Kunz, famous for his research on animal psychology, but who eventually starts experimenting on gypsies! Professor Kunz’s work also involves studying the behaviour of cats in situations involving conflict: He would place the animals in huge labyrinths, where they are subjected to constant dilemmas, such as choosing between two paths – one leading to a saucer with milk, the other to a fierce bulldog. (yep, foreshadowing)

Eventually Max incurs the wrath of a high-ranking Nazi officer and is forced to flee Germany. He finds passage to Brazil on a ship full of animals, unaware that the shady captain plans to sink the ship and flee with the insurance. This is where we find Max held captive in a little dinghy with a menacing jaguar, adrift in the middle of the ocean. Another uneasy relationship with a feline develops, as Max tries to appease the big cat with fish that he has caught. The jaguar inadvertently saves his life by striking at a shark that was attempting to make a meal out of the both of them. This is probably the most adventurous part of the tale.

Max miraculously makes it over to Brazil and starts a new life as a farmer. As a German he faces some difficulties when Brazil declares war on Germany in 1942, but on the whole manages reasonably well. After the war he visits his homeland, but finds nothing there he can really return to. Back in Brazil, a newly arrived German neighbour builds a palacial mansion overlooking his modest farm, and Max recognizes him as the former Nazi officer. This third variation of the feline-theme is a different yet equally threatening one, but Max confronts this one head-on, without a few consequences.

The story is structured into 3 distinct phases, each representing a different aspect of Max’s – I don’t know how else to say it – psychic development, which is represented by his attitude and relationship with his various “cat encounters”. The first phase of his life is based around fear, the second is one of resignation and/or complacency and the final phase is one of self-actualization. If you’re thinking this sounds a little on the Freudian side, well, it is! Later in the story, a doctor living in Brazil tells Max that he likes to share his story to the indigenous people about a craftsman named Ego, his nemesis named Id and an authoritarian figure named Super Ego. You get the drift.

Max & The Cats has been called everything from brilliant, to appealing yet unfulfilling. I would side with the latter. The tone of the narrative is rather allegorical, and it was told in a detached and removed style, so there wasn’t much in the way of substance for me (not much to identify with). I think that the novel would have hit the mark better if it was aimed at young adults as the ideas were interesting, but the symbolism was a little too trite and obvious for my liking. So really, more unfulfilling than appealing, overall!

Book 18 – The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

By Mordecai Richler

Spending the past several years on the Plateau Montreal has definitely been a privilege, but living in such close proximity to St Urbain St and having never read any Mordecai Richler the whole time is almost a crime. So if I’m going to start things off right, I figure the best intro would be none other than Duddy Kravitz. Indeed, the titular character’s old stomping grounds are now my own, the only major difference being what was once a working-class Jewish neighbourhood is now a gentrified and coveted area to reside in. Reading about Duddy’s boyhood on the Plateau evokes a mixed sense of loss for a bygone era and awe at how many things manage to remain unchanged since, say, WWII.

To the middle-class stranger, it’s true, one street would have seemed as squalid as the next. On each corner a cigar store, a grocery, and a fruit man. Outside staircases everywhere. Winding ones, wooden ones, rusty and risky ones. Here’s a prized plot of grass splendidly barbered, there a spitefully weedy patch. An endless repetition of precious peeling balconies and waste lots making the occasional gap here and there. But, as the boys knew, each street between St Dominique and Park Avenue represented subtle differences in income. No two cold-water flats were alike… No two stores were the same, either. Best Fruit gypped on the scales, but Smiley’s didn’t give credit.

The beginning of the novel is splendid, with teenaged Duddy Kravitz and his gang of Warriors pretty much ruling over Fletcher Fields High School, tormenting their pathetic teacher, Mr MacPherson, and getting into tussles with the CPS, a kind of civil defense organization during the war. Kravitz is a born troublemaker, but this doesn’t mean he’s lacking in ambition and drive. His biggest dream of all is to someday own his own land. As his Grandpa Simcha would constantly drive it home to Duddy, “A man without land is nobody”.

At night, lying exhausted on his cot, Duddy realized how little money he had in big business terms and he dreamed about his future. He knew what he wanted, and that was to own his own land and to be rich, a somebody, but he was not sure of the smartest way to go about it. He was confident. But there had been other comers before him. South America, for instance, could no longer be discovered. It had been found. Toni Home Permanent had been invented. Another guy had already thought up Kleenex. But there was something out there, like let’s say the atom bomb formula before it had been discovered, and Duddy dreamed that he would find it and make his fortune.

The last sentence is telling, implying that Duddy is willing to resort to rather unscrupulous methods if it means he can get that much closer to achieving his dream. That turns out to be a bit of an understatement. The rest of the novel is pretty much about Duddy’s various ill-conceived yet audacious enterprises, the business men he comes across who are varying shades of shady and legit, the friends and lovers he meets and eventually screws over. The stuff about Duddy’s half-baked schemes, like his stint as a socalled movie producer who hires a washed-up alcoholic filmmaker to shoot bar mitzvahs and weddings in and around Westmount, can be down-right hilarious.

Before all the scheming and manipulating, Duddy starts off humbly and honestly working as a waiter at a summer resort in Ste Agathe. This section is also fun to read since I stayed at a friend’s summer cottage out there, and could almost visualize how it must’ve been like back in the day:

Some sixty miles from Montreal, set high in the Laurentian hills on the shore of a splendid blue lake, Ste Agathe des Monts had been made the middle-class Jewish community’s own resort town many years ago. Here, as they prospered, the Jews came from Outremont to build summer cottages and hotels and children’s camps. … There were still some pockets of Gentile resistance, it’s true … For even as they played croquet and sipped their gin and tonics behind protecting pines they could not miss the loud, swarthy parade outside. The short husbands with their outrageously patterned sports shirts arm in arm with purring wives too obviously full for slacks… The lake was out of the question. Sailboats and canoes had no chance against speedboats, spilling over with relatives and leaving behind a wash of empty Pepsi bottles.

What really makes this coming-of-age story rather unorthodox and memorable, if not always likable, is the dark and ugly side of Duddy Kravitz. This would imply that there could also be a good and appealing side, which does on occasion surface when it involves Duddy’s immediate family. Other than that, Duddy is pretty much pure ambition and mostly driven by his obsession to come out on top. TAoDK is a brutally honest and unsympathetic portrayal of a protagonist that sinks to despicable lows, and ends up getting what he wants in the end... at a cost. There is no disguising that Duddy Kravitz represents the epitome of the Jewish nightmare. In this sense, Richler’s novel kind of plays out as a morality tale. The ending is ambiguous in that it lacks any kind of satisfying reconciliation -- Duddy never learns his lesson and ends up alienating everyone around him. What’s certain is that Duddy will always be driven to make money and will never change his ways.

I want some land, Uncle Benjy. I’m going to own my own place one day. King of the castle, that’s me. And there won’t be any superior drecks there to laugh at me or run me off. That’s just about the size of it.

---

The 1974 film version by Ted Kotcheff, which stars the young Richard Dreyfuss as the titular character, is considered a Canadian landmark. I saw it long ago in film school, and will likely revisit the film again now that I finally read Richler’s book many years later!

Book 17 – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

By Philip K. Dick

Yup, believe it. Just read this for the very first time! Plenty of spoilers ahead since I assume the rest of the world has read it…

First off, I understand that Blade Runner is only very loosely based on this PKD classic. But since I’ve seen the movie, like, multiple times, and the cinematic imagery and storyline are so deeply ingrained in me, it’s almost impossible not to go in without any preconceptions or inevitable comparisons. Guess it’s rather fitting that I found a used paperback featuring Blade Runner as the cover!

In this respect, DADoES was a bit of a let-down for me, with none of the action and violence of the film version. Although everything took place over the course of a 24-hour period in which Deckard retired a total of 6 androids… mostly executed in a weirdly un-dramatic manner. There was no race against time where the rogue Nexus-6 androids seek a cure to extend their robot lives, no “lemme tell you about my mother” confrontations, nor a maker meets his doom scenario where his android creation squeezes eyes n’ brains out of skull. And lastly, no final laser tube showdown between human and machine. In fact, the ending where Deckard finishes off the remaining androids was rather anti-climactic and remarkably unexciting.

There was also a very un-sexy bedroom scene with Deckard and Rachael, a female android (unsexy because the dated descriptions and dialogue rendered it tame and rather laughable). Even Dick’s earlier work The Man In The High Castle had some excellent ass-kicking in there, so it’s not like ass-kicking was out of the realm of his stylistic milieu.

Ok, now the negative stuff is out of the say. What Blade Runner lacks in background setting, contextual details and thematic exploration, the novel provides in abundance -- PKD-style. Sometime after an unnamed nuclear war, a mysterious radioactive dust contaminates most of the planet’s surface and almost wipes out every species in the animal kingdom. With the human race at risk, a colonization program is escalated on a massive scale. As an immigration incentive, and under U.N. law:

Each emigrant automatically receives in possession an android subtype of his choice, and, by 2019, the variety of subtypes passed all understanding, in the manner of American automobiles of the 1960s.

It’s this cool sci-fi background stuff that naturally makes the novel interesting. That, and how the leftover defective Earthlings live out their lives. One of the few things worth possessing is a real, live animal. Not necessarily for companionship, but because life of any kind is so rare, and a living thing, even a little toad, is worth its weight in gold. For the unfortunates who can’t afford a live animal, they fool their neighbours by acquiring an electric one that looks and behaves almost like the real thing. While the indigenous life on Earth dies a slow death, the evolution of android sentiency grows increasingly complex, thanks to the snazzy new Nexus-6 line developed by the Rosen Association.

With newfangled brainchips, a minority of rogue androids escape the oppressive colonies and gradually infiltrate all aspects of human society on Earth. Some androids even think they’re human due to implanted synthetic memories. But no matter how humanized an android becomes, they can never acquire the same right to life as human beings, or any living thing for that matter. As one android-in-hiding puts it: “… it’s a chance anyway, breaking free and coming here to Earth, where we’re not even considered animals. Where every worm and louse is considered more desirable than all of us put together.”

Apparently, the only remaining attribute that separates humans from androids is empathy, and administering the Voigt-Kampff test is standard practice in order to distinguish android from authentic human. From early on in the novel, inherent flaws in the VK empathy test are revealed, not in determining a lack of empathy in an android per se, but rather the failure to account for humans with underdeveloped empathic ability. Thus, this calls into question various moral and ethical reasoning and beliefs.

So yes, very familiar and universal themes at play here, ie. the science fiction exploration of the ethical dimensions inherent to the android concept literary device, in order to understand the persecution of a person based upon artificial distinctions such as "ethnic group" (wikipedia). Even though Deckard and all the other characters were rather flat and the lack of ass-kicking was a big letdown, Dick’s ideas and themes remain engaging and timeless.

Book 16 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Diaz

Olman’s awesome experience with this Pulitzer Prize winner pretty much spurred me on to read it ASAP. Although I’d heard about the book before (something about a Dominican ghetto nerd and his immigrant family with lots of pop cultural refs thrown in), never in my wildest imagining would I’ve guessed that this would speak to Olman and nerds of the world (the kind of people who would not otherwise touch postcolonial, or magic realist, literature with a 10-foot jousting lance) in such a profoundly visceral way!

After reading the first few pages, you quickly realize TBWLOW wields a powerful combo of nerdery and historical fiction that's confidently told by a colloquial voice rich in a mishmash of Spanglish & hiphop influences. Even though the style is consistently entertaining in its delivery, it does not take away from any of the personal tragedy & struggles that permeate the novel. Right off the bat, an unknown narrator introduces this as a fukú story. Fukú is a kind of superstitious curse or doom, first unleashed upon the Hispanic New World with the arrival of the Europeans. And this vague sinister force of the fukú, we learn, follows the lives of various members of the Cabral family.

I had originally thought the story would mainly focus on Oscar Cabral (Wao is more like a nickname), but it actually vacillates between him, his mother Belicia, his sister Lola and his grandfather Abelard, who are all, in various ways, misfits or outcasts in society, whether it’s in the city of Santo Domingo or the suburbs of New Jersey. Our mysterious narrator (whose identity is revealed later in the novel) first introduces Oscar as a guy who “wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber”, and who couldn’t hide his otakuness to save his life. Sadly, our anti-hero is likely the only Dominican male on planet Earth who is still a virgin due to the fact that:

Oscar’s idea of G was to talk about role-playing games! How fucking crazy is that? (My favorite was the day on the E bus when he informed some hot morena, If you were in my game I would give you an eighteen Charisma!)

If you still don’t understand why Olman loves this book so much, well then, may Saruman help you (my feeble attempt at infusing this review with Tolkien plugs). Even I re-discovered my inner geek while reading this book, getting a frisson of gratifying pleasure whenever I recognized a nerdy reference (except the ones that have to do with gaming, of course), which isn’t hard since nerdery is generously scattered throughout the book. Even the female characters cannot escape the geek mythologizing, like Oscar’s rebellious sister, Lola, the only teenage punk Latina in her hood whose favorite books are about runaways, e.g. Watership Down, The Incredible Journey, My Side of the Mountain (like, hey, that was like me too!).

Most importantly and impressively is how Diaz integrates his one-of-a-kind vernacular into his historical accounts of the Dominican Republic (most of which is in the form of David Foster Wallace-inspired footnotes), particularly when it was under the Trujillo dictatorship throughout the 1930s and 1960s:

In some ways living in Santo Domingo during the Trujillato was a lot like being in that famous Twilight Zone episode that Oscar loved so much, the one where the monstrous white kid with the godlike powers rules over a town that is completely isolated from the rest of the world, a town called Peaksville… You might roll your eyes at this comparison, but friends: it would be hard to exaggerate the power Trujillo exerted over the Dominican people and the shadow of fear he cast throughout the region. Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor…

I don’t know about you, but who would’ve thought that learning about 20th century Latin American history and how it impacts an immigrant family can be so freakin’ fun? Not to mention the fact that history can sometimes be truly stranger than any sci-fi or fantasy and more horrific than any Stephen King concoction. What’s also notable in Diaz’s writing style is the seamless lack of quotations in regards to all the dialogue. I remember Olman had a big problem with this very same stylistic device in No Country For Old Men, so I asked him: so you didn’t have a problem with it here? The funny thing was, Olman didn’t even notice the lack of dialogue quotations, he was so into the story! Even if you don’t know any Spanish, or anything about Latin history, Tolkien, Star Trek, comic books and/or Akira, believe it or not, this is still a remarkable and unique novel. A highly recommended reading experience!