Reading Wednesday
Apr. 27th, 2016 03:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Arab Jazz by Karim Miské. God, this book is terrible. It's partly a mystery novel – it opens with the murder of a young woman, and most of the plot centers around figuring out who killed her and why, complete with police detectives and the dead woman's innocent neighbor who only now realizes that they could have been lovers – but it has much grander pretensions than that, wanting to comment on the nature of religion and mental health and love and good and evil.
If only the author had any thoughts on said topics worth sharing.
The religious issue is the worst, in my opinion. Miské clearly wants to make some grand statement about how fundamentalists of all religions are the same, and how cynical opportunists take advantage of the faithful, but he doesn't seem to know anything about the religions he depicts. The setting of the novel is the 19th arrondissement of Paris, a neighborhood buzzing with Hasidic Jews and Salafist Muslims, and it eventually turns out that the murdered woman was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, which turns out to be central to the murder. (As a side note, I continually found the depiction of the Jehovah's Witnesses as a sinister global cult to be unintentionally hilarious. I mean, I get that Miské wanted some Christian fundamentalists to round out his religious parallel, but there are so many worse Christian cults than the Jehovah's Witnesses. They're practically affable in comparison to the Westboro Baptist Church or, hell, any random Quiverfull or hard-core Born Again church.) Miské continually makes mistakes in his depictions of these religions; the worst was probably when he described as Jewish woman who wanted to learn more about her religion turning to the Bible. And okay, let's give him the benefit of the doubt that the mistake might just be a bad translation from the French. He still doesn't really seem to have any understanding of what would drive a person to become that religious, and at the resolution of the book all of his fundamentalist characters pretty easily accept that their superiors were just using them as part of a drug ring. There's no crises of faith here, whether accepting it or losing it. And ultimately none of it matters, because all of the religions turn out to be nothing more than a red herring.
The writing itself is a mix of stream of consciousness and postmodern literary nonsense, such that it's often not quite clear what's really happening and what's a fantasy. This is exacerbated by the fact that multiple male characters have violent misogynistic fantasies, which the narration seems to treat as hey, just one of those guy things, no big deal:
“It’s like there’s this knot tying together my father’s death, my mother’s madness and the murder of that girl at the warehouse . . . Everything’s lumped together in my throat . . . It’s like this thing that won’t go away. Like all the images that have filled my mind for so long. It was my father who died, for fuck’s sake, so why do I always picture myself killing women?”
“I see. What did they do wrong, these women?”
“Oh fucking hell!”
This plot detail is never resolved, by the way, it just seems to magically disappear once this character falls in love.
Or here's an entirely different character:
A young woman in a dark skirt emerges from the storeroom, her flip-flops clacking on the black and white concrete floor. She looks at him for a moment before speaking.
“Yes, sir, what would you like?”
To take you from behind back there in the storeroom – you pushed up against the beer crates and me fucking you up the arse. Not dry, oh no. I want to work it in with your saliva on my fingers.
“A Chinese beer, please. A large one. And some prawn crackers.”
“Take a seat, sir.”
[...]
Laura’s murder seems to have opened a very deep fault line, bringing him closer to the magma within, the lava of inner confusion. The elaborate crime scene, the potency of the imagery created by the killer . . . It was all speaking directly to his unconscious mind.
[...]
With a sigh Jean leans back in his chair and takes a long gulp, his eyes half-closed. Violence. His boyhood cruelty comes back to him. Toasting ants. The time he beat the hell out of a cat he had trapped in a cemetery with his friend Jérémie simply to let off steam. [...] SMASH IT BATTER IT
DESTROY THE FUCKING LITTLE CAT
WIPE IT OUT FUCK IT UP
KILL THE FUCKER
LET THE EARTH FINALLY BE SHOT OF ITS
SHITTY PRESENCE
Which always reminds me! Arab Jazz also chooses random words and passages to suddenly shift into an all-caps, oversized, centered font. Because there's nothing like dumb orthographic tricks to emphasize how ~deep~ your writing is.
The writing is awful, the plot is stupid, the attempted insights fail miserably: in short, don't bother.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Baumgartner’s Bombay by Anita Desai. Baumgartner is a German Jew growing up in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s. But wait: this is not – not exactly, not quite – a novel about the Holocaust. Instead Baumgartner leaves Germany before things get too bad, and takes a job in Calcutta. Eventually 1947 approaches, and in the riots and violence that led up to Partition, he leaves Calcutta too, ending up in Bombay.
This is not a novel about either of these tragedies. Instead it's a novel about a man who is forever isolated, forever an outsider, cut off from the community that tragedy, at least, could engender. In Berlin he is not a German, because he's a Jew. In Calcutta during WWII (still a British colony then, remember), he is considered an foreign national due to his German citizenship – but of course, he's not really that either. Afterwards he's a foreigner but not a Britisher, unable to take either the Hindu or the Muslim side during the Independence movement and Partition. Finally he is caught up in a small, random act of violence, killed by a petty thief and quickly forgotten by his neighbors and acquaintances (not really a spoiler since this happens on page one, and then the rest of the novel is told in flashback).
I've been meaning to read this book for literally years, since it's often recommended as one of the classics of Indian fiction, but despite searching I only managed to find a copy recently. After waiting so long to read it, it's not at all what I expected. It's a small short book, a quiet book, about a small, passionless life defined more by what it lacks than what it holds. The writing is lovely and the arc is a deep sort of sadness: a mono no aware feel (wrong culture, I know), the beauty of loss and the wistfulness of impermanence. But I'd expected something grander, something more about The Meaning of India. And that's just not this book. It is worth reading though, at least if you want to feel sad for an afternoon.
What are you currently reading?
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, #13 in the Discworld series. I'd considered skipping this book on my reread – not because I don't like it, but because I love it too much. And therefore have reread it so many times that I was worried I'd worn out the appeal, and needed to let it rest for a few more years before I went back to it.
Obviously I decided to go ahead and read it regardless of the risk, and you guys. I'm so glad I did. I love this book just as much as I always have, and it's still the best thing ever.
Arab Jazz by Karim Miské. God, this book is terrible. It's partly a mystery novel – it opens with the murder of a young woman, and most of the plot centers around figuring out who killed her and why, complete with police detectives and the dead woman's innocent neighbor who only now realizes that they could have been lovers – but it has much grander pretensions than that, wanting to comment on the nature of religion and mental health and love and good and evil.
If only the author had any thoughts on said topics worth sharing.
The religious issue is the worst, in my opinion. Miské clearly wants to make some grand statement about how fundamentalists of all religions are the same, and how cynical opportunists take advantage of the faithful, but he doesn't seem to know anything about the religions he depicts. The setting of the novel is the 19th arrondissement of Paris, a neighborhood buzzing with Hasidic Jews and Salafist Muslims, and it eventually turns out that the murdered woman was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, which turns out to be central to the murder. (As a side note, I continually found the depiction of the Jehovah's Witnesses as a sinister global cult to be unintentionally hilarious. I mean, I get that Miské wanted some Christian fundamentalists to round out his religious parallel, but there are so many worse Christian cults than the Jehovah's Witnesses. They're practically affable in comparison to the Westboro Baptist Church or, hell, any random Quiverfull or hard-core Born Again church.) Miské continually makes mistakes in his depictions of these religions; the worst was probably when he described as Jewish woman who wanted to learn more about her religion turning to the Bible. And okay, let's give him the benefit of the doubt that the mistake might just be a bad translation from the French. He still doesn't really seem to have any understanding of what would drive a person to become that religious, and at the resolution of the book all of his fundamentalist characters pretty easily accept that their superiors were just using them as part of a drug ring. There's no crises of faith here, whether accepting it or losing it. And ultimately none of it matters, because all of the religions turn out to be nothing more than a red herring.
The writing itself is a mix of stream of consciousness and postmodern literary nonsense, such that it's often not quite clear what's really happening and what's a fantasy. This is exacerbated by the fact that multiple male characters have violent misogynistic fantasies, which the narration seems to treat as hey, just one of those guy things, no big deal:
“It’s like there’s this knot tying together my father’s death, my mother’s madness and the murder of that girl at the warehouse . . . Everything’s lumped together in my throat . . . It’s like this thing that won’t go away. Like all the images that have filled my mind for so long. It was my father who died, for fuck’s sake, so why do I always picture myself killing women?”
“I see. What did they do wrong, these women?”
“Oh fucking hell!”
This plot detail is never resolved, by the way, it just seems to magically disappear once this character falls in love.
Or here's an entirely different character:
A young woman in a dark skirt emerges from the storeroom, her flip-flops clacking on the black and white concrete floor. She looks at him for a moment before speaking.
“Yes, sir, what would you like?”
To take you from behind back there in the storeroom – you pushed up against the beer crates and me fucking you up the arse. Not dry, oh no. I want to work it in with your saliva on my fingers.
“A Chinese beer, please. A large one. And some prawn crackers.”
“Take a seat, sir.”
[...]
Laura’s murder seems to have opened a very deep fault line, bringing him closer to the magma within, the lava of inner confusion. The elaborate crime scene, the potency of the imagery created by the killer . . . It was all speaking directly to his unconscious mind.
[...]
With a sigh Jean leans back in his chair and takes a long gulp, his eyes half-closed. Violence. His boyhood cruelty comes back to him. Toasting ants. The time he beat the hell out of a cat he had trapped in a cemetery with his friend Jérémie simply to let off steam. [...] SMASH IT BATTER IT
DESTROY THE FUCKING LITTLE CAT
WIPE IT OUT FUCK IT UP
KILL THE FUCKER
LET THE EARTH FINALLY BE SHOT OF ITS
SHITTY PRESENCE
Which always reminds me! Arab Jazz also chooses random words and passages to suddenly shift into an all-caps, oversized, centered font. Because there's nothing like dumb orthographic tricks to emphasize how ~deep~ your writing is.
The writing is awful, the plot is stupid, the attempted insights fail miserably: in short, don't bother.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Baumgartner’s Bombay by Anita Desai. Baumgartner is a German Jew growing up in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s. But wait: this is not – not exactly, not quite – a novel about the Holocaust. Instead Baumgartner leaves Germany before things get too bad, and takes a job in Calcutta. Eventually 1947 approaches, and in the riots and violence that led up to Partition, he leaves Calcutta too, ending up in Bombay.
This is not a novel about either of these tragedies. Instead it's a novel about a man who is forever isolated, forever an outsider, cut off from the community that tragedy, at least, could engender. In Berlin he is not a German, because he's a Jew. In Calcutta during WWII (still a British colony then, remember), he is considered an foreign national due to his German citizenship – but of course, he's not really that either. Afterwards he's a foreigner but not a Britisher, unable to take either the Hindu or the Muslim side during the Independence movement and Partition. Finally he is caught up in a small, random act of violence, killed by a petty thief and quickly forgotten by his neighbors and acquaintances (not really a spoiler since this happens on page one, and then the rest of the novel is told in flashback).
I've been meaning to read this book for literally years, since it's often recommended as one of the classics of Indian fiction, but despite searching I only managed to find a copy recently. After waiting so long to read it, it's not at all what I expected. It's a small short book, a quiet book, about a small, passionless life defined more by what it lacks than what it holds. The writing is lovely and the arc is a deep sort of sadness: a mono no aware feel (wrong culture, I know), the beauty of loss and the wistfulness of impermanence. But I'd expected something grander, something more about The Meaning of India. And that's just not this book. It is worth reading though, at least if you want to feel sad for an afternoon.
What are you currently reading?
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, #13 in the Discworld series. I'd considered skipping this book on my reread – not because I don't like it, but because I love it too much. And therefore have reread it so many times that I was worried I'd worn out the appeal, and needed to let it rest for a few more years before I went back to it.
Obviously I decided to go ahead and read it regardless of the risk, and you guys. I'm so glad I did. I love this book just as much as I always have, and it's still the best thing ever.
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no subject
Date: 2016-04-27 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-27 09:35 pm (UTC)Jehovah's Witnesses are committed to non-participation in politics, or were until recently. I wonder if that was a factor in the book? but I probably won't read this bludgeony allcaps fest to find out what is going on with the JWs in it.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-28 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-28 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-29 09:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-30 09:31 pm (UTC)