FYSR

I've been working at Duke University this summer, and one of the main perks is being able to utilize the extensive library on campus. Working on East, I am in walking distance of Lilly Library...literally a building away. Perusing the "Lilly Current Literature" collection, I stumbled upon this short story collection. I picked up this collection because the inside says that Charles Yu has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams (which are *pretty* heavy comparisons if I do say so myself). 

The short stories as a whole are...okay. I really enjoyed two of them~~"Standard Loneliness Package" and "First Person Shooter." The other stories are....okay. "Standard Loneliness Package" is about a company in the future that outsources grief and pain. It's super insightful and pretty witty. "First Person Shooter" is incredible. It's about two late night Walmart workers who run into a zombie who is getting ready for a date and gets really offended at zombie movie playing in the electronics department. It's amazing. 

(via Summer Reading Flowchart: What Should You Read On Your Break? | Teach.com)

It's been about four days since I finished The Road, and there's something about the novel that makes it hard to write about it now that I've finished it. Perhaps it's best described by Bookforum in the reviews at the beginning, “ Once opened, [it is] nearly impossible to put down; it is as if you must keep reading in order for the characters to stay alive...”. The only problem is, now that I've finished it, I almost feel guilty, for not being able to continue to watch over them, that I turned away at the wrong moment and now they're lost.

I've loved McCarthy's style since the first time I struggled through one of his novels (All the Pretty Horses – a book I at once recommend and discouraging you from bothering with. It's beautiful like all his work, but a bit too cliched for how I know him now). And I will admit I had watched the film version of The Road (starring Viggo Mortenson) before I read the book. I know, I know, bad form, but it was a good film and I will tell you right now it did not ruin the book for me at all. But it was inevitable I would read the novel soon enough, and luckily a friend of mine took note of my heartache and got me the book as a sort of graduation gift. The irony of apocalyptic journey vs. journey out into the real world wasn't lost on me, but mine is no where near as heartbreakingly beautiful and crushing.

And so I devoured the book in the kind of desperation that can only be understood by that Bookforum quote up above. The basic gist of the story is that the apocalypse has happened, somehow, in a way that isn't quite explained and isn't quite the point, and a man and a boy, a father and his son to be specific, are wandering this awful, awesome world in search of.....something. Anything, it seems. And throughout this, every moment that the man and boy went through cut me to the core. I was elated with them, broken with them, constantly trying to remain objective and failing. I couldn't do it because McCarthy has always been a champion of pulling you into landscapes and he has done that better here than anywhere else. The world he paints in The Road is brutal but beautiful, and he has perfectly captured both a man who views it like a funeral and wake, and the boy who has known nothing else but to survive the desolation.“The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.” Together they must push through but to what purpose? To what end? I wanted to come out of this novel and be able to say I came to some great moral conclusion and engaged in a philosophical debate, and I tried and I was close, but in the end I was too caught up, I was in too much pain with them, I was too distracted by the odd moment of beauty and peace. I didn't have time to question morals, and maybe that's what McCarthy meant to prove. “Where men can't live gods fare no better.”

McCarthy, through the man, has us treasure every moment and curse it at the same time. Every moment of beauty, of joy, stems from pain, reminds of grief. In the end there's the debate of which is worth it? To lie and fashion fantasies that aren't around and may never return or to force harsh realitiy constantly on such a young child? But the boy proves himself more mature than the man, or the reader in many ways. It is him, beacon of a future that no one quite believes in, to realize first the cold truths, to carry the burdens. “He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.”

This is going to be a quick post on a long book.  Finally, months after I started it, I finished the semi-epic that is Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.  It's a book that spans several lifetimes, a handful of different countries, and it's also a book that got me stopped at the airport multiple times by its fans.  On a recent flight, I pulled out the book and the woman next to me tapped my arm, looked me straight in the eye and said, "I love that book." Without giving too much away, the story centers around Marion and his twin brother Shiva who were born to an Indian nun and British surgeon at a mission hospital in Ethiopia.  The book, told through Marion's point of view, spans their entire lives, beginning with a tragic yet miraculous birth. I initially started the book in April since I was going to see the author speak and sadly, the book was ignored for a bit due to the end of my academic semester.  Not only was Cutting for Stone fascinating, but Verghese, its author, is also fascinating.  He's a physician, a professor at Stanford, a writer, and one of the most engaging lecturers I've ever watched.  Yet I found the book oddly hard to finish.  The best way I can describe my reading experience with it was that I read it in waves.  I would find myself completely immersed in the story for a hundred pages, but then the story would lull for another hundred.  It carried on like that through the entire thing. But that's not to say I wouldn't recommend it. I would, very much so. Cutting for Stone is written beautifully (though often times the medical terms eluded me) and when it hooks you, it's very hard to put the book down.  The characters are fascinating.  They change and develop so believably.  It's one of those books where as a reader, I really connected with the people on the pages.  I really do think of this novel as an epic, a story that spans a lifetime and doesn't skip any of the details. 

So, if that sounds appealing and you're in the mood for a 600+ page book, definitely pick this one up.

I first read George Saunders during a fiction workshop my freshman year of college nearly four (oh dear...)  years ago. I hadn't heard of Saunders then, but among the stories we were assigned to read was his "Sea Oak." It was, I said, when I tried to describe it at the time, "Like Highway 61 Revisited, if it were a story," which may have told people more about my odd and occasionally limited cultural vocabulary than it did about Saunders' writing. (I'd maintain that it is actually not an inaccurate characterization of Saunders' style, though I'm going to try and be a little clearer about what that all means in a moment.)

Anyhow, that was all of my George Saunders reading for a while, but "Sea Oak" stuck in my mind. I started working at a bookstore and reading fiction again last fall, and I heard Saunders' name again, from one of my coworkers, and remembered "Sea Oak." Was that the guy who wrote about that weird semi-surreal America of housing projects and strip clubs and amusement parks and people coming back from the dead to try and save their families?, I thought. It was. 

So I went on a bit of a Saunders kick recently and read both CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (his first book) and then In Persuasion Nation. They're both wonderful--In Persuasion Nation is more structured as a book but the title story in CivilWarLand is among Saunders' best--so it's pretty much an even tie.

Saunders is often described as a satirist, but he lacks the basic misanthropy that the term has always been associated with in my mind. The world I'd loved in "Sea Oak" is continues in the rest of Saunders' stories. They're dark and just slightly off-kilter. Most aren't flat out dystopian; in fact two in Persuasion Nation ("Christmas" and "Bohemians") are pretty normal-worldish. But what Saunders has a great feel for are the things that seem surreal about the world we live in every day. The settings of these stories reflect that: strange amusement park-esque places (the title story of CivilWarLand is a set in a failing historical reenactment park where the management debates--among other plans--killing off all the birds that are historically inaccurate on the site); grotesquely poor post-industrial urban landscapes ("The Red Bow," from Persuasion); insanity-inducing suburbia ("Adams" in which a man because so obsessed with his neighbor's potentially threatening him and his family that he begins sneaking into the neighbor's house to try and stop him, with violent results), and ridiculous corporate worlds ("I CAN SPEAK" and "Commcomm").On top of this there are a lot of ghosts and violent deaths.

Saunders' characters, however, remain human and believable even at the most bizarre moments in his writing. They love their children, attempt to protect their families, and muddle through their lives--often to mixed results--with genuine hope. And in Saunders' stories the hope is genuine. I'm not just throwing that word in as a substitute for "really" or "a lot of" or something like that. These people hope that their children will lead better lives and be better people than they themselves were capable of being, they fall in love, they try to save people they are wholly unequipped to save. This could seem maudlin, but played off against the cartoon violence, the loud brutality of advertising and pop-culture greed that also plays such a part in these stories, it somehow clicks. It's laugh out loud funny, too, if your idea of funny runs along the lines of Daffy Duck getting shot in the face or Warren Zevon's Excitable Boy. Or, you know, Highway 61 Revisited.

In "My Flamboyant Grandson" the narrator reflects

"America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamorous reasonable voice."

I finished Lolita about an hour ago, and while it might normally make sense to sit on a finished novel for a bit before writing about it, this is not such a novel. Nabokov, or perhaps Humbert Humbert, leaves me with a sense of restlessness, and I'm hoping discussing the book will calm that.

I noticed there was an older entry about Lolita in the archives, in which the author says how she doesn't understand why she hadn't read the novel sooner. When I first picked up Lolita, it was with similar thoughts. I had sat through a 300 lvl Lit course where it constantly came up, it had been mentioned in numerous conversations with friends, and I had been talking about reading it since high school. But now that I've finished it, I'm glad I waited, because I don't think I would have approached or understood the book in the same way then as I did now.

Nabokov creates in Lolita the autobiography of a man who society would teach us to deplore, yet through this very narrator he creates a turmoil of morals and emotions in the reader. This is because throughout Lolita we don't completely hate H. Humbert, we don't view every occurrence as absolutely wrong and disgusting. Instead we find ourselves sympathizing, aroused (the back of my book quotes Vanity Fair in saying that it is “the only convincing love story of our generation.”), and confused but trying to understand. I want to applaud Nabokov on one hand, and sob at his feet and beg him to give me back my sense of order, on the other.

Perhaps it is because H. H. is so completely overwhelmed by his passion/love for little Lo that we can't seem to hate him or blame him for how wrong it all went. And with the way it all ends (which I won't give away, for my fellow late readers, though be warned that there are some slight, predictable spoilers ahead), it's almost as if we can argue that no true harm was done. But is this possibly true? A question I found myself asking over and over again once I had delved into Part 2 of the novel was what was worse: how disturbing Part 2 feels as Lo becomes increasingly disinterested and Humbert more forceful and manipulative, or, that Part 1 didn't feel disturbing because it seemed so much like Lolita wanted it? It felt like a rape victim blaming debate, only I was struggling to maintain my feminist stance. And that's Nabokov's true genius of this novel, that we are so enmeshed in Humbert Humbert's mind that we have trouble reminding ourselves that Dolores Haze is only a 12 year old girl, or perhaps more accurately, that children are never quite sure of what they really want and make mistakes that adults (H. H.) are supposed to help them navigate. But who is the first manipulator of the situation? Is there anyone who can be said to make the ultimate decision that leads down the dark road of their travels? It's up to the reader to pick a side, if they even can. Maybe it's easier to fall onto societal conventions and call up the classic laws of consent, as a lawyer's defense against ourselves. (Thanks, Nabokov, here's some applause for my confusion.)

Overall, though, Lolita had to be one of the most infuriating and beautiful pieces of literature I'd read in a good while. It left me crushed and pining. It made me reexamine pieces of myself, my life, and ideals we hold. Who is it that said the only love worth having is the maddening kind? Because that is what Lolita is all about, the kind of love for things we shouldn't have, the kind of love that breaks you down.

Edit : Just watched the film (1997) as well, and I figured I'd throw in my opinion of that too...

I just finished reading this book last night. You should read it.

(Then I wrote a rambling and maybe irritatingly personal thing about reading it here, where I say pretentious things about books and things on my own.)

I think that's all I have to say about it for now.

Hello! I figured that since Tara did a little intro post, I should too. My name’s Sammie, I’m also new to FYSR and really excited to be joining in. Bio major from Bard that took a lot of lit courses. I also just graduated, which is scary. I was lazy and thus took a bad quality webcam photo, enjoy.

Currently reading: Lolita, and half way through. Chances of me writing a post on a short story first, though, are pretty high.

=D

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea.