The laughter of the young men with their keys.
I really enjoyed reading this Mirai interview. Not least because, ♥MIRAI♥. Also, you can tell that she's grown up some! It was interesting to read about her injury and how she dealt with that, argh surgery :( but also, this quote: "I just have a lot of great memories of the Olympics, it was like Disneyland, the happiest place on earth for me!" Oh Mirai♥
Some more books:
To Live, by Yu Hua.
So if you remember me mentioning this at all recently you will know that To Live is one of the best films I watched last year and also possibly the greatest Zhang Yimou film I've watched. Here's the novel! I mean, well, the translated novel. harborshore, who is brilliant and lovely and also knows about these things, says that translated things are always different -- you can't always get the exact same meaning across, and now I'm thinking about the differences between books and movie adaptations and novels and translated versions.
Anyway! "After squandering his family's fortune in gambling dens and brothels, the young, deeply penitent Fugui settles down to do the honest work of a farmer. Forced by the Nationalist Army to leave behind his family, he witnesses the horrors and privations of the Civil War, only to return years later to face a string of hardships brought on by the ravages of the [Great Leap Forward, might I add, and] Cultural Revolution."
This novel was a lot less scenic and descriptive than the movie -- Zhang Yimou's work, I suppose. But more than that it was darker, more existential (the movie's ending scene is of Fugui's family gathered around the table for a meal together, whereas by the time the book ends, everyone's... dead), and earthier in the sense that it was a rural rather than town setting? There's more bawdy humour too, such as --
Fugui's body shook a bit before he could stand up. As he patted his knees he said to me, "My whole body keeps getting stiffer and stiffer. Only one part keeps getting softer."
Also, when I read this I kept translating the dialogue in it into Chinese, in my head? Not that I'm any great shakes at the language, but it just sounded better in my head. The construction of "keeps getting stiffer and stiffer", argh, it's just more elegant in Chinese because you get to render that in four syllables flat, and I think in general Chinese is a more reticent language, you get to say more in less, and it disturbs me a little that the translation didn't get to convey that even though it is an indubitably good one.
Or about the part where Fugui's (deaf) daughter gets mocked by the village (another scene which wasn't in the movie, and this I think is significant):
Standing next to the bride, she smiled awkwardly and then followed the bride off on her procession. Fengxia was wearing an outfit covered with patches, while the bride was wearing an immaculate and brightly coloured dress -- she was pretty, too. Seeing them walk together, there was no comparison. It was sad to see Fengxia ridiculed like that. She wasn't wearing any makeup, but her face was just as red as the bride's. She kept turning around, unable to keep her eyes off the new bride.
The young guys from the village continued to laugh and holler. "Fengxia wants a man!" they taunted.
& later, when her parents do find a match for her:
The moment the team leader left, I threw down the manure ladle and ran toward our hut, yelling, "Jiazhen! Jiazhen!"
Sitting in bed, Jiazhen thought I'd had an accident. Her eyes widened as she saw me come in.
"Fengxia's got a man!" I said.
If I am not wrong (and it's highly possible that I might be! PLEASE DO NOT THINK MY THOUGHTS ARE IN ANY WAY AUTHORITATIVE...), there's a neat kind of parallelism in there, that comes through more strongly in Chinese. "Fengxia wants a man!" and "Fengxia's got a man!" -- there's only a single word's difference in there? And want and have sound remarkably similar in Chinese. I dunno, I just thought it was cool.
Umm, okay, and more book and movie comparison time -- I did think that the movie was simpler, in the way movies always are. It was more directly political, in the sense that all the major conflict and tragedies arose from the ways in which the characters fell victim to the political upheavals of the time? And there is a happy ending that points towards a "post-communist utopia" (afterword's words, not mine), whereas the book is more concerned with the ravages of, well, life. But there is still a lot that is political in there.
Such as this scene, when they tried to burn down a villager's hut to find a location with good fengshui for communal iron smelting (this was during the Great Leap Forward):
I used to think that I was the only wastrel -- I never imagined that the team leader was one, too. I stood less than a hundred feet away, watching the team leader and the rest of them take perfectly good oil and pour it over the straw. The oil was being taken right out of our mouths and now, in their hands, was going up in smoke and flames. They poured the oil we were meant to cook with on the straw roof, and the flames whisked upwards, dancing in the sky, while the smoke rolled back and forth across the roof.
The obsessiveness of the repetition the oil, the oil, argh, the wastefulness of it.
And this goddamn scene, oh god, I think it is possibly my favourite scene in the movie and I was pleased to read the novel for it:
[Chunsheng is Fugui's old war buddy and also the Communist cadre who caused the death of Fugui's son some years ago. Jiazhen (Fugui's wife) has never forgiven him. Now Chunsheng is being persecuted by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution and he's here for a last visit before going off to commit suicide.]
As soon as he heard this, Chunsheng started to cry.
"Fugui, every day they tie me up and beat me," he said. As he spoke he stretched out his hands. "Feel my hands."
The second I touched them I realised his hands felt as if they had been boiled. They were so hot it scared the hell out of me. I asked him, "Does it hurt?"
He shook his head. "I can't feel them anymore."
I gently pushed his shoulders and said, "Chunsheng, sit down. The dead all want to keep on living. Here you are alive and kicking; you can't die."
I went on, "Your life is given to you by your parents. If you don't want to live, you have to ask them first."
Wiping his tears, Chunsheng said, "My parents passed away a long time ago."
"Then that's all the more reason to keep on living," I said. "Think about it: from north to south you were in so many battles during the war. Staying alive wasn't easy, was it?"
That night Chunsheng and I talked endlessly. Sitting inside in bed, Jiazhen heard everything. By the time dawn was approaching it seemed like Chunsheng had come around. When he stood up to leave, Jiazhen called from inside, "Chunsheng!"
For a moment the two of us were caught off guard. Only after Jiazhen called a second time did Chunsheng answer. We walked over to the door, and Jiazhen called out from bed, "Chunsheng, you've got to hang in there. You've got to keep on living."
Chunsheng nodded his head, and Jiazhen began to cry.
"You still owe us a life," she told him. "Hold on to your life to repay us."
Oh my god. I have all these thoughts about the meaning embodied in the title, To Live (and even then, I think, the English translation doesn't quite deliver it -- in Chinese, Huo Zhe, there are all these connotations of surviving and bearing with it that may or may not be only in my head), and the movie score and the fact that there was a shadow puppet motif in the movie but seriously, you know, what, it doesn't matter. Read the book, watch the movie, just make sure that you get to this story because it is completely worthwhile.
&
The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle.
Haha well yes. I'd read Meet the Austins and A Ring of Endless Light before, but for some reason never the one in between, and now things are making so much more sense. I really enjoyed this Vicky, for one! Sort of older than she was in Meet the Austins, just starting to grapple with adolescent angst but talking with a slightly childish voice, I think?
Argh seriously I love reading about moody teenagers:
I drew circles with my toe in the dusty sand of the camp ground. 'I didn't mean to skive off, but I'm not so hot on all this togetherness stuff any more.' I went over to the picnic table, took a tomato out of the food box, washed it, and started slicing it into the middle-sized pot where Mother'd been making the salad.
'I already have a tomato in the salad, Vicky,' Mother said. That was all she said, but she said it as though I'd stabbed her or something.
Daddy looked at me as though I were a patient and not one of his own children. 'If this is the way Zachary affects you it's just as well you're not likely to see him again.'
'What's Zachary got to do with it?' I shouted. I had to shout in order not to burst into tears. 'I've been deteriorating all year, according to you.'
Then she bursts into tears. :D Or this part, which is hilarious for some reason I can't quite put my finger on:
Now that I hadn't seen him for some time I forgot how he sometimes scared and depressed me and I was dying to see him again. Whatever else he was, he was different, and he was exciting. He was, you might say, an education, and everybody keeps talking about how you ought to get all the education you can.
Of course, this is L'Engle, so there is a fair amount of discussion of politics and philosophy and spirituality, and when I was a kid it was great, but now there keeps on being these little remarks she'd throw into the mix which would piss me off:
Suzy and I wore Bermudas and knee socks and sweaters, and John and Rob and Daddy wore jeans. Daddy doesn't like women in trousers and Mother never wears them, but she looked comfortable and all ready for the trip in a plaid skirt and white blouse and red cardigan.
This makes me think of a part in A Ring of Endless Light where Suzy protests that the Bible keeps referring to "Man", and Mrs Austin tells her that "woman is half of mankind, and don't let reverse sexism give you more than your fair share, Suzy" and arrrrgh. Oh L'Engle!
Also:
'Mostly for Elena's sake. Also when I first had my beard it was all right for an artist to have a beard because nobody else did. But now all kinds of people have beards. It isn't anything special any more.'
'You mean like beatniks and everything.'
'Yes. People who think things come easy in this life. People who sit around and wait for inspiration to descend upon them from the blue. Who think they can create with genius alone. Instead of with a background of work harder than any labourer's.'
Yay for social conservatism! /o\ Also say all you want about Ginsberg but he's a genius
Additionally, I kept thinking about Jeff in the first episode of Community, when he tells Troy, "If you take it [his letter jacket] off to please them, or keep it to spite them, either way you're doing it for them." IT MADE ME LOL OKAY.
... I would read a Community/Austin family crossover though.
Anyway, this is why I liked Zachary Grey lots! (Oh dude I so want a fic where he and Jeff from Community riff off each other, stop judging me) Because he would never rag off Ginsberg -- I mean, you could read him as L'Engle's take on the spoilt rich kid/tormented liberal who knows lots about Pueblo Indians but doesn't treat his own parents well:
He kind of snuck his arm around me then, and I said, 'Well, I don't know much about anthropology, but I do know the Pueblos haven't lived here for ages. I mean, it wasn't us moving out West a hundred years ago or anything. It didn't have anything to do with Americans, the cliff dwellers were history way back then.'
'They're the Americans, we're not. We're just thieving, murdering, genocidal upstarts.'
[Additionally I must say that I was interested to note the random italicisation of words and syllables of words in dialogues! I mean, was that a thing in the 60s or what? I've only come across it in Salinger and I always thought that was his stylistic thing, so it was surprising to find that here.]
And also!!!
'No!' I shouted. I didn't even try to stop from crying, now. The tears streamed down my cheeks and I hardly noticed.
Zachary shouted back. 'What's the point of believing in God when nothing makes any sense? Nothing makes sense, Vicky! Anne Frank doesn't make sense and Pop fleecing other people to make his millions doesn't make sense, but it makes about the best kind of sense there is. You're so darned good, Vicky, you dope! Don't you know it doesn't make any sense to be good?' I gave a kind of sob, and then his arms went around me and he was kissing me. 'Ah, Vicky,' he murmured, 'why do I do this to you? What makes me do it? You're such a good kid, why do I want to hurt you?' He held my wet face in his hands. 'I only want to hurt people I love, Vicky.' Then he kissed me again.
Okay so retrospectively I am SO DISAPPOINTED that Vicky got with Adam Eddington in the end, because even though Zachary is awful in some ways he's so lovely in others! I mean -- Adam's dull. (And yeah, I get that in A Ring of Endless Light Leo's the really dull childhood friend, Zachary's the exciting! and dangerous! and ruined! young man, and Adam's supposed to be just the right fit for Vicky, but seriously, ZACHARY GREY ♥___♥
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson.
Dude I should have read this YEARS ago. How did no one tell me how funny Jeanette Winterson is? Anyway, "Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial north of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality [the blurb really means GAY], the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves."
Anyway. She's so so brilliantly funny, her style's a bit like Raymond Chandler, the bitten-off brevity of it except, you know, funnier:
She always prayed standing up, because of her knees, just as Bonaparte always gave orders from his horse, because of his size.
&
'Time to go home,' said my mother. 'I think you've had enough excitement for one day.'
It's odd, the things other people think are exciting.
&
A couple of days afterward, my mother had gone to see the doctor in a fit of guilty anxiety. She lay on the couch while the doctor prodded her stomach and chest, asking if she ever felt giddy, or fizzy in the belly. My mother coyly explained that she was in love, and that she often felt strange, but that wasn't the reason for her visit.
'You may well be in love,' said the doctor, 'but you also have a stomach ulcer.'
And there's this sort of very otherworldly dimension (I think she does riff off Alice in Wonderland quite a bit) to it, the way she interrupts narratives with long fairytales and sermons on things (there's a whole chapter on that, I think?), and:
But the rags and the ribbons and then the years are gone. Uncle Will had died a pauper, she was not so young these days and people were not kind. She liked to speak French and to play the piano, but what do these things mean?
&
In her head she was still queen, but not my queen any more, not the White Queen any more. Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.
&
I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.
And, oh god, the brutality of some parts:
'I know who she was, why didn't you tell me?'
'It's nothing to do with you.'
'She's my mother.'
No sooner had I said that than I felt a blow that wrapped around my head like a bandage. I lay on the lino looking up into the face.
'I'm your mother,' she said very quietly. 'She was a carrying case.'
Jesus, jesus. Also the phrasing of 'looking up into the face', it made me feel all twisted inside.
Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby
Some more books:
To Live, by Yu Hua.
So if you remember me mentioning this at all recently you will know that To Live is one of the best films I watched last year and also possibly the greatest Zhang Yimou film I've watched. Here's the novel! I mean, well, the translated novel. harborshore, who is brilliant and lovely and also knows about these things, says that translated things are always different -- you can't always get the exact same meaning across, and now I'm thinking about the differences between books and movie adaptations and novels and translated versions.
Anyway! "After squandering his family's fortune in gambling dens and brothels, the young, deeply penitent Fugui settles down to do the honest work of a farmer. Forced by the Nationalist Army to leave behind his family, he witnesses the horrors and privations of the Civil War, only to return years later to face a string of hardships brought on by the ravages of the [Great Leap Forward, might I add, and] Cultural Revolution."
This novel was a lot less scenic and descriptive than the movie -- Zhang Yimou's work, I suppose. But more than that it was darker, more existential (the movie's ending scene is of Fugui's family gathered around the table for a meal together, whereas by the time the book ends, everyone's... dead), and earthier in the sense that it was a rural rather than town setting? There's more bawdy humour too, such as --
Fugui's body shook a bit before he could stand up. As he patted his knees he said to me, "My whole body keeps getting stiffer and stiffer. Only one part keeps getting softer."
Also, when I read this I kept translating the dialogue in it into Chinese, in my head? Not that I'm any great shakes at the language, but it just sounded better in my head. The construction of "keeps getting stiffer and stiffer", argh, it's just more elegant in Chinese because you get to render that in four syllables flat, and I think in general Chinese is a more reticent language, you get to say more in less, and it disturbs me a little that the translation didn't get to convey that even though it is an indubitably good one.
Or about the part where Fugui's (deaf) daughter gets mocked by the village (another scene which wasn't in the movie, and this I think is significant):
Standing next to the bride, she smiled awkwardly and then followed the bride off on her procession. Fengxia was wearing an outfit covered with patches, while the bride was wearing an immaculate and brightly coloured dress -- she was pretty, too. Seeing them walk together, there was no comparison. It was sad to see Fengxia ridiculed like that. She wasn't wearing any makeup, but her face was just as red as the bride's. She kept turning around, unable to keep her eyes off the new bride.
The young guys from the village continued to laugh and holler. "Fengxia wants a man!" they taunted.
& later, when her parents do find a match for her:
The moment the team leader left, I threw down the manure ladle and ran toward our hut, yelling, "Jiazhen! Jiazhen!"
Sitting in bed, Jiazhen thought I'd had an accident. Her eyes widened as she saw me come in.
"Fengxia's got a man!" I said.
If I am not wrong (and it's highly possible that I might be! PLEASE DO NOT THINK MY THOUGHTS ARE IN ANY WAY AUTHORITATIVE...), there's a neat kind of parallelism in there, that comes through more strongly in Chinese. "Fengxia wants a man!" and "Fengxia's got a man!" -- there's only a single word's difference in there? And want and have sound remarkably similar in Chinese. I dunno, I just thought it was cool.
Umm, okay, and more book and movie comparison time -- I did think that the movie was simpler, in the way movies always are. It was more directly political, in the sense that all the major conflict and tragedies arose from the ways in which the characters fell victim to the political upheavals of the time? And there is a happy ending that points towards a "post-communist utopia" (afterword's words, not mine), whereas the book is more concerned with the ravages of, well, life. But there is still a lot that is political in there.
Such as this scene, when they tried to burn down a villager's hut to find a location with good fengshui for communal iron smelting (this was during the Great Leap Forward):
I used to think that I was the only wastrel -- I never imagined that the team leader was one, too. I stood less than a hundred feet away, watching the team leader and the rest of them take perfectly good oil and pour it over the straw. The oil was being taken right out of our mouths and now, in their hands, was going up in smoke and flames. They poured the oil we were meant to cook with on the straw roof, and the flames whisked upwards, dancing in the sky, while the smoke rolled back and forth across the roof.
The obsessiveness of the repetition the oil, the oil, argh, the wastefulness of it.
And this goddamn scene, oh god, I think it is possibly my favourite scene in the movie and I was pleased to read the novel for it:
[Chunsheng is Fugui's old war buddy and also the Communist cadre who caused the death of Fugui's son some years ago. Jiazhen (Fugui's wife) has never forgiven him. Now Chunsheng is being persecuted by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution and he's here for a last visit before going off to commit suicide.]
As soon as he heard this, Chunsheng started to cry.
"Fugui, every day they tie me up and beat me," he said. As he spoke he stretched out his hands. "Feel my hands."
The second I touched them I realised his hands felt as if they had been boiled. They were so hot it scared the hell out of me. I asked him, "Does it hurt?"
He shook his head. "I can't feel them anymore."
I gently pushed his shoulders and said, "Chunsheng, sit down. The dead all want to keep on living. Here you are alive and kicking; you can't die."
I went on, "Your life is given to you by your parents. If you don't want to live, you have to ask them first."
Wiping his tears, Chunsheng said, "My parents passed away a long time ago."
"Then that's all the more reason to keep on living," I said. "Think about it: from north to south you were in so many battles during the war. Staying alive wasn't easy, was it?"
That night Chunsheng and I talked endlessly. Sitting inside in bed, Jiazhen heard everything. By the time dawn was approaching it seemed like Chunsheng had come around. When he stood up to leave, Jiazhen called from inside, "Chunsheng!"
For a moment the two of us were caught off guard. Only after Jiazhen called a second time did Chunsheng answer. We walked over to the door, and Jiazhen called out from bed, "Chunsheng, you've got to hang in there. You've got to keep on living."
Chunsheng nodded his head, and Jiazhen began to cry.
"You still owe us a life," she told him. "Hold on to your life to repay us."
Oh my god. I have all these thoughts about the meaning embodied in the title, To Live (and even then, I think, the English translation doesn't quite deliver it -- in Chinese, Huo Zhe, there are all these connotations of surviving and bearing with it that may or may not be only in my head), and the movie score and the fact that there was a shadow puppet motif in the movie but seriously, you know, what, it doesn't matter. Read the book, watch the movie, just make sure that you get to this story because it is completely worthwhile.
&
The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle.
Haha well yes. I'd read Meet the Austins and A Ring of Endless Light before, but for some reason never the one in between, and now things are making so much more sense. I really enjoyed this Vicky, for one! Sort of older than she was in Meet the Austins, just starting to grapple with adolescent angst but talking with a slightly childish voice, I think?
Argh seriously I love reading about moody teenagers:
I drew circles with my toe in the dusty sand of the camp ground. 'I didn't mean to skive off, but I'm not so hot on all this togetherness stuff any more.' I went over to the picnic table, took a tomato out of the food box, washed it, and started slicing it into the middle-sized pot where Mother'd been making the salad.
'I already have a tomato in the salad, Vicky,' Mother said. That was all she said, but she said it as though I'd stabbed her or something.
Daddy looked at me as though I were a patient and not one of his own children. 'If this is the way Zachary affects you it's just as well you're not likely to see him again.'
'What's Zachary got to do with it?' I shouted. I had to shout in order not to burst into tears. 'I've been deteriorating all year, according to you.'
Then she bursts into tears. :D Or this part, which is hilarious for some reason I can't quite put my finger on:
Now that I hadn't seen him for some time I forgot how he sometimes scared and depressed me and I was dying to see him again. Whatever else he was, he was different, and he was exciting. He was, you might say, an education, and everybody keeps talking about how you ought to get all the education you can.
Of course, this is L'Engle, so there is a fair amount of discussion of politics and philosophy and spirituality, and when I was a kid it was great, but now there keeps on being these little remarks she'd throw into the mix which would piss me off:
Suzy and I wore Bermudas and knee socks and sweaters, and John and Rob and Daddy wore jeans. Daddy doesn't like women in trousers and Mother never wears them, but she looked comfortable and all ready for the trip in a plaid skirt and white blouse and red cardigan.
This makes me think of a part in A Ring of Endless Light where Suzy protests that the Bible keeps referring to "Man", and Mrs Austin tells her that "woman is half of mankind, and don't let reverse sexism give you more than your fair share, Suzy" and arrrrgh. Oh L'Engle!
Also:
'Mostly for Elena's sake. Also when I first had my beard it was all right for an artist to have a beard because nobody else did. But now all kinds of people have beards. It isn't anything special any more.'
'You mean like beatniks and everything.'
'Yes. People who think things come easy in this life. People who sit around and wait for inspiration to descend upon them from the blue. Who think they can create with genius alone. Instead of with a background of work harder than any labourer's.'
Yay for social conservatism! /o\ Also say all you want about Ginsberg but he's a genius
Additionally, I kept thinking about Jeff in the first episode of Community, when he tells Troy, "If you take it [his letter jacket] off to please them, or keep it to spite them, either way you're doing it for them." IT MADE ME LOL OKAY.
... I would read a Community/Austin family crossover though.
Anyway, this is why I liked Zachary Grey lots! (Oh dude I so want a fic where he and Jeff from Community riff off each other, stop judging me) Because he would never rag off Ginsberg -- I mean, you could read him as L'Engle's take on the spoilt rich kid/tormented liberal who knows lots about Pueblo Indians but doesn't treat his own parents well:
He kind of snuck his arm around me then, and I said, 'Well, I don't know much about anthropology, but I do know the Pueblos haven't lived here for ages. I mean, it wasn't us moving out West a hundred years ago or anything. It didn't have anything to do with Americans, the cliff dwellers were history way back then.'
'They're the Americans, we're not. We're just thieving, murdering, genocidal upstarts.'
[Additionally I must say that I was interested to note the random italicisation of words and syllables of words in dialogues! I mean, was that a thing in the 60s or what? I've only come across it in Salinger and I always thought that was his stylistic thing, so it was surprising to find that here.]
And also!!!
'No!' I shouted. I didn't even try to stop from crying, now. The tears streamed down my cheeks and I hardly noticed.
Zachary shouted back. 'What's the point of believing in God when nothing makes any sense? Nothing makes sense, Vicky! Anne Frank doesn't make sense and Pop fleecing other people to make his millions doesn't make sense, but it makes about the best kind of sense there is. You're so darned good, Vicky, you dope! Don't you know it doesn't make any sense to be good?' I gave a kind of sob, and then his arms went around me and he was kissing me. 'Ah, Vicky,' he murmured, 'why do I do this to you? What makes me do it? You're such a good kid, why do I want to hurt you?' He held my wet face in his hands. 'I only want to hurt people I love, Vicky.' Then he kissed me again.
Okay so retrospectively I am SO DISAPPOINTED that Vicky got with Adam Eddington in the end, because even though Zachary is awful in some ways he's so lovely in others! I mean -- Adam's dull. (And yeah, I get that in A Ring of Endless Light Leo's the really dull childhood friend, Zachary's the exciting! and dangerous! and ruined! young man, and Adam's supposed to be just the right fit for Vicky, but seriously, ZACHARY GREY ♥___♥
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson.
Dude I should have read this YEARS ago. How did no one tell me how funny Jeanette Winterson is? Anyway, "Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial north of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality [the blurb really means GAY], the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves."
Anyway. She's so so brilliantly funny, her style's a bit like Raymond Chandler, the bitten-off brevity of it except, you know, funnier:
She always prayed standing up, because of her knees, just as Bonaparte always gave orders from his horse, because of his size.
&
'Time to go home,' said my mother. 'I think you've had enough excitement for one day.'
It's odd, the things other people think are exciting.
&
A couple of days afterward, my mother had gone to see the doctor in a fit of guilty anxiety. She lay on the couch while the doctor prodded her stomach and chest, asking if she ever felt giddy, or fizzy in the belly. My mother coyly explained that she was in love, and that she often felt strange, but that wasn't the reason for her visit.
'You may well be in love,' said the doctor, 'but you also have a stomach ulcer.'
And there's this sort of very otherworldly dimension (I think she does riff off Alice in Wonderland quite a bit) to it, the way she interrupts narratives with long fairytales and sermons on things (there's a whole chapter on that, I think?), and:
But the rags and the ribbons and then the years are gone. Uncle Will had died a pauper, she was not so young these days and people were not kind. She liked to speak French and to play the piano, but what do these things mean?
&
In her head she was still queen, but not my queen any more, not the White Queen any more. Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.
&
I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.
And, oh god, the brutality of some parts:
'I know who she was, why didn't you tell me?'
'It's nothing to do with you.'
'She's my mother.'
No sooner had I said that than I felt a blow that wrapped around my head like a bandage. I lay on the lino looking up into the face.
'I'm your mother,' she said very quietly. 'She was a carrying case.'
Jesus, jesus. Also the phrasing of 'looking up into the face', it made me feel all twisted inside.
Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby