Why have I not read any Atwood since Surfacing? Reading this book, I realized what I've been missing for the last few years. I have got to get me some more Atwood!
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Although Atwood has been very vocal about identifying her work as not science fiction, this book can certainly hold its head up against any other science fiction that I've read. It has what good sf should have... plausible characters put in unusual circumstances and enacting their lives the best they can given those circumstances. That is what science fiction is all about after all (aside from the gee-whiz rocket science stuff of the Gernsbachian era) - stick people in a situation that is not like our lives, but close enough to our world to be recognizable as a society as such, and see how they might react.
A Handmaid's Tale imagines what life would be like in a theocracy that is obsessed with a declining birth rate. Neuromancer imagines what life would be like in a society where we can implant all kinds of fabulous devices into and onto our bodies, with a concomitant reduction in the value of those bodies. The Hitchhiker's Guide the the Galaxy imagines what life would be like if we could manage interstellar travel only to realize life as we know it is a prolonged experiment. The Left Hand of Darkness imagines what life would be like if our genders weren't fixed.
Each of these stories (and all the rest) simply change one or two key elements about life as we know it and imagine how things might be different, how people might act differently, how social norms and institutions might develop differently, how life might look a little different.
Aside from my argument that Oryx and Crake is indeed science fiction, it is some of the sf I like the most in that we don't get lengthy explanations about the genetic engineering that takes place in the story (much of the description that we do get is from the point of view of a child, and later, a non-specialist, a word smith who 'never was good with numbers'). What we do get is details about how it affects the characters of the story, their relationships, both intimate and social, and the world in general - boy! does it ever affect the world in general!
As usual, it is well written, with an eye for demonstrating internal states of mind and feeling without waxing poetic or metaphoric (or at least not in excess).
A friend tells me she saw lots of people reading it on the plane when she flew last week - it's definitely good plane reading material.
Monday, June 28, 2004
Friday, June 25, 2004
White Teeth Zadie Smith
First off, wow! I'm pretty impressed by the writing in this novel. While there may be a few rough edges as far as plotting and characterization go, the actual writing is very well done. Wish I could write like that.
Zadie Smith's novel begins with an attempted suicide, and although the sensation wanes shortly thereafter and doesn't rise again until the very end, the story is so well told that the characters take over and the plot becomes less important in the middle of the story.
*Begin Spoiler*
The text is divided into four sections based on some of the main characters: Archie 1974, 1945; Samad 1984, 1857; Irie 1990, 1907; and Magid, Millat and Marcus 1992, 1997. The story begins with Archibald Jones sitting is his car preparing to die of carbon monoxide poisoning but being prevented by a shopkeeper who shooes him away. He meets his future wife Clara, a second generation Carribean immigrant, daughter of a Jehovah's Witness named Hortense who was born during the Jamaican earthquake of 1907.
The narrative then tells of the friendship that sprung up between Archie and Samad Miah Iqbal, during WWII when their tank broke down in a Bulgarian village. Samad talked Archie into killing a French spy, Dr. Marc-Pierre Perret, who they discovered there. The two men went home - Archie to a first marriage that failed, and Samad, to marry his wife Alsana in an arranged marriage. We learn that Archie has a daughter Irie and Samad twin sons Magid and Millat during the same year.
The children grow up in North London with Irie experimenting with how to rid herself of her curly hair and Samad sending off Magid to the old country to make him more religious (he can't afford to send both sons) in an attempt to keeping him from becoming Westernized. As they grow, Millat has a penchant for trouble, but eventually joins a radical islamic group: Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (KEVIN), though he has difficulty adhering to some of the tenets. Magid returns to London an atheist intending to pursue a law degree. The twins and Irie have meanwhile met the Chalfens - Marcus, the father, is creating a genetically programmed oncomouse, Joyce writes about botany and tries to nurture everyone around her, and their four sons, one of whom, Josh, becomes disillusioned with "Chalfenism", the family's own egocentric belief in the rightness of the rationality and forthrightness, and joins a radical animal rights group: Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation (FATE) because he's obsessed with the group leader's wife.
Irie, in a fit of anger/angst, sleeps with Millat and then Magid in the same day. At the end of the novel, we find she is pregnant but doesn't know by whom, and of course a DNA test won't be able to tell the difference. Everyone comes together at a press conference Dec. 31, 1992, when the oncomouse is revealed; KEVIN and FATE to disrupt the proceedings, Hortense and her Witnesses to spread the word about the end of the world, and the Iqbals and Joneses to hear the announcement and be with their children. Millat intends to shoot Chalfens, but shoots Archie instead, who realizes what he is about to do and blocks the shot at the same time as both he and Samad realize that Marcus Chalfens mentor is Dr. Perrot, who Archie did not kill back in 1945.
*End Spoiler*
The text makes commentary on the nature of families, history, memory, genetic engineering and science, while pulling it all together in one final confrontation.
It's a fascinating story about the immigrant experience, the cross-generational conflict that affects immigrant families, and the desire to find a place where you belong. The anxiety of all adolescence is to find your niche, but when you are trying to define your ethnic identity at the same time, it gets even harder, something this book does a pretty good job of starting to describe. And the bits about genetic engineering and Samad's obsession with history certainly add to the overall problem of identity formation (in particular, national identity formation) that's treated in the book. I'm glad the book club read this, even though I'm also going to put it on my contemporary brit lit list as well.
I know I'll be looking forward to her next book.
UPDATE: Post book club - I have to add this comment from a book club member. "Reading White Teeth was a bit like taking vitamins. You know they're good for you". Interpret as you will.
Zadie Smith's novel begins with an attempted suicide, and although the sensation wanes shortly thereafter and doesn't rise again until the very end, the story is so well told that the characters take over and the plot becomes less important in the middle of the story.
*Begin Spoiler*
The text is divided into four sections based on some of the main characters: Archie 1974, 1945; Samad 1984, 1857; Irie 1990, 1907; and Magid, Millat and Marcus 1992, 1997. The story begins with Archibald Jones sitting is his car preparing to die of carbon monoxide poisoning but being prevented by a shopkeeper who shooes him away. He meets his future wife Clara, a second generation Carribean immigrant, daughter of a Jehovah's Witness named Hortense who was born during the Jamaican earthquake of 1907.
The narrative then tells of the friendship that sprung up between Archie and Samad Miah Iqbal, during WWII when their tank broke down in a Bulgarian village. Samad talked Archie into killing a French spy, Dr. Marc-Pierre Perret, who they discovered there. The two men went home - Archie to a first marriage that failed, and Samad, to marry his wife Alsana in an arranged marriage. We learn that Archie has a daughter Irie and Samad twin sons Magid and Millat during the same year.
The children grow up in North London with Irie experimenting with how to rid herself of her curly hair and Samad sending off Magid to the old country to make him more religious (he can't afford to send both sons) in an attempt to keeping him from becoming Westernized. As they grow, Millat has a penchant for trouble, but eventually joins a radical islamic group: Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (KEVIN), though he has difficulty adhering to some of the tenets. Magid returns to London an atheist intending to pursue a law degree. The twins and Irie have meanwhile met the Chalfens - Marcus, the father, is creating a genetically programmed oncomouse, Joyce writes about botany and tries to nurture everyone around her, and their four sons, one of whom, Josh, becomes disillusioned with "Chalfenism", the family's own egocentric belief in the rightness of the rationality and forthrightness, and joins a radical animal rights group: Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation (FATE) because he's obsessed with the group leader's wife.
Irie, in a fit of anger/angst, sleeps with Millat and then Magid in the same day. At the end of the novel, we find she is pregnant but doesn't know by whom, and of course a DNA test won't be able to tell the difference. Everyone comes together at a press conference Dec. 31, 1992, when the oncomouse is revealed; KEVIN and FATE to disrupt the proceedings, Hortense and her Witnesses to spread the word about the end of the world, and the Iqbals and Joneses to hear the announcement and be with their children. Millat intends to shoot Chalfens, but shoots Archie instead, who realizes what he is about to do and blocks the shot at the same time as both he and Samad realize that Marcus Chalfens mentor is Dr. Perrot, who Archie did not kill back in 1945.
*End Spoiler*
The text makes commentary on the nature of families, history, memory, genetic engineering and science, while pulling it all together in one final confrontation.
It's a fascinating story about the immigrant experience, the cross-generational conflict that affects immigrant families, and the desire to find a place where you belong. The anxiety of all adolescence is to find your niche, but when you are trying to define your ethnic identity at the same time, it gets even harder, something this book does a pretty good job of starting to describe. And the bits about genetic engineering and Samad's obsession with history certainly add to the overall problem of identity formation (in particular, national identity formation) that's treated in the book. I'm glad the book club read this, even though I'm also going to put it on my contemporary brit lit list as well.
I know I'll be looking forward to her next book.
UPDATE: Post book club - I have to add this comment from a book club member. "Reading White Teeth was a bit like taking vitamins. You know they're good for you". Interpret as you will.
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner
Yep, another Faulkner book. This one was very different from the earlier one in that the story provided an overload of information where As I Lay Dying left you in the dark sometimes, trying to figure out what was going on behind the scenes. This one did that too on occasion, but if you missed it the first time (which was easy to do), you still would get it by the second, or third, or fourth iteration.
At one point, one of the early narrators says that some stories can be told in three words, and for those stories three words would be too many, but other stories might be told in three thousand words and those three thousand words wouldn't be enough. I think that's a really good way of describing Faulkner's writing in general, and more specifically, the difference between these two texts.
The story is all recollection, with the activities of the various narrators who tell the older story playing a small and for the most part (except at the very end) unimportant role in the way the novel is put together. It questions the construction of history through the multiple narrations - at times, several events are told from multiple perspectives, with an extreme case of narrator embellishment when a character who has only heard the story, begins to tell the rest of it, even though he has never heard anyone tell how it ends.
The Faulkner course is over now, so I doubt I'll read more of his work, but I'm going to continue to try to add American writers to the list of texts I'm familiar with.
At one point, one of the early narrators says that some stories can be told in three words, and for those stories three words would be too many, but other stories might be told in three thousand words and those three thousand words wouldn't be enough. I think that's a really good way of describing Faulkner's writing in general, and more specifically, the difference between these two texts.
The story is all recollection, with the activities of the various narrators who tell the older story playing a small and for the most part (except at the very end) unimportant role in the way the novel is put together. It questions the construction of history through the multiple narrations - at times, several events are told from multiple perspectives, with an extreme case of narrator embellishment when a character who has only heard the story, begins to tell the rest of it, even though he has never heard anyone tell how it ends.
The Faulkner course is over now, so I doubt I'll read more of his work, but I'm going to continue to try to add American writers to the list of texts I'm familiar with.