Rogue One, a Star Wars movie

Last weekend I went to see Rogue One, the latest in the Star Wars franchise.  Didn’t do much for me.  I tend to be unimpressed with special effects, explosions, crashes, and such.  Even grotesque space creatures, though such conceptions can be interesting.  

Special effects, at best, are cool the first time; the next time they are old hat, ho hum.  We’ve seen the x-wing fighters, the death star, various blasters, the cumbersome awkward white plastic suited faceless and feckless empire flunkies, the goofy and vulnerable AT-AT, the light saber.  The shield gate was a cool concept (Forgive me if it was not new; I haven’t seen all the movies).  The blind guy walking calmly through a firefight, chanting “I am one with the force.  The force is with me,” was second hand goods.  In the great 1970s film “Little Big Man”, the blind old chief walked slowly upright and unharmed through a vicious attack on an unsuspecting native American encampment by the US cavalry.

It must be difficult making a movie with any originality, so many have already been made.  The best you can do is take and old story--and aren't’ they all old stories?--and tell it better than ever before.  It reminds me of modern music, which has become so non-melodic, because so many melodies have already been written.  Or maybe ‘discovered’ would be a better word.  With a limited number of notes and rhythms, the number of possible melodies is not infinite.  You can’t write, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” again.  

Back to Rogue One, I assume that most of the characters were new, and since they died, it’s one and done for them.  Character development was lacking.  They came across as a set of one dimensional action characters, like plastic G I Joes to be knocked over and left behind.  People who know me know that I’m a soft touch for the emotional moment.  I’ll cry at a good commercial.  A well crafted movie can leave me dehydrated.  This film did nothing.  Nada.  A planet destroyed, a couple who found love killed, big deal.  It just never managed to touch an emotional button for me.  I’ll admit that I’m inclined to be critical of anything that gets too popular.  This film made it easy for me.

The Humbling, by Philip Roth

A prominent actor, on stage and screen, suddenly and inexplicably loses his ability to act.  Performances are panned, and worst of all, the actor knows his performances were poor.  Acting is by definition pretending to be something that one is not.  A fake, a phony.  But it must be at least a good phony, and he can no longer be that.  

It’s a short novel, fewer than 150 pages, and the font isn’t tiny, but Roth manages to pack in a lot of anguish.  The latter part of the story involves some kinky sex that, in the context of the story line, seemed gratuitous to me.  I suppose at this point, given Roth’s huge body of work, all of which features sexual episodes, you have to just shrug it off with “Oh well, it’s Roth.”  

It’s a short novel with a clear theme, a steady progression of plot, a fitting conclusion, a useful lesson.  Speaking of which, I can see how different people could draw different lessons, and that's okay.  Eye of the beholder, you know.

Man Walks In a Room, by Nicole Krauss

SPOILER ALERT--plot giveaway

I picked this book up at the Baltimore Book Festival where they were selling two books for $15.  I chose it because my daughter had effused about another book by Krauss.  I recall starting that book and losing interest before finishing.  This one I did finish but don’t recommend.  I kept expecting the story to lead somewhere significant, important, or meaningful, somewhere that would make the not insignificant time spent reading it worthwhile, some payback on the investment.  But no.  

The premise is interesting enough.  A man, Samson, has a brain tumor that erases all memories between the ages of 12 and 36, his current age.  It’s easy to imagine how difficult that would be for him, as well as for those close to him.  Good material for a short story.  Krauss extends the plot by inventing a scientific project, secluded in the Nevada desert, complete with nerds and supercomputers, with the goal of recording memories from one person and implanting them in another.  Samson is a perfect candidate for implantation because of the 24 year empty space in his memory.  There are problems, obviously, but for me this experiment didn’t make for the event that the story turns on, as it could have and probably should have.  As it turned out, the weird experiment had to compete with the unusual memory loss for thematic dominance.  That is, it left me wondering which theme the story was about.  Things fall apart in Samson’s life, not surprisingly, with a series of pathetic misadventures.  In the end (SPOILER ALERT) he has an unconvincing reconciliation with his situation, and we are left to accept that he moves on with his life.

I like Krauss's writing, especially her descriptive language.  “Samson stood by the window watching the flakes of snow, each an original, irreducible fact, fall through the lamplight.”  The “irreducible fact” is a compelling term, one I’ve never before associated with snowflakes, but that bears powerful meaning in a story about thought and memory.  Bursts of descriptive brilliance are not uncommon in the story and were enough to keep me going, those and the hope of the story eventually leading to a conclusion worth of the premise.  Ultimately I was disappointed.

Ending Up, by Kingsley Amis

I’ve heard or read mention of this author a number of times before, and so was curious to read something of his myself.  His son, Martin Amis, is also a novelist, so I picked up one of his books as well.  I’m now hopeful that the son can measure up to the work of the father, because I found this book to be brilliant.  It’s a short novel, just over a hundred pages in this printing, and I read it in two sittings.

I’m not a fan of stories about people with some exceptional gift, or the great and powerful, or especially the supernatural.   Don’t bother me with vampires and werewolves, the undead and such tommyrot.  It’s real people that interest me.  Ending Up is about regular people getting old, five regular people in particular, living together in rural England in 1972.  None of them is happy of course with the declines that accompany aging, and they cope in different ways.  It is those different ways that, intentional or oblivious, irritate one another.  

It could be a sad, desperate sort of story, but Amis plays it out with intense humor.  I literally laughed out loud at least half a dozen times.  Books don't often do that for me; any one that does gets a hearty endorsement.   It’s hard to present an example of the humor separate from the full story, but here goes.  Shorty and Marigold are two of the aged, and a doctor is looking in on Marigold.  “Before the doctor had finished, Shorty came in with coffee and biscuits on a bent silver tray.  He stayed a little longer than was altogether necessary, constantly glancing at Marigold in a way the doctor saw as indicating concern, and Marigold herself as pretended concern hiding utter indifference, but in fact amounted to pretended concern hiding hostile curiosity: if there was anything wrong with her more than being a snobbish old bitch eaten up with her own importance, he wanted to be one of the first to know about it.”  

Another example from the same visit: “Dr. Mainwaring recognized his patient’s departure from her habitual style, but was just as good at hiding the pity the departure made him feel as he was at hiding the irritation the habitual style made him feel.”  The syntax sometimes obscures the meaning, but re-reading a time or two reveals the punch.  It’s worth it.  Regarding the style of writing, I think Amis is poking fun at his own work in describing a book that Shorty is reading.  “The prose style was tortuous, elliptic, allusive, full of strange poeticisms; the dialogue, after the same fashion, was stuffed with obscurities and non-sequiturs....”  

At age 66, I’m still far from the state of decline of these characters, but the story calls me to see bits of myself in them, and them in me.  I think this empathy is an essential characteristic of good fiction, and Ending Up is good fiction.

Bill's stuff

For some time now I've been writing my own little reviews of books I've read, writing them in a journal.  They're mixed in with my private thoughts about a lot of things, and also just some notes about things I've done, places I've been.  Journal stuff.  I was talking with my daughter-in-law about books, and how I'd like to find a good group to join to discuss things we've read.  She suggested I publish my reviews in a blog, and maybe people would respond with comments, like in a discussion group, but without the wine and munchies.  So here goes.  I have a few saved up which I'll post now.  Please feel free, even encouraged, to comment, agree or disagree, retort, ridicule as you see fit.  It's all good.
Bill

The Hateful Eight, a movie by Quentin Tarantino

The Hateful Eight, a movie by Quentin Tarantino

The director’s reputation sets up the viewer’s expectations of violence a gore, and on that score it doesn’t disappoint.  I felt like I needed to take a bath in case any of it has splashed on me.  Like his earlier movies, the violence had a tongue-in-cheek feel, so over the top that its realism was unrealistic, which is nice because it doesn't lead to nightmares, at least not for me.  Actually the violence didn’t really get rolling until very late in the film, which by the way was almost three hours long.  I did miss a few minutes of it for a necessary break.  

Before the real violence was some pretty intriguing dialogue between the eight hateful characters, about their past, their recognition of each other’s infamy, and how they shared previously unknown connections.  The acting was excellent, the sets realistic, the details meticulously attended to, the premise and plot completely water tight.  

The socially significant aspect was the setting--post civil war--the characters, former fighters from both sides including a black Union officer (Samuel L. Jackson), and the liberal use of the n-word.  Ten or fifteen years ago the word was almost totally out of bounds in movies.  Books too.  Which gave the word enormous power.  Tarantino may have done more than anyone to disempower the word and show it to be a pathetic racist outcry when used with its hateful intent.   An attempt to make oneself feel superior...that falls obviously flat.

Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart

Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart

This is the third novel I’ve read by this author, and that’s all the novels he has published.  As soon as the next one comes out I’ll gobble it up.  I may even read his memoir, much as I am not fond of memoirs.

This one is the story of Lenny Abramov, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the US, which I’m guessing is Gray Shteyngart’s situation.  In contrast to the other two books, this one is less about his Russian-ness and his Jewishness.  The setting is a not-too-distant world in which youth, wealth, and sexuality have taken near total possession of the culture.  Everyone carries an ‘apparat’, a device not unlike a smart phone.  Walk through a room and it displays people’s current credit score, personality rating, f*ckability rating, all of which rise and fall according to behavior.  Instead of “verbaling” (talking), people mostly “teen”, which is sort of emailing using a site called GlobalTeens.  

Lenny falls for a young Korean girl who lives in, and appears to thrive in, the shallow pop culture.  His problem is that he is a real person with doubts, introspection and feelings with which he is mostly in touch.  Parallel to the turmoil in his life is a breakdown of order--political, economic, military--and Lenny has to decide where he stands in it all.  Plenty of plot.  The writing is brilliant.  

Shteyngart paints the characters with the things they say, the way they say them, and with striking descriptions, similes and metaphors.  I can turn to any random page and find a jewel.  I’ll do it now, using the random number generator on my iPhone calculator.  First three digit number from 001 to 331, the last page of the book.  Okay 240.  Eunice, the Korean girlfriend, reacting to an unwanted admonition from Lenny, “The dead smile came on with such full force that I thought a part of her cheekbone had cracked.  ‘That’s fine’, she said.”  Again, 004.  Here’s Lenny writing in his diary.  “Take a look at me, diary.  What do you see?  A slight man with a gray, sunken battleship of a face, curious wet eyes, a giant gleaming forehead on which a dozen cavemen could have painted something nice, a sickle of a nose perched atop a tiny puckered mouth, and from the back, a growing bald spot whose shape perfectly replicates the great state of Ohio, with its capital city, Columbus, marked by a deep brown mole.  Slight.  Slightness is my curse in every sense.”

I’m obviously very fond of Shteyngart’s writing.  It may not appeal to a very large audience.  I haven't read any reviews yet; I should do that.  But I know that I liked it, looked with anticipation to every next page, and thought about it a lot afterward.  Good stuff.

Slade House, by David Mitchell

Slade House, by David Mitchell

I found this story to be an extension of Mitchell’s creation in an earlier novel, The Bone Clocks, of a world of ‘atemporals’, beings who live outside of time, not touched by aging.  Unfortunately their continued existence depends on periodic--every nine years--feedings on human souls.  They also have the impressive power to create orisons--imaginary worlds to lure their prey into their clutches.  

I can’t help being reminded of the Twilight series, the young adult books about vampires and werewolves, in which an inordinate number of words and pages were devoted to explaining just how all this otherworldly world works.  That aspect of Slade House had the same young adult feel to it, though Mitchell’s use of vocabulary and imagery would probably make it difficult for most young adults to follow.  But Mitchell’s ability to create believable characters, complete with accents, jobs, motivations, fears, worries, and wishes, made it just a little bit jarring each time one was trapped and separated from his or her soul, which was consumed in a quick inhalation, leaving only a lifeless carcass.  What a tragic state of affairs for real people!  

Ah but then along comes a horologist--clock maker--to defeat the hungry soul eaters, revealing a battle between good and evil that rages on eternally, unseen by mere mortals.  In the end, just as the horologist thinks she has destroyed the evil twin atemporals, one of them slips away to inhabit the body of a nearby fetus, to continue its evil ways in another time.... and another book. A corny device for a writer of Mitchell’s talents.  Good writing, as always, but weak premise.  My advice to Mitchell: let the atemporals to their own way and write us a story abut us mortals.

Napoleon Symphony, by Anthony Burgess

Napoleon Symphony, by Anthony Burgess

 I’ve long been a fan of Burgess, and have read most of his fiction.  His work is always educational.   I used to keep a dictionary at my side; now I use Google and Wikipedia, even better.  They are especially useful with historical fiction.  If I’m ever in doubt as to whether a character or an event is historical or fictional, the internet provides a speedy answer.   With Burgess, you have to decide which things to look up, and which to let remain not understood. lf I looked up every word or reference I wasn’t sure of, I’d lose the thread of the plot line and probably never finish the book.  And I’m fairly well educated and well read.  Needless to say, Burgess is not for the unambitious reader. 

Napoleon Symphony is a historical fictional account about Napoleon Bonaparte, his rise to power, his majestic conquests, his colossal defeats, and his ultimate demise.  The reader’s education begins with the first sentence, “Tallien pressed his old royal watch and it chimed a new republican nine.”  Who was Tallien, real or fictional?  What’s a republican nine?  Jean-Lambert Tallien was real, an important player in the years that followed the storming of the Bastille in 1789.  The republican nine was real too.  In 1793 the French leaders declared a new calendar, with year I (why did they choose Roman numerals?) as 1792.  The twelve months were each 30 days long and were given new, French names such as Ventose, meaning windy, for February, and Thermidor, meaning hot, for July.   Each month consisted of three weeks, each ten days long.  The day was divided into ten long hours, which were each divided into 100 minutes, each consisting of 100 seconds.  So the “new republican nine” would have been about 9:30 pm.  I had never before heard of all that.  It ended in 1805 when they reverted to the old timekeeping standard, I suppose because that’s what the rest of the world was still using.  So that’s the lesson from the first sentence.  Not every sentence is as rich as that, but many are, and the reader who takes time to look things up will come away with a newly buttressed education.  

Burgess was a lover of music.  He supposedly stated that he would rather be known as a composer who also wrote books, than the other way around.  The book’s subtitle is “A novel in four movements.”  It appears in four sections, reflecting different phases of Napoleon’s life.  Interspersed in the story are various pieces of verse, some of which I found annoying.  Maybe I’m not sufficiently educated to ‘get’ the significance and relevance of these pieces of verse, but there you go.  Burgess also has an annoying way of inserting foreign language--not just words or phrases, but one or more whole sentences--without also giving an accompanying translation.  Just who is he writing for?  If he’s trying to impress me with his erudition, no need.  I was already thoroughly impressed by the part written in English.  The unfamiliar foreign language is just aggravating.

Still, I’m a big fan and fond of this book.  Historian Dan Carlin says the more we know abut a civilization or society or period in history, the more complex it appears.   If we know very little it can seem deceptively simple.  This book provides facts and speculation that greatly enrich, and complicate, our understanding of Napoleon, a character who deserves to be acknowledged as much more than simply “the little general.”

My Sunshine Away, by M. O. Walsh

My Sunshine Away, by M. O. Walsh

A touching, very touching story told in plain English as if it were a father writing to his son.  I found myself repeatedly having to dry my eyes during the last few pages.  Cried myself silly.  Not out of sadness or happiness either, but because it touched so close to home even for someone as normal and unscathed by life as me.  

The narrator, as a teenager, was a suspect in the rape of Lindy Simpson, a girl his age who lived across the street in their upper middle class suburb in Baton Rouge, LA.  He idealized her, worshipped her, fantasized about her, loved her.  The author uses events, both shocking and banal, to portray the character of other suspects in the rape, all very realistic.  The Louisiana heat and culture also factor in the story. 

There is a heavy dose of page-turner technique involved, which tugs you from the close of one chapter to the start of the next one.  This is a cheap device used by authors of thrillers, pot boilers, swash bucklers, and young adult fiction.  I noticed it in this story but was not put off by it.  The way the author unfolded the story amplified its emotional punch, page tuner technique and all.  I also give the author credit for not trying to impress anyone with his vocabulary.  There was not a single word I had to look up.  I don’t mind learning new words, but that would not have made sense in the context of the story or the premise of the narration.  

All fiction is supposedly autobiographical, so I wonder how much of this story is the author’s story.  I also wonder if Walsh has any more stories in him.  This is a powerful coming-of-age story, loaded with insights about people, society, perversion, everything.  Did he use them all his insights up or does he have some more to offer his readers?  I hope he does.

Eugenie Grandet, by Honore de Balzac

Eugenie Grandet, by Honore de Balzac

This novel is part of Balzac’s body of work known, aptly, as The Human Comedy.  His stories capture the whole range of peoples’ best and worst, the strength and weakness, the lowness and the heights of the human spirit.  Eugenie is the only child of Monsieur Grandet, a cooper by trade, maker of casks, who used cunning and sometimes deceit to amass a fortune in gold and property.  He ruled his household as a cruel dictator and miser, doling out the day’s rations of bread, fruits, and firewood, keeping supplies under lock and key, never allowing fires before November or after March.  

The setting is 1820 in a French village, a three day journey by coach from Paris.  Balzac himself was born in 1799 so this was a period when he was coming of age and making clear-eyed observations about people and their behavior.  Just a few years after the close of the Napoleonic era which, itself followed close on the heels of the French revolution, it was a time of incredible turmoil, violence, and change.  The longstanding customs associated with king, nobility, and the church were still apparent, and though the monarchy had been restored, there was much disagreement among the populace about the mode of government.  

It was well known in the town that M. Grandet had squirreled away a lot of money, and that Eugenie would be his heiress, making her an attractive catch.  She was pretty to boot.  Her marriage of course, would be totally up to M. Grandet.  The custom of the time was so thoroughly ingrained that she knew and accepted the reality that if she were to play any role in the choosing of her husband, it would have to be done by influencing her father.  But in the case of the hard hearted money hoarder M. Grandet, she knew there would be no influencing him.  Her mother was sweet but mousy and weak.  ”’So far as I can see, there’s no possible husband for her in Saumur,’ observed Madame Grandet, with a timid glance at her husband, which in a woman of her age was a sign of complete matrimonial subjection, and revealed how thoroughly her spirit was broken.”  

There were two families in town competing to put forward their bachelors as a husband for Eugenie.  Both presented themselves as a splendid match, bursting with flattery for M. Grandet, affecting sophistication and important connections.  Balzac pierces them with razor-like sarcasm: “The day was an anniversary well known to the Cruchot and Grassinist parties, and the six antagonists were preparing to sally forth, armed to the teeth, for and encounter in the parlour, there to vie with one another in demonstrations of friendship.”  Bam!  Brilliant, just brilliant.  Note that this is a translation from the French, and I would assume that it is at least as incisive in the original.  

Despite his acute depictions of ignorance, selfishness, greed, and deceit, Balzac celebrates strength and goodness in people as well.  In the climactic scene, Eugenie, the simple unsophisticated girl stands up to her father with an assertiveness that is unassailable, even by the one who had domineered the household since before Eugenie was born.  

I liked this book.  No supernatural wonders, no sci-fi, no person of exceptional intelligence, athleticism, or beauty.  Just real people dealing the best they can with their situations, their drives, their times, and the people who happen into their lives.  What could be more engaging?

A Doubter's Almanac, by Ethan Canin

Novel, A Doubter's Almanac, by Ethan Canin.

Does every family have some touch of mental illness?  Think about parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins.  In my family there's a fair share of issues, of which I'll only mention one.  I have a relative who announced, sometime in his early forties, that he was cutting off all contact with the family, not because of a crime, an argument, or even a slight.  He hasn't been heard from since.  The conclusion is inescapable that the cause is in him, in his own psyche.  All of these people in my family who have revealed mental demons have another thing in common: they are very bright.

Ethan Canin's novel follows the thin wavering line that separates genius from mental illness, the particular genius in this case being a rare ability in mathematics.  The first half of the book features Milo Andret, a midwestern youth who happens to have a facility with numbers and rules of mathematics, including an ability to visualize in more than three dimensions.  Not really visualize but understand the application of rules, regardless of the number of dimensions.  I brushed up against this thorny branch in a Linear Algebra class--lambdas, Eigenvalues--in which I was able to mimic the calculations, but felt very ungrounded.  Milo Andret would see it as child’s play.  

Milo lands an assistant professorship at Princeton, and looks around for an unsolved math problem to take on.  Like proving that every even number is the sum of two prime numbers.  How would you prove that?  Milo chooses a century-old conjecture, and manages to prove it, mathematically, to be true.  On the strength of this stunning achievement he is awarded the Fields Medal, the math equivalent of a Nobel.  Mixed in with the mental high on the beauties of mathematics are sexual highs with multiple women and a growing dependence on alcohol.  Gradually things deteriorate as he is frustrated in further attempts at lasting achievement in his academic field, and he shows up more frequently on the insane side of that wavering line.  Somehow, on the downslope, he marries and has two children.  

The second half of the story, which is told in first person by the son, Hans, is where the book gets interesting.  Hans and his sister Paulette have both inherited Milo’s genius, and the wavering line that comes with it.  Hans in turn fathers two children, both of whom also carry it.  The real richness in the book is not about math genius, but about family and the infinity of relationships that members struggle to sort out and seek a measure of peace, of mental solace.  A universal theme.

The writing is well researched, laced with references to mathematicians and theorems, both real and fictional.  Canin is imaginative with his similes, as when he likens the tear forming in the corner of his sister’s eye to a drop of solder.  Anyone who has assembled a Heathkit will picture that swelling little sphere of silver.  Parts of the book seemed to drag, and editing out a hundred or so of the five hundred pages wouldn’t detract from the power of the story.  It’s a book that makes you think, which is a notion that I would take as a fine compliment if I were a writer.