Paper Towns
At the end of 2012 - I read The Fault In Our Stars, the young adult romance novel by John Green, and thought it was a classy affair with real crossover merit. Many people my own age have also read it and recommended it to me, including just the other day a friend of mine from uni days. A film of The Fault In Our Stars is set to appear at a cinema near you shortly.
What then of the rest of John Green's output? I've just got round to a second one of his now and chose Paper Towns.
This novel is told from the perspective of Quentin, one night school Queen Bee Margo who was once his friend and lives next door appears at his window and makes him join her on a series of revenge pranks in the middle of the night and then promptly vanishes leaving Quentin and his friends to decipher the mystery of her whereabouts.
There's a lot to like about Paper Towns and I'll start with that, for every girl with a complicated internal life there is something to identify with in Margo. She's the girl with a million records whose friends don't even know she likes music. The girl with a copy of Leaves Of Grass by Walt Whitman whose friends don't even know she likes poetry. The popular girl at the centre of things who knows she's faking it all.
She's the girl who keeps going missing because she needs to be found. And the girl who wants to stay lost too.
Margo is a great character - fascinating even, though perhaps with some annoying hipster tendencies.
Margo is the best thing about this novel - but she is also its biggest problem.
The book isn't about Margo. It's about Quentin. Quentin and his friends Ben and Radar - later joined by Lacey who are searching for Margo.
And there's nothing of note about any of them really; Quentin IMs his friends, they play video games, they scour the equivalent of Wikipedia for Margo clues and live out standard American High School Outsider tropes about which there is nothing original.
The only thing that is interesting about Quentin is 'Quentin in relation to Margo' - he's not interesting outside of her. The essential point that John Green is making about people with this novel and it's a great point and one particularly worth making to young people I think, is about how Quentin relates to Margo.
At the beginning of the novel Quentin counts it as a miracle that he ever knew Margo, that she ever happened to be his next door neighbour.
Quentin has an idea, a concept, of the person that he believes Margo to be, he's built it all in his mind, this idea that he has of her, is an impression that he's decided upon. It's an interesting lesson about how we, and it applies to adults too, carry ideals or mistaken beliefs about people based upon the narrative we have imposed upon them ourselves.
Margo, Quentin realises eventually is not a miracle, she's just a troubled girl and nothing more or less than that.
And this is such a good book for young people just for that lesson, but it's a mistake that adults including myself are often guilty of making; of expecting superhuman behaviour from people who we put on a pedestal who ultimately are just as human and fallible as we are.
A good book with a great secondary character 7/10 for Paper Towns the bulk of which didn't engage me - 10/10 for Margo herself.
Showing posts with label Life Experience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Life Experience. Show all posts
Thursday, 6 February 2014
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Book #37 The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried
After the difficulty I had with Crow Country, the next book I picked up: Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried' could not have been more different. It's been lounging round my house unread for what must be about three years now and I finally took pity on it, call me a mental person but I feel sorry for books that aren't read and wonder if they feel sad. That's how alive books are to me, they aren't just words that someone made up, between two hard covers lie whole worlds, people we could never meet, places and times we can never experience for ourselves.
In 'The Things They Carried' O'Brien takes us to a period of history and an event that only men of a certain age and nationality will ever experience, the US invasion of Vietnam, and shares it. O'Brien is renowned in the States as the foremost contributor to Vietnam veteran literature, having prior to the publication of this book released a memoir of his experience as a young soldier 'If I Die In A Combat Zone, Box Me Up And Ship Me Home' and a Vietnam war based novel 'Going After Cacciato'.
'The Things They Carried' blurs the distinction between the memoir format and the novel format, apparently deliberately. "Tim O'Brien" is the narrator of the novel, he became a writer following leaving service and is 43, just like the author, but the "Tim O'Brien" of the novel is a fictionalised version of the self. In the novel O'Brien talks about the difference between "story truths and happening truths" and it is clear that O'Brien uses 'The Things They Carried' as a vehicle to tell stories that portray truths of the experience without necessarily being factually accurate. Some people would say that this is a short story collection but I think it hangs together as a novel made up of episodic tales.
The title The Things They Carried has a literal meaning in terms not only of their backpacks and weaponry, but their mementos from home. It also has the figurative meaning of what they carried with them from home when they came into the war in their minds, what experiences they carried with them in the duration of their service and what they psychologically carried on going home. It is tough to know if it's the real O'Brien or the fictional O'Brien who speaks but he described never really being one to tell stories to friends and family about the war but has never stopped writing about it. The writing has become his dialogue and his therapy it seems, and yet there is no overwhelming feel in the writing of a desperate or bitter man. Just of a man with a great ability to tell the stories of the era and the stories they told each other at night in their foxholes.
If my experience reading Crow Country was plodding and exasperating, reading The Things They Carried was the exact opposite. I would have read this book in one single sitting had it not got so late. It was phenomenal, truly. Gripping, beautifully constructed and written, with not only a sense of place and time but a great sense of the psyche. The psyche of what turns young men into soldiers and how they cope or are damaged by that psychologically. What it is like to be a soldier not just in terms of times of incident and battle, but the daily trudging grind of patrol alongside men who may perish or whom you may count on to ensure you don't. What it is like to be "in" a war.
There was a great section around page 81 and I feel I must quote it as an example of how great the writing is
I had a hard time picking out where to start and finish that quote as the writing around it is equally fine.
This book is an experience which awakes the senses and evokes the atmosphere. Without wanting to make a crass allusion to popular culture, you can smell the napalm. I think that this, though a shorter book, is the best piece of war fiction I've read since I read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks; though this is of course, an earlier book. But what makes this a bit more special is that Tim O'Brien's voice is the voice of a man who actually went there and lived to tell the tale.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Read this book please. 10/10
After the difficulty I had with Crow Country, the next book I picked up: Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried' could not have been more different. It's been lounging round my house unread for what must be about three years now and I finally took pity on it, call me a mental person but I feel sorry for books that aren't read and wonder if they feel sad. That's how alive books are to me, they aren't just words that someone made up, between two hard covers lie whole worlds, people we could never meet, places and times we can never experience for ourselves.
In 'The Things They Carried' O'Brien takes us to a period of history and an event that only men of a certain age and nationality will ever experience, the US invasion of Vietnam, and shares it. O'Brien is renowned in the States as the foremost contributor to Vietnam veteran literature, having prior to the publication of this book released a memoir of his experience as a young soldier 'If I Die In A Combat Zone, Box Me Up And Ship Me Home' and a Vietnam war based novel 'Going After Cacciato'.
'The Things They Carried' blurs the distinction between the memoir format and the novel format, apparently deliberately. "Tim O'Brien" is the narrator of the novel, he became a writer following leaving service and is 43, just like the author, but the "Tim O'Brien" of the novel is a fictionalised version of the self. In the novel O'Brien talks about the difference between "story truths and happening truths" and it is clear that O'Brien uses 'The Things They Carried' as a vehicle to tell stories that portray truths of the experience without necessarily being factually accurate. Some people would say that this is a short story collection but I think it hangs together as a novel made up of episodic tales.
The title The Things They Carried has a literal meaning in terms not only of their backpacks and weaponry, but their mementos from home. It also has the figurative meaning of what they carried with them from home when they came into the war in their minds, what experiences they carried with them in the duration of their service and what they psychologically carried on going home. It is tough to know if it's the real O'Brien or the fictional O'Brien who speaks but he described never really being one to tell stories to friends and family about the war but has never stopped writing about it. The writing has become his dialogue and his therapy it seems, and yet there is no overwhelming feel in the writing of a desperate or bitter man. Just of a man with a great ability to tell the stories of the era and the stories they told each other at night in their foxholes.
If my experience reading Crow Country was plodding and exasperating, reading The Things They Carried was the exact opposite. I would have read this book in one single sitting had it not got so late. It was phenomenal, truly. Gripping, beautifully constructed and written, with not only a sense of place and time but a great sense of the psyche. The psyche of what turns young men into soldiers and how they cope or are damaged by that psychologically. What it is like to be a soldier not just in terms of times of incident and battle, but the daily trudging grind of patrol alongside men who may perish or whom you may count on to ensure you don't. What it is like to be "in" a war.
There was a great section around page 81 and I feel I must quote it as an example of how great the writing is
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At it's core perhaps war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive, the grass, the soil - everything. All around you things are purely living and you among them and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out of the skin awareness of your living self - your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There's a kind of largeness to it a kind of godliness. Though it's odd you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly as if for the first time you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.
I had a hard time picking out where to start and finish that quote as the writing around it is equally fine.
This book is an experience which awakes the senses and evokes the atmosphere. Without wanting to make a crass allusion to popular culture, you can smell the napalm. I think that this, though a shorter book, is the best piece of war fiction I've read since I read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks; though this is of course, an earlier book. But what makes this a bit more special is that Tim O'Brien's voice is the voice of a man who actually went there and lived to tell the tale.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Read this book please. 10/10
Sunday, 3 April 2011
Book #19 Shikasta by Doris Lessing
Shikasta
Sometimes we read a book because we choose it, but I think other times we read a book because it chooses us. I particularly feel that way about my favourite novel 'Cry The Beloved Country' by Alan Paton which seemed to me to wink at me every time browsed my school library shelves, willing me to pick it up. Another reason I think we choose books is because we know that someone else loved it or it had a great impact upon them, and we choose upon faith in recommendation from them. Or in this case perhaps more out of curiosity, as an experiment, an effort to know someone more through the books that mean something to them.
Which poses the question, can you learn more about who someone is through reading books they read? Or do your own feelings about literature and the different eras in which you read the book, colour your persepective making it essentially, a different book for you?
Having read Shikasta I think so, and that poses another interesting question for me - is it possible that no-one can ever read the SAME book because of that said issue. The fact that the experiences of life which we draw from and what those experiences lead us to draw from the novels we read are always going to be different?
Shikasta is the first in a quintet of 'space fiction' novels by the highly respected author Doris Lessing who won the Nobel Prize For Literature in 2007, so great credentials there. The quintet is collectively known as Canopus in Argos : Archives, which are in the first novel at least a set of historical documents relating to the struggle of the Canopus Empire regarding the difficult planet Shikasta.
Shikasta first known to Canopeans as Rohanda, is seen as a planet of promise and brought into the Canopus Empire, were they attempted to colonise it and bring it in line with the rest of the Empire. When this attempt fails they leave the planet largely to its own devices and watch horrified as it devolves. Shikasta is revealed to be our planet Earth.
Canopus continues to send agents in disguise to Shikasta to help change the course of events, and improve the conditions of Shikastans but any improvements largely breakdown over time. These interventions are cleverly shown to mirror the events and covenant of the Old Testament, we don't realise but Canopus is our master and God.
By choosing to use observers from outer space as her primary voice in the novel, it has a sense of detachment and superiority, Canopus judges but is not to blame. The archive reports read as anthropology which as a writer is a different angle to take and for a reader makes a new experience.
Here Lessing uses the disgust and despair of the Canopeans to launch a blistering attack on 20th Century human behaviour and by doing so makes her novel something of a polemic.
This is for me what makes my response to the novel somewhat mixed. It was published in 1979. In that era and in the 1980's which followed many things occurred or were occurring politically: The Cold War, Feminism, the rise of Capitalism, and Thatcherism and the breaking of the trade unions. Lessing's writing in Shikasta is clearly heavily influenced by the current events of the day. I imagine that those who cared about those subjects or were involved in them politically or personally found the novel mind-blowing, exciting and massively important and relevant.
I, however, reading it in 2011 living in the Post-x era with the benefit of history know that much of what is predicted did not come to pass, and society has gone for good or ill a very different way. One notable "mistake" if you like is that those in the novel living in The End Times do not have and never did have computers. This kind of thing makes the novel dated yet it remains a curiosity.
I went up and down with this novel as I read it, liking it in parts more than others. I struggled with the last third, particularly The Trial, although the issue put on trial is very important and still a relevant question to this day, I found the notion of this issue having a trial itself and its written execution rather absurd. It would never happen.
Given that this book is part of a quintet I bought all five at once, and, I'm not sure if I regret that now or not, I certainly like the concept and am interested to see how Lessing applied it to different situations and characters but I am wondering if I will also find the ideas and themes of the other four books similarly dated. 7/10
Sometimes we read a book because we choose it, but I think other times we read a book because it chooses us. I particularly feel that way about my favourite novel 'Cry The Beloved Country' by Alan Paton which seemed to me to wink at me every time browsed my school library shelves, willing me to pick it up. Another reason I think we choose books is because we know that someone else loved it or it had a great impact upon them, and we choose upon faith in recommendation from them. Or in this case perhaps more out of curiosity, as an experiment, an effort to know someone more through the books that mean something to them.
Which poses the question, can you learn more about who someone is through reading books they read? Or do your own feelings about literature and the different eras in which you read the book, colour your persepective making it essentially, a different book for you?
Having read Shikasta I think so, and that poses another interesting question for me - is it possible that no-one can ever read the SAME book because of that said issue. The fact that the experiences of life which we draw from and what those experiences lead us to draw from the novels we read are always going to be different?
Shikasta is the first in a quintet of 'space fiction' novels by the highly respected author Doris Lessing who won the Nobel Prize For Literature in 2007, so great credentials there. The quintet is collectively known as Canopus in Argos : Archives, which are in the first novel at least a set of historical documents relating to the struggle of the Canopus Empire regarding the difficult planet Shikasta.
Shikasta first known to Canopeans as Rohanda, is seen as a planet of promise and brought into the Canopus Empire, were they attempted to colonise it and bring it in line with the rest of the Empire. When this attempt fails they leave the planet largely to its own devices and watch horrified as it devolves. Shikasta is revealed to be our planet Earth.
Canopus continues to send agents in disguise to Shikasta to help change the course of events, and improve the conditions of Shikastans but any improvements largely breakdown over time. These interventions are cleverly shown to mirror the events and covenant of the Old Testament, we don't realise but Canopus is our master and God.
By choosing to use observers from outer space as her primary voice in the novel, it has a sense of detachment and superiority, Canopus judges but is not to blame. The archive reports read as anthropology which as a writer is a different angle to take and for a reader makes a new experience.
Here Lessing uses the disgust and despair of the Canopeans to launch a blistering attack on 20th Century human behaviour and by doing so makes her novel something of a polemic.
This is for me what makes my response to the novel somewhat mixed. It was published in 1979. In that era and in the 1980's which followed many things occurred or were occurring politically: The Cold War, Feminism, the rise of Capitalism, and Thatcherism and the breaking of the trade unions. Lessing's writing in Shikasta is clearly heavily influenced by the current events of the day. I imagine that those who cared about those subjects or were involved in them politically or personally found the novel mind-blowing, exciting and massively important and relevant.
I, however, reading it in 2011 living in the Post-x era with the benefit of history know that much of what is predicted did not come to pass, and society has gone for good or ill a very different way. One notable "mistake" if you like is that those in the novel living in The End Times do not have and never did have computers. This kind of thing makes the novel dated yet it remains a curiosity.
I went up and down with this novel as I read it, liking it in parts more than others. I struggled with the last third, particularly The Trial, although the issue put on trial is very important and still a relevant question to this day, I found the notion of this issue having a trial itself and its written execution rather absurd. It would never happen.
Given that this book is part of a quintet I bought all five at once, and, I'm not sure if I regret that now or not, I certainly like the concept and am interested to see how Lessing applied it to different situations and characters but I am wondering if I will also find the ideas and themes of the other four books similarly dated. 7/10
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)