The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I liked this book better the first time, when it was called A Confederacy of Dunces and wasn't half in Spanish.  For example, here is advice about how to get over an ex-boyfriend, given to Oscar's mother by her friend/coworker: "Forget that hijo de la porra, that comohuevo.  Every desgraciado who walks in here is in love with you.  You could have the whole maltido world if you wanted."  I can understand the basics from context in this example, but in some places there are entire paragraphs in Spanish that I had no clue about...I just felt like I was missing a whole lot because I didn't want to stop and google every 7th word.  Does desgraciado just mean man or gentleman or something more specific?  Any other non-Spanish speakers read this book, and how did you deal with the language problem?

But that being said, this book did make me laugh a lot and was very interesting.  I also learned a lot about the political history of the Dominican Republic.  The footnotes were very long and were in very small font, but they were some of my favorite parts, I kind of wish there had been a lot more of them.  I also loved all the Tolkein references, because I've read LOTR and seen the films multiple times, so I felt like I was actually in on those inside jokes.

One major theme of his book is fuku or the idea that a curse can follow a family through generations.  So that made me think about whether or not I am superstitious.  When I was a kid, I used to have this thing where I would have to open and close the laundry hamper three times before the tiolet stopped flushing everytime I used the bathroom, but I don't remember what I thought was going to happen if I didn't do that, so maybe that's more OCD and not superstition.  There's a black cat that likes to hang out under our black car and runs across the driveway whenever we turn in, so Aaron and I are in trouble if that's a bad omen.  I think that to a certain extent our lives are subject to fate.  Everything that happens is leading you to where you're meant to be, whether it's a decision you make or one that gets made for you.  And it's certainly true that your parents' mistakes can stick with you and have irrevocable consequences, although I think that's environmental and not because there's a fuku hanging over your head.  So go walk under a ladder or break a mirror and enjoy the ride because life is short and you are not in control.  And take a few semesters of Spanish if you want to try and read this book.

Up next: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Out Stealing Horses

Another WWII era story about stealing things.  I found this book to be a little annoying, it kind of had that artsy-fartsy tone where you think the author is trying to show that he is smarter than you because he is so creative and not subject to the rules of linear storytelling and wants to keep you guessing about exactly how far over your head he is.  Which is probably why the NY Times picked as one of the 10 best books of the year, because those Times book reviewers obvi can't admit that anyone is over their heads.  However, to be fair, this book is translated from Norwegian, so it's hard to know how much the translator influenced the tone.  Here's a quote from the author according to Wikipedia:

When asked “How did the Nazi Occupation of Norway translate into the plot of your novel?” Mr. Petterson responded “Well, like I said, I do not plan, so that double meaning came up when I needed it. That is disappointing to some readers, I know. But for me it shows the strength of art. It is like carving out a sculpture from some material. You have to go with the quality of the material and not force upon it a form that it will not yield to anyway. That will only look awkward. Early in the book, in the 1948 part, I let the two fathers (of my main characters, Jon and Trond) have a problem with looking at each other. And I wondered, why is that? So I thought, well, it’s 1948, only three years after the Germans left Norway. It has to be something with the war. And then I thought, shit, I have to write about the war. You see, I hate research.”


It's kind of funny that he said shit, but seriously, it's that easy for you to spit out an award winning novel that you don't have to plan, you just rely on "the strength of the art"?  Vom.

And I also questioned the verisimilitude (shout out to Mr. Burke, my 10th grade english teacher) in Chapter 2 when the main character Trond, 15 years old at the time, jumps from a tree branch onto a running horse's back.  Maybe if Mr. Petterson did not hate research so much, he would know that no normal horse is going to let a human, esp. a teenage boy who probably weighs what, 140-150 lbs?, jump on its back from a tree.  Horses are fast, that's kind of how they survive...  And even if by some miracle the horse does not shy away and leave the would-be rider in the dust, no teenage boy who does not know how to ride is going to be able to hold on when the horse starts rearing and bucking.  As a general rule, I will love any book with the word Horses in the title, but geez, that scene was ridiculous.

But except for those problems, this book does have some beautiful imagery of the forests and lakes and rivers of northeastern Norway.  Lots of snow, spruce trees, and cold clear water.  Although it is a war story to a certain extent, it is really about a boy's discovery that his father, who disappears after the summer when most of the story occurs, is not the person he thought he knew, and how that discovery is kind of his final break with childhood.  I agree with that idea - you can't be your own person until you decide how you are going to be different from your parents.  Another theme that really resonated with me is the idea of being alone vs. being lonely, because I've been spending a lot of time alone lately.  Is it truly unnatural for a person to prefer being alone, is solitude a personal choice that we should have the right to make?  As an introvert myself, I feel like most introverts would choose to be extroverts if they could, but I doubt that most extroverts wish they were more introverted.  I can actually see myself living like Trond if I'm old and without my spouse, even though I hate to think about that - just going for walks with my dog, piddling around the house and yard, sitting on a bench thinking, reading Dickens by the woodstove at night... Except I would not move to a cabin in the forest with an outhouse :)

Up Next: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

The Book Thief, Part 2

I could not go to bed last night without finishing this book, so I ended up awake until almost 2:00 am, tears streaming silently down my face.  I almost decided to wake Aaron up just to give me a hug because I was so sad.  But instead I just wiped my face with the covers, went to sleep, and had horrible dreams.  This book is narrated by Death so death is everpresent.  The question I kept asking myself at the end is whether I would want to live if basically everyone I loved was dead.  Horrible to even think about, isn't it?  What else would you have to live for?  Books, I guess.

This author was able to really make me care about the characters, they seemed like such real people.  I think they were so likable because their lives were so difficult but they still managed to love each other and be funny, and that is what real people have to do.  I was a little skeptical at first of the choice to have Death as the narrator - it's such a human story, I thought maybe it should have been told by a human - but now I think it was really cool because it was a tool to see these characters from an omniscient birds eye view and to also fit in information about what was happening in the war and in the death camps.  One of the most beautiful things in the book is the word shaker story that Max writes for Liesel, and message in that story is that as long as there are some people who are willing to stand up for the oppressed, change will happen.  Hitler's downfall can start with just two people.  So the idea that Death could become so interested in following one little girl and telling her story fits perfectly with that theme.

This is definitely a book that will stick with me, although I think I might still be a little too sad to fully appreciate how much.  It actually made me think of The Hunger Games a lot as I was reading it, just in terms of the impact of war and totalitarianism on young people, but like The Hunger Games, it is so much more than just a war story.  I think what I will remember most about The Book Thief is its portrayal of Liesel's relationship with her foster parents and what it says about what makes a family - you don't have to be blood-related or even affectionate, you just have to be selfless.  Read this book, Saumensch!

Up next: Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson

The Book Thief, Part 1

I consider myself to be a good speller, and I know the i before e rule, but for some reason whenever I type the word thief, I want to spell it theif.  Why is that?  But other than that minor issue, I am loving this book.  I like the random bits of German that are thrown in because they make me feel good about how much German I actually retained from those 4 years in high school and 2 semesters in college.  But most of all, I like Rudy.  He is such a lovable guy - mischievous and reckless but also incredibly loyal and caring.   I like the main character Liesel also, but for some reason she doesn't seem as special as Rudy.  Liesel is tough and resilient enough that you want to cheer for her to keep going, but Rudy's character I think has more of a spark and seems more alive.  He's the sidekick character in the action movie who you know is not going to make it to the end because he's just a little too larger than life.  A kid who paints himself black with charcoal and runs around the park pretending to be Jesse Owens is probably going to have some problems in Nazi Germany, and the narrator tells us about 1/2 way through the book that Rudy is going to meet with a tragic end.  Obviously this made me sad and upset and a little angry, but as I continue reading, I think it's kind of interesting to know that a character is going to die before it actually happens.  Now I feel like I'm getting a chance to say goodbye whenever Rudy appears, or like he was given 3 months to live 6 months ago and keeps hanging on.  I'm sure I'll still cry though when it actually happens :(

Our Mutual Friend, the 4th and final part

Done-zo!  I'm sure you're all tired of hearing about this book, but I am actually pretty sad that it's over.  I would really love to watch a reality show about these characters.  In typical Dickens fashion, the good guys win and get married and rich, the bad guys lose and move away or die, and all the loose ends are neatly tied up in the last 30 pages.  The afterword by J. Hillis Miller says that this book is about "money, money, money, and what money can make of life," and it's definitely true that the central conflict for almost all of the characters involves money - how to get it, how to keep it, how to marry it, how to show it off.  The obvious, and in my opinion a little overly pedantic, moral of the story is that the happiest characters are those who realize the value in things other than money, which characters of course end up being rewarded for their virtue with lots of money...But I think that's pretty true in life; it's the Goldilocks principle.  Too much or too little is not good, we're always the most comfortable with what is "just right."  The poor characters are generally uneducated and are unwelcome in most parts of society; but almost all of the rich characters are vapid and ridiculous.  So I say be grateful if you're in that happy medium that doesn't live in fear of the poorhouse, but it is also not forced to endure dinner parties with the Podsnaps and Lady Tippins.

The people who don't care about money in this book do have some beautiful relationships, which I think is a nice change from always thinking about Victorian-age British people being so oppressed.  The two young couples who end up married at the end are actually outwardly affectionate and make each other laugh and they have real conversations about their feelings and their lives, not just small talk about the weather or other appropriate topics.  Bella and her father have a very close relationship as well, and he shows her unconditional love and acceptance like a good parent, but I wonder what Freud would say about them because she pets him and kisses him and calls him her child a lot, which is weird.

And on a final note, whenever I read Dickens, I think about the people who had to read these stories in pieces as they were published as serials.  I need more instant gratification that that.  According to Wikipedia, it was originally published in 19 monthly installments.  Can you imagine starting a book and not being able to finish it for over a year and a half!  And it was being published as Dickens wrote it - he apparently was short or late or something on one of the installments because he was in some horrible train accident, but that's another story - so imagine how difficult that was as an author.  Apparently he tried to say about five months ahead of the publication schedule, but what if he had changed his mind about something?  This was his last completed novel, so I guess by that time he was just that good.

So that's it for our mutual friend.   If you read this blog, odds are good that you are nerdy enough to appreciate Dickens, so seriously, people, go read some Chuck D and get ready to laugh your head off.

Up next: The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak.

Our Mutual Friend, Part 3

Yep, still trucking along with Chuck D.  Currently on page 631 of 895.  The theme of the past 100 pages or so has been Anti-Semitism.  There is a Jewish man who is employed as a debt collector by one of the really bad characters.  This bad guy figures out which of his friends are in debt, and then secretly buys the debt and sends Mr. Riah, the Jewish man, out to collect it, so that the friends don't know who is actually behind it.  Awful, right?  And to make it worse, the whole time, the bad guy just harangues Mr. Riah about how is he convinced that he has secret hoards of money hidden away somewhere and is sure that Mr. Riah steals from him, because of course that's what Jewish people do, and just mercilessly makes fun of Mr. Riah in front of people.  And another character calls him Mr. Aaron because he thinks that's what all Jewish people are named.  I'm really hoping that this is just a devise by Dickens to show how bad the bad guy really is.  The actual portrayal of Mr. Riah is otherwise positive - he tutors two poor girls and helps one of them escape a dangerous situation - so I don't think that Dickens actually hated Jewish people.  Maybe Wikipedia will tell me.

The other interesting theme that I've noticed since my last post is that Dickens sets up these great similarities and contrasts between the young female characters.  In a lot of ways, they are foils for each other, but I think they have too much in common to really call them foils.  Bella is spoiled and is desperate to marry money so that she can get away from her tiny house and horrible mother, but she is totally devoted to her father, who is basically a long-suffering, sweet, cherubic lump.  Lizzie is industrious and self-sacrificing; she helps her brother run away so that he can go to school and takes care of their father even though he is mean and does not approve of education and is possibly a murderer; after her father dies, she moves in with and cares for this weird midget crippled child/woman, but then her world is basically turned upside down because two men are in love with her, and she has to run away (with the help of Mr. Riah) because she worries that the one man who she doesn't love will kill the other one who she actually does love.  Oh Chuck, I am counting on you to have Bella and Mr. Rokesmith and Lizzie and Mr. Wrayburn together in the end...

In other news - Barnes & Noble is having a 3-for-2 sale on their Classics series, so I picked out three:
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (more Dickens!)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot also by Dostoevsky
After Our Mutual Friend, I'm definitely going back to shorter books for a while, but I am looking forward to getting my Russian lit on eventually, maybe if we have a big snow this winter or something, and of course, I can't ever get enough Dickens.  (That's what she said?)

Name Game Answers

Sorry I forgot to post this sooner!  For all (4, maybe?) of you who are dying to know how you did on the Dickens name game, here are the answers:

1-C
2-B
3-D
4-A
5-F
6-E

Our Mutual Friend, Part 2

This ish is getting good yall!  I'm currently on page 421 of 895, and Chuck has really kicked it up a notch in the last 100 pages.  This guy who supposedly was murdered at the beginning of the book is actually alive, but now he can't reveal his true identity because he will lose the woman he loves.  There's a couple that just got married because they both thought the other was rich, but actually they are both poor -- kind of twisted gift of the magi -- so now they're plotting revenge against the guy who set them up.  Another couple got rich because they inherited a fortune from the supposedly murdered guy's father, and they have just adopted a hilarious teenage orphan named Sloppy.  I mean, who besides Dickens or maybe a writer for Days of Our Lives could come up with that stuff?  I think that some people find Dickens to be kind of formulaic -- all of his books are just protagonist with some problem/obstacle, protagonist meets a bunch of funny, crazy people, some more stuff happens to highlight the plight of the working class, someone falls in love, protagonist inherits a bunch of money and everything turns out pretty much ok in the end -- but I love it, and even if there are certain similarities, who cares, it's still wonderful.  Sorry this is a short post and posting in general has been kind of sporadic lately... Too much Corporate Tax homework and other fun things going on and not enough time to read.  Bear with me!