Two short notes:
Firstly, on the title of this journal. It is more or less entirely a reference to this Pictures For Sad Children comic. I like the idea of a piece of art made out of pages from books; even moreso, I like the idea that every person is a collage or a papier mâché sculpture made from the pages of the texts that we've read and incorporated (incorporated-- embodied, made part of our selves). I think it would be very cool to make a sculpture like that. I've started including the names of the people who have recommended these books to me, because I like that image as well-- it is as if, in reading a book someone else has recommended to us, we take the pages from that book, with our friend's marginalia, and add them to the papier mâché sculpture that is our self, and so there is a beautiful continuity of words and texts linking us together as we read the books that our friends have read.
Also webcomics are the best.
Secondly, apparently there is a word for the type of books I described earlier as "sprawling" and "breathless." According to this Wikipedia article it is called hysterical realism, or, recherché postmodernism (I suppose the literal translation is "researched", or, "re-searched", postmodernism?), or literary maximalism. The article cites both Salman Rushdie and Dave Eggers as examples of hysterical realism, as well as certain passages of Kundera. Having read about half of one Kundera novel, I can't really comment on that, but sure, why not. Critic James Wood, writing about Zadie Smith's White Teeth, criticises hysterical realism for attempting to turn literature into social theory, for ""know[ing] a thousand things but... not know[ing] a single human being" and for depicting "how the world works rather than how somebody felt about something." I am not really sure I like hysterical realism aesthetically-- I prefer extremely understated, unadorned, straightforward prose-- but I am not sure that telling us how the world works rather than how someone felt about something is really a pitfall of a certain genre of literature. For one thing, I don't even think it's true; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, while incredibly self-conscious and, at times, painfully clever, is pretty much entirely about how Eggers feels about things; I would say an important feature of Midnight's Children is how Saleem Sinai feels about himself, being a fairly unreliable narrator and hence making the story as much or more about how he feels about the world rather than how it objectively works. Secondly, even if that were the case, is that a bad thing? I can't help feeling that telling us how the world works (whatever that means) makes literature more politically relevant than self-involved. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, if literature isn't social theory, then there is no reason to read it.
UPDATE: So I have now read about three-quarters of the article, and I don't think it is very good. Knowing nothing about James Wood, I would peg him as a fairly conservative, old-fashioned literary critic. He claims his "hysterical realism" is not the same as magical realism, but I don't quite see the difference; given the claims he makes in this review, his argument is necessarily that the function of art is to be the mirror of life. Which makes art, ultimately, vanity.
Anyway, I discovered all of this at work yesterday while looking up Jonathan Franzen, who is a pretty big deal, but I don't think I'll put him on the list-- white North American male writing big sprawling novels about family? Doesn't sound like the sort of thing I'd enjoy. White Teeth, on the other hand...
Showing posts with label salman rushdie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label salman rushdie. Show all posts
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Disgrace
My bus leaves in half an hour, so I probably won't do this justice. But I will do my best.
Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
Vintage, 2000
220 pages
ISBN 9780099289524
Recommended by: Jesse
I read this book more or less in one day. A weekday, even; I think it was Thursday last week. It's short, which helps, but it was also the style-- simple, minimalist, almost tense, spartan prose. A big change from the last two novels I read, which were sprawling, breathless, hugely complex (those adjectives mostly apply to Midnight's Children, but "breathless" certainly to the Eggers book as well). Not that Disgrace isn't complex; one of the most incredible things about it was its ability to suggest, with a few words, a dissertation's worth of material on an incredible variety of subjects-- evil, politics, gender-- anything. The simplicity and brevity of the novel makes its plot and subject matter more powerful, as if it were more concentrated.
Briefly: The first chunk of the book is a fairly classic story of a professor, David Lurie, in liberal arts (in this case, language studies, relocated to a technical university and dissatisfied) who has an affair with a student and is forced to resign from his position. Thus disgraced, he moves to his daughter's farm to take some time off, work on an opera about, fittingly, Byron's last days in Italy. The story hereafter is one that moves in opposite directions, towards Lurie's redemption, but also, in its depiction of a violent attack on Lurie and his daughter, of further disgrace and the exposition of the violence deeply ingrained in both human nature and post-apartheid South Africa.
I read this book largely because of a paper I want to write, or re-write. I mentioned my interest in speaking and silence earlier; it comes from a paper I wrote last year for a course in postmodern philosophy on Derrida and forgiveness. It was the last paper of my degree, I think; I was exhausted and did not do a very good job, but the topic has stayed with me. Derrida talks about South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the interview I used for the paper, and since then I have wanted to read Disgrace so I can use it in my discussion of speaking, silence and forgiveness.
Which I will think more carefully about when I get around to writing the paper. I hope I do; I'd like to redeem myself for doing such a poor job with a topic I'm so interested in.
The topic of speaking and silence first came up for me in studying Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Titus's daughter Lavinia is violently raped, and then has her tongue and her hands cut off so she is completely incapable of communicating the violence done to her. Silence is, of course, often associated with sexual abuse, and so poor Lavinia is the perfect image of this sort of violence. Silence, in this sense, also plays an important part in Disgrace; "Silence," says Coetzee, "is drawn over the body of the woman like a blanket." (I'll double check that when I get home.) Silence is not reserved, however, for sexual violence, but also for the systemic, political, racial violence that has left its scar on South Africa. I mentioned Salman Rushdie's tension between explicit explanation and circumlocution; Coetzee's prose is much more direct and lacks the room for that kind of back-and-forth; however, isn't the minimalism defined by the importance placed on negative space-- what is not said is just as important as what is said, and what is absent becomes remarkably present in its very absence. Coetzee hardly mentions racial violence, barely mentions race at all, never mentions apartheid directly, and yet it haunts the text, infecting every action and interaction. Silence here marks all kinds of violence; flags it, invisibly.
So hopefully I'll be able to investigate that more fully after doing more reading on the subject. Next time: reflections, possibly on gender, on Milan Kundera's very beautiful The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
DisgraceJ.M. Coetzee
Vintage, 2000
220 pages
ISBN 9780099289524
Recommended by: Jesse
I read this book more or less in one day. A weekday, even; I think it was Thursday last week. It's short, which helps, but it was also the style-- simple, minimalist, almost tense, spartan prose. A big change from the last two novels I read, which were sprawling, breathless, hugely complex (those adjectives mostly apply to Midnight's Children, but "breathless" certainly to the Eggers book as well). Not that Disgrace isn't complex; one of the most incredible things about it was its ability to suggest, with a few words, a dissertation's worth of material on an incredible variety of subjects-- evil, politics, gender-- anything. The simplicity and brevity of the novel makes its plot and subject matter more powerful, as if it were more concentrated.
Briefly: The first chunk of the book is a fairly classic story of a professor, David Lurie, in liberal arts (in this case, language studies, relocated to a technical university and dissatisfied) who has an affair with a student and is forced to resign from his position. Thus disgraced, he moves to his daughter's farm to take some time off, work on an opera about, fittingly, Byron's last days in Italy. The story hereafter is one that moves in opposite directions, towards Lurie's redemption, but also, in its depiction of a violent attack on Lurie and his daughter, of further disgrace and the exposition of the violence deeply ingrained in both human nature and post-apartheid South Africa.
I read this book largely because of a paper I want to write, or re-write. I mentioned my interest in speaking and silence earlier; it comes from a paper I wrote last year for a course in postmodern philosophy on Derrida and forgiveness. It was the last paper of my degree, I think; I was exhausted and did not do a very good job, but the topic has stayed with me. Derrida talks about South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the interview I used for the paper, and since then I have wanted to read Disgrace so I can use it in my discussion of speaking, silence and forgiveness.
Which I will think more carefully about when I get around to writing the paper. I hope I do; I'd like to redeem myself for doing such a poor job with a topic I'm so interested in.
The topic of speaking and silence first came up for me in studying Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Titus's daughter Lavinia is violently raped, and then has her tongue and her hands cut off so she is completely incapable of communicating the violence done to her. Silence is, of course, often associated with sexual abuse, and so poor Lavinia is the perfect image of this sort of violence. Silence, in this sense, also plays an important part in Disgrace; "Silence," says Coetzee, "is drawn over the body of the woman like a blanket." (I'll double check that when I get home.) Silence is not reserved, however, for sexual violence, but also for the systemic, political, racial violence that has left its scar on South Africa. I mentioned Salman Rushdie's tension between explicit explanation and circumlocution; Coetzee's prose is much more direct and lacks the room for that kind of back-and-forth; however, isn't the minimalism defined by the importance placed on negative space-- what is not said is just as important as what is said, and what is absent becomes remarkably present in its very absence. Coetzee hardly mentions racial violence, barely mentions race at all, never mentions apartheid directly, and yet it haunts the text, infecting every action and interaction. Silence here marks all kinds of violence; flags it, invisibly.
So hopefully I'll be able to investigate that more fully after doing more reading on the subject. Next time: reflections, possibly on gender, on Milan Kundera's very beautiful The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Swallowing a world: Midnight's Children
FINALLY. Maybe I'll pick up a bottle of champagne on the way home.
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Vintage Canada 2006 (originally published 1981 by Jonathan Cape)
560 pages
ISBN 978-0676970654
All in all, it took me about two and a half months to read this book-- because I was busy, and because it is long and complex, and because I felt pretty ambivalent about it for a long time. It has suffered the inevitable consequences of being read over such a long time in an occasionally fairly lackadaisical manner-- in cafes, on buses, and so forth. I've forgotten things that have happened and how some things relate to others, and I'm sure this is a consequence of the manner in which I read it and also the nature of the book itself. However, at the end it won me over with a spectacular, sprawling, gigantic, breathless run-on sentence reminiscent of the last sentence of James Joyce's Ulysses. (No, I haven't read Ulysses. No, I am not going to. In this I unite my innate tendency to slack off with a protest against the elitist literary establishment and the tyranny of the Western canon. Mostly though, it's the slacking off.)
A brief and inadequate synopsis: Midnight's Children is the fictional autobiography of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight on August 15th 1947, the date India achieved independence. Saleem's life is inextricably (throughout the course of the novel anyway) tied to the life of the newly independent nation of India; the personal struggles of his life parallel the religious, political, economic struggles of his nation. The story itself is told orally, as he writes, to his peasant wife-to-be, Padma, who interrupts him constantly, question the veracity of the admittedly outrageous claims he is making, pointing out errors in his chronology, encouraging him to stop and rest. The couple articles I read before writing this emphasise this metafictional aspect of the novel, pointing out its relationship with Indian oral tradition and the 1001 Nights-- in which the narrative is of necessity shaped by the listener-- would not exist without the character of the one to whom the story is told. As the article in the Literary Encyclopedia points out, Padma's presence also somewhat prevents Saleem from characterising himself as a martyr in quite the way he would like to-- although his life has been "chained" to the life of India from the moment of his birth, Padma is "the physical reminder of those people in India who suffer the real pangs and vicissitudes of the Indian reality that Saleem is attempting to encapsulate in the story of his individual life."
As I read, I marked sections that seemed important; this is an old habit. According to this, these are the themes that most are as follows.
Firstly, the blurred distinction between fragmentation and unity, recalling for me David Hume's characterisation of the self-- that each of is the arena, the location, in which events take place, in which personalities pass through, and it is the sum total of these and not an inherent, unchangeable, essentialised self-ness that is what we mean when we talk about a "self." Or, famously, in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: "I am large, I contain multitudes." Saleem reflects, towards the end of the novel:
And elsewhere:
Difference between nations, difference within the nation, difference within the self; is it not in the efforts to eradicate these differences that all kinds of violences have their roots?
Secondly, the tension between-- not speaking and silence, which is a particular interest of mine-- but between exposition and circumlocution. I knew the basic premise of the novel before I read and had been told, by the very nice man at McNally Robinson who complimented by taste in literature (I was also picking up Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being-- it is very hard to find either of those books secondhand) that Rushdie was quite difficult, and so I expected the parallels between Saleem's life and the life of the Indian nation to take a little bit of work to unearth. Not the case; throughout the narrative, Saleem/Rushdie makes completely explicit where the parallels exist and how they function. Metaphors and recurring themes are explained, for the benefit of Padma/the reader, I can only assume. (See, for example, page 459: "The problems of the magician's ghetto were the problems of the Communist movement in India..." and ensuing explanation, for one example.) However, Saleem is often very indirect, pointing readers toward a revelation by a series of questions at the end of which it is obvious what the answer is, but without every explicitly revealing it. This occurs when he follows his mother to the Pioneer Cafe to meet with, of course, Nadir Qasim; similarly, but not identical, when he eventually reveals the identity of the Widow whose role in his life he has hinted at throughout the course of the novel, he struggles, wishing to keep it a secret, talking around it, until he finally convinces himself that is a secret necessary to reveal.
I don't know how important this is-- if its primary purpose is to lend veracity to the supposedly oral character of the narrative, or it is something more. I remember Wittgenstein's "That about which we cannot speak we must consign to silence" (or something like that), and Nietzsche's "That for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." And as well, the apophatic and cataphatic traditions in Christianity in regards to speaking about God-- simply, some things are too big, too important, too secret, too shameful, to put directly into words; we must, figuratively speaking, lower our gaze and only peek from under lowered lashes.
And with that, I finally put Rushdie back on the shelf and pick up the next one-- Daver Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I imagine sometime pretty soon I will post something about how much and why I dislike literature about family. Teaser: it's not just because it's boring!
Midnight's ChildrenSalman Rushdie
Vintage Canada 2006 (originally published 1981 by Jonathan Cape)
560 pages
ISBN 978-0676970654
All in all, it took me about two and a half months to read this book-- because I was busy, and because it is long and complex, and because I felt pretty ambivalent about it for a long time. It has suffered the inevitable consequences of being read over such a long time in an occasionally fairly lackadaisical manner-- in cafes, on buses, and so forth. I've forgotten things that have happened and how some things relate to others, and I'm sure this is a consequence of the manner in which I read it and also the nature of the book itself. However, at the end it won me over with a spectacular, sprawling, gigantic, breathless run-on sentence reminiscent of the last sentence of James Joyce's Ulysses. (No, I haven't read Ulysses. No, I am not going to. In this I unite my innate tendency to slack off with a protest against the elitist literary establishment and the tyranny of the Western canon. Mostly though, it's the slacking off.)
A brief and inadequate synopsis: Midnight's Children is the fictional autobiography of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight on August 15th 1947, the date India achieved independence. Saleem's life is inextricably (throughout the course of the novel anyway) tied to the life of the newly independent nation of India; the personal struggles of his life parallel the religious, political, economic struggles of his nation. The story itself is told orally, as he writes, to his peasant wife-to-be, Padma, who interrupts him constantly, question the veracity of the admittedly outrageous claims he is making, pointing out errors in his chronology, encouraging him to stop and rest. The couple articles I read before writing this emphasise this metafictional aspect of the novel, pointing out its relationship with Indian oral tradition and the 1001 Nights-- in which the narrative is of necessity shaped by the listener-- would not exist without the character of the one to whom the story is told. As the article in the Literary Encyclopedia points out, Padma's presence also somewhat prevents Saleem from characterising himself as a martyr in quite the way he would like to-- although his life has been "chained" to the life of India from the moment of his birth, Padma is "the physical reminder of those people in India who suffer the real pangs and vicissitudes of the Indian reality that Saleem is attempting to encapsulate in the story of his individual life."
As I read, I marked sections that seemed important; this is an old habit. According to this, these are the themes that most are as follows.
Firstly, the blurred distinction between fragmentation and unity, recalling for me David Hume's characterisation of the self-- that each of is the arena, the location, in which events take place, in which personalities pass through, and it is the sum total of these and not an inherent, unchangeable, essentialised self-ness that is what we mean when we talk about a "self." Or, famously, in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: "I am large, I contain multitudes." Saleem reflects, towards the end of the novel:
“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything tha thappens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I”, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.” (440, italics mine.)
And elsewhere:
“... I suggest that at the deep foundations of their unease lay the fear of schizophrenia, of splitting, that was buried like an umbilical cord in every Pakistani heart. In those days, [Pakistan's] East and West Wings were separated by the unbridgeable land-mass of India; but past and present, too, are divided by an unbridgeable gulf. Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of past an present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and now.” (404)
Difference between nations, difference within the nation, difference within the self; is it not in the efforts to eradicate these differences that all kinds of violences have their roots?
Secondly, the tension between-- not speaking and silence, which is a particular interest of mine-- but between exposition and circumlocution. I knew the basic premise of the novel before I read and had been told, by the very nice man at McNally Robinson who complimented by taste in literature (I was also picking up Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being-- it is very hard to find either of those books secondhand) that Rushdie was quite difficult, and so I expected the parallels between Saleem's life and the life of the Indian nation to take a little bit of work to unearth. Not the case; throughout the narrative, Saleem/Rushdie makes completely explicit where the parallels exist and how they function. Metaphors and recurring themes are explained, for the benefit of Padma/the reader, I can only assume. (See, for example, page 459: "The problems of the magician's ghetto were the problems of the Communist movement in India..." and ensuing explanation, for one example.) However, Saleem is often very indirect, pointing readers toward a revelation by a series of questions at the end of which it is obvious what the answer is, but without every explicitly revealing it. This occurs when he follows his mother to the Pioneer Cafe to meet with, of course, Nadir Qasim; similarly, but not identical, when he eventually reveals the identity of the Widow whose role in his life he has hinted at throughout the course of the novel, he struggles, wishing to keep it a secret, talking around it, until he finally convinces himself that is a secret necessary to reveal.
I don't know how important this is-- if its primary purpose is to lend veracity to the supposedly oral character of the narrative, or it is something more. I remember Wittgenstein's "That about which we cannot speak we must consign to silence" (or something like that), and Nietzsche's "That for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." And as well, the apophatic and cataphatic traditions in Christianity in regards to speaking about God-- simply, some things are too big, too important, too secret, too shameful, to put directly into words; we must, figuratively speaking, lower our gaze and only peek from under lowered lashes.
And with that, I finally put Rushdie back on the shelf and pick up the next one-- Daver Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I imagine sometime pretty soon I will post something about how much and why I dislike literature about family. Teaser: it's not just because it's boring!
Thursday, October 21, 2010
The Polysyllabic Spree, or, how about reading a fucking book once in a while?
Soooo. Yesterday at work I picked up The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby, and ignoring my personal ethics of reading (i.e., try not to read more than one book at a time), ended up reading a good half of it last night after my DVD player refused to read my current disc of Mad Men.
A few things, first. I've been busy working (busy for me means working about 35 hours a week, sometimes even 40), and when I'm not doing that or hanging out with the two friends I have left in Canada, I've mostly been watching TV. In my defense, it's mostly been Mad Men, which is stunningly good, but still. Given that I work in publishing and also at a bookstore, I feel a little guilty about how little I've been reading. I keep picking up books at work-- 30% staff discount, it's trouble-- and not reading them.
That said, I've been slogging through Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie for honestly the last month and a half. Embarrassing. Not to mention that I failed to finish the last book I was reading-- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami-- because, even though I was enjoying it, it was just taking too damn long. I brought it to Chicago with me, figuring that spending 40+ hours in a van would be the perfect opportunity to finish a 600 page novel that I was halfway through. However, a combination of friends, WireTap and my apparently inexhaustible delight in staring out the window of a moving vehicle all conspired to ensure I did not, in fact, get any reading at all done on that trip. That was at the beginning of August.
Which brings us to my current book, which I found on top of a pile of books that had just come in at work. I love books about reading, and I assume I love Nick Hornby although I've never actually read any of his books, but I have seen High Fidelity like fourteen times. And, as I said, my shitty ancient DVD player wouldn't read Mad Men, and the book is so small, so I crawled into bed with that instead.
And it was so comforting and delightful! Reading another reader writing about how, sometimes, even if you really like the book you're reading, you are just not that into it, really helped with the guilt. Sometimes life gets in the way, and sometimes the thought of sitting down and turning pages, for whatever reason, seems repulsive. You think about all the times you whipped through a novel in three days and loved every minute of it-- like when I read Middlesex this summer-- and wonder "What happened?" All in all, the almost 100 pages I've read have been reassuring to me as a reader.
So, with the hope of getting back on the Book Horse in mind, I think I am going to put aside Wednesdays as my day to myself, to read. My roommates aren't home, so I can sit in my armchair, which would not fit into my room, make a cup of tea, and just go for it for a few hours.
It is also hilarious, which brings me to another point. Most of the novels I have read or intend to read (and so, I suspect, most novels at all) are just not very funny. Which seems odd, because I would say that I'm someone who values fun in the things I enjoy. Like music-- some of my very favourite bands-- Spoon, The Decemberists, Of Montreal-- when it comes down to it, one of the main reasons I like these bands because they're fun. It often seems like, if literature is going to be serious, it has to be heavy. Like, for example, some of my other favourite things. The National. Arcade Fire. Mad Men. Not funny.
Obviously there are exceptions, but I wish more so-called "serious" literature was more fun, if beauty and humour could exist side by side more often in literature. And maybe it's not even true that they don't. Maybe it's a cultural construct-- there's Art, and then there's things that make you laugh. And maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, or maybe I can't find the humour in beautiful, serious books (or the beauty in funny ones). But I think I'm pretty safe in my assessment of Ondaatje as Not Funny.
Not intentionally, anyway. Some of those sex scenes are out of control.
A few things, first. I've been busy working (busy for me means working about 35 hours a week, sometimes even 40), and when I'm not doing that or hanging out with the two friends I have left in Canada, I've mostly been watching TV. In my defense, it's mostly been Mad Men, which is stunningly good, but still. Given that I work in publishing and also at a bookstore, I feel a little guilty about how little I've been reading. I keep picking up books at work-- 30% staff discount, it's trouble-- and not reading them.
That said, I've been slogging through Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie for honestly the last month and a half. Embarrassing. Not to mention that I failed to finish the last book I was reading-- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami-- because, even though I was enjoying it, it was just taking too damn long. I brought it to Chicago with me, figuring that spending 40+ hours in a van would be the perfect opportunity to finish a 600 page novel that I was halfway through. However, a combination of friends, WireTap and my apparently inexhaustible delight in staring out the window of a moving vehicle all conspired to ensure I did not, in fact, get any reading at all done on that trip. That was at the beginning of August.
Which brings us to my current book, which I found on top of a pile of books that had just come in at work. I love books about reading, and I assume I love Nick Hornby although I've never actually read any of his books, but I have seen High Fidelity like fourteen times. And, as I said, my shitty ancient DVD player wouldn't read Mad Men, and the book is so small, so I crawled into bed with that instead.
And it was so comforting and delightful! Reading another reader writing about how, sometimes, even if you really like the book you're reading, you are just not that into it, really helped with the guilt. Sometimes life gets in the way, and sometimes the thought of sitting down and turning pages, for whatever reason, seems repulsive. You think about all the times you whipped through a novel in three days and loved every minute of it-- like when I read Middlesex this summer-- and wonder "What happened?" All in all, the almost 100 pages I've read have been reassuring to me as a reader.
So, with the hope of getting back on the Book Horse in mind, I think I am going to put aside Wednesdays as my day to myself, to read. My roommates aren't home, so I can sit in my armchair, which would not fit into my room, make a cup of tea, and just go for it for a few hours.
It is also hilarious, which brings me to another point. Most of the novels I have read or intend to read (and so, I suspect, most novels at all) are just not very funny. Which seems odd, because I would say that I'm someone who values fun in the things I enjoy. Like music-- some of my very favourite bands-- Spoon, The Decemberists, Of Montreal-- when it comes down to it, one of the main reasons I like these bands because they're fun. It often seems like, if literature is going to be serious, it has to be heavy. Like, for example, some of my other favourite things. The National. Arcade Fire. Mad Men. Not funny.
Obviously there are exceptions, but I wish more so-called "serious" literature was more fun, if beauty and humour could exist side by side more often in literature. And maybe it's not even true that they don't. Maybe it's a cultural construct-- there's Art, and then there's things that make you laugh. And maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, or maybe I can't find the humour in beautiful, serious books (or the beauty in funny ones). But I think I'm pretty safe in my assessment of Ondaatje as Not Funny.
Not intentionally, anyway. Some of those sex scenes are out of control.
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