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A mouthful of bees couldn't stop me from whispering
1. Go read Erik Amundsen's "Pony," now up at Clarkesworld. It's amazing. The rest of the lineup's not to sneer at, either.
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greygirlbeast was right that I'd like Pillars and Tongues.
3. I really, really liked Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn (1984). It's a difficult novel to summarize or even describe, since it looks both superficially and structurally like a genre it isn't, the literary equivalent of the heritage picture. It opens in 1939 and follows its characters into the war; the viewpoint is a declarative, elliptical omniscient, and it takes a few chapters to reveal that these are the same events being recalled forty years later by the surviving characters, now reconvened for a funeral at the cliffside house in Cornwall where their lives all crossed, the salient difference being that the present-day retrospectives are full of judgments and analysis—frequently wrong—while the past simply happens: it's a kind of collective unreliable narrator, which I'm not sure I've ever seen before.
But it is not a heritage picture, and neither is it a straight reversal of one, because its characters are the assorted members of a mostly polyamorous, slightly incestuous, very English family and this is not scandalous or titillating, it is not the exigencies of wartime or the ways people break out under stress, it is just how people are. Polly, in love with the twins Paul and David, is desperately unhappy in the knowledge that she'll have to choose one to marry and give the other up, until she realizes she doesn't actually have to make that decision; she never marries either, has children by both, and they're all still happily together in 1984. Another of the original five cousins, Calypso, marries very successfully for money and then falls in love with her husband, which is on one level reassuring and on another so embarrassing that she spends the next four decades denying she's even capable of it; in neither case does it interfere with her sleeping her way through most of the main cast and a fair percentage of London, because her love for Hector once realized is unbreakable, but physical fidelity is a thing she doesn't do. Of the parental generation, Richard and Helena have a terrible marriage. They end up hosting a pair of Austrian Jewish refugees, the famous violinist Max and his wife Monika, and the resulting ménage à quatre is an improvement in everyone's lives.
Some of the characters pine hopelessly for others, some casually hook up. All are sympathetic to interesting degrees; most do at least one awful thing over the course of the novel, because people do. And all of it is very matter-of-fact, so that the reader is not directed to feel any particular way toward the characters except as they present themselves. (The results can be a sort of Rorschach. I had a very hard time liking Helena except for her delight in Max, who really is the love of her life; I found myself surprisingly attached to Richard, even though he's crashingly oblivious to taste or nuance and, less comedically, just this side of safe with his young nieces. I loved Sophy, the thin, watchful child whose father nobody knows—family legend abetted by physical appearance is betting on Chinese, because her mother was last seen in Hong Kong, but it is only fleetingly relevant to Sophy herself.) Wesley's is one of the deceptively plain styles; you are almost always being told everything, it's just a matter of finding the right sentences to look between. It's not sensationalistic. It's not passionless, either. Does anyone have an opinion on whether the series was a faithful adaptation or not? I haven't been able to tell from the reviews—its reputation for controversy makes me think the adapters played up the sex rather than simply presenting it, but it has such a great cast, I might try anyway.
4. The current issue of Words Without Borders is all about Iceland. I need more of Sjón's poetry, even if he did write the lyrics to Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000).
5. The fact that I could renew my driver's license online fills me with mortal horror of the Massachusetts roads.
2.
greygirlbeast was right that I'd like Pillars and Tongues.3. I really, really liked Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn (1984). It's a difficult novel to summarize or even describe, since it looks both superficially and structurally like a genre it isn't, the literary equivalent of the heritage picture. It opens in 1939 and follows its characters into the war; the viewpoint is a declarative, elliptical omniscient, and it takes a few chapters to reveal that these are the same events being recalled forty years later by the surviving characters, now reconvened for a funeral at the cliffside house in Cornwall where their lives all crossed, the salient difference being that the present-day retrospectives are full of judgments and analysis—frequently wrong—while the past simply happens: it's a kind of collective unreliable narrator, which I'm not sure I've ever seen before.
But it is not a heritage picture, and neither is it a straight reversal of one, because its characters are the assorted members of a mostly polyamorous, slightly incestuous, very English family and this is not scandalous or titillating, it is not the exigencies of wartime or the ways people break out under stress, it is just how people are. Polly, in love with the twins Paul and David, is desperately unhappy in the knowledge that she'll have to choose one to marry and give the other up, until she realizes she doesn't actually have to make that decision; she never marries either, has children by both, and they're all still happily together in 1984. Another of the original five cousins, Calypso, marries very successfully for money and then falls in love with her husband, which is on one level reassuring and on another so embarrassing that she spends the next four decades denying she's even capable of it; in neither case does it interfere with her sleeping her way through most of the main cast and a fair percentage of London, because her love for Hector once realized is unbreakable, but physical fidelity is a thing she doesn't do. Of the parental generation, Richard and Helena have a terrible marriage. They end up hosting a pair of Austrian Jewish refugees, the famous violinist Max and his wife Monika, and the resulting ménage à quatre is an improvement in everyone's lives.
Some of the characters pine hopelessly for others, some casually hook up. All are sympathetic to interesting degrees; most do at least one awful thing over the course of the novel, because people do. And all of it is very matter-of-fact, so that the reader is not directed to feel any particular way toward the characters except as they present themselves. (The results can be a sort of Rorschach. I had a very hard time liking Helena except for her delight in Max, who really is the love of her life; I found myself surprisingly attached to Richard, even though he's crashingly oblivious to taste or nuance and, less comedically, just this side of safe with his young nieces. I loved Sophy, the thin, watchful child whose father nobody knows—family legend abetted by physical appearance is betting on Chinese, because her mother was last seen in Hong Kong, but it is only fleetingly relevant to Sophy herself.) Wesley's is one of the deceptively plain styles; you are almost always being told everything, it's just a matter of finding the right sentences to look between. It's not sensationalistic. It's not passionless, either. Does anyone have an opinion on whether the series was a faithful adaptation or not? I haven't been able to tell from the reviews—its reputation for controversy makes me think the adapters played up the sex rather than simply presenting it, but it has such a great cast, I might try anyway.
4. The current issue of Words Without Borders is all about Iceland. I need more of Sjón's poetry, even if he did write the lyrics to Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000).
5. The fact that I could renew my driver's license online fills me with mortal horror of the Massachusetts roads.
no subject
The freeways are thick with avatars, trolls and Trojans, and the occasional charabanc full of rich Nigerian widows.
no subject
Nine
no subject
You win this thread.