I just finished Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, the 12th title I've completed from my Fill in the Gaps list. (Yes, I know... I am very far behind many of the readers here!)
I really enjoyed the book. Gaiman is always good for a fun read (I've got several of his novels on my list — more than any other author, I think). He's funny and he's smart, and that gives his humor a level of depth and his more profound thoughts a rather light touch. Over all, the effect is wonderful.
The story begins with Fat Charlie and his embarrassment over his father. And aren't all of us mortified with embarrassment by our parents? Well, Fat Charlie is just like us in that regard... with the added layer being that his dad is a minor deity, the trickster god of West African and Caribbean traditional folklore.
I love how the folklore weaves into this story. It's Rudyard Kipling without all the trappings of colonialism. It's fun to enter into a tradition other than the one I was brought up in, and yet to have it brought near to the experiences of my own world. That is what Gaiman does so effectively in this novel.
Fat Charlie doesn't start out as a very sympathetic character, for me, but something about the story still managed to suck me in. It is a page turner. For me, I think it is Gaiman's writing (fantastic!) and humor (hilarious!) that kept me turning the pages, even though Fat Charlie didn't immediately strike a chord with me. Anyway, whatever kept me interested, the characters all began to grown on me, the more I read, and made it so I didn't quite want the story to end.
Shelly
Showing posts with label *2005. Show all posts
Showing posts with label *2005. Show all posts
Monday, December 14, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
*Karen, *Per Petterson, *Out Stealing Horses
Out Stealing Horses is a story about this guy having memories about his father. He's Norwegian and there are lakes and timber and affairs and stuff.
Yes, I'm aware I'm not doing justice to a book that received rave reviews and is considered one of the top books published since 2000. I don't really care.
It did nothing for me. It's a great book, and there's emotional resonance, a beautiful little theme about pain, crisp scenery, sex, suspense, and war. But I just didn't care.
I found the narrator inconsistent and untrustworthy. In high school, we talked a bit about the untrustworthy narrator after reading The Great Gatsby, though for the life of me, I can't remember why the narrator was untrustworthy. But that's not the point at all. The point, of course, is that I found THIS narrator unreliable and kind of annoying. Perhaps I was the untrustworthy one--maybe I wasn't reading close enough, and so felt that he was holding out on me and misleading me, when really I just wasn't paying attention--but the result is, I begrudged the time I spent with Trond, and I'm glad to be moving on. At last. This is not a long or difficult book. It should not have taken me so long to get through it (over a month).
Since Out Stealing Horses was originally written in Norwegian, I found one of the most interesting parts of the book to be thinking about the translation; choosing "torch" instead of "flashlight" helped to give it a European air. Not knowing anything about the Norwegian language, however, I really wonder what the book was like in its own language. English speakers are blessed/cursed with one of the largest supplies of words in the world. I wonder how that changes our reading experience. Since the English translation was not exactly brimming with fifty cent words, I'm curious as to how complex the language was originally.
In a foreign language with a limited lexicon, what, exactly, makes a novel literary instead of just boring?
Yes, I'm aware I'm not doing justice to a book that received rave reviews and is considered one of the top books published since 2000. I don't really care.
It did nothing for me. It's a great book, and there's emotional resonance, a beautiful little theme about pain, crisp scenery, sex, suspense, and war. But I just didn't care.
I found the narrator inconsistent and untrustworthy. In high school, we talked a bit about the untrustworthy narrator after reading The Great Gatsby, though for the life of me, I can't remember why the narrator was untrustworthy. But that's not the point at all. The point, of course, is that I found THIS narrator unreliable and kind of annoying. Perhaps I was the untrustworthy one--maybe I wasn't reading close enough, and so felt that he was holding out on me and misleading me, when really I just wasn't paying attention--but the result is, I begrudged the time I spent with Trond, and I'm glad to be moving on. At last. This is not a long or difficult book. It should not have taken me so long to get through it (over a month).
Since Out Stealing Horses was originally written in Norwegian, I found one of the most interesting parts of the book to be thinking about the translation; choosing "torch" instead of "flashlight" helped to give it a European air. Not knowing anything about the Norwegian language, however, I really wonder what the book was like in its own language. English speakers are blessed/cursed with one of the largest supplies of words in the world. I wonder how that changes our reading experience. Since the English translation was not exactly brimming with fifty cent words, I'm curious as to how complex the language was originally.
In a foreign language with a limited lexicon, what, exactly, makes a novel literary instead of just boring?
