pope joan

Donna Woolfork Cross’s fictionalized account of the life of a woman who lives her adult life as a man and becomes pope in the 9th century A. D. is by turns a page-turner and a bit tedious. At its best in the first half, Woolfork describes a very precocious girl, living in time when girls were little more than chattel and certainly never educated. Learning in secrecy and trying to avoid a brutal, dictatorial father, the young Joan displays courage, loyalty, and ingenuity — traits that will serve her well when she takes on her role as a man and becomes a monk. The book falters in the later half when the plot becomes predictable: Joan’s success will lead to a crisis, which Joan will (almost) always finesse to her credit.

Meticulously researched and cleanly written, Pope Joan will be enjoyed by anyone who likes a good story. Bonus fun if you like early church history, medieval history, in general, and/or if you hate sexism.

logicomix

I don’t read a lot of graphic novels and I’ve certainly never read one about Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) and the project of putting mathematics on solid philosophical ground. Logicomix (2009) is exactly this. Writers Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou (art by Alecos Padatos and Annie Di Donna) give a nice telling of the story, combining social and political context, as well as personal influences on the men who developed some of these ideas. Their history is pretty good, though they do take some license with the facts (owning up to it at the end) and explore a potential relationship between mathematical genius and going insane — a cliché we seen explored uncountably many times (Pi, Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, Proof, etc.) and one I wouldn’t have missed here. Nevertheless, it’s a good, quick read, despite an ending that falls flat as it tries to use drama tries to talk about the (large amounts of) truth and wisdom outside of formal logic.

Read Logicomix if you want a quick, entertaining review of some of themes from late 19^th and early 20^th century mathematics and logic — or if you’re just tired of graphic novels by Neil Gaiman and the like.

the stress of her regard

As I read Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard (1989), I started to think that in order to understand the novel I needed to have read more vampire novels. Since I can only recall reading two books from that genre—one by Bram Stoker and one by Octavia Butler—and neither of them are Anne Rice or Stephenie Meyer, my response to this novel can claim only to be ignorant and uninformed.

That said, my overall response to the book is mostly boredom. Yes, Powers writes well. Yes, he does his research, setting his protagonist, Michael Crawford, in an early 19^th century populated by Byron, Shelly (both Percy and Mary), Keats, and other real figures who are more or less associated with the origins of gothic traditions that gave rise to Frankenstein and the Count. Powers also peppers the text with literary references and allusions, skillfully combining the real history, the literature, and his imagination.

However, early in the novel, Powers repeatedly and obviously keeps back information that would help the reader understand events, a device for creating tension that I always find artificial and frustrating. In addition, the plot, such as it is, wanders, including big unexplained gaps in the chronology that seem more designed to fit the historical record than dictated by narrative logic. Finally, I never liked any of the characters, nor cared very much what happened to them.

Good writing is good writing, but it is only as compelling as its story. In The Stress of Her Regard, Powers seems more concerned with using his considerable prose craft and erudition to show off his knowledge instead of serving the story he could be telling.

the caryatids

For several years Bruce Sterling has been one of my favorite science fiction writers. He’s smart, clever, and stays as close to the cutting edge of what’s coming in technology to make his books provocative and at least a little visionary. He also writes about characters and relationships with enough complexity that, at least in my younger days, his observations about humans and our interactions with technology seemed wise and occasionally even profound.

With The Caryatids (2009), Sterling speculates about cloning, world environmental disaster, and the future of the entertainment industry, which in his mind is capable of creating new family dynasties of mega-rich, super-powerful people who manage their lives in a hyper-image conscious style that is almost entirely public, thereby reducing the size of their private lives. This is celebrity-focused culture is a pretty natural extension of the tabloid environment we currently inhabit. He also makes observations about the future our geo-political future with characteristic chaotic logic. However, though he works to develop some characters, namely the cloned sisters—the titular caryatids—that form the structural core of the novel, there are essentially no likable people in the book and it’s hard to develop much empathy for the various trials and dangers they face.

In recent years, Sterling has been doing a lot of editing and lecturing. He’s become a kind of statesman for science fiction and for using science fiction to discuss ideas that are important in our society and its future. His attempt to do that in The Caryatids is laudable, if not entirely successful as a novel.

selling out

Selling Out (2007), the second book in Justina Robson’s Quantum Gravity series, is another fast-paced, carefully plotted, entertaining novel with elements of fantasy and science fiction. This time Robson builds out the Quantum Gravity universe she’s constructing with characteristic descriptive power, here exploring the realms of demons and death. Book two is more psychological than book one, delving into the internal lives of the story’s two main protagonists.

I’m not sure why, but I keep finding myself comparing Robson’s writing to that of other authors. In Selling Out, she displays a streak of dark mysticism reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy:

There was no need to speak, because all thoughts were understood, all desires known. Nothing could be hidden. She understood implicitly that she and Tath were being judged, though against what standards there was no knowing, and in this place of shared knowledge she realized the fine thread by which their lives clung to existence—this being had the power to sever them from the material world, to strand them here, or banish them far from either kind of reality, or sunder them to nothing. And there was no knowing why, or what it would do but now that they had drawn its attention they must endure its reasons because that was the cover charge for the living in Thanatopia.

Also like McCarthy, Robson believes in the power and significance of relationship. Unlike McCarthy, she maintains an optimistic sense of our inner natures and a persistent confidence that we have the ability to do more than the best we can with the cards life deals us; i.e., we have the chance to alter our destiny when we try. Lila Black, Robson’s heroine, may be enmeshed in a complicated governmental web of secrecy, lies, and manipulation, but she and her community have the power and determination to rise above it from time to time.

I’ll be taking a break from the series for a while after this, but I’ll definitely be returning as soon as I can.

keeping it real

A book centering on a cyborg secret agent spying for a human government on elves, demons, faeries, and a panoply of magical creatures sounds like a recipe for tired cliché. And to some degree it is. However, Keeping it Real (2006), the first book in Justina Robson’s “Quantum Gravity” series, is unusual for the genre because it’s written by a woman about a female protagonist and Robson combines an intimate knowledge of her literary precursors with a seemingly limitless imagination and a flair for detailed, colorful description to create a novel that will satisfy most genre readers, as well as many who aren’t.

Set in 2015, six years after an accident that opened the space-time continuum to allow somewhat restricted travel between realms previously separated, the universe Robson creates is gratifyingly complex metaphysically, politically, and socially. But what really makes this book is that it (perhaps characteristically for Robson—though I don’t know because this is the first book of hers I’ve read) combines non-stop action, motorcycles, and a slightly kinky sexuality with flirting, fashion, complex relationship dynamics, and magic. The synthesis is unique and, at times, stunning.

Comparisons for such a concoction are difficult. In terms of sheer inventiveness and glorious detail, the work of China Miéville is somewhat like it, but Robson’s is lighter of heart and more tied (just barely) to our current reality. Robson’s pacing is fast, to the point of fatigue: just when you’re relaxing a bit she throws a deadly new threat at the heroine, another phantasmagorical description, another twisting plot line. The pages turn quickly and you have to force yourself to slow down for what is really very fine prose. The end was seemingly random, as if she just decided it was time to stop in the middle of the story. On the other hand, there are (to date) four books in the series, so there’s plenty more to enjoy and, perhaps, plenty of time to understand her reasons.

balzac and the little chinese seamstress

Spoiler Alert!

Dai Sijie’s deceptively simple book, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2001), is in large part a conversation with the cultural revolution in 20^th-century China and the novels of 19^th-century Europe—Dickens, Dumas, Bronte, Faubert, and, of course Balzac, among others. The conversation is complex and I believe Sijie’s novel is, in important ways, a revision of those stories.

The novel’s narrator is the teenage son of a doctor who, along with his friend, Luo, son of a dentist and a poet, is sent to a tiny village on Phoenix Mountain for “re-education.” They are cut off from the urban and family life they knew before with almost no chance of return (“three in a thousand”). When they meet the pretty daughter of the mountain’s traveling tailor, they quickly fall in love, but they don’t do much about their love aside from polite visiting until they come under the influence of a suitcase full of romantic Western novels. After stealing the suitcase and reading the books with all the passion and obsession that teenagers can bring, Luo begins meeting the girl as often as possible and starts reading the stories to the girl. His goal is to share something he loves with her and, perhaps more important, to give the country girl some “culture.” Their idylls at a secluded mountain pool include lovemaking and, eventually, the girl, whose name we never learn, becomes pregnant.

Pregnancy for an unmarried, teenage girl was disastrous at this time and could have meant a life spent in ignominious poverty and servitude. Fortunately, while Luo (ignorant of the girl’s condition) is away caring for his serioulsy ill mother, our narrator parlays two of the books into an abortion for the girl. But the girl is no bumpkin. The novels have served to wake her up to the possibilities of her future and she heads for the city without the boys, who rue the day they read the books; they burn everyone of them in drunken grief over losing her and the irony of them still being trapped in the countryside while she has the opportunity to start a new life in the city.

The plight of women in the 19^th-century novel is almost always the opposite. Typically, and whether by male design or not, a woman in these stories falls into an illicit relationship that eventually ruins her reputation and life, frequently leading to suicide or other death for her. The passionate life, following love and art above all things, gives her the highest form of self-expression she has experienced, but the concomitant breaking of social taboos about female independence and sexuality leads to her downfall. Sijie twists this narrative all around by using the novels to open the passionate life to both the young men and the girl they hope will be their leading lady (Galatea to their Pygmalion), but then freeing the woman and trapping the man in society’s machine. The class differential is also upside-down from such stories; in Sijie’s, the young, upper-middle class men are stuck, while the working class woman is relatively unhindered. The delicious irony of using novels that depict women as helpless to doom the male characters and free the female, makes Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress a cultural clash with a tragic, yet triumphant resolution.

100 top novels — 13

New addition: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (#45), by Junot Díaz

1 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2 Beloved – Toni Morrison
3 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Molloy – Samuel Beckett
6 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
7 Underworld – Don DeLillo
8 Middle Passage – Charles Johnson
9 White Noise – Don DeLillo
10 Middlemarch – George Eliot

11 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12 Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
13 Housekeeping – Marilyn Robinson
14 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 The Brother’s Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16 The Plague – Albert Camus
17 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
18 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
19 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
20 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

21 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
22 Native Son – Richard Wright
23 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
24 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
25 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
26 The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
27 Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
28 Wolf – Jim Harrison
29 Narcissus and Goldmund – Herman Hesse
30 The Master and Marguerita – Mikhail Bulgakov

31 Blindness – Jose Saramago
32 A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
33 Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
34 The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)- Herman Hesse
35 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
36 Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
37 The Intuitionist – Colson Whitehead
38 The Bone People – Keri Hulme
39 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
40 The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass

41 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
42 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitzen
43 Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
44 Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
45 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Díaz
46 1984 – George Orwell
47 The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
48 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
49 The Uncomfortable Dead: (what’s missing is missing) – Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos
50 Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

51 Mao II – Don DeLillo
52 Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
53 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
54 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
55 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
56 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
57 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
58 The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
59 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
60 Neuromancer – William Gibson

61 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Earnest Hemingway
62 Generation X – Douglass Copeland
63 Brave New World – Aldus Huxley
64 The Chosen – Chaim Potok
65 Doomsday Book – Connie Willis
66 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
67 Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald
68 Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
69 The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
70 All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy

71 Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
72 The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
73 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
74 Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith
75 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
76 The Stone Canal – Ken MacLeod
77 Schizmatrix – Bruce Sterling
78 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin
79 The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
80 The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka

81 The Fall – Albert Camus
82 Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
83 Straight Man – Richard Russo
84 A Small Death in Lisbon – Robert Wilson
85 Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
86 Kindred – Octavia Butler
87 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
88 The Palace of Dreams – Ismail Kadare
89 The Street – Ann Petry
90 The Feast of Love – Charles Baxter

91 Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
92 Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
93 The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
94 The Star Fraction – Ken MacLeod
95 He, She, and It – Marge Piercy
96 The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
97 The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
98 The Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler

the brief wondrous life of oscar wao

When I taught English composition, one of the things I disliked most was trying to describe why a perfectly good paper got a B grade and what separated it from an A grade. It’s a tired cliché that is true about many arts: it’s hard to define good writing, but you know it when you see it. There’s an ineffable something that makes some writing feel elegant, smooth, clever, and pleasing, while other writing seems clunky, silly, boring, and torturous. And even when I’m reading good writing, I’m often hard put to say how the author pulled off an audacious, but fantastic passage that would have fallen flat in other hands.

Junot Díaz, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), is that kind of writer in spades. He mixes graduate-level English prose and vocabulary, with street slang English and Spanish and a heavy dose of literary and cinematic references from genres as broad as classical English poets to science fiction and fantasy to comic books and Japanese anime—somehow managing to make it all sound effortless and natural. His thoroughly post-modern, non-linear narrative turns category inside-out and hierarchy upside-down. Sometimes it’s hard just keeping track of the narrator, who shifts without warning through different first-person voices, into a blend of second- and third-person, and back.

Lest you think Díaz is some kind of savant, unaware of his craft, his introductory first chapter—not called an introduction, but clearly serving to frame the rest of the novel—explicitly tells you he’s about to take you down the rabbit hole, into a Dominican wonderland (the titular “wondrous” is a direct link to Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), and then he takes you there. That place is full of oppressive heat, superstition, violence, corruption, plantains, and sugar cane. Reading the many footnotes (yes, footnotes!) provides a crash course in the history of the Dominican Republic, with special emphasis on the Trujillo Era (named for the Dominican dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, aka, El Jefe), which lasted for over 30 years (1930-1961). Díaz quite consciously uses the novel to educate his audience, creating an entire new world (for the Dominican-ignorant) in the high tradition of the fantasy literature in which he is obviously steeped.

Oh, and there’s a story, too. It’s a family story. A story about sons and daughters. About growing up with parents that love their children, but show it in ways that are not always helpful for anyone. It’s a sad story, with the possibility for life and love between the tragedies. It’s a story about racism, sexism, bad luck, and a few things we can do to fight them, whether successfully or not. If the ending doesn’t leave you hopeful, at least it doesn’t leave you broken. The novel feels very personal for Díaz, like he was compelled to write it, if for no other reason than to have it stop bothering him. And perhaps this is part of what makes it a great novel—that Díaz knows his craft and his material intimately and could write it no other way than as an expression of himself and his experience.

imaro i & ii

Those of you that follow this blog at all know that I’m enjoy science fiction. It fills my need to escape into a story, while, at it’s best, still making me think about interesting and often currently relevant issues. The frequently associated genre, fantasy, is not as appealing to me—though I dabble in it from time to time—because it engages me on a more emotional level. It’s not that I avoid engaging on emotional levels; it’s that when I’m trying to escape, some of the things I’m escaping from are my emotions.

In addition, I almost always find that the fantasy worlds created are throwbacks to a bygone age, so unrelated to our contemporary world or where we might be going that they are irrelevant. Typically, there are retrograde chivalry and a regressive, hierarchical social system in which I have no interest and from which the author seems to gain little in terms of lessons or ideas that apply to the present day. (Of course, fantasy is a big genre and there are notable exceptions, such as China Mieville, Harlan Ellison, and, most famously, J. R. R. Tolkien. Whether or not J. K. Rowling should go on this list is the subject of debate among many.)

Given my feelings, it was with suspicion and reluctance that I received the recommendation from Alisa, germinator of this blog, for Imaro and Imaro II: The Quest for Cush (Charles Saunders, 2006 and 2007). She lent them to me, urging me to get past the cover art, which smacks of blacksploitation—think huge, splendid black man with a sword in his hand and nearly naked voluptuous woman, kneeling at his feet. My experience with the books both confirmed and belied my expectations: while there’s certainly a danger of reading them from an exploitative stance, Saunders doesn’t intend them that way and they are worth looking at as long as you like the sword and sorcery genre. This is not to say they are great literature. But they definitely filled the escapist bill I was hoping for.

Saunders writes in the introduction to the first book, a story of working on the Imaro tale in the 1970s and then letting it drop as he moved on to other projects. In 2003, a reader contacted him, writing how much he enjoyed the Imaro stories he’d read and what a great thing it would be to see them collected in book form and completed. That was motivation Saunders needed and now we have three books in the series, though I have yet to locate the third.

Back in the 70s, Saunders had intentionally created an African hero out of African material, mixing cultures and traditions to serve his own authorial intent, because he wasn’t seeing those myths in the fantasy novels on the market. He wrote the kind of story he wanted to read and he figured there would be some others interested in the same thing. Conceived partly with politics in mind, Saunders’ ability as a storyteller makes the result an eminently readable page-turner. We move from one adventure to another, Imaro battling and slicing through enemies both human and not. An overarching narrative focuses the plot and maintains tension between battle climaxes. The books do not have the subtle, elegiac beauty of Tolkien’s classic novels, but they are a product of a very different and much less melancholic time and they have their own celebratory energy.