Bibliography
Aug. 12th, 2012 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyRagnarok - A. S. Byatt
This is one of the Canongate myth series, and I'm really not quite sure what to make of it. Byatt has gone very autobiographical - she essentially forms the tales around her own biography, as a small girl in the war years, encountering the tales in book form and weaving them into her consciousness. The encounters of the "thin girl" with the stories in her book are broken up by the tales themselves, told very literally - which is quite unusual in the Canongate series, where writers normally take rather more unusual approaches to their methods. Byatt is surprisingly unimaginative with the form (particularly given the sort of thing she had done with the Norse myths in Possession: A Romance.
On the one hand, the book functions very nicely as a record of individual encounters, and serves to illustrate the importance of getting books into children's hands and encouraging the development of internal worlds as soon as possible, in balance with all the sorts of outdoors stuff that the "thin child" also does. The writing is also typically excellent, and Byatt demonstrates her mastery of the English language in setting Norse myths into their new bones. But on the other hand... it feels like an opportunity missed. A chance to do something more interesting with the source material. It has made me realise that I really want to read Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy, which is apparently a very clever reworking of Ovid's Iphis tale, to see what this form can be if the author is willing to go there.
Kraken - China Miéville
Cor, this was a bit of a shifting-all-over-the-place hectic trying to work out what the hell was going on but finding it immense fun nonetheless extravaganza. It has got all the ingredients of the things that appeal to me as a reader - a mystery plot, police procedural, the Uncanny, a good dose of cult, some criminal underworld stuff - but also a surprisingly clever 'hiding the reveal' plot that keeps on unrolling right up until the end of the book. I had, I should confess, guessed that Something Was Up and that the person responsible was in fact going to be the person responsible, but I hadn't got the details of the plan - which meant the reveal (a final reveal after a series of reveals that began kicking in about half of the way through) was still narratively satisfying.
The world building, based around London but a London that is full of religions, cults, hidden religious tensions and so on, is very convincing, and pleasingly esoteric - sort of a bit of an evolution from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens, actually, now that I think about it. Definitely a descendant, at any rate. The development of character feels credible, and the gender issues are... not ideal, by any means, but less failsome than they had the potential to be. There is also, thank goodness, nothing that one would label a traditional romance subplot, which would have been entirely out of place and I'm delighted no attempt was made to shoehorn one in.
I also loved the sheer eclecticism of the things that got pulled into the story - the little digressions, the minature discourses on somebody's back story, the glimpses into the other parts of the odd world that Miéville had built around the main story. The oddness made it all richer, and the structure meant that you never felt derailed by learning a character's context - but they then made a hell of a lot of sense. Plus the backstory details normally came to matter later in the novel, so you didn't feel you'd been given information for no reason. So, yes. A very satisfying read, but I think you have to like the sort of thing where you're going to get squid and cults and police in close proximity.
The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969 - Jorge Luis Borges
I fancied reading some more Borges, as it has been a while. This collection is designed for the English-language reader, and contains a rather lengthy biographical essay which it took me a while to work out was not, in fact, mytho-history, as well as some critical commentary on the short stories contained in the volume. Those stories range widely - there are a lot of the 'life in Brazil' stories, and not so many of the 'quirky academic' stories, which feel to me to be the two main streams of Borges' writing. I think my favourite is Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth, which is a whodunnit short story which takes place in a massive circular labyrinth structure on the English coast but with oriental flavours of mythical insanity.
I think the short message I want to give here is that if you haven't read Borges, you need to - his technique is amazing, his imagery gripping, his ideas innovative and unusual (although the critical commentary is notable in its modesty). I've cheerled for Borges before, so I shall point you to the right place instead of repeating it here.
This is one of the Canongate myth series, and I'm really not quite sure what to make of it. Byatt has gone very autobiographical - she essentially forms the tales around her own biography, as a small girl in the war years, encountering the tales in book form and weaving them into her consciousness. The encounters of the "thin girl" with the stories in her book are broken up by the tales themselves, told very literally - which is quite unusual in the Canongate series, where writers normally take rather more unusual approaches to their methods. Byatt is surprisingly unimaginative with the form (particularly given the sort of thing she had done with the Norse myths in Possession: A Romance.
On the one hand, the book functions very nicely as a record of individual encounters, and serves to illustrate the importance of getting books into children's hands and encouraging the development of internal worlds as soon as possible, in balance with all the sorts of outdoors stuff that the "thin child" also does. The writing is also typically excellent, and Byatt demonstrates her mastery of the English language in setting Norse myths into their new bones. But on the other hand... it feels like an opportunity missed. A chance to do something more interesting with the source material. It has made me realise that I really want to read Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy, which is apparently a very clever reworking of Ovid's Iphis tale, to see what this form can be if the author is willing to go there.
Kraken - China Miéville
Cor, this was a bit of a shifting-all-over-the-place hectic trying to work out what the hell was going on but finding it immense fun nonetheless extravaganza. It has got all the ingredients of the things that appeal to me as a reader - a mystery plot, police procedural, the Uncanny, a good dose of cult, some criminal underworld stuff - but also a surprisingly clever 'hiding the reveal' plot that keeps on unrolling right up until the end of the book. I had, I should confess, guessed that Something Was Up and that the person responsible was in fact going to be the person responsible, but I hadn't got the details of the plan - which meant the reveal (a final reveal after a series of reveals that began kicking in about half of the way through) was still narratively satisfying.
The world building, based around London but a London that is full of religions, cults, hidden religious tensions and so on, is very convincing, and pleasingly esoteric - sort of a bit of an evolution from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens, actually, now that I think about it. Definitely a descendant, at any rate. The development of character feels credible, and the gender issues are... not ideal, by any means, but less failsome than they had the potential to be. There is also, thank goodness, nothing that one would label a traditional romance subplot, which would have been entirely out of place and I'm delighted no attempt was made to shoehorn one in.
I also loved the sheer eclecticism of the things that got pulled into the story - the little digressions, the minature discourses on somebody's back story, the glimpses into the other parts of the odd world that Miéville had built around the main story. The oddness made it all richer, and the structure meant that you never felt derailed by learning a character's context - but they then made a hell of a lot of sense. Plus the backstory details normally came to matter later in the novel, so you didn't feel you'd been given information for no reason. So, yes. A very satisfying read, but I think you have to like the sort of thing where you're going to get squid and cults and police in close proximity.
The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969 - Jorge Luis Borges
I fancied reading some more Borges, as it has been a while. This collection is designed for the English-language reader, and contains a rather lengthy biographical essay which it took me a while to work out was not, in fact, mytho-history, as well as some critical commentary on the short stories contained in the volume. Those stories range widely - there are a lot of the 'life in Brazil' stories, and not so many of the 'quirky academic' stories, which feel to me to be the two main streams of Borges' writing. I think my favourite is Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth, which is a whodunnit short story which takes place in a massive circular labyrinth structure on the English coast but with oriental flavours of mythical insanity.
I think the short message I want to give here is that if you haven't read Borges, you need to - his technique is amazing, his imagery gripping, his ideas innovative and unusual (although the critical commentary is notable in its modesty). I've cheerled for Borges before, so I shall point you to the right place instead of repeating it here.
