Weekend Update: The Giver versus Matched

[calico_reaction]

Comments

[aliciaaudrey]

f you're a writer, I know you know what I'm talking about, but I think even readers can relate: have you ever read a book and noticed a little thing about the world-building and fallen in love with that little detail? It doesn't play a role in the story, but it lingers with you to the point where you really, really, really wish the author had somehow incorporated the detail into the story MORE, and if not that, maybe hope the author would write a book focusing on just that detail.This

[phoenixfalls]

If you want to kill, like, a WEEK, go onto Wikipedia.

That's very, very dangerous advice to give. I'm pretty sure I've given up at least a month doing that. . . :D

And then you had to go and mention TV Tropes too!

[aliciaaudrey]

TVTropes is more my hubby's thing than mine. :) He's created a few big pages there (Knight in Sour Armor and Complete Monster, though he kinda lost control of that one)

[intoyourlungs]

I've only ever read The Giver and it's one of my favorite books of all time. With that said, I'm definitely a little hesitant to read Matched. I think I might give it a chance anyway -- I know what to expect, unlike the Book Smugglers, who were a little jazzed with all the hype surrounding the book.

[calico_reaction]

It's easy to get jazzed by hype. I've been, well, not quite burned, but disappointed in my last couple of hyped-YA reads that I'm starting to look at the genre with a very jaded eye...

[calico_reaction]

I think the main problems is that all these dystopian worlds are starting to look all the same (to me at least).

YES. They are. I was thinking the very same thing about a completely different book when I was writing about these two!

[beth_shulman]

I grew up on The Giver, so to me Condie's book is a bit shocking. I think Lowry's a better writer, too, though now that I look back, I do have some issues with her book. I still love it, though; it's got that childhood nostalgia thing going for it.

[calico_reaction]

I agree that Lowry's definitely the better writer, and for my buck, I don't have nostalgia weighing on my decisions! :)

[charlie_ego]

Interesting. I've read both and I didn't think at all that they were similar (besides both being dystopia everything-is-controlled-blah-blah, but, I mean, any dystopia with total control is going to be like that, really, right?) -- I guess looking at your post a lot of the names are the same (I read Giver a long enough time ago that the similarity of the names didn't occur to me), but I feel they're used rather differently (e.g., the pills -- in Giver they're an everyday thing for repressing emotions, but in Matched they manage to do the emotion repressing mainly through social pressure and need pills only rarely). It wouldn't even have struck me to compare the two except as common examples of dystopia. Perhaps it makes a difference that I wasn't a huge fan of The Giver, finding it a little too preachy and one-dimensional for me -- IIRC there's no possible way of approving of the world in the Giver, which kind of turns me off.

What Matched did remind me of was Brave New World, except that I think BNW is a much better book, not least

[charlie_ego]

Sorry about the terribly written comment above; I'm a little short on sleep. Here's an example where I feel like Matched could have gone a little deeper but didn't: at some point Cassia and the government official have a tiff about why the government regulates romance/marriage. The official says something like, "If we let people do that then eventually they'd want to choose, like, whether to have children!" Which is, of course, a ridiculous argument. The right argument is, "When people get to choose who they marry there's a 50% divorce rate, and you don't see that in our society, do you?" I felt like the book was sort of groping towards being the book I wanted to read (the one where Cassia really has to struggle with questions like, is it really better to have choice if it comes at the expense of a 50% divorce rate? Would she be willing to make that choice with that kind of risk?), but never quite got there.

[calico_reaction]

No worries. I'm responding to these comments and I'm a wee bit intoxicated, so god only knows how sensical I am right now!

See, I think one could create an interesting dystopia based on the battle against failed marriages. That said, I'm not sure how accurately the officials could've used a divorce rate from our time, because they seem so far removed from our time, you know? And would someone like Cassia even understand what a 50% divorce rate even means?

But you're right in that THAT was the direction they should've gone towards: a dystopia where family and marriage is highly regulated and there's a reason why. I was quite surprised when I discovered there were other dystopian elements (restricted reading, no creative pursuits, curfews, etc) and I thought that added to the book. That said, I still think you're on the right track. :)

[charlie_ego]

Yes! THAT is it, exactly, that's the book I wanted to read, something where they had compelling reasons (or, at least, reasons that made sense) for highly regulating marriage, and more generally some sort of interesting discussion about freedom vs. happiness -- would you take happiness if it came at the expense of freedom? Would you choose freedom if you knew it came with a greatly reduced risk of happiness? In Brave New World, most of the people are totally cool with happiness at the expense of freedom and think people who think otherwise are idiots, whereas John (and a couple of others IIRC) are the opposite.

Okay, yeah, Cassia wouldn't've understood "50% divorce rate," but I bet it could have been presented in a way that she would have understood it. ("In ancient times, when people chose their own mates, half of them later realized they had chosen wrongly, at great personal and societal cost.")