New Century Reading

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I bought this book when it first was published and getting all kinds of buzz. But you know how it is, you don't quite get around to it. Eventually my friend Girl Detective asked to borrow it, and as I knew I wouldn't read it for a while, I loaned it to her. While she was reading it, author Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize. When she returned it, she'd carefully slipped it into a protective plastic cover, noting that it was a first edition and might someday be valuable.

Well, for heaven's sake, now what was I supposed to do? I read books in the bathtub. I read books while eating toast and jam, or burgers with ketchup and mustard, or sipping red wine, and I am a notoriously sloppy eater. I leave books on the floor where the dogs walk over them and kids kick them and sometimes they get bumped against the dog bowl and sloshed on. Obviously, there was nothing for it, but that I must not read this book for its own safety.**

Then the Reading Wolves announced they would read it for their June selection, and I thought, huh, maybe? Maybe I could do that? Take it out of its plastic protection, be brave, and read?

And so I did. With great trepidation. I won't drag out the suspense--the book is finished and going back into its plastic sleeve (thanks, Girl Detective!) in pretty respectable shape. Except for what looks like a partial footprint on the lower front cover...

I really liked this book, although I suspect, not being a Tolkien fan or able to speak/read Spanish, that there's plenty of subtext that zoomed right over my head. Diaz uses copious amounts of Spanish mixed into the English, and I'm guessing he's using a great deal of slang and/or profanity, and initially that slowed me down. At first I tried to look up online any words I didn't know. But I quickly realized that if I did that, I'd have a better chance of finishing War and Peace this year than finishing this book. So I had to go with the idea that I could probably guess at meaning from context, and the reading went much more quickly after that.

Except for the footnotes. In a way, the footnotes were often interesting, explaining points of Dominican history that I was clueless about, and often in such a breezy, tossed-off manner that it brought me into Oscar's world, where this stuff is common knowledge. But: footnotes? Really? They become coy after a while, tricksy, and just downright annoying.

Early on we learn that Oscar is a grossly overweight nerd who has very few "friends":

"And right there he learned something about his friends he'd never known (or at least never admitted to himself). Right there had had an epiphany that echoed through his fat self. He realized his fucked-up comic-book-reading, role-playing-game-loving, no-sports-playing friends were embarrassed by him."

As if that's not bad enough, Oscar isn't just an ungainly nerd, but apparently a victim of fuku, an ancient curse that's been tormenting his family for decades. And just like that, Diaz is off and running, showing the family members before Oscar who have been battered by fuku (much of which takes place in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo years, a time of much violence), and this becomes telling of how Oscar ended up the way he did.

Af first the title didn't make sense to me, since the book is only partially about Oscar. But, at least in Oscar's mind, his brief wondrous life is wholly a battle against this fuku, generated long before his birth in a time and place as cursed as any.

A tough read in some ways, especially given my lack of foreign language knowledge, but I'm glad I finally took it off the shelf and exposed it to the real world.

**That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. And by the way, footnotes are not annoying when I use them.

 

Great Expectations

Hoo boy, if last week's installment was a transitional one, well, now the proverbial you-know-what's hitting the fan.

Miss Havisham, at long last, comes to the terrible realization of the harm she's done, both to Estella and to Pip. Dickens makes a brilliant case for not allowing oneself to become secluded by heartbreak:

"But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equally well."

Then she goes up in flames--literally. Do you think that was a suicide attempt, or an accident? How creepily ghastly the image of her at the end of that chapter is, laid out on the table she'd already said would be her funeral display, muttering "What have I done?" over and over.

BUT then we find out, as Pip has been starting to suspect, that Estella is the daughter of Mr. Jaggers' housekeeper and none other than Pip's real benefactor.

Wow. I may not always agree with Mr. Jaggers--and we could debate for a very long time whether he ought to have done what he did with Estella and Estella's mother--but at this point, he's absolutely right: don't tell Estella.

Or maybe that would be good for her...what do you think?

Great Expectations

Sometimes Dickens seems to be writing transitional chapters, where not so very much happens, or it happens off-stage, and is recounted by someone else. To me, that was this section. It had the feel of building up to something else, but didn't leave me much to comment on.

Except for this:

"Well!" said Wemmick, "that's over! He's a wonderful man, without his living likeness; but I feel that I have to screw myself up when I dine with him--and I dine more comfortably unscrewed."

Haven't we all had dinners like that?

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

ETA: I just realized that, at 479 pages, this qualifies as a Chunkster Challenge entry. Woot!

I have such a huge literary crush on David Mitchell.I count Cloud Atlas as one of my all-time favorite books, and I loved Black Swan Green. I was a bit apprehensive going into The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, wondering if he could maintain my adoration--I can be quite fickle--but yes, I can tell you: the crush is still intact and stronger than ever.

One of the things I admire about him is, like Jennifer Egan, his ability to start completely from scratch with each novel. The three books I've listed here are so completely different from each other, from the wild century-spanning Cloud Atlas to the coming-of-age Black Swan Green to this, a story set in early 19th century Japan. Jacob de Zoet works for the Dutch East Indies Company, tasked with sorting through and solving the problem of rampant fraud. While there, he meets Orito Aibagawa, a Japanese midwife, and slowly becomes attracted to her.

But that makes it sound like a romance, and this really isn't a romantic novel. It's a rich historical tale, told in the present tense with just enough details to illustrate the period without doggedly listing every single thing Mitchell learned while researching (a pet peeve of mine regarding historical novels). There are numerous fascinating characters, fully fleshed out and all too human.

There is some sweetness and humor to this book, but also some dark--very dark--plot points. I won't give spoilers, but I have to wonder if those plot points are historically accurate; if so...well...there were some really awful things going on in early 19th-century Japan.

I'll admit it took me a while to get into this book, but once I did, I could hardly put it down. There are themes of cultural differences, the role of education for men and for women, business dealings that feel unfortunately very contemporary, and religious musings:

"Well, as my friend the dean observes," Marinus said, leaning on the rail, "we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love."

In a way, it's a sweeping tale, even though geographically it takes place in one small region over a relatively short period of time. But the scope of characters and story makes it feel much larger than that.

More, please, David Mitchell.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast

I know it's Friday, and that's supposed to be about Great Expectations. Today is about Great Expectations, but of a non-Dickens variety:

Namely: Backroads & Byways of Minnesota, by yours truly, now available at fine booksellers everywhere. Well, at least in the Midwest, and definitely online.

Won't you support a toiling travel writer and buy her witty, charming book?

 

Great Expectations

Oh, Pip. Things are just getting worser and worser and worser. It's bad enough that he has to own up to Miss Havisham about the source of his expectations, but he discovers that, true to her word, Estella truly is heartless and is set to marry that scoundrel, Bentley Drummle. The chapter where he finds this out and confronts both Estella and Miss Havisham is heartbreaking, and Miss Havisham's response is intriguing:

"[T]he spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of pity and remorse."

Could it be that she actually is fond of Pip and just now realizes that her decades of self-pity and vengeance may be brutally harming an innocent young man?

An innocent young man who, it appears, may have his life endangered by his connection to Magwitch. We know he survives, because he's narrating the story from the future, but there's still an intense sense of dread building up here. As in: how can this possibly end well?