A Tale for the Time Being (Ruth Ozeki)

I want to embed a sound clip of myself sighing. This is frustrating. When I started reading this book, I was really into it--I was engaged and sucked in and all those other really positive things people say about books. But before I was even a third of the way done, the book was dragging: I was bored and inventing reasons not to read it. By the end, I was really unhappy and a little bit horrified. Where was the book I loved at the beginning?

Ruth Ozeki's novel has a rather elaborate set-up. The main character (also named Ruth, which is a thing that writers do that I don't like) is walking on the beach and finds a plastic bag with a lunch box in it; inside that is an old watch, an English diary written by Nao Yasutani, and a series of letters written in Japanese and a French diary. The book alternates between Nao's diary and Ruth reacting to what she has/we have just read.

Nao's diary is by far the most interesting; not only is Nao a delightful, vibrant character, but her writings manage to be educational and interesting. She provides a fascinating insider/outsider perspective on Japanese culture--her parents moved to the United States and had her, and in her teens, they move back to Japan. Her detailing of Japan as someone who should belong to its culture but does not is heartbreaking--she is cruelly rejected. She finds solace in her nun great-grandmother, Jiko, who is also a fun character because, I mean, she's a spunky 104-year-old Buddhist. What's not to love about that? To add to the concoction that is the set-up, it appears that Ruth has annotated Nao's diary, as if she's published it. What?

On the other hand, Ruth's sections were insufferable. At first, I was attracted to them as much as I was to Nao's, but it didn't take long for me to grow incredibly weary of her. I can't tell if we're not supposed to like her, but I certainly didn't; this is a problem because I don't believe that we were supposed to dislike her. Her sections are filled with pointed ravings (there's a section where she and her husband/boyfriend/what are freaking out about greedy capitalism and the environment)--I can understand wanting your book to have a strong message, but thinly veiling it by putting it in the mouths of your characters (especially one that shares the author's name) is not the way to go. This is Happy Feet syndrome, which was an adorable movie about dancing/singing penguins that suddenly got awful when it was like "blah blah the environment", a cause I support. Don't be so obvious with your motives, okay?

I am a self-professed fan of magical realism, but not when it awkwardly appears in the story more as a deus ex machina than as an actual plot device. Actual use: One Hundred Years of Solitude. Deus ex machina: Jane Eyre. Actual use: The River of No Return. Deus ex machina: A Tale for the Time Being. I'm not even sure it's a deus ex thing here, just bizarre and annoying. I don't want to spoil what happens, but there appears to be some entanglement with Ruth the reader and the events of the diary and it's very puzzling and abstract and unresolved. I was upset with the technique because it was confusing and obviously unnecessary.

In general, the book was a giant problem for me. I had to struggle through it, often feeling like things were too trendycool for their own good. The book was certainly an experiment, but it wasn't necessarily a good one. Nao's diary on its own would have made a fantastic, interesting, exploratory novel, albeit a short one; it's clear that Ozeki is a talented writer because I occasionally forgot that no one actually found the diary. But she apparently loses control with the section with the other (the same? This is why I hate this device) Ruth, trying to go big when she ought to have gone home. What a shame.

My rating: 2/5
A Tale for the Time Being on Goodreads
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The River of No Return (Bee Ridgway)

Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this book! I'm obviously quite terrible at reviewing the book before it comes out, and I evidently have a secret thing for time travel. Can we make a new genre called "literary time travel" that books like this one, Life After Life and The Time Traveler's Wife belong to?

The River of No Return certainly has an interesting premise: Nicholas Falcott, a marquess and soldier in 1812, accidentally time travels to 2003 in the middle of a battle. He is intercepted by something called The Guild, which claims to be an organization created to help these accidental jumpers--people who have unintentionally fled to the future to escape a life-threatening situation. They teach him to adjust to modern society and tell him that it's impossible to go back in time, to just forget the idea of ever returning to that life because it is gone to him.

Until, of course, it's not. Fast forward ten years and  Nick is being summoned by The Guild for a special mission to travel to 1815, three years after his disappearance, to do some reconnaissance involving a faction of rogue time travelers called the Ofan. Meanwhile, his neighbor Ignatius Percy has just died, putting the life of his granddaughter, Julia Percy in danger--she, too can manipulate time, and it just so happens that Nick has been harboring romantic inclinations for Julia during his ten years in the future.

What ensues is a veritable mash-up of genres--romance, conspiracy thriller, historical fiction and sci-fi mystery. Ridgway is incredibly ambitious in combining so many different elements; one of the great joys of reading the book is seeing how successful she is in mixing together so many seemingly disparate types of narrative. But seeing the experiment succeed is not the only reason to read the book; in fact, it's probably lowest on the list.

The Dinner (Herman Koch)

I'll be honest. The only reason I considered reading The Dinner is the review quotation on the cover which calls it "the European Gone Girl". I really liked Gone Girl. I saw Koch's book wasn't doing so hot on Goodreads (I consider anything under 3.50 "bad" because I am picky and/or I don't have time to read every book in the universe, right?) but I still decided to give it a go because it actually sounded interesting.

Two sets of parents (Paul, the narrator, and Claire; Babette and Serge) are meeting at a restaurant to discuss a horrible incident involving their children. Ooh, family dysfunction. How delicious. It's going to be really hard to talk about this book because the actual incident is supposed to be part of the mystery. In Gone Girl, we know that Amy goes missing. It doesn't spoil the twists to know that. But what went down between the parents' children is one of the "big twists"; I put it in quotation marks because it's one of my issues with the book.

This book is short--barely 300 pages--and that's another reason I decided to read it. Even if it's not good, I thought, at least it's short. Despite its tiny length, I was horrified by how overly long the book felt. Seriously, it took me two weeks to read the thing because it dragged. The whole thing is very strange structurally--our narrator, one of the fathers, slides in and out of time. Whole chapters will be about events that happened 10 years before the dinner that we're supposed to be paying attention to. I ought to applaud Koch for how realistic this feels--I know that real people's thoughts are never focused solely on the matter at hand--but it grew tiresome after the first two or three times. There's an uncomfortable scene where Paul goes to the bathroom to escape his insufferable brother; another man walks in and we get a treatise on how loud the other man's pee stream is. WHY.

Super-Review #4

The Call of the Wild
I was excited to read this book because it's one of those ones that I should have read years ago. All I knew was that there were dogs and Alaska involved. That seemed like enough to make the book exciting. Instead, it was dull. There are passages of engaging writing (mostly describing Alaska), but the book, which is really short, felt a little too padded. Buck is kind of frustrating as a narrator because he's so malleable. How can I sympathize with a character if he changes his personality every few pages? I know that this book and others by Jack London were mired in controversy about realistically portraying animals (it even involved Teddy Roosevelt, seriously), so I couldn't tell if this was supposed to be an "accurate" rendition of a dog's mind, but it didn't work for me.
My rating: 3/5

Sweet Bird of Youth
Approaching the end of my Tennessee Williams readings! Hooray! This one is about an aging actress and her gigolo, who is trying to blackmail her for a chance at stardom and a way to get his ladylove (to whom he gives a venereal disease) out of the small Southern town he's from. It was pretty good, mostly because of Alexandra del Lago (the aging actress, who is even more fun in the film in Geraldine Page's more than capable hands), but as with any text (visual or written) with an aging actress in it, I am going to unconsciously compare it to Sunset Boulevard and it is not going to hold up to that scrutiny. This play is markedly more fun than some other Williams plays and is probably among the better plays that explores youth (which appears in almost every play he wrote).
My rating: 4/5

Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela
This Elena Poniatowska novella (short story? pretend biography? I just don't even know) was actually kind of bad. The idea is that the letters are written to Diego Rivera from his first wife, Angelina Beloff, but it's puzzling because Poniatowska chooses to fictionalize the letters. What ends up happening is twelve letters of whining and irritating, clingy behavior. I hope that Quiela was not nearly so annoying in real life. Yes, it's horrible your child died but can you please stop talking about it (jeez I'm such a mean guy).
My rating: 2/5

Life After Life (Kate Atkinson)

Thanks to NetGalley for sending me an e-ARC of this novel for review!

The most difficult thing about a concept novel is that it has two levels of functionality--there's the concept-level function where whatever gimmick the author uses must function and there's the regular novel-level function where the book must stand up to our expectations for a narrative. The good news for concept authors is that, if the concept is really intriguing and well-crafted, as a reader I might cut you a little slack if the story is not up to par. If the book in terms of plot and character is fantastic and the words used to write it are beautiful but the concept is illogical or bland, the entire book will nonetheless fall apart.

That's why it's such a pleasure when I encounter a book where high-concept and high-quality converge; the results are beautiful and often breath-taking (the best examples being Cloud Atlas and The Time Traveler's Wife, in my opinion). Kate Atkinson's Life After Life is an example of a book melding its two parts into one amazing work. The concept: Ursula Todd can live her life over and over until she gets it right. For example, the book starts off with her mother delivering her stillborn, the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. "Darkness falls" and the chapter begins anew, this time with Ursula surviving the experience.

The book navigates variable timelines of Ursula's life over and over and it is always engaging; Atkinson never makes the idea seem boring, even when we must re-read the same version of events repeatedly. It becomes like a scavenger hunt, seeking out the differences to figure out how the events are going to change and how Ursula is going to survive this time around.

Eleanor and Park (Rainbow Rowell)

I got the chance to read this book as an ARC from NetGalley months ago, but I decided not to read it because I realized it didn't sound as interesting as I had first thought. However, I saw a few weeks ago that the book had a ridiculously high Goodreads rating (currently 4.18), plus hype from Gayle Forman and John Green and decided this wasn't a book I should miss.

The book, told in alternating perspectives, goes like this: it's 1986. Eleanor and Park meet on the school bus. Eleanor is weird and kind of weird-looking. Park is half-Korean but socially inoffensive. They fall in love ("star-crossed love" is how just about every blurb/review I see insists on referring to their romance). Okay, I thought. I'm down for a good love story.

And to some extent, I got one. Yes, so Park and Eleanor are kind of misfits that fall in love and we all want that to happen since we think we're all misfits who deserve to find love. Some of the writing is a little unconvincing--Eleanor talks about how much she hates Romeo and Juliet but occasionally comes off as a monologue from the play: neither of the main characters can stop talking about how much they need to be with the other, how the moments without them are the worst moments of their lives. It's quite endearing, very sixteenish and a little too dramatic for my tastes.

Underneath the shiny veneer, Rowell's novel is kind of a mess. I'm going to invent a new term here (panic): "YA curse". Eleanor and Park falls victim to the YA curse, by which I mean that we are presented with a totally great book with interesting characters that ends up bogged down by the "obligatory" inclusion of real-life issues (in this case, home abuse and effeminacy) and teen protagonists acting a little too pretentious, worldly and wise. I suspect that John Green may be the biggest culprit here, but David Levithan's Every Day succumbed to it. It's not necessarily a kiss of death, but the rest of the book has to work really hard to cover it up. Eleanor and Park never quite gets there.

The book sort of unravels into a quirkfest and a who's who of the 1980s. The aforementioned real-life issues seem a little forced into the narrative in order to give it some driving force--without Eleanor's mean stepfather, it's hard to imagine Eleanor and Park getting off the ground, and even with it is a central narrative force, the book only awkwardly flings itself at the finish line. In fact, the ending was one of my major issues with the novel. Of course there has to be something that forces our lovers apart (which, as I mentioned, is not as strong as it could be), but what we end up with is an ending that doesn't want to commit to hope or tragedy. And that's always disappointing.

Despite my reservations with the novel, it's something that the John Green set must read. They will absolutely love it, probably for all of the reasons that I didn't. It's not a bad book (in fact, it was pretty good), but my own personal weariness with the YA curse prevent me from rating it higher.

My rating: 3/5
Eleanor and Park on Goodreads
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Super-Review #3

The Island of Dr. Moreau
This was my first H. G. Wells experience--I went in with pretty high expectations, and was impressed with how well these exceptions were met. The story, about a man who ends up on the island of a crazed vivisectionist, is rather delightfully creepy. It's a short novel, but one worth reading for fans of science fiction.
My rating: 4/5

Orpheus Descending
Another Tennessee Williams play. I was excited about this play because of the Orpheus-related title. What I got was a play very thing in allusion and myth-layering that was actually kind of dull. The characters seemed flat and I couldn't get myself particularly invested in their story. Not Williams' best work.
My rating: 3/5

Summer and Smoke
Yet another Tennessee Williams play, and this time I was really wowed. My second-favorite of his plays I've read (coming only after A Streetcar Named Desire), this story of love between Alma and John really stirred up some feelings. The characters are vivid and the story engaged me. The ending got to me. What a marvelous work.
My rating: 4.5/5

Cinder (Marissa Meyer)

Another fairy tale-related book! I am a fiend and cannot be stopped.

One of the trickiest things about adapting a fairy tale is deciding how different it ought to be from the original. It has to be different enough to not be the actual fairy tale (in that case, all you've done is written is a fairy tale anthology), but it can't be too different, either--it calls into question why you even bothered using the fairy tale as a jumping point for your story or that you ran out of ideas and started pulling in a bunch of nonsensical ideas to give your retelling some "spice".

Cinder is an engaging story even if you know what's supposed to happen: of course there's a prince and a mean stepmother and a kind-hearted girl who slaves all day and loves the prince. But Meyer is able to so craftily blend what you know about the story with her science fiction world. Set who knows how far into the future, it would appear that the entirety of Asia belongs to an empire known as the Eastern Commonwealth, a country being ravaged by a plague. Cinder is a cyborg citizen of the Commonwealth, a mechanic whose skill earns her the attention of Prince Kai, first in line to the throne (is that what it's called in an empire?) as his father grows closer and closer to death (himself a victim of the plague).

The prince requests her help repairing one of his androids and also invites her personally to the ball. Of course, Adri the wicked stepmother doesn't want her to go. Instead, she volunteers Cinder (who is technically her property because of her mechanical parts) to be a research subject in plague vaccination tests.  That's where I'm going to cut off the plot summary because I don't want to reveal the whole story. It's worth reading.

The Bloody Chamber (Angela Carter)

I feel like I can't talk about how much I love fairy tales in a way that isn't repetitious and annoying. So I shall just say (once again) that I love fairy tales in all forms, including adaptations. I had heard plenty of wonderful things about Carter's The Bloody Chamber and decided to go for it.

I've heard different things about the manner in which Carter adapted the stories, the terms "modernized" and "with a feminist twist" being thrown around a lot. I think that both of these terms, however, don't do the short collection justice--it's easy to hear both of those words in conjunction with "fairy tales" and groan inwardly because it all just feels done before (though this collection is from 1979 so I suppose at the time the idea would not have seemed so overused).

My advice about reading The Bloody Chamber is to stop thinking about how the familiar stories have been updated or shifted in regard to gender roles and perspective. Give them space to breathe and grow because they will ensnare you if you let them. For example, I made it entirely through the titular story--was totally wowed and dazzled--without realizing it was a Bluebeard story. Isn't that marker enough of the author's talent, that she was able to make me forget these were supposed to be fairy tales? I generally don't reread fairy tales for the story (I already know what's going to happen), but rather to see how the familiar content has been used and retold, and very often during this Carter collection I forgot that I already knew what was supposed to happen.

The author takes us through Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Puss-in-Boots, Little Red Riding Hood and a few stories that don't seem to correspond to one particular tale. There are ten tales, and each of them is distinct and beautiful. Carter's writing is thick and enchanting; I once heard a way of describing a really good book as "feeling suspended in a jar" while you read the book, and I never understood what that meant until I read The Bloody Chamber. I became so fully wrapped up in each little morsel of story and it is moments like those that make reading such a delight.

Normally I like to praise the book and then throw in any negative statements I might have to say about it, but I can't find anything bad to say about it. I was never once bored. There's not a weak story in the bunch (although you might get a little confused if you try hard to pair up some of the stories with fairy tales you already know and expect a one-to-one correlation), though my favorites were "The Bloody Chamber" and "The Company of Wolves".

If you like (or love) fairy tales, then Angela Carter's collection is one to absolutely not be missed. Even if you aren't a fan of the genre or try to avoid retellings, I still think you ought to give The Bloody Chamber a chance. You might be surprised by how pleased you are.

My rating: 5/5
The Bloody Chamber on Goodreads
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The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)

How exciting! One of the big ones in the Quest for Great Literature. What a shame, then, that I didn't like it. Am I a slob for not enjoying Faulkner (or my previous experience with Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises)? I like F. Scott Fitzgerald, though! Does that count?

The Sound and the Fury is highly experimental in its set-up. We are tracing the history of the Compson family in Faulker's famous, fictional Yoknapatawpha County over the course of Easter weekend, plus a jump back to a day eighteen years previous to that weekend. There are four sections, three of which are narrated in the first person by the boys of the Compson family (Quentin, Jason, and Benjy/Maury), with the fourth section taking place through an omniscient narrator.

One of the reasons I didn't like the book was how difficult the opening is to work through. Benjy has a complex set of mental issues that have left him stunted in his ability to perceive and interact with the outside world. His narrative slides in and out of time, moving through about thirty years of his life seamlessly and often without signal. It's nearly impossible to keep track of all of the changes or even the people or the events being discussed (again, so difficult because Benjy's understanding of the world is so different from our own). This is the book at its most experimental and its most frustrating. As I have mentioned lately, stream of consciousness and I are not friends, and this is that technique driven to the extreme. I'm not saying that I'm opposed to working for an understanding (sometimes denser is better), but the amount of work Faulkner expects of the reader is ridiculous.

The second section follows Quentin, and is the portion of the novel that moves back to 18 years before the beginning of the book. This is generally more comprehensible, but it's clear that Quentin is also suffering from some mental instability (he kills himself on the day of his narrated section) and has moments of Benjy-like stream of consciousness. Faulkner uses it more interestingly and understandably in this section to communicate to us something about Quentin's character--perhaps that he is externally stable but internally wrecked? The way the author uses his technique here can make for some very interesting lines of thought and discussion without feeling as hopeless and frustrating as the first section.