#lustrada

Lustrada Definition The lustrada is the Spanish word for “shoe shine.” In the intimate language of tango, it is a classic embellishment, or adorno, typically initiated by the leader. It involves a soft, caressing slide of the leader’s shoe against the follower’s leg, ankle, or shoe. It is not a functional step that travels along the dance floor, but a pause, a detail, a moment of playful…

Aw you are so sweet! I’m glad I didn’t scare you off with my ridiculously doom-bound take on the monster romance of our times, and now we can talk about GOOD READS.

I have read both in fact — both very gorgeous, lyrical and shifting. Lyrical and shifting is good for spring I think, and as I’ve set a precedent of Seasonal Recs, let’s do another one of those!

That most of these, like The God of Small Things, are Booker Prize winners written by women, is a coincidence I am sure.

Spring Reads

The Blind Assassin - Atwood, MargaretMy favorite Atwood. This is an absolute tour de force. It’s so layered, ok come with me: the framing story is being literally written, journal-style, by an old woman in Ontario, looking back on her life. Her younger sister was a novelist, died very young after driving her car off a bridge, and has since become the Sylvia Plath of Canada. Her book is called The Blind Assassin, and we get to read it too, chaptered in among the framing story. Now within this novel within a novel, the unnamed female character is having a relationship with an unnamed male character who writes pulpy fantastical sci-fi stories for magazines, and we get long sections of him telling her one called…“The Blind Assassin.” HOLY GOD, MARGARET. Naturally, all three components work together to tell the full story, and please do not Wikipedia this one because you will rob yourself of the wonderful experience of having it unfold as you read it.

Cloud Atlas - Mitchell, DavidA stunner. This one knocked me fully to the ground, and the fact that I actually haven’t reread it is absurd and I need to get on that right now. Fun Fact, this was another one of the books I read with my old high school English teacher the same year we read The Name of the Rose. He told me if he was still teaching high school he would want to start a course with Moby-Dick and end with Cloud Atlas.

Mr. Dorman knows what he’s about, because Cloud Atlas begins on a sailing ship in the 19th century, then goes soooo far away from there, only to then come back, and it’s like, how far did we go, really? Cloud Atlas actually tells six stories, folded perfectly in two: the first one cuts off in the middle, and goes to the next, and on and on until the central story, which is told in full, and then backward through all the second halves until we return to the ship. Each is a different genre, a different writing style, a different time period, two of them even in the near and far distant future, where even the very stuff of language has changed. It’s absolutely incredible.

Possession: A Romance - Byatt, A.S.Somehow it is only now that I’m realizing that this set of recommendations all have elaborate structures? Because this one too is multi-layered, as it’s about two literary researchers trying to piece together the story of a relationship between two Victorian poets (made up for the purposes of this novel), and partly the stories and poems that those fictional writers wrote, as well as their letters and what all else. This is another one of those astonishing feats of authorship, because the brilliant A.S. Byatt wrote all these ~primary sources~ herself, and they are really, really beautiful.

The Luminaries - Catton, EleanorAn immensely long, strange, immersive read that fills my head with wet green rains whenever I think about it. This one does not involve the pulling together of different time periods the way the others have, but well, Time is still an interesting and powerful presence in the novel and in the lives of its characters — though they do not know it. Set in a tiny settlement on the coast of New Zealand during the 1860s gold rush, this a heavily peopled, intricate murder mystery where everyone represents a sign of the Zodiac, and moves into each other’s orbits according to the spin of the sky. Nice.

(continued)  The writers aren’t unraveling these delicate developments as they should, which is why Bellamy’s murdering 300+ innocent Grounders is so jarring and why Clarke letting Lexa fight her battles for her is so unconvincing. The writers are fleshing out Raven’s arc, but that’s because it’s barely an arc, she gets so little screentime. In BTVS season 6, the characters’ trainwreck decisions were boiling beneath the surface of every scene, foreshadowed by wordplay or constructed challenge by challenge.

Meanwhile, in The 100 season 3, these changes either seemingly happened overnight (Clarke’s overnight forgiveness of Lexa, Bellamy getting long-needed validation from Kane one night and then selling him out to Pike 24 hrs later, Miller as suddenly the only reasonable Delinquent?) or the characters weren’t moving at all (ie, every scene with Murphy, Jaha, or Jasper in it). This shallow level of character development, in my opinion, isn’t enough to destroy the show, but it does lessen the quality of enjoyment considerably. I can only see things deepening from here, however, with the inevitable Blake-sibling-break (over Lincoln dying, probably *sigh*), the schism forming among the Sky People, Clarke going home eventually, and Raven snapping out of it after building ALIE’s bombs. It’d be hard to mess the writing up even further at this point.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with regard to rushed storylines and development happening off screen.

At this point I’m just waiting for the Polis storyline to be over and Clarke to go home, so we can finally start sorting through the grave hole the writers have needlessly dug for themselves.  Every week I watch the new episode thinking Maybe this week the nonsense will stop and people will act like people again. Maybe this week I’ll see something plausible from someone other than Jaha. Maybe this week the show will make sense. Maybe this week the weird post-modern reenactment of Invasion Of the Body Snatchers that has consumed Bellamy and Clarke and Monty will end.

 Maybe this week. Maybe this week…

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