penitent, turbulent, multiplex!

I haven’t done this in a long time, but recently I plowed through a couple of novels that were quite good. If I can increase their PageRank a little, then I’ve done a good deed.

The Broken Sword
My sister loaned me The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson. It was written in around the same literary era as the Lord of the Rings, but it’s much less fluffy. It reads more like a Norse tale.

My favorite part of the book was how Anderson mashes together all sorts of religions into an angsty, cohesive mass. Norse, Greek, and Irish “pagan” spirits are all at play here, along with the Christian “White God”. It’s funny, because as a kid, fantasy that read “too close to the source” (i.e. the characters didn’t seem like they’d wandered onto the set from a modern American city) would immediately turn me off. Now the opposite is true.

If you had to read Norse Myths or any classical mythology in school and you liked it, The Broken Sword is definitely worth sitting down with.

The Broken Sword

Perfume
The other book I wanted to mention here is Perfume, by Patrick Süskind. It’s about an emotionless, nigh-invincible sociopath who has the world’s most refined sense of smell, but who emits no discernible odor himself. I found a tattered copy of this book on my bookshelf, and I have absolutely no clue how it got there.

When I first picked it up, the ‘feel’ of it made me think it was going to be one of those mind-altering classics that you mention in oddball conversations for the next five years. By the time I reached the end, I thought to myself, “that was an extremely well-told story, but that’s about it.”

The plot and the prose are incredibly creative and well-crafted, especially considering that this was translated from the original German. There are a few parts where things start to meander a little, but the advantage of opposable thumbs is that you can completely skip past those sections.

Perfume

If you’re looking for something new and weird to read, I’d definitely recommend either of these books.

Ground Works tricked me. I thought it was going to be an anthology of short stories written in post-modern style by the authors that really originated the movement in Canada. It’s close to that, but instead each work is actually an excerpt from a larger one. In pretty much every case, the “story” is a single chapter or subsection of a novel.

At first I thought that the distinction would be minor, but it was not. For one thing, most of the pieces that I read in this collection still felt self-contained, which led me to wonder why I would subject myself to reading the complete work in the first place. (I say “subject” because a lot of these pieces are challenging to read, to say the least.) At the same time, many of the pieces were also quite diffuse, probably because of a combination of the style and the fact that they were parts of larger works, and so lacked the intensity of a short story.

I have discovered that reading a sampler-pack of book chapters gives you sort of the same feeling as eating a sampler-pack of snacks: I ultimately ended up feeling unsatisfied, but was pleased to try a bunch of new things and came out of the experience with a short list of items I’d like to explore with more depth.

Other good things about reading Ground Works? Of the stories presented, Remote Control and some other work about a mother who takes her child along with her when she shoplifts were pretty awesome. I was compelled to research what “post-modernism” actually is, albeit shallowly (read: I visited the wikipedia page. It didn’t help much. Neither did comparing it to “modernism”. I need to do some real book-work to appreciate this, I think.) I learned what a “panopticon” is. I discovered that I’m not very much interested in writing that focuses on the act of writing itself. (Metawriting?) And finally, I very much enjoyed the biographies presented on each author, especially the discussions of the historical and regional contexts in which they were operating.

It’s strange how few novels one actually comes across that are written by people with a formal education in creative writing. (I’m not sure if this is more telling of the profession or of the mass readership.) However, it is perhaps because of this lack of popularity that they usually end up in the bargain bin. I found Hunger, by creative writing instructor and MFA Elise Blackwell, at Chapters for four dollars a few months back. The slim, sparse cover caught my eye before the price tag did. It’s quite beautiful.

Hunger is a book about newly married couple of Soviet botanists who are forced to guard the research granary from pillagers during the siege of Leningrad. The novel is short — it is more of a novella — and it is told from the perspective of the husband in sort of a continuous, rambling narrative that jumps back and forth in time. This has a touch of post-modernism to it, but is comparatively subdued and surprisingly coherent despite all of the bouncing around. There’s no gaming around with punctuation or sentence structure or anything like this.

Like most “academic” writing exercises, there are a lot of glib and pithy value statements couched as observations throughout the novel, but I can’t remember any of them feeling overbearing, excessive, or forced.

All in all, I found this to be a great read — so much so, that I am going to hunt down some more of Blackwell’s stuff. I encourage you to do the same!