Reading Wednesday
Aug. 13th, 2014 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar. A white American couple, having lost their only son to a sudden illness, moves to India in the vague hope that a new start might help them overcome their grief. It does not go well. Or, it goes pretty well for the wife, who makes friends, gets a useful job, and finds herself a place. The husband quickly gets involved in corruption (paying bribes to the government for various benefits), scandal (when labor demands at the factory he manages lead to a strike), more extreme corruption and scandal (when a leader of the strike is killed in police custody, which the husband may or may not be responsible for), a weird obsession with a local little boy whom he wants to replace his dead son, and eventually murder.
I suppose he's meant to be a symbol of America (there's a lot of references to the contemporary Iraq war), which is fine, but I don't want to spend hundreds of pages focused on a dude who is so appallingly self-absorbed. He's not even bad particularly (at least not until the very end), just the very definition of privilege. It never occurs to him to see the differences between his own perspective and that of the others around him, or the consequences of his actions; all he does is whine about how hard things are for him. I'm not sure if Umrigar meant for him to be a Humbert Humbert sort of narrator, or if he was actually supposed to be sympathetic, but either way I hated him. The book was perfectly well-written and engaging, but it's hard to enjoy it when you can't stand the main character.
Fever Season by Barbara Hambly.
This book is so dark - more than I'd really remembered. It's not so much that anything particularly horrific happens (though there is that attic scene at the end), but it's just an endless grinding low-level misery of heat and illness and isolation. And, well, the general sense of an uncaring, unjust universe. I think Ben not yet being committed to staying in NO - still thinking of himself as only being there until he heals, and then planning to leave again - adds to that. He doesn't even have a home, really! Even the joy of Ben's new friendship with Rose (and, to a lesser extent, his relationships with Minou and Olympe and Hannibal) doesn't make much of an impression compared to that.
Though I do love Rose, forever and ever, she's the best. It's almost hard for me to recommend the series to people, because I want them to meet Rose immediately and not have to wait through A Free Man of Color to get to her. It's interesting to compare Ben's perspective on her here to it in later books - though I also wonder if it's just that he's not as close to her yet, doesn't know her as well, or if Rose herself changes somewhat. She's certainly under some extreme circumstances here. For instance, in this book he describes her, as 'stuck-up' and similar terms - things he'll never say about her again. I really like watching how relationships change over this series.
I love how Rose's back-story is handled, not just here, but in all of the series. But it comes up here first, and I really like how it's both something that happened long ago and something that's still very important to her. It's one of the best stories involving rape I've ever seen.
I also really like the glimpses we get of the relationship between Rose and Hannibal. Of course, Ben's the POV character, so there's not that much of a focus on it, but I love all the little indications of how close they are. Hannibal knows about Cora, for example. That's a lot of trust from Rose, to tell a white dude she's known for less than a year: "Oh yeah, I'm harboring runaway slaves who are also wanted for murder" (though possibly Rose and Cora didn't know that yet). And then there's also the trust of Rose letting Hannibal sleep at her house, when he must have a terrible reputation regarding women. And, in reverse, Rose apparently knows about Hannibal's second career forging papers, while Ben only suspects it (in this book, I mean, since he does know later).
I know she's such a terrible person, but I sort of love the Widow Redfern and her Preacher Dunk. I think they're my favorite of the various background characters. Every time they show up in subsequent books, they make me laugh. Speaking of background characters: Gabriel is here! And despite being only 11 and having barely any dialogue, he's already mentioned as a good cook. Hambly must have planned these books out so carefully; it's really impressive. There was also an appearance by Angelique's mother from the first book, but not her brothers or Clemence unfortunately.
I love Delphine Lalaurie's characterization in this book. It's always a hard thing to write about actual historical figures, and it's also hard to write about serial killers without ending up in over-the-top ridiculousness, but I think it's done so well here (particularly when you can compare it to American Horror Story: Coven, which I thought was an awful take on the same character). She's absolutely horrifying, but you can also see why people might have refused to believe the accusations against her. Even Ben goes back and forth between being sure she's guilty and thinking he's only imagining things - which I imagine is fairly realistic, since so many killers do get away with crimes by maintaing a veneer of normalness. In her first scene, it's so clear why Ben finds her sympathetic - she's clever, funny, a wealthy white person but who appreciates Ben's own position and show sympathy and offers assistance to a runway, not to mention showing greater consideration for the sick than most of the actual doctors Ben works with. Sigh, if only she wasn't a crazy serial killer, she would be a great ally for him. The piano scene with her daughters is amazing - it's so tense and dreadful and creepy. It's almost worse than the actual torture later on (at least in the feel of it, if not in the actual content).
Also, man, there's nothing like a detailed account of an epidemic in the 1800s to make you appreciate modern medicine. I also appreciate modern clothes: how on earth did people wear formal 1830s dress in New Orleans? It's one thing in the climate of England or Paris, but seriously, summer in NOLA? I wouldn't be able to bear it.
Here's some smaller things I noticed while reading:
His younger sister Dominique had tried to initiate him into the intricacies of the proper tying of tignons into fanciful, seductive, or outrageous styles in defiance of the law, but without much success. Ha, I desperately want the fic where Minou puts on a fashion show for Ben! That sounds hilarious.
Every time Ben and Hannibal ride this train between New Orleans and Milneburg, I wonder if Hannibal rides with Ben in the 'colored' car or goes and sits by himself in the one for whites. On the one hand, Hannibal is usually perfectly happy to follow along after Ben, despite racial boundaries, but in this case it might be explicitly illegal, or at least cause a big scene, in which case it would be easier for them to ride separately.
Yes, he thought. Yes, I am lonely, and I want a friend. Awwwww, Ben. ;____; I do love how into Rose he is.
But I do think I should point out to you that even if Miss Chouteau gets cleared of Borgialatin’ the soup herself, it ain’t gonna win her freedom.” "Borgialatin" is the BEST WORD. I love Shaw's dialogue.
January wondered if there’d been more than liquor in those glasses, though God knew the drink dispensed along Tchapitoulas Street was lethal enough. - If Ben's right, that makes this the first of three books in a row where Hannibal gets drugged/poisoned for Ben's sake, which is kind of amusing. Though yeah, it's probably not necessary for it to have been anything other than alcohol.
“You haven’t actually been going around saying you’re going back to medicine, have you?” he asked, perched on Livia’s sofa rosining the bow of his violin after January’s two pupils had departed one afternoon. “I had the impression you didn’t think you’d do well at it, but if Ker or one of the beaux sabreurs of the local medical community decided to become your patron...” [...] “I asked him why he’d hired Rich Maissie to play the St. Stephen’s Day ball next week, instead of you.” I like this scene a lot, because it gets that weird tension when you're in a new friendship with someone and think about them often, but aren't sure if they do the same for you. Hannibal is concerned enough for Ben that he takes it on himself to go asking after Ben's job prospects, but he still seems to consider it a real possibility that Ben changed careers without mentioning it. Though I think this is the last book where you'd see this happen - even by the very next one, I think Hannibal would be confident enough to assume he knows Ben better than Froissart does.
He and Hannibal borrowed a wheelbarrow from Odile Gignac’s brother and trundled her books down to her, load after load of them in the hot bright April sun. They bought jambalaya from the woman who sold it off a cart for a picayune a plate and ate it sitting on the steps up to the gallery outside Rose’s room, drank lemonade, and devoured Mexican mangoes bought on the wharf, like three children with the juice running down their chins. This is one of my favorite Ben/Rose/Hannibal scenes. They are just endlessly sweet together.
(Again, totally copy-pasted from a thread on ffa, if you're interested in reading the discussion.)
What are you currently reading?
Seven for a Secret by Lyndsay Faye. A second in the series about Timothy Wilde, a policeman in 1840s NYC. In this one, he deals with slave catchers (men who profit by catching runaway slaves - or anyone who could be mistaken for one) and secret marriages. I'm liking it more than the first in the series – not that the first was bad, not at all, but it was a bit trope-ier in ways that didn't appeal to me.
The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais. A novel about an Indian family who starts an Indian restaurant in a small town in France (yes, the movie came out last week). Other people's reviews have promised me lots of food-porn, so I'm looking forward to it.
The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar. A white American couple, having lost their only son to a sudden illness, moves to India in the vague hope that a new start might help them overcome their grief. It does not go well. Or, it goes pretty well for the wife, who makes friends, gets a useful job, and finds herself a place. The husband quickly gets involved in corruption (paying bribes to the government for various benefits), scandal (when labor demands at the factory he manages lead to a strike), more extreme corruption and scandal (when a leader of the strike is killed in police custody, which the husband may or may not be responsible for), a weird obsession with a local little boy whom he wants to replace his dead son, and eventually murder.
I suppose he's meant to be a symbol of America (there's a lot of references to the contemporary Iraq war), which is fine, but I don't want to spend hundreds of pages focused on a dude who is so appallingly self-absorbed. He's not even bad particularly (at least not until the very end), just the very definition of privilege. It never occurs to him to see the differences between his own perspective and that of the others around him, or the consequences of his actions; all he does is whine about how hard things are for him. I'm not sure if Umrigar meant for him to be a Humbert Humbert sort of narrator, or if he was actually supposed to be sympathetic, but either way I hated him. The book was perfectly well-written and engaging, but it's hard to enjoy it when you can't stand the main character.
Fever Season by Barbara Hambly.
This book is so dark - more than I'd really remembered. It's not so much that anything particularly horrific happens (though there is that attic scene at the end), but it's just an endless grinding low-level misery of heat and illness and isolation. And, well, the general sense of an uncaring, unjust universe. I think Ben not yet being committed to staying in NO - still thinking of himself as only being there until he heals, and then planning to leave again - adds to that. He doesn't even have a home, really! Even the joy of Ben's new friendship with Rose (and, to a lesser extent, his relationships with Minou and Olympe and Hannibal) doesn't make much of an impression compared to that.
Though I do love Rose, forever and ever, she's the best. It's almost hard for me to recommend the series to people, because I want them to meet Rose immediately and not have to wait through A Free Man of Color to get to her. It's interesting to compare Ben's perspective on her here to it in later books - though I also wonder if it's just that he's not as close to her yet, doesn't know her as well, or if Rose herself changes somewhat. She's certainly under some extreme circumstances here. For instance, in this book he describes her, as 'stuck-up' and similar terms - things he'll never say about her again. I really like watching how relationships change over this series.
I love how Rose's back-story is handled, not just here, but in all of the series. But it comes up here first, and I really like how it's both something that happened long ago and something that's still very important to her. It's one of the best stories involving rape I've ever seen.
I also really like the glimpses we get of the relationship between Rose and Hannibal. Of course, Ben's the POV character, so there's not that much of a focus on it, but I love all the little indications of how close they are. Hannibal knows about Cora, for example. That's a lot of trust from Rose, to tell a white dude she's known for less than a year: "Oh yeah, I'm harboring runaway slaves who are also wanted for murder" (though possibly Rose and Cora didn't know that yet). And then there's also the trust of Rose letting Hannibal sleep at her house, when he must have a terrible reputation regarding women. And, in reverse, Rose apparently knows about Hannibal's second career forging papers, while Ben only suspects it (in this book, I mean, since he does know later).
I know she's such a terrible person, but I sort of love the Widow Redfern and her Preacher Dunk. I think they're my favorite of the various background characters. Every time they show up in subsequent books, they make me laugh. Speaking of background characters: Gabriel is here! And despite being only 11 and having barely any dialogue, he's already mentioned as a good cook. Hambly must have planned these books out so carefully; it's really impressive. There was also an appearance by Angelique's mother from the first book, but not her brothers or Clemence unfortunately.
I love Delphine Lalaurie's characterization in this book. It's always a hard thing to write about actual historical figures, and it's also hard to write about serial killers without ending up in over-the-top ridiculousness, but I think it's done so well here (particularly when you can compare it to American Horror Story: Coven, which I thought was an awful take on the same character). She's absolutely horrifying, but you can also see why people might have refused to believe the accusations against her. Even Ben goes back and forth between being sure she's guilty and thinking he's only imagining things - which I imagine is fairly realistic, since so many killers do get away with crimes by maintaing a veneer of normalness. In her first scene, it's so clear why Ben finds her sympathetic - she's clever, funny, a wealthy white person but who appreciates Ben's own position and show sympathy and offers assistance to a runway, not to mention showing greater consideration for the sick than most of the actual doctors Ben works with. Sigh, if only she wasn't a crazy serial killer, she would be a great ally for him. The piano scene with her daughters is amazing - it's so tense and dreadful and creepy. It's almost worse than the actual torture later on (at least in the feel of it, if not in the actual content).
Also, man, there's nothing like a detailed account of an epidemic in the 1800s to make you appreciate modern medicine. I also appreciate modern clothes: how on earth did people wear formal 1830s dress in New Orleans? It's one thing in the climate of England or Paris, but seriously, summer in NOLA? I wouldn't be able to bear it.
Here's some smaller things I noticed while reading:
His younger sister Dominique had tried to initiate him into the intricacies of the proper tying of tignons into fanciful, seductive, or outrageous styles in defiance of the law, but without much success. Ha, I desperately want the fic where Minou puts on a fashion show for Ben! That sounds hilarious.
Every time Ben and Hannibal ride this train between New Orleans and Milneburg, I wonder if Hannibal rides with Ben in the 'colored' car or goes and sits by himself in the one for whites. On the one hand, Hannibal is usually perfectly happy to follow along after Ben, despite racial boundaries, but in this case it might be explicitly illegal, or at least cause a big scene, in which case it would be easier for them to ride separately.
Yes, he thought. Yes, I am lonely, and I want a friend. Awwwww, Ben. ;____; I do love how into Rose he is.
But I do think I should point out to you that even if Miss Chouteau gets cleared of Borgialatin’ the soup herself, it ain’t gonna win her freedom.” "Borgialatin" is the BEST WORD. I love Shaw's dialogue.
January wondered if there’d been more than liquor in those glasses, though God knew the drink dispensed along Tchapitoulas Street was lethal enough. - If Ben's right, that makes this the first of three books in a row where Hannibal gets drugged/poisoned for Ben's sake, which is kind of amusing. Though yeah, it's probably not necessary for it to have been anything other than alcohol.
“You haven’t actually been going around saying you’re going back to medicine, have you?” he asked, perched on Livia’s sofa rosining the bow of his violin after January’s two pupils had departed one afternoon. “I had the impression you didn’t think you’d do well at it, but if Ker or one of the beaux sabreurs of the local medical community decided to become your patron...” [...] “I asked him why he’d hired Rich Maissie to play the St. Stephen’s Day ball next week, instead of you.” I like this scene a lot, because it gets that weird tension when you're in a new friendship with someone and think about them often, but aren't sure if they do the same for you. Hannibal is concerned enough for Ben that he takes it on himself to go asking after Ben's job prospects, but he still seems to consider it a real possibility that Ben changed careers without mentioning it. Though I think this is the last book where you'd see this happen - even by the very next one, I think Hannibal would be confident enough to assume he knows Ben better than Froissart does.
He and Hannibal borrowed a wheelbarrow from Odile Gignac’s brother and trundled her books down to her, load after load of them in the hot bright April sun. They bought jambalaya from the woman who sold it off a cart for a picayune a plate and ate it sitting on the steps up to the gallery outside Rose’s room, drank lemonade, and devoured Mexican mangoes bought on the wharf, like three children with the juice running down their chins. This is one of my favorite Ben/Rose/Hannibal scenes. They are just endlessly sweet together.
(Again, totally copy-pasted from a thread on ffa, if you're interested in reading the discussion.)
What are you currently reading?
Seven for a Secret by Lyndsay Faye. A second in the series about Timothy Wilde, a policeman in 1840s NYC. In this one, he deals with slave catchers (men who profit by catching runaway slaves - or anyone who could be mistaken for one) and secret marriages. I'm liking it more than the first in the series – not that the first was bad, not at all, but it was a bit trope-ier in ways that didn't appeal to me.
The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais. A novel about an Indian family who starts an Indian restaurant in a small town in France (yes, the movie came out last week). Other people's reviews have promised me lots of food-porn, so I'm looking forward to it.
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no subject
Date: 2014-08-15 05:48 pm (UTC)Could you be possibly bribed into audiobooking that piece of dialogue?Great point about Hannibal's tentativeness AND Rose's absolute trust in him. It's kinda difficult to remember your fic isn't canon, because it makes so much sense that Rose would trust Hannibal so completely partly because she knows about his great hopeless same-sex crush.
I adore that mango scene, it's adorable but also, like, sensual, idk. Not in a romantic way necessarily, but it shows a huge intimacy between them, a huge degree of trust (especially since Ben is a little - rigid - and very dignified, esp. when it comes to food) (and I suppose Rose is too, what with the "laughed but stopped, unsure if it was allowed" parts.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-15 07:18 pm (UTC)Everything is better and more logical if you just assume Hannibal is in love with Ben all the time.Aw, thank you! I sort of wanted Rose to already know about Ben - from Hannibal or just general gossip - or even that she went looking for him specifically when she needed a doctor, but it's hard to even make that subtext; it does seem like it genuinely was a sort of accidental meeting.Yeah, it's such a playful scene, especially in contrast to the entire rest of the book. Food tends to have that physicality and closeness to it (I'm also a big fan of the scene in the next book where they cook together) but "juice running down their chins" is especially... sensual is really the only word. Like, it's a little silly, a little ridiculous, and especially Ben and Rose aren't people who let their guards down to behave like that very often.
Also I like that the "laughed but stopped, unsure if it was allowed" bits drop away after a few books. It's very nice to think that Ben and Hannibal give her a place to be herself.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-17 04:20 pm (UTC)Yes! I always wonder if we're supposed to assume that words like that are more or less real words people might actually have used, or that Shaw just makes them up. (I like both theories.)
It's kinda difficult to remember your fic isn't canon, because it makes so much sense that Rose would trust Hannibal so completely partly because she knows about his great hopeless same-sex crush.
One of the stranger things about Hambly's books is that most male characters who are clearly into men (Esteban Fourchet and his partner from Sold Down the River, Diogenes Stuart from Dead and Buried, Daniel ben-Gideon from Ran Away and some characters in her fantasy novels) fit a certain type - they tend to be "dandified" and perfumed and often fat, and to stay away from anything that's dangerous or uncomfortable. I wonder if she somehow assumes that male characters who aren't like that can't possibly like men.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-17 11:53 pm (UTC)I haven't read Hambly's fantasy yet, but there are bi and gay men in this series who don't fit that description: Augustus, and Franz and Werther. I am also reasonably sure that Luke was canonically pining for Mede (and, I mean, Ganymede), though I guess it might have just been, like, fraternal yearning for intimacy. I mean, I agree that m/m couples in canon tend to be tragic! But individual gay or bi guys are written diversely and sympathetically, I think. (Well, except Franz, but Franz really sucked for reasons that were completely unrelated to sex and sexuality.)
no subject
Date: 2014-08-18 03:21 pm (UTC)You're right - I forgot about Franz and Werther and the fact that Augustus is bi (he says he "never thought it would be a woman he fell in love with" in the first book, doesn't he?) That might mean her later books are better than the fantasy ones (specifically the Windrose novels and the last Darwath book), so that's encouraging.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-18 08:08 pm (UTC)I think it's a mix. I'm pretty sure "absquatulated" is unique to Shaw, and "Borgialatin'' sounds like it too, to me. But some of it's stuff I've still heard people say today – "conniption fits", for example. I'll have to watch his dialogue more closely for more!
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Date: 2014-08-18 08:37 pm (UTC)no subject
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