Well, that’s a good 5 hours I’ll never get back
Over the weekend I skimmed all three Stephenie Meyer Books: Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse.
I’m not sure what compelled me to buy them. Maybe I was gagging for a good romance, or a clever retelling of a classic legend, or just an excuse to think about Gaspard Ulliel.
I got none of those things.
The premise is interesting enough (if you like this sort of thing)-Meyer takes an age-old myth and puts it in the most mundane of environments: a small town in Washington. It’s much like what J.K. Rowling did in taking magic out of fairyland and putting it in the real world, thereby making it valid, accessible, and most importantly, new.
The trouble is, girl-meets-vampire stories are incredibly common, and Meyer does nothing to make Bella Swan and Edward Cullen new. If I’ve read one story about a clumsy Mary Sue who loves a devastatingly handsome, sensitive-but-aloof, morally conflicted, supernormal angst-muffin, I’ve read a thousand of them. In fact, last year I read a Japanese comic called A Thousand Years of Snow with the same basic premise. It even features a rival werewolf love interest! (Except I enjoyed it more than Twilight, ‘cause it has a talking bat. I love manga).
Everything in Twilight, from characterization and names to syntax and pacing, is like fanfiction. This is not to say that it is entirely bad. After all, I’ve encountered many a fanfic that was halfway between amateur and decent, and I read it solely because I liked the essential idea. I suppose I do like the essential idea of the ordinary girl and the extraordinary boy. But these two, even in their unusual circumstance, aren’t believable-Bella is so insufferably helpless and Edward so insufferably perfect that I was restless and even offended at times. (For instance, Edward, who can read minds, miraculously saves Bella from being attacked by three or four dudes in a dark alleyway. Cliché, sexist, and silly).
And this is why I had to skim. 80 pages into Twilight, I gave up. I was only in it for the kissing, but Edward and Bella, I suppose because they can’t have real physical intimacy, mostly talk. And talk. And talk. Meanwhile, Edward is handsome handsome handsome and Bella’s heart is pounding pounding pounding and they love love love each other forever and ever and ever. Nothing actually happens in book one; Bella simply expounds on every single tedious activity of every day of her life, and Edward counts the ways he loves her, and then they banter/argue for ten or fifteen pages. It truly reads as if Meyer is writing her own fanfiction by including the scenes you shouldn’t be seeing in canon. Two books would suffice, not four.
And you know? I kept skimming not because I wanted to hate it, but because I wanted to enjoy it. And maybe, maybe, once the plot picked up, I would. But in the end I found I really wasn’t interested in the plot. It’s the characters that drive any series, and these characters are simply too contrived. The books have potential-flashes of clever allusions, beautiful imagery, impressive sequences-but it’s buried beneath verbosity, clumsy pacing, and, to be frank, an unoriginal story line. And a reader, whether she likes vampires or not, just shouldn’t have to work that hard to find it.
Gosh, that was harsh, wasn’t it?
Speaking of Gaspard Ulliel, and totally unrelated to Twilight: YouTube interview with him IN FRENCH. Do not click if you’re fond of your ovaries.
I’m not sure what compelled me to buy them. Maybe I was gagging for a good romance, or a clever retelling of a classic legend, or just an excuse to think about Gaspard Ulliel.
I got none of those things.
The premise is interesting enough (if you like this sort of thing)-Meyer takes an age-old myth and puts it in the most mundane of environments: a small town in Washington. It’s much like what J.K. Rowling did in taking magic out of fairyland and putting it in the real world, thereby making it valid, accessible, and most importantly, new.
The trouble is, girl-meets-vampire stories are incredibly common, and Meyer does nothing to make Bella Swan and Edward Cullen new. If I’ve read one story about a clumsy Mary Sue who loves a devastatingly handsome, sensitive-but-aloof, morally conflicted, supernormal angst-muffin, I’ve read a thousand of them. In fact, last year I read a Japanese comic called A Thousand Years of Snow with the same basic premise. It even features a rival werewolf love interest! (Except I enjoyed it more than Twilight, ‘cause it has a talking bat. I love manga).
Everything in Twilight, from characterization and names to syntax and pacing, is like fanfiction. This is not to say that it is entirely bad. After all, I’ve encountered many a fanfic that was halfway between amateur and decent, and I read it solely because I liked the essential idea. I suppose I do like the essential idea of the ordinary girl and the extraordinary boy. But these two, even in their unusual circumstance, aren’t believable-Bella is so insufferably helpless and Edward so insufferably perfect that I was restless and even offended at times. (For instance, Edward, who can read minds, miraculously saves Bella from being attacked by three or four dudes in a dark alleyway. Cliché, sexist, and silly).
And this is why I had to skim. 80 pages into Twilight, I gave up. I was only in it for the kissing, but Edward and Bella, I suppose because they can’t have real physical intimacy, mostly talk. And talk. And talk. Meanwhile, Edward is handsome handsome handsome and Bella’s heart is pounding pounding pounding and they love love love each other forever and ever and ever. Nothing actually happens in book one; Bella simply expounds on every single tedious activity of every day of her life, and Edward counts the ways he loves her, and then they banter/argue for ten or fifteen pages. It truly reads as if Meyer is writing her own fanfiction by including the scenes you shouldn’t be seeing in canon. Two books would suffice, not four.
And you know? I kept skimming not because I wanted to hate it, but because I wanted to enjoy it. And maybe, maybe, once the plot picked up, I would. But in the end I found I really wasn’t interested in the plot. It’s the characters that drive any series, and these characters are simply too contrived. The books have potential-flashes of clever allusions, beautiful imagery, impressive sequences-but it’s buried beneath verbosity, clumsy pacing, and, to be frank, an unoriginal story line. And a reader, whether she likes vampires or not, just shouldn’t have to work that hard to find it.
Gosh, that was harsh, wasn’t it?
Speaking of Gaspard Ulliel, and totally unrelated to Twilight: YouTube interview with him IN FRENCH. Do not click if you’re fond of your ovaries.