readings & watchings 2011 #5
Time for another journey through the cultural landscape as navigated by Your Somewhat Whimsical Cartographer. Bit of a marathon journey, I'm afraid - other projects have meant this has been delayed a week or two, and so grown a little larger than usual.
Books
The Arctic Marauder, Jacques Tardi (1974), I bought because Warren Ellis had raved about these on his blog. Tardi is a famous bande desinée writer/artist in France but isn't well-known in English. Fantagraphics are translating all of his best-known works , and publishing them as handsome hardback volumes. I admit, it was the cover art which caused me to pick this one - and it was a good choice. The story is like Jules Verne on, well, on drugs. A young man survives a mysterious attack which sinks the ship he is travelling on in the Arctic. Later, he returns to solve the mystery, and discovers a pair of mad scientists in a floating fort disguised as an iceberg. Tardi's style is very distinctive, but the story is very quick. I'm glad I bought it, though. I think I'll buy some of the other volumes...
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1980), is apparently one of the great American comic novels of the twentieth century. Or so I was told. By many people. Perhaps they over-sold it. Because I didn't like it all that much. I'm a firm believer in the Confucian maxim that "the funniest sight on the whole world is watching an old friend fall off a high roof". In other words, slapstick makes me laugh. A great fat over-educated arrogant and self-deluded idiot like Ignatius J Reilly doesn't. There is some wit in A Confederacy of Dunces, notably in the dialogue of the black characters, but too often the story is asking the reader to laugh at Reilly and not with him. Disappointing.
The Female Man, Joanna Russ (1975), I read to honour Russ after her recent death, and I was surprised at how well the book has aged. It's set chiefly in 1969, although it was published in 1975, and reads very much like a book set in the late 1960s - so it didn't feel at all dated. But even the overtly sfnal sections have aged quite well. I'd remembered the book as an angry one, but I'd forgotten that as the story progresses, so does the book's anger. Towards the end, it reaches quite astonishing levels. One chapter seemed more familiar to me than the rest of the book - which I've read only the once before during the 1980s. It didn't take me long to figure out why - I'd read it as a short story titled 'An Old Fashioned Girl' in the anthology Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology when I was about twelve years old. That anthology was one of the first sf books I ever read, and its stories have stuck with me over the decades (yes, even the Harlan Ellison one). I still have that original copy on my book-shelves. But The Female Man: I have the SF Masterworks edition, and it's a worthy addition to the series - it's one of those remarkably few sf novels which can change the way you view the world. This is a book I think I will be reading again. Regularly.
(Rest of post on It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)
Books
The Arctic Marauder, Jacques Tardi (1974), I bought because Warren Ellis had raved about these on his blog. Tardi is a famous bande desinée writer/artist in France but isn't well-known in English. Fantagraphics are translating all of his best-known works , and publishing them as handsome hardback volumes. I admit, it was the cover art which caused me to pick this one - and it was a good choice. The story is like Jules Verne on, well, on drugs. A young man survives a mysterious attack which sinks the ship he is travelling on in the Arctic. Later, he returns to solve the mystery, and discovers a pair of mad scientists in a floating fort disguised as an iceberg. Tardi's style is very distinctive, but the story is very quick. I'm glad I bought it, though. I think I'll buy some of the other volumes...
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1980), is apparently one of the great American comic novels of the twentieth century. Or so I was told. By many people. Perhaps they over-sold it. Because I didn't like it all that much. I'm a firm believer in the Confucian maxim that "the funniest sight on the whole world is watching an old friend fall off a high roof". In other words, slapstick makes me laugh. A great fat over-educated arrogant and self-deluded idiot like Ignatius J Reilly doesn't. There is some wit in A Confederacy of Dunces, notably in the dialogue of the black characters, but too often the story is asking the reader to laugh at Reilly and not with him. Disappointing.
The Female Man, Joanna Russ (1975), I read to honour Russ after her recent death, and I was surprised at how well the book has aged. It's set chiefly in 1969, although it was published in 1975, and reads very much like a book set in the late 1960s - so it didn't feel at all dated. But even the overtly sfnal sections have aged quite well. I'd remembered the book as an angry one, but I'd forgotten that as the story progresses, so does the book's anger. Towards the end, it reaches quite astonishing levels. One chapter seemed more familiar to me than the rest of the book - which I've read only the once before during the 1980s. It didn't take me long to figure out why - I'd read it as a short story titled 'An Old Fashioned Girl' in the anthology Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology when I was about twelve years old. That anthology was one of the first sf books I ever read, and its stories have stuck with me over the decades (yes, even the Harlan Ellison one). I still have that original copy on my book-shelves. But The Female Man: I have the SF Masterworks edition, and it's a worthy addition to the series - it's one of those remarkably few sf novels which can change the way you view the world. This is a book I think I will be reading again. Regularly.
(Rest of post on It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)