Pulp Fiction Sandwich

Being thoroughly immersed in chemobrain these days, there are times when I can’t focus well on books with depth and substantial meanings or themes. I’ve been longing to read some of these books on my shelves for long-time³, but chemobrain or being intensely involved in work, and now back to chemobrain has put a lot of the more intellectually challenging books off the table for me.

But I find little ways to squeak them in – partly by distracting the chemobrain into thinking that it’s getting pap, then sneaking something edgy in; but of course I have to finish it off with pap to keep it cool and the chemobrain fooled.

My latest pulp fiction sandwich consisted of Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie; the meat of the sandwich was The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi; and the pure whitebread closure was The 5th Horseman by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro.

Not much to say about either Death in the Clouds or The 5th Horseman – I mentioned on my main blog that I finally ran into an Agatha Christie book that I could not estomac, as Hercule Poirot says – I actually had to force myself to pick it up – although I have to admit that I was slightly surprised about the perp – I’d twigged to the person who was unexpectedly involved very early on, and had even guessed her identity; but it wasn’t until the heroine starts having another love interest that I realized there was something not quite right about the original love interest. Even then, I didn’t suspect him as the perp – guess in some ways it was better than I expected it to be based on my lack of interest initially.

The 5th Horseman was an example of Patterson’s usual work on the Women’s Murder Club Series, but I don’t really consider Lindsay pitching a fit about not wanting to be Lieutenant out of the blue, and then dropping it right back into the blue to be character development. Yuki was supposed to show how deep she is by freaking about her mother’s death, and then obsessing about the person she thinks is the murderer; but then to be all back together in days looking gorgeous, self-possessed, and happy just didn’t cut it with me. Especially since the guy she thought was the murderer turned out not to be “it” – and we only find out who really did it after we see her being socially poised and thrilled with her new job, after a couple months of not washing, stalking the doctor in question, forgetting to change into real clothes. Perhaps there will be some indication in future books about how she focused her obsession into her new job with the DA, but *describing* that she has a new job with the DA “putting away bad guys” isn’t enough to show how she turned herself around so quickly.

So there’s the pap.

Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, is a wonderful graphic novel about growing up as a woman in Iran during the 70s and 80s. I certainly can’t compare my childhood to hers in any direct way, but as I read the book I felt everything she felt, and it reminded me of growing up in a house where I was expected to be a girly girl instead of the tomboy that I really was. To be subjected to wearing the headscarf without being given a choice, to be raised in a liberal family who all were forced to act in ways that were contrary to their beliefs, to be given the opportunity to leave but still go back to find out who one really is speaks about how strongly our childhood impacts our adult selves.

One of the most powerful aspects for me is how Marjane soaks up the party line when she is a child – to the point where she believes her parents are disillusioned traitors. As she grows older and more understanding, she starts to see that she was sucked in, and that she was the disillusioned one, both by believing the government’s lies, and again when she realizes that they are lies. When she moves to Vienna as a teenager, she turns into a rebel because she doesn’t fit in with the “normal” girls; she doesn’t really fit in with the punk crowd she falls in with either; and she had trouble learning to fit in with anyone, even after going back home to find herself.

It takes her 10 years to mature enough and really understand what her parents and grandmother had told her before – that she was not meant to live in Iran. Raised in a liberal home suddenly shunted back into a highly traditional culture, she had the taste of freedom that would never truly be hers in Iran. But as a teenager in Austria, she was not able to appreciate the freedom she had, and like so many youths of so many cultures, the freedom went to her head. Finally, she was mature enough, and able to move out of Iran again at a time when she’d been through learning to fit in, but was still able to be herself.

We should all learn that lesson so quickly!

Fire on High

I’m going to tell you up-front that I didn’t hate Brisingr by Christopher Paolini – probably a 2 or 2.5 on a scale of 1 to 5. Just to remove any tension you might have been feeling about that.

However . . .

(*************Spoiler alert********* – I’m going to discuss several specific plot points and may even give away the ending of the book, so avert your eyes if you haven’t read it yet and plan to)

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

I do have problems with Brisingr.

1. Plot points

a.) When Eragon and Murtagh are fighting, Eragon tells Murtagh that he can escape Galbatorix’s hold by changing his character/real name. But later, when Oromis tells Eragon that Selena (Eragon’s mother) defied her binding oath of fealty to Morzan, Eragon asks how she could have turned against him. Of course, Oromis explains exactly what Eragon had previously explained to Murtagh. I know Eragon isn’t too smart, and seems to forget a lot of things, but come on!

b.) Another one that really doesn’t make sense (maybe someone can explain it to me – I’m definitely not good at political manipulations, so perhaps I am missing the whole point) is when Orik asks Eragon to support his claim to become king of the dwarves. Eragon waffles, and tells him “If I do, my support might turn the other clans against you. Not only will you be asking your people to ally themselves with the Varden, you will be asking them to accept a Dragon Rider as one of their own, which they have never done before and I doubt they will want to now.”

The problems I see with this reasoning are:

i.) The previous dwarf king, whom Orik is heir to, *already* adopted Eragon as part of the clan, making him “one of their own”, i.e., a dwarf by adoption; and thus part of the dwarf community as a whole. Orik even says that the only way the adoption can be undone is if Orik as clan chief banishes Eragon.

ii.) If Eragon’s support is going to turn the other clans against Orik, why would his support of a different clan’s candidate be helpful to that candidate? I mean, the point is that they don’t like what Eragon stands for, and so they won’t support Orik if Eragon is supporting him. If Eragon were supporting a different candidate, then nobody who was opposed to Eragon would support that candidate, right? (So really, to get Orik elected, Eragon’s support of a different candidate might alienate enough voters from that candidate that Orik would win; so by supporting a different candidate, he’d really be supporting Orik, wouldn’t he?)

These are just two major plot issues (I didn’t keep a list of all the questionable points) – if someone can convince me that I’m wrong, I’m willing to change my mind…

2. Show me!

Eliza Doolittle sings to Freddie – “Tell me no dreams filled with desire, if you’re on fire, show me!”

This isn’t at all related to Eragon’s calf-love for Arya. This is railing against the fact that we spend too much time in Eragon’s (and everyone else’s) head.

Paolini tells us, in detail, every little thought and emotion that flits through the transom of Eragon’s thick skull. Give your readers a little credit – SHOW us what he thinks by his actions; let us use our brains to read your message without spelling out exactly what we’re supposed to think and believe about every little thing.

We’re smart – we don’t need detailed instructions on how to read your characters. If anything, this shows Paolini’s immaturity as a writer in that a) he feels the need to control exactly how we perceive his characters and messages and/or b) that he doesn’t know *how* to write without just flat-out telling us what he wants us to know.

Why is Wuthering Heights so compelling, with two such unlikeable main characters? Because we have to think about what is going on in their minds, try to figure out why they do the things they do, how the tragic situation came to be, and what is going to happen next.

3. Yeah, I could see that coming a mile away

And that leads into my next gripe – how predictable! This covers two aspects:

a) I was mostly unsurprised at any of the “twists” or “turns” of the plot. Heavy-handed foreshadowing and plotlines that echo thousands of previous stories make it hard to avoid running headlong into the brick wall of been there, read that.

The thing is, most stories are the same, having been told and retold – the important thing is the journey. Lots of writers can tell a story in a fresh way, with characters that are captivating (whether we like them or not). Paolini hasn’t reached that point yet.

and b) The races (Elves, Dwarves, Humans, Dragons, etc.) are straight out of stereotype. I mean, I played characters like these when I started playing D&D over 30 (OMG!) years ago. There have been plenty of good variations on these races in the mountain of fantasy literature written over the years; and there will no doubt be plenty more to come. I don’t consider Paolini’s take to be a variation.

On this point, however, I think that the age of the intended audience might slightly ameliorate the use of stereotypes – perhaps many of the younger readers who haven’t read as much fantasy as those of us who’ve been around for a while will get their first taste of Elves, Dwarves, etc. from these books – hey, they might even think that Tolkien stole his ideas from Paolini. . .

And *this* leads into the next topic:

4. Characterization? What characterization?

The stereotypes are also spread throughout the rest of the cast. The evil dudes are stereotypical evil dudes, the monsters/sort-of allies are stereoptypical monsters/sort-of allies, the villagers are stereotypical villagers, ad nauseum. The use of stereotypes in lieu of characterization is definitely a sign of a writer who doesn’t have the depth of skills to show us individual characters through his writing.

The agonizing done by Eragon and Roren over their killing of enemies isn’t a bad idea, but it is extremely uneven. Eragon’s in particular was so much like an afterthought (oh yeah, I’m supposed to make sure readers know just how human and vulnerable he is), and was like a mantle that he would put on and take off, that it just didn’t convince me. Roren was a little bit better, and probably of all the characters is the one that I thought was the most realistic (notice I qualified that – sort of like “mostly harmless”). Katrina is basically just a sperm recipient.

************************

Let’s see – on the positive side, I didn’t throw the book across the room with cursing and exclamations of disgust (I have done that before, although usually I’ll just put the book down and back away if it is really atrocious).

It did keep my interest, and I am no doubt going to read the next episode. In all fairness, I was pretty impressed with Eragon when it first came out, based on the age of the author. Paolini has potential, and he writes well in many ways. I hope that he grows as a writer to fit his ideas – the basic framework is there, the execution, not so much.

Unable to look away

Rather than returning immediately to Don Quixote, I picked up “Running with Scissors” by Augusten Burroughs as my next read.

I had read “Possible Side Effects” previously, and found it both funny and touching. The ride is much more intense in RwS. Suffering from insomina anyway, I couldn’t put the book down, and even when I tried to get to sleep once I felt sufficiently exhausted, I lay there thinking about it. In spite of the humor in Burroughs’ book, I was horrified at the situation this young boy was thrust into; and I was also amazed by just how crazy people can be (and how normal they can think themselves).

It was mesmerizing – the type of horrible fascination where you want to look away from something awful, but can’t stop yourself from watching – it felt the same as the time I was going through another insomia bout, watching some videos on YouTube; I thought I’d clicked on a picture of a video about some cute kittens, but instead, what came up were some cars in a brushy field with a man in a blue shirt taking photographs of something I couldn’t see – all of a sudden a lioness comes running up behind the man and takes him down – he fights, trying to block her, but she, of course, overpowers him. The video keeps rolling, and even as the man is struggling, the filmer pans back and shows the man’s wife and children in the car next to him, screaming and crying; and the man in the car on the other side starting to rush forward, but realizing that there’s nothing he can do and moving back again. As the camera turns back toward the lioness, the man is lying still, and she bites at him again – his body, perhaps in some nerve-response because he’s unconscious but not dead, jerks into a sitting position, then sinks backward again.

Even as I desperately wanted to stop watching it, I was unable to stop – I had nightmares for nearly a month after; and even years later, now, the images remain in my mind, and are still as disturbing as when they were fresh.

Reading RwS was disturbing in a similar way. Although it hasn’t caused nightmares, I can’t forget the callous selfishness of Burroughs’ mother; the cold anger and rejection of his father, and the genial predation of Dr. Finch.

Burroughs managed to survive, mauled but still alive – to come through with his humor intact, despite everything.

His book wounds like a lion.

Madness, War, and Peace

Every person who meets Don Quixote during the first third of the book sees madness in Don Quixote, including Sancho Panza. And indeed, between tilting at windmills, seeing a barber’s basin as the Golden Helmet of Mambrino, and freeing galley slaves who were sentenced for crimes against the King’s justice (and who then turned around and beat both DQ and SP), the kindest words that can be used about him are that he has very poor judgment and little common sense.

Don Quixote recognizes no madness in himself, and so when he desires to bring even greater glory and fame upon himself by performing penance in the mountains, he determines that the way to do it is to imitate the greatest of chivalric knights in literature, “playing the part of one who is desperate, a fool, a madman;” and he bids Sancho not to advise him “to abandon so rare, so felicitous, so extraordinary an imitation.”

In essence, the episode of performing penance in the Sierra Morena is play-acting on the part of Don Quixote; under that same umbrella, his whole imitation of chivalrous knights and their lives and deeds is a type of play-acting, with Don Quixote trying to shape the world he lives in to be more like the Golden Age of Chivalry, which is delineated in so much detail in the romances he reads.

Is it madness that we try to shape our own worlds through our actions, either positive or negative? One person provides free legal services to poor people in an attempt to shape their world on his model of justice; another person becomes a suicide bomber to shape the world according to her beliefs. Each of these might perceive the others’ actions as madness, yet believe that their own actions are perfectly logical and sensible with the context of their world view.

At the inn where Don Quixote and his friends meet with the captive and the Lela Zoraida, DQ speaks to the assembled group, telling them that arms are superior to letters (i.e., being a knight or soldier is superior to being a priest or scholar). “The purpose and aim of letters . . . is to maintain distributive justice, and give each man what is his, and make certain that good laws are obeyed.” Whereas the purpose of arms “is peace, which is the greatest good that men can desire in this life. . . . This peace is the true purpose of war, and saying arms is the same as saying war.”

Cervantes describes DQ’s arguments in favor of arms and war as rational, “and no one listening to him at that moment could think of him as a madman”.

However, isn’t war just another way of trying to shape our world? If Don Quixote is mad to think that chivalry is an appropriate way to shape his world, isn’t he equally mad to think that war is an appropriate way to shape his world? Isn’t war just chivalry expanded to include a country or regime rather than just a single enemy knight?

The claim that peace is the purpose of war sounds mad to me.

Mixed Feelings

I’m loving “Don Quixote” – it is hilarious, interesting, romantic (OED: Romance – A tale in verse, embodying the adventures of some hero of chivalry, esp. of those of the great cycles of mediaeval ages, and belonging both in matter and form to the ages of knighthood; also, in later use, a prose tale of similar character).

Having studied medieval literature when I returned to school to get my degree (was it only 4 years ago that I graduated?), I have a particular fondness for this kind of story. The digressions and disquisitions that Cervantes throws in, if anything help keep the medieval flavor of the tale, with a more updated feel to the language (which is appropriate for a book written during the Renaissance).

Although Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are the official protagonists, we learn much more about the peripheral characters, their feelings, beliefs, and motivations. So far (roughly 1/3 in), the tale of DQ’s adventures seems more like a framework used by Cervantes on which to hang the stories of other characters than the point of the book itself. Time is very flexible – in a couple hundred pages, barely three days pass, but then in just a couple pages, three more days are blithely mentioned as having passed.

The mixed feelings come from the peripheral characters’ reaction to Don Quixote and his perceived madness. His friends laugh at him secretly, manipulate him through lies, and even strangers make fun of him by pretending to go along with his worldview and beliefs in order to see what sort of outrageous things he will say or do. On one level, I find the story amusing as DQ does say and do more and more outrageous things; but I also cringe when I read about his friends the priest and the barber telling him lies and laughing behind his back at how DQ believes the lies.

Madness is next up on the table – who is, who isn’t, what is it anyway? Perhaps that will be answered as I read further…