I’ve elected not to review this book until I’ve finished the entire Hyperion Cantos. This novel has all of the excellent qualities of the first in the series, and really feels more like a part of the entire rather than it’s own entity. As such, I’ll save the gushing for later.

Much praise indeed has already been heaped upon this novel, and justly so. It is one of the most deftly written pieces of modern American fiction I have had the pleasure to read; poignant, witty, and deeply insightful, this book offers a tremendous opportunity to anyone who will bend its spine.

We enter the family life of the Berglands, who at first seem very ordinary, but soon reveal themselves as each in their own way a very archetype of American culture; their interactions with each other and those around them providing a perfect vignette by which Franzen can flawlessly satirize the stereotypes he reveals. His use of language is inspired and leaves no one unscathed:

“[T]he Berglunds were the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege.”

The attention to the family as a whole gives way to a portion of first-person-writing-in-third-person voice. The effect seems slightly tried at first, but it becomes obvious that this is partly because the “autobiographer” Patty, is only just learning to speak in her own voice. Doing so, she is somewhat clumsy and self-conscious; perfectly reflecting the emotional state of her character. She describes herself as undefined without competition to shape her, but most of her reflections lead one to think it is rather opposition she craves. Her portrayal of her mother is a singularly unsympathetic, if nevertheless amusing bit of vitriol:

“[T]he Honorable Joyce Emerson, known for her advocacy of open space, poor children, and the Arts. Paradise for Joyce is an open space where poor children can go and do arts at state expense.”

She classifies the rest of her family of origin in similarly wry and less-than-flattering terms, and in her way she has chosen to be as unlike them as humanly possible, less out of any wholehearted contempt for them, as simply having always thrived on antagonism.

When Patty goes away to a mediocre midwestern school to pursue an athletic scholarship she does so as much to enjoy the best chance to exercise her talents as to confound her parents. Once there she meets Walter who finds her contrariety charming instead of exhausting, and her height enchanting (this was a basketball scholarship after all) instead of merely odd. And while she finds his attention pleasant enough, it is really his glamorous rock-star-wanna-be best friend and roommate that Patty finds herself drawn to.

For Walter, is boring. He is the epitome of The Good Man. He has risen from his humble Minnesotan roots to become a lawyer and advocate of zero population growth. An avowed and vocal feminist, he is impressed by Patty’s independence, her toughness, and her body.

“Patty had never been around a man so obviously in love with her. What he and she were secretly talking about, of course, was Walter’s desire to put his hands on her.”

Which in no way diminished his desire to be respectful and honorable at all times. Which ends up being a bit of a drag for their sex life, as time goes by.

Richard, on the other hand, is Walter’s best friend and the Bad Boy to Walter’s Good Man. Richard (Dick?) is a tosser aside of women. A user of drugs and a shirker of responsibility. Though he knows full well that Walter is more-than-half-but-less-than-all-the-way in love with Patty, he agrees to take her and her heaving bosom across country with the intent of letting something “happen” if it was going to. Though nothing does, it remains a point of almost obsessive regret on Patty’s part after she realizes that the Bad Boy would not think wonderful things about her the way the Good Man would, and flees, mid-road trip, to northern Minnesota to give herself body and soul to Walter’s eager love of her.

Married life produces children also struck in an archetypal mold; the dutiful daughter and the favored son. Jessica, like her father, is hardworking and earnest. She does all that she should and;

“was smitten by books[...] not so pretty as to be morally deformed by it.”

Also like her father, she does not seem to have the natural gift for getting what she wants. All that luck has landed on her brother, Joey.

This golden boy seems possessed of all the traits required for great success; he is handsome, witty, charming, and strong-willed, but he has inherited his mother’s need for opposition. Or at least a healthy unwillingness to submit. In this vein he moves out of his parent’s house while still a teenager to live with a girlfriend he is largely ambivalent about, largely because he knows how much the idea will madden his mother.

The family drifts away, not just from the home they had together while the children were small, but from one another as well. As the fabric of the Berglund family begins to unknit itself, Patty no longer knows who she is or what to do with herself. Having chosen to forgo a career and be a devoted homemaker (as opposed to the working mother she had herself) now that the children are no longer small or dependent upon her, she has no idea of her value or purpose. She falls into a serious depression and as she puts it in her autobiography “mistakes were made.”

These archetypal figures work on each other in mysterious but beautiful ways. Patty seems empty-headed and obstinate at first, but exposure to her Good Man and a series of wounds inflicted by the Favored Son and the Bad Boy create in her a greater sensitivity to her own ability to hurt others. The Favored Son continues to get almost exactly what he wants in every possible situation, but rather than spoiling him, it makes him increasingly mindful of the responsibilities this implies.

Jessica becomes rather a bitter figure, retreating increasingly into the distance, and Walter develops and ultimately unleashes a heretofore unseen rage against a system that he has incrementally become entangled with. All those good intentions getting him much further down the road to hell than he can credit. But when he finally chooses to embrace his anger, it is utterly cleansing.

The collapse the family suffers is inevitable, but heartrending nevertheless. Recriminations fly in the face of the beautiful discoveries they were always on the verge of. Each one of the Berglunds seem unable to relinquish their position; a stance that propagates the unwinding of their lives together until they no longer have one at all.

However, they manage, somehow to pick up the threads of their lives, and weave them back together again. The pattern of their family is irrevocably changed, but what emerges is a more honest and fully realized version of each person as well as the clan as a whole.

By the end of this novel, the family and the autobiographer in it have matured and changed enormously. There is a confidence in Patty’s voice that lends her a sympathy that was hard to muster in the earliest chapters of her story. The greater understanding she extends her own family of origin extends itself around all of the Berglunds like a mantle. And with this, we have the freedom to love them unstintingly.

Recommended

Poor Irulan.

Being an intergalactic pawn must be awful. She is never allowed to have her own destiny, it was hijacked at birth by the Bene Gesserit breeding program. Her husband sees her as a necessary evil and won’t lay a finger on her. Her father never valued her as anything more than a political tool. Really, I pity her. She does little to endear herself to anybody, I’ll admit, but I still think she deserved better than she got.

But I digress…

Frank Herbert created a universe unto itself. There are echoes of Earth, but they are distant indeed. The feudal rule enacted across galaxies is perhaps the most romantic, but the Orange Catholics also hearken back quite clearly. An enthralling admixture of politics, mysticism, social commentary, and psychedelic journey, Dune manages to touch some of the most deeply meaningful aspects of human reality all while offering a thrilling adventure story in the offing.

This book is, however, a challenge. It is dense and byzantine in the truest sense of the word; the political maneuvering and machinations of various clans, houses, factions, and religious orders is dizzying at times. Herbert manages to stay flawlesslyconsistent in his details, and this alone could stand as a mark of his genius. Even the most determined reader might occasionally balk at the laberinthine course of this tale.

For all of that, it is nevertheless compelling enough to make one press on. Reading this book never feels like a chore so much as a complete departure from reality. The details are rich and engage all the senses. The way Herbert describes the arid landscape of Arrakkis, our Dune planet, surpasses anything a human from our gloriously hydrated world could ever truly relate to. It makes one conscious of the tongue sent out to wet the lips; we are parched by proxy. I am profoundly aware of the luxury of submerging my bare flesh in a substance so precious, the Fremen would kill for the portion of it left inside my skin.

This book has fans who are not only devoted, but in some cases, rabid. Just as easily (perhaps even more so) as L. Ron Hubbard turned Dianetics into a cult, so too could have Herbert. His own ethics caused him to dismiss this notion as rightfully absurd (though someone once pointed out that we could easily call them the Bene Jesuits) but it was by no means because there was insufficient passion for the notion, or fodder for the purpose to be gleaned from the novel. 

It’s capacity to do so marks it out as a true classic of literature. Science fiction is often sidelined as trivial and not worthy of status equal to Dickens or Austen. However, in the best examples of the genre, the human imagination is unhampered by the bounds of reality, yet can reveal more truth about the universe we can see as well as what we can only imagine. It is liberating and deserves as much reverence as any other form of truth revealed upon the page.

Ayn Rand was kind of a crazy bitch. I do not say this to dismiss her, I say it because although I find many of the themes she champions to have a profound resonance for me, I find her sort of personally repugnant.

I read a biography called Goddess of the Market By Jennifer Burns and though it is clear the author is not much in sympathy with Ayn’s views, she turned a fairly dispassionate eye on her life and actions. Ayn was a bit of a megalomaniac, and being one myself, I can relate to that part, but her absolute certainty that her own rationale was the only evidence she needed to support her sometimes outlandish claims flies in the face of sound decision making.

All that being said, The Fountainhead is a truly engaging novel about the ways in which well-meaning people with an overdose of white guilt can undermine the efforts of genius. And also, masochism.

The female lead in this story is utterly unlike any woman I have ever met. I understand she is meant to represent Ayn’s feminine ideal, but it is a truly fascinating experience to read a female character, written by a woman who also happens to be a raging misogynist. I can relate to her feelings; some women are wretches. But her wholesale conviction of the female of the species seems, like many of her views, partially justifiable but wholly overwrought.

Dominique fails to convince as a person, let alone a woman. In almost every instance she behaves in a way the defies reason, let alone natural human feeling. When she realizes she loves our protagonist, she forces herself to marry his rival to punish herself and him, for reasons that really don’t make bunches of sense. Ayn subjects this character to a rape that she romanticizes to the point where rather than feeling violated, Dominique feels freed of her pesky virginity and liberated to abuse herself some more, if that was what her attacker thought was best.

Howard Roark is more of an archetype even than his lady love. But he manages to seem more feasible than her because Ayn invests him with some vulnerability, even if it’s hard to see at first. He truly is a genius, thwarted by circumstance and jealousy, as well as his own unwillingness to compromise.

All of the forces and folks arrayed against the protagonists are caricatures meant to make a point about what Ayn saw as the terrifying slide of our capitalist system toward a socialist/communist nightmare like the one from which she fled in the USSR. Her fear and loathing of the type of  “government” serving as a legitimizing force for the abominations that Stalin enacted on his people is understandable, but her slippery slope mentality was a classic fallacy of logic and unlikely to amount to her dire predictions. 

Now, you might be a little confused so far, as this book is listed as one of my favorites, and thusfar I’ve kinda taken it to pieces. I did this mainly because I like it to be clear that I love it in spite of it’s rather glaring flaws. I am not unaware of them, I just see the entire as worthwhile and rewarding even with all of these things in mind.

Despite the extremity of her position, and the exaggerated tendencies of her characters, Rand manages to point out some rather disturbing undercurrents in American political ans social culture. She mocks the entrenchment of the intellegensia, and their fear of  accepted wisdom being challenged in significant ways; this classically because their position is assured by the conventional wisdom, and where would they be without it? She also points out the fundamentally patronizing and frighteningly persistant attitude that government is somehow better equipped to dictate the structure of it’s citizens lives than they might do themselves. She cunningly illustrates the frightening potential of mob rule, and questions why utilitarianism has become just cause to deprive individuals of their rights and the products of their toil. 

Whatever your political bent may be, her critique of the nanny state has moments of luminous clarity, and is phrased in evocative language which has captured the imagination of generations. And though I do not agree with everything she says, I owe her a debt of gratitude for being a voice that could articulate the dignity of the human spirit in the face of oppression, and explicate the value of a reasoned struggle against political forces that serve to undermine liberty.

If you haven’t seen The Sixth Sense, some of the ranting in this post won’t make sense. Even if you HAVE seen The Sixth Sense, it might not, but I feel like it has to be said: Somebody’s a Fuckin Thief. More on that later…

This book is actually composed of two novellas. The first is called Sabella: The Bloodstone and is a gothic sci-fi mystery romance. Sabella is the preternaturally beautiful and seductive focus of the tale. She narrates the course of her life in vignettes and outtakes slowly revealing that on her far space colony of Novo Mars, she is in fact one of the old inhabitants reborn; She’s a vampire.

It has it’s advantages, but she’s fairly paranoid all things considered. As she puts it “I’m a lady who’s past is all littered with dead gentlemen callers” She didn’t start out as a vampire, and what happened to her is part of the mystery, but she carries around a palpable sense of guilt for her feeding habits and tries in various ways to repent for her sins.

Ultimately she finds herself with a nemesis, Jace. He’s hot on her trail and seems to have a good idea of what she’s been up to. Jace is determined to make her answer for her actions. As she runs away from her pursuer, she runs toward the remnants of the Christian faith, imported from Earth. She finds herself sitting in a church whispering in Latin

De profundus clamave. Ad te domine. Domine exaude voca meam

Out of the depths oh, lord I have cried to you. Hear my voice.*

When Jace finally catches her, he does not punish her as she expects, but shows her a truth that sets her free of her guilt and teaches her a new way to live. And rather than being based on religion, it’s all about sex. I’m for it.

The second novella is Kill The Dead

In this story Parl Dro is a famous exorcist who travels the landscape leaving his legend to grow as long as his shadow at dusk. His history is melancholy and mostly solitare, but when he does come into contact with other people, his energy and seventh sense tend to impact the course of events rather profoundly.

We begin on a hillside on the outskirts of a small village. When Parl comes down out of the mountains, he can sense the presence of the undead in a leaning house by the wayside. It happens that unlike in some cases, where his services are welcome and wanted, here the ghost in residence is there due to the conjuring of her still living witch-gifted sister. She was called back from the spirit world as means to assuage the guilt the still living sister Ciddy felt after she killed her sister Cilny in the first place. She’s a charming girl, really.

When Parl sends Ciddy on her way to the next world, Cilny is incensed and driven to a mad rage that no human means of revenge could ever satisfy. She goes to the length of drowning herself to exact the particular brand of retribution she has picked out for the ghost-killer.

Meanwhile, back in the village, Parl has made the acquaintance of one Mayal; a minstrel who’s skills mark him as singularly gifted, but leave him generally despised. He hopes to write a song which will make his fortune, and when he sees the famous Dro, he decides to follow him about and try to make a ballad from his exploits.

Less than thrilled with this addition to his journey, Parl attempts to leave Mayal behind more than once. Somehow though, Mayal manages to find him nevertheless. After he catches Parl up a second time, it become clear that not only is Mayal following him, so too is the vengeance bent Ciddy. Dro attempts to exorcise her in the customary manner, but for some reason fail to send her away entirely.

Worried that Ciddy has latched on to Mayal as a source of ongoing energy for her weird pseudo-life Parl keeps the minstrel with him to try and rid them both of her presence once and for all.

De profundus clamave. Ad te domine. Domine exaude voca meam

Out of the depths oh, lord I have cried to you. Hear my voice.

*This will be important for the ranting

**This too.

It is hard to be both heartfelt and earnest, while also being world-wise and wry. They usually cancel each other out in a battle-royale style cage match of competing ideals, but somehow in this novel, they coexist. And the comfortable peace they have made with each other results in an excellent read.

This is Alex Shakar’s first novel, but you’d never know it. He is deft and confident in his storytelling. He handles having a protagonist of the opposite gender with great finesse and utter believability, which is rare enough generally, but more so for a man writing in a woman’s voice. There is almost always something missing, or added that should not be. Shakar speaks as Ursula with complete veracity, and I admire that.

Ursula is a character that is altogether easily liked. She is smart and determined, though it isn’t always clear to her just what she is determined to do. She is picking her way through the aftermath of a dramatic family crisis, and trying to build a world around herself that makes sense. She lives in a large city perched on the side of a volcano, and you get the sense that this very clearly demonstrates the volatile energy that both she and the city are possessed by.

For in addition to her own struggle to decide who she is, her younger sister Ivy is engaged in a much more literal struggle to determine this. She’s suffered a psychotic break and is suffering from intense schizophrenia. Somehow the mental and emotional arc of these sisters is remarkably similar, and appears to vary mostly in terms of intensity, rather than content.

The portrayal of mental illness in this book is different than any i have ever encountered. It seeks to discuss it in terms that are immediately relateable and easy for people who’ve never dealt with it to take in. Catatonia is described, rather than being a lack of awareness, as a response to stimulus overload. The body and mind cannot function with all of the input currently in play, and so in self-defense, all systems lock in place to allow processing to take place. Likewise the way Shakar describes Ivy’s paranoia makes it all too easy to see that, she might be crazy, but she also has a point.

At least, Ursula does. She has taken a job in marketing and finds herself trying to absorb all the countless ways in which we are manipulated every moment of our lives, without losing a grip on a kinder gentler version of reality.Her job has essentially become to watch and observe people so as to use the information to compel them to act in a particular way. Not too far from Ivy’s version of the truth, after all…

Throughout the book Shakar drops in little mini-lectures on advertising and the marketing mindset. Having read this novel several years before Mad Men came out, I recognized many of the compelling themes in that excellent show to have been touched upon here. One of the characters Chas delivers a speech to his clients not unlike the one Don Draper gives to his cohorts. How, not only to exploit desire, but how to create it where none currently exists. It is almost a treatise on consumerism, and it is compelling and deeply though provoking.

As is, to my mind, this whole book. It creates a world where there is a serious push toward and market for diet water. Finding the means to sell this absurdity become Ursula’s job, and though she is appalled at the notion of doing so on some core level, she is also seduced by the notion that she might have the skills to do so. The capacity to enchant a whole population into doing her will. Into traveling lite.

I feel like I’ve been describing a lot of my favorite things by saying they are “charming.” It may be the case, but I cannot escape the adjective with regard to this book. It is a novel, a middleweight example of the genre, and a perfectly enjoyable read.

We join Faris Nallaneen at the gates of Greenlaw College in turn-of-the-century France. She is attempting to gain entry, though she doesn’t particularly want to attend. She is the duchess of a small country called Galazon, which is situated somewhere amidst a semi-fictionalized Europe. The book follows her progress through the gates of the college, and to all else beyond, till she reaches the World’s End.

Most everything about Faris seems rather awkward and ill-fitting, but she is a winning heroine nevertheless. She is nobility, but taken away from her duties and her homeland, she is fiercely eager to return, and it sometimes robs her of her manners. She is feisty and stubborn, and though she is obliged to take her education far from home, she is convinced the claim that students can leave having learned magic is aught but superstition and fancy.

She makes friends and enemies both while at the school, and despite her skepticism, manages not only to learn magic, but even to perform some; accidentally, and later with a will. She is sent away from school to answer larger responsibilities and takes with her the best friend she made during her time in the college, one Jane Brailsford. She also has in her company Reed and Tyrian; one a subject from her homeland, the other a hired gun. As Faris begins to realize the scope of her duties, both to Galazon and the world, she is confronted with ever more dramatic encounters with the magic she wasn’t even sure she believed in.

This book touches on so many themes, yet it manages never to wander away from what is essentially an entertaining romp. Stevermer has a wry sense of humor, and all the characters display a sound appreciation for the absurd. Though the novel focused primarily on Faris, all of her companions and cohorts are fully fleshed out and three dimensional. Even Menary, as Faris’ primary antagonist, manages to be winning in her utter disregard for anything but her own pleasure. As they range all over the face of Europe, we feel more closely drawn in to the tight little clique that Faris has created around her. There is a feeling of friendly intimacy with these characters that is actually rather difficult to achieve in most stories. This sense of inclusion lends itself to becoming absorbed in this tale to a considerable degree.

And though it cannot be called totally uncluttered, the story is engaging in the extreme and touches on various compelling topics; duty, politics, romance, family, and the value of a sound liberal education. As Faris is suffering through deportment, her teacher scolds her for failing to execute her stance with proper finesse. Faris retorts that deportment is a stale discipline, and asks why should she not form her own fashions. Dame Brachet replies

You must form your own fashions in a way which demonstrates that you flout the standards from knowledge, not from ignorance[...]

From the first words, Faris followed this speech with eyes narrowed, “But I may flout the standards?”

“Of course,” said Dame Brachet with some asperity “What do you think standards are for?”

I think in the haste toward rebellion, or the weariness with traditions we feel are pointless, many people forget this very important truth.

Stevermer uses her language with skill and flair. She has as much a sense of fun with her prose as she does with her plot, and this always makes a read much more enjoyable to my mind. She isn’t taking herself too seriously, even though she is communicating some very touching and meaningful sentiments about love and duty throughout. And though the book is indeed romantic in style, the light touch with with Stevermer handles the actual romance in the story somehow makes it touching and dignified in a way with many authors fail by revealing too much; inviting too much scrutiny to be cast upon the most private dealings.

I customarily sit down with this book and find myself completely absorbed. I enjoy being in the act of reading it. It is comfortable and familliar without ever becoming stale. At just under 400 pages I can tear through it in a long afternoon, but I enjoy the process of savoring it. You can tell how much I love a book by how abused it looks; more so if I have a second copy that isn’t for reading, but rather just to have. Mine is edges curled, water stained, sauce be-spotted, and even slightly torn in spots. It’s condition a testament to it’s place in my heart.

I read this book primarily because someone claimed it was their favorite and I was kinda skeptical. it seemed an unlikely choice. but, committed to trying to get to the “classics” I read it. this review is written with the assumption that the reader has also read the book. i do not usually do so, but in this case it was a bit of a book report so i was commenting more on the underlying themes than on exposition. if this is confusing or unpleasant, you have my apologies.

It was difficult, I will admit, for me to at first discern how this book could be anybody’s favorite. Well written enough, and interesting in that it provided a vivid picture of Paris at a particular time in history, it lacked a sense of dynamism I would expect from something that had commanded the imagination in such a way as to be termed a favorite.

The book begins with Hugo’s witty and amusing tour of Paris. A love of new places would be helpful in enjoying this meandering, as would a particular, if not pronounced, fondness for architecture as an intellectual discipline. Hugo’s thorough coverage of the topic could certainly have fed somewhat to enjoyment of the novel.

His irreverence for the church offered a similarly feasible, but incomplete suggestion as to the book’s appeal. Well written and by all accounts informed, Hugo does much to ridicule the church in subtle but pointed ways. His contempt for those who would blindly submit to authority is apparent. His disdain for the absurdity of the hierarchy of the church itself likewise.

And. It’s funny. So, there’s that.

It wasn’t til I had made it further along into the book that a clearer and more convincing sense of how anyone could find it so compelling began to emerge. This is not simply a walking tour of Paris with a bit of socio-religious commentary thrown in for good measure. Indeed it is an examination of much deeper and more profound themes; how righteousness can all too easily foster hypocrisy, the lack of justice in the social structures of church and monarchy, how zealotry leads to obsession, obsession to madness. Hugo touches on the absurd nature of love; how it is born, how it endures, despite all reason, evidence, and opposition. He lingers long on the role of fate, or at least, on the inevitability of suffering. Even in Sanctuary, there is no real relief…

I began to wonder at one point, that the book was called the Hunchback at all, so little does Quasimodo appear in its pages. We are told about his deformity, meant to loathe him for all his strangeness, and then he goes largely unmentioned for a goodly portion of the tale. At most he is the dogsbody of Claude Frollo; an object of pity and fear. Though it is through his actions that Esmeralda is initially “saved” from the gallows, it seems his role is mainly to provide a warped and distorted mirror to Esmeralda herself. His own love for her is as misguided and shallow as her love for Phoebus. In both cases it is based on one incident of kindness proffered by a person of great beauty thence followed by nothing but cruelty, disregard, and contempt.

Quasimodo brings Esmeralda to his eyrie because it is sanctuary. She can escape her fate at the end of a hangman’s noose, if she consents to stay put within the walls of Notre Dame. A prison perhaps, but one filled with light rather than darkness, with a loving if grotesque companion, and with the freedom to gaze upon Phoebus should that suit her fancy. It is no wonder the escape is qualified in this way, for it is always the perception of the subject which decides if sanctuary is indeed refuge or cage. The cost of escape is not overlooked, then.

And who decides the cost of refuge here is of course La Esmeralda. Esmeralda presents herself as a compelling character from the first. She is proud despite her low social station, she is self-assured though she is in possession of no wealth or the protection of family, she is content with her gifts as a dancer and the companionship of her little goat. She is searching for her lost mother, but is confident in her ability to find her. She is capricious, but good natured. She takes pity on the philosopher who is cast at her feet, but in no way entertains his advances. It is not until she is abducted and threatened by Cluade Frollo’s designs that we begin to see a side of her nature that is more complex. Though it is perhaps understandable she be grateful to her rescuer, the handsome and valiant soldier who frees her from Quasimodo’s clutches, her immediate and irrevocable attachment to Phoebus is all out of reckoning with the scope of his actions. She is still capable of asserting herself to come extent, as she displays remarkable compassion for Quasimodo in the pillory even after he has seized and terrorized her. However, as soon as she comes into contact again with the much lauded Phoebus, she is instantly reduced to a creature who seems to have no will of her own but to love her Pheobus. Even as he is attempting to seduce and defile her, when she becomes sensible to this as his aim, her regard for him never wavers: indeed, she reviles herself;

“Oh, take me. Take all! Do what you will with me, I am thine. What matters to me the amulet, what matters to me my mother. Tis thou who art my mother since I love thee! […] My soul, my life, my body, my person, all is one thing-which is thine my captain. Well, no! We will not marry since that displeases thee; and then what am I? A miserable girl of the gutters, whilst thou, my Phoebus, art a gentlemen. A fine thing, truly! A dancer wed an officer! I was mad. No Phoebus, no. I will be thy mistress, thy amusement, thy pleasure, when thou wilt; a girl who shall belong to thee. I was only made for that, soiled, despised, dishonored, but what matters it beloved? I shall be the proudest and most joyous of women. […] Meanwhile, take me! Here, Phoebus, all this belongs to thee, only love me! We gypsies only need air and love.”

(this was exceedingly difficult to read. For it is, in the main, precisely how I feel.)

Hugo causes this creature, once proud and glorious, to submit entirely to her love, yet even in her moment of supplication, she remains undespoiled. For just as she has consented to be taken, Pheobus is struck by the hand of the envious priest. She thus engenders that which is most desirable in love; utter purity willing to debase itself completely.

Her great beauty, her will and fire, are all now subjugate to this love. She cares for none of it and nothing in the wake of losing the object of her love. She longs not for light, nor life, nor respite from her suffering as long as she believes Phoebus to be dead. When the priest comes to her with the offer to relieve her pain and abjection if only she will consent to his will, she refuses, preferring the darkness and misery to any other pursuit.

And so we turn to the priest. He offers such a fascinating mix of traits. He is wise but capable of great folly, he is a man supplicant to the church, but defiant in his workings within it. He subjects himself to no authority other than his own intellect and reason, but who abandons both in the wake of a dark obsession. He arouses sympathy with his humane treatment of Quasimodo, his misguided but affectionate care of his younger brother. His actions on their behalf allow him to think quite well of himself, and his self-righteousness is profound. He sees his devotion to the church and to these two unfortunates as a chief example of his worth, and he ceases to examine himself much further in the wake of this self-assurance. Most fascinating is his complete inability to detach himself from the notion that he must utterly and completely possess the object of his desire or destroy it completely. I was stunned, time and again, at the total selfishness of his “love” for Esmeralda. Both she and the hunchback have some sense that if at least their love is alive and happy, that they themselves can be at peace knowing that to be the case. Claude Frollo has no such capacity. He is utterly consumed by his need to dominate and keep her captive only to him. He views even the kindness of Quasimodo as a threat to his ownership of this girl and repeatedly seeks her ruin in the face of her refusal to submit to him. Even after he believes she is dead more or less at his hand and regrets the actions he undertook to see it done, he immediately puts her back in harms way when he realizes she is alive and continues to resist him.

It seems Hugo has but two conflicting, though equally tragic, views of love; that it is either totally self-serving, dominating, and obsessive or that it is utterly self-abasing, unwarranted, and obsessive. So, at least he’s consistent on that last point…

This story unwinds itself in typical tragic fashion. A series of misunderstandings and quirks of fate leave the gypsy (which of course she really isnt) back in the clutches of the hangman. She discovers the woman who has most reviled her is in fact her own lost and lamented mother, and the mother who has sought her so long, has the joy of finding her only to lose her again immediately. At least the old woman dies herself before she is forced to watch her daughter perish.

Quasimodo’s attempts to save Esmeralda are of course to no avail. He finally sees the treachery of Claude Frollo and rises from his reconciled subservience to dispense justice for Esmeralda. A blow he would never strike on his own behalf is easily dealt when Quasimodo sees the effects of the priest’s treachery. Ah, the power of love. Ultimately, the hunchback contents himself with stealing Esmeralda’s corpse and being united with her for eternity, since no other earthly love awaits him.

And that of course, is ultimately, what this novel is about; it is a meditation on love and all its follies. Why we love as we do, how such love can be our undoing, and the way that the world has of being utterly indifferent to our suffering in its service.

recommended

By Curtis Sittenfeld

went away without a book to read and plucked this off the shelf where i was staying. i finished it in less than 24 hours and it left little impression on me. i have the distinct feeling that if i were to fail to write this review promptly, i would forget what i thought altogether.

having attended public school for the length of my primary education, i can’t speak to whether this portrayal of a private boarding school back east really captures what it is like to attend one, but i can say this with utter surety; i was most definitely at one point a teenage girl, and i do not feel this novel in any way even captures a glimpse of what it was like to have been one.

i was actually turned off from the opening line, which is trite to the point of pain;

I think that everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the roman architecture mixup

this novel is a first-person account given by one Lee Fiora the adult of her time at Ault, a boarding school outside Boston. while i am usually a fan of this first person voice,  the narrative in this case  seems self-indulgent without the concomitant indulgence. none of what happens to this character takes on any color, texture, or temperature. there is a strange sense of both being unable to see past the end of Lee’s nose, but there being nothing of consequence going on behind it.

the fundamental premise is that Lee, a heretofore successful public-school student from a working-class family has managed to win a place and scholarship to a school that would otherwise be socially and financially far beyond her scope. once she arrives she is totally unprepared, academically, personally, and emotionally for the experience. while the plot lacks much in imaginative originality, handled properly it could still have been a rich vein through which to explore alienation.

however, this character displays a degree of ambivilence about her life and surroundings i found utterly disingenuous.  teenagers may feign this much detachment, but i have never known one that actually felt it. especially not when they are surrounded by so many people so fundamentally different from themselves, and completely without a social network of any strength.

what’s more, the way Lee interacts with her peers seems to fly in the face of expectations. she holds on to a strangely aloof demeanor, despite her professed loneliness. she regards all friendliness on the part of her fellow students with bewilderment. not a healthy skepticism, which would at least seem more reasonable, but rather a complete lack of comprehension about any gesture made toward her other than open hostility. what’s more, she seems to lack any real sense of herself in a way i also find somewhat difficult to understand. i may not have been the most self-aware person out there, but i certainly had a self-image, even if it wasn’t accurate or nearly complete. this character almost never mentions how she views herself; not the complicated question of her place at Ault or what things she has going for her, nor even the most mundane sense of how she looks or feels about her appearance in anything more than the most cursory way. i usually have at least some sense of the physical attributes of my main character, but in this case i barely have a sense of what her insides are like, let alone her outsides.

a disproportionate amount of time is spent remembering the first half of freshman year and the last half of senior year whereas the rest of Lee’s time at Ault seems to pass in a indistinct haze. what’s more, the promise of that oh-so-trite first line is never actually realized; nothing really happens to Lee. she goes to school, she makes a handful of friends, though only one of any real import, she performs with a remarkable lack of distinction academically and fails to create much of an impression of her time at Ault, or of Ault itself.

there are any number of leading comments that would seem like foreshadowing, except that the author follows up on none of them. any reference to her adult self is utterly self-contained and discrete. no real hints about Lee’s future are contained in these asides, but they are frequent enough to become somewhat pestiferous when details about her actual thoughts and feelings and impressions of Ault seem so sparsely populated and lacking any vibrancy.

the author’s description of Lee’s lone passionate preoccupation, one Cross Sugarman, also lacks a certain veracity. she experiences a fleeting and totally unconvincing infatuation with a girl in her freshman year and then becomes indistinctly obessed with Cross after a strangely tender, but wholly isolated encounter at the local mall. though her intensity of feeling for him seems genuine enough, her behavior as a lover defies logic. teenage girls are not well known for their self-control or for their willingness to accept being nothing but a sex object for a person who shows up at random in their dorm room one night after 3 years of having virtually no contact. perhaps the strangest part is that Cross himself seems willing to genuinely like Lee, but her own lack of sensitivity seem to undermine any possibility that she could sense or accept this on any level apart from being receptive to his sexual advances.  and just at the moment she might begin to want more from him than a fumbling encounter in the spare dorm room up the hall, he disappears. unaccountably she becomes suddenly but sporadically emotional enough to seek him out for the very first time, (the only action of hers in this entire scenario that resonates with any sense of truth) only to recoil when he is on the verge of telling her that he cares about her more than she seemed willing to let him.

all of this happens in tandem with a somewhat sudden plot development the subtext of which, very much in bright red letters was “this is meant to be the climax of the story, and it is DRAMATIC!” Lee is asked because of her status as a scholarship student to consent to an interview with a reporter from the NYT. the interview is conducted by a caricature of a latina reporter with a chip on her shoulder who through hard work and spunk made her own way through Harvard! this character has an agenda that is painfully transparent to everyone except Lee, who then says a variety of things which are then used in an article which humiliates her and Ault and everyone there.

or, at least, that’s what we are expected to believe. but her dramatic and embarrassing behavior results in a completely passionless reaction from almost everyone and has no discernible consequences other than that the people who already didn’t like her very much, now they like her somewhat less.

i found this novel dull, flat, and lacking in any emotional resonance or intellectual veracity.

boo.

i would like to start out by saying; this book fucking tricked me.

it was a snatch & grab on the way through the fantasy section at Powell’s. by the look of this cover i was expecting a somewhat whimsical tale about orphans travelling around in a hot air balloon that they procured in some no-doubt-amusing manner and all the hilarity that would ensue as they floated around about the landscape all willy nilly. tra-la-la!

no-eh.

this is instead, a dark, scary, complex politico-philsophical rant of epic proportions.  it’s kinda like Dune, but with hot-air balloons instead of the Guild. plus also a lot less good.

we have: robot-people, crustaceous folks, the Fey-breed (ironically named since their traits are due to environmental exposure and not genetic in nature), worldsingers who ostensibly keep the Fey-breed in line cause they (the Fey) have scary magic-type powers and would run amok wanting… like freedom otherwise, the aristocracy, the guardians, the titualar court of the air, wolftakers,  a vallianous force to the south the “Cassarabians”, and an armless king. and i’m definitely forgetting some stuff. oh yeah, the scary locust guys who can only come through a tear in the fabric of reality when people start eating each other.

lost yet??

i will admit, the book was pretty engrossing in parts. in other places, it was just gross. like where we encounter the underground fields of people been grown for food. soylent green anyone?

mostly, it was top heavy and too ambitious for its own good. i feel like this was an epic in three parts smooshed into one overlong novel of questionable absorbability. i found myself getting to the middle of the page and saying “whaaa?” not because i couldn’t keep track of the 18 simultaneous plot lines, but because i just wasn’t interested enough to bother trying.

also, it is very clear that this author REALLY REALLY thinks socialism is a BAD THING. also, religion. and government in general.

i did make it through the whole thing, but it really became about showing this book who was boss, not because i had any real desire to see how it all turned out. and perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing really got resolved and there was a clear implication that more was to come. mercy.

this book would have been vastly improved to have lost about 9 or 12 of the subplots and just stuck to the 6 or 7 reasonably interesting main-ish plots. complexity of tale does not automatically = epic in the way that was clearly intended. creating an unnecessarily byzantine network of politico-religio-philisophic-psycho-sexual happenings & characters does not make you seem like a more gifted author capable of vision of enormous scope. it just makes you seem like you are trying REALLY HARD to look like one.

thumbs down