A novel weekend

Due to a light illness, I spent the weekend in quest of something entertaining to wile away the sniffling hours. Naturally I was in no mood for any academic folderol; I instead dipped into the stacks of the local public library. I spent the rest of the weekend loafed out on my couch, playing Super Mario Galaxy and reading.

2. Persepolis & Chicken With Plums

I have not seen the movie, no. Though after reading Persepolis 1, I may have to find it in the theaters. I feel reluctant to subject such a pleasurable reading experience to the problems of translation between various mediums; however, Satrapi’s writing/drawing is so wonderfully poignant that I can’t get enough of it.

There is some inherent difficulty in talking about (writing about?) a graphic novel. While graphic novels certainly do have plots, much of the meaning is so deeply imbedded in the images themselves that it’s difficult to express how and why a graphic novel works the way it does on the reader. Simply focusing on the language is not enough.

Still, things that stood out to me: Satrapi’s glittering sense of self. Persepolis lends itself to that, obviously, as a memoir; it is brave without overstatement, humorous without strain. I never found myself feeling irritated with the narrator, which was the case in reading the graphic novel La Perdida (bohemian young woman finds self & trouble in Mexico). Even in Chicken With Plums, in which she’s hardly present as a character, the elliptical storytelling and smooth overlap of fantastical elements–such as Azrael, the Angel of Death, or a naked Sophia Loren–with the details of a particular person’s life make Satrapi very much present.

Thinking back briefly to La Perdida: perhaps the problem with La Perdida was that the main character was largely unsympathetic–personally, I met a lot of middle class kids with ethnic/hipster-ish longings in college, and didn’t care for them. Hipsters drive me crazy. Crazy. More than that, however, was that I sensed that the main character was a thinly disguised stand-in for the writer/artist, and the lack of forthrightness there bothered me. I generally dislike books that are about a character’s (or an author’s) search for “self” or “identity,” whatever that means. It can, however, be done very well, in the case of Persepolis. But Persepolis is all about a person forced into unusual circumstances (which makes a hero). La Perdida is about a person who seeks unusual circumstances (which makes her somewhat unsympathetic, but perhaps that was the point).

That’s probably my problem, however, and maybe not truly reflective of the merits of Abel/Satrapi.

2. Ascending Peculiarity

I had a college roommate in the days of yore who adored Edward Gorey. I couldn’t understand it very well myself. I found his art mesmerizing: the obsessive cross-hatching, the distinctive melancholy. However, it never struck me as anything spectacular or mind-blowing, and this glimpse into his life confirmed my opinion of Gorey as an eccentric and nothing much beyond that.

Ascending Peculiarity is a collection of interviews with Gorey, with some of his drawings tossed in for good measure. They were bound to mention his affectations: rings, a long fur coat, numerous cats, a love of tv re-runs. The sense I got of Gorey was a very privileged, mild-mannered, kind, introspective creep (without the malicious connotation) who had very little to say.

The one thing I did find interesting was his obsession with the New York City Ballet; Gorey attended every single performance for some 17 or so years, developing a special affinity for Balanchine. However, it’s not even clear why he was drawn to ballet…not that meanings or explanations or purpose had any value for Gorey. Towards the middle of the book I read that he was a fan of Samuel Beckett, rolled my eyes, and closed the book.

Gorey I suppose is very interesting, but not for me. I think I only picked up this book because I thought of my old roommate when I saw it.

3. Black Boy, by Richard Wright

Assigned for my students, to give them a sense of the Jim Crow south. This memoir is beautifully written; I got a real sense of Wright weighing his words, testing the tautness of his sentences and paragraphs. The book moves at a perfect pace; it’s impossible to lose interest in the narrative.

My only other observation is that there is not a single sympathetic character in the entire book, not even Wright himself. Perhaps this is reflective of Wright’s attitude towards life and humanity at large, or reveals the crushing consequences of Jim Crow; however, as a reader I found it quite oppressive. Could it be that there was not a single happy and compassionate moment to speak of in the years that Wright recounts? Maybe. Wright as a character is perpetually alienated and distant from all that he describes, which reminds me of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which also expresses a great deal of cynicism towards pretty much everything.

A good read, but not even the slightest bit optimistic. A complete and total downer.

4. The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

I was pretty excited to pick up this book; as a fairly rabid devotee of sci fi in my youth, I consumed untold hundreds of shitty pulpy novels. I felt that my taste in scifi/fantasy had evolved over the years, however: I dutifully read my Asimovs, my Poul Andersons, my Herbert, my Bradbury and a bit of Sagan. So seeing that this book promised to engage with questions of alien encounters, God, religion, etc. appealed to me.

Ugh, terrible. Terrible. The title is drawn from the biblical verse that “not even a sparrow falls without God’s knowing it.” A team of explorers and Jesuit priests make their way to a newly discovered world, only to encounter disaster. Thus “the sparrow” is supposed to refer to the question of God’s terrible nature…or something. The end of this story climaxes in the forced alien gangbang sodomizing of a priest (I can’t believe I just typed that), which is ridiculous, even for a scifi novel. Even the rest of the story itself, which strains to make some sort of statement about God, is left fanning itself in a corner, bored, disconnected to the end.

I should have heeded that split moment of foreboding when I noticed that the book had an interview with the author in the back, as well as study questions for reading groups. When an author puts all her cards on the table like that–basically explaining what she was trying to do with the story–what’s the point of reading the damn thing at all? Similarly, I noticed study questions in Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist, which was also a pointless exercise in New Agey self-affirmation. Capital B Bo-ring.

5. The Family, Mario Puzo

I once TA’d a course on Renaissance Italy, so I thought that this novelization of the exploits of the Borgias would be a fun romp.

Nope.

The characters were thin beyond my lowest expectations. The weirdest and least believable episode in the book came early, with Pope Alexander overseeing the incestuous union of his daughter and son (historically unproven, btw!!) while sitting on his throne. I mean, what a provocative scene. Yet it was given no believable context or rationale, and what could have been a grossly powerful moment was just…sort of blah. Puzo should have taken a few lessons from Judith Krantz.

6. The Godfather, by Mario Puzo

In my defense, I read the Godfather before I read The Family; but I thought I’d end my reviews on a good note. This is much better than The Family, which was Puzo’s last novel.
However, given my love for all things Al Pacino, and love for the first two Godfather films, I had been keeping my expectations as low as possible for the book.

I liked it. The plot was very complex, and the characters were somewhat thin, but decently well-muscled for a mass market piece of fiction. It was definitely not as good as the films. Coppola gave the characters of the film so much more ambiguity, and therefore humanity. This may reflect again the issue of medium; film must say a lot in a few moments, whereas a writer is free to ramble on for pages about a character’s hair, his thoughts on Proust, his taste in wine, ad nauseum.

Also interesting to me was Puzo’s inability to write a half-decent female character. Kay, Michael Corleone’s wife, had the most potential; how can a woman reconcile romantic love with moral principles, etc? But she was written as basically an accessory to the character of Michael. Which for a novel on organized crime is probably fine, but one hates to see a wasted opportunity. Puzo’s weakness with female characters also emerged quite obviously in The Family, where all women were either moms, hos, hotties, or crones. Or some combination thereof.

Perhaps I’m being too critical? Blame it on the rhinovirus. But it was a definite pleasure to simply hang off the edge of the couch and thumb through a few fluffy books.