All the Light We Cannot See

Dear Ana,

I’m so sorry this is late! I’ve had a heck of a week. The scioly competition was today, and the mad scramble leading up to it is kind of breathtaking to watch (and participate in). Though we did make States! So.

Anyway, I recently read All the light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

It has grown something of a huge following among critics, not disimilar to Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

And I have to say that overall it really does deserve all the hype. It is superbly written, and Doerr is tremendously gifted at description. Ordinary events become, through Doerr’s words, a swirling, intensely chromatic, dynamic picture. You can taste the gun-smoke tang of Paris during the dusk of Hitler’s regime. You can hear the melodious French of a sheltered blind girl growing up too fast in the midst of war.

Which is all to say that yes it’s beautifully written. But I suppose the general problem is that the opportunity cost of such detailed and delicate and finely wrought description is a well paced plot. Doerr ends up with a hundred or so more pages than really necessary or pertinent.

The novel follows two different children into adulthood during the years leading up to and past World War II. Marie-Laure and Werner have two different experiences, one being a blind French girl and daughter of a museum curator and the other a German orphaned boy. There’s a maybe-magical blue diamond involved. Radios feature a lot as well.

They meet like 80% into the book or something, which I found a little ridiculous because prior to that meeting the book read like two completely disparate books contained in alternating chapters.

Also, what happens to one of the children seemed really emotionally cheap to me. But if this was supposed to be reflective of life, then I guess that’d be the point?

This isn’t the ending we deserve.

But this is the ending we get. (Is that how it goes?)

Sincerely,

Crystal

The Song of Achilles

Dear Ana,

Ah, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.

If you haven’t guessed by now, this book is a retelling of the story of Achilles. And it’s just like the original but with 200% more gay! Ie. Achilles and Patroclus are young lovers instead of simply being young implied lovers. (You may have furrowed your brow in thought, wondering where you’ve heard that before. That’s right–sounds like fanfiction.)

Anyway, the novel is written from Patroclus’s point of view, which is a refreshing change. This little adjustment allows Miller to tweak a quintessential war story and morph it into a love story.

It is beautifully written, reading the way your rich aunt’s Pantone-color-of-the-year Valentino dress looks. The phrases are modern-born, with a grand, ancient, lineage; they could have dropped from the mouths of kings.

However, as pleasing as the word use was, I didn’t like the way time was utilized/formatted. Two years in the earlier days of Patroclus’s life was covered in as many words as like seven years of the war. In magnifying the love story aspect, and still making the book a manageable length, Miller made it so that time no longer moved in a consistent manner. Time skipped and paused, flowed like molasses and then suddenly like arterial blood.

I also could not get over nine-year-old Patroclus speaking like twenty-nine-year-old Patroclus?? Nine year olds don’t talk/think like that?? I have siblings. Trust me, I’m an expert. I guess this way the style of speaking is consistent, but in solving one problem, Miller creates another, this one of dissonance.

I also appreciated the fact that the author knew what she was saying, mostly. She obviously knew stuff about Ancient Greeks and their culture/language. (And maybe comparing people like this is a little petty, but Miller still comes nowhere near Donna Tartt’s mastery).

Last notes: The romance was sweet and you might be all like no! I don’t ship Patroclus/Achilles romantically! They were best bros! Platonic life partners!

But I guarantee that the way Miller writes the story, you’ll end up shipping it.

And though the luuurve got a little bit cliche at times, love itself is a giant cliche. So. You know. Whatever.

Very worthwhile read.

Sincerely,

Crystal

No Country For Old Men

Dear Ana,

A few days ago I read No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, who wrote such classics as The Road and Blood Meridian. It’s about a man who finds 2.4 million dollars clutched in the hands of a corpse, his subsequent run from various gangs/hired assassins/overall baddies, the policeman on the case of the murders, and said hired assassins. I’ve heard of the movie, and actually had no idea it was a novel first. Anyway, I’m going to dispense with the meet-cute (where the meeting was between me and the book), and jump straight into its gritty wind-swept Tex-Mex borderlands.

And man is it gritty. This book is as gritty as a bowl of grits. Or a piece of grit gritting up your eye. Right about now you might be saying, Crystal, I don’t think that word means what you think it means. And you’d probably be right. But the point is, the atmosphere McCarthy manages to develop in this novel feels almost hyper-saturated. This is the Fabio of Westerns. It’s every Western movie’s wet dream. It’s what Breaking Bad wanted to grow up to be (Okay, I may be exaggerating a little on this last one. Especially since I’ve never seen Breaking Bad).

Back to the ever important point: McCarthy manipulates his words really fricking well. He does something tremendous with the language here. The prose is colloquial and punctuationally sparse (no quotation marks ever, the rare apostrophe, and he’s something of a comma-phobe) yet exhilaratingly immediate. I was there. And though I understand this is the whole point of books duh, rarely have I seen it done quite so well. Perhaps because the setting is so integral to the storytelling format. Perhaps not. Either way, driving motivations don’t change outcomes: while reading, dust swirled around my feet, and blood pooled beneath yet another gunshot victim.

McCarthy also throws in clever&humorous dialogue, glinting aphorisms and gems of wisdom that add even more dimension to the rich setting.

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who’s layin there?…Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. You understand what I’m sayin?

Sincerely,

Crystal

Charm & Strange

Dear Ana,

Happy three day weekend!

I recently read Charm & Strange by Stephanie Kuehn.

Kuehn is the master of unreliable narrators. The protagonist, Andrew Winston Winters isn’t unreliable because he’s necessarily lying to the reader, but because he doesn’t even know himself. The narrative has alternating chapters titled Matter or Antimatter (this physics theme, also referenced in the title: Charm & Strange quarks, threads throughout the novel). One is of Winters’s past life, and one of his present life. They merge into something coherent and haunting.

The writing is okay, a little bit heavy-handed sometimes and does occasionally fall into cliched territory, but the way that Kuehn layers the plot is absolutely stunning. In the first layer, and what the reader assumes is the only layer, Kuehn drops hints the size of greenland pointing to a certain idea of Winters. And so, I went through the book thinking something like, ‘Psh, I totally know what’s gonna happen.’

I didn’t.

Spoilers would ruin the book. But the central question is this: What is (wrong with) Winters?

Read it. It’s an experience, and the ending is astonishing. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days.

Sincerely,

Crystal

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Hi Crystal,

I bought a pretty copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from an indie bookstore last week, so I had to read it again to avoid feeling guilty about spending $20 on a book that is definitely free on the Internet somewhere.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is by Betty Smith and is a coming-of-age story about a girl named Francie Nolan. She is growing up in Brooklyn (note the extreme subtlety of the metaphor in the title) in the 1960s, pre-gentrification. The book follows Francie into young adulthood.

I first read this when I was just a little bit older than Francie, and it’s been really important to me ever since. Smith creates a vivid and exciting sense of time and place, but she also finds moments and thoughts in the life of a particular young girl that are profoundly universal. The author’s details are honest and important, and I’ve definitely thought about Smith’s genuinely beautiful writing in this book when attempting to write fiction myself. (I’ve tried to write fiction like twice, but still.)  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a very simple story, and I think that adults undervalue those sometimes.

The novel was published 70 years ago last year, and I do think it’s one of those Books Everyone Should Read. It’s sweet and it reminds me of my childhood, so I think those $20 were well-spent. I don’t think I’ve ever regretted spending money on a book, anyways. I find a lot more meaning in the Artemis Fowl series that I bought when I was in middle school than in the overly stretchy Abercrombie sweatpants I bought at around the same time, even if I haven’t touched either of those things in years. Have a good weekend!

Sincerely,

Ana

Give and Take

Dear Ana,

There are two three types of people in this world: givers, matchers, and takers. Or at least that’s one of the arguments Adam Grant makes in his brilliant non-fiction book Give and Take, which has all the anecdotal glory of a good Malcolm Gladwell piece and as much information as a psych textbook.

This book actually took me quite a while to read but it wasn’t because it was by any means boring, there was just so much information to absorb.

I think it may be marketed as self-help, and while I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, I also think that’s an oversimplification. If you take the lessons in here to heart (and they ultimately boil down to: Be nice to people. This benefits everyone, including you.) you are going to end up a Good Person and an Asset to Humanity. But Give and Take is also an extremely intricate and highly interesting look at human nature.

NGL, I cried real tears.

As for whether or not you should read it, let me broaden that by saying, if I could only recommend one book I think every human being should read, this would be it.

Sincerely,

Crystal

The Metamorphosis

Dear Ana,

As part of the string of creepy(?) literature I’ve been reading, I had to throw in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” It’s about a dude who turns into a bug.

All things considered, the guy rolls with it pretty well.

As its premise would suggest, the story is a bit trippy. And perhaps, depending on how you read interspecies transformations, the premise would also suggest tragedy.

I found it emotionally distant, but I think this was deliberate so that instead of getting too entangled in Bugman’s emotions the reader would be forced to look at the objective consequences of The Event.

The way the family dealt with the transformation of the Bugman (this moniker is not Kafka-approved) also presents a very interesting look at the way a family, albeit fictional, deals with a frankly ludicrous situation. I was so put off by the fantastical titular occurrence that everything thereafter took on a surreal, dreamlike quality. I couldn’t suspend disbelief within the context of the story and this made the whole reading experience very bizarre.

Of course there are also other themes like identity (duh). How does such a drastic physical change alter you? How does this alienate the people who are supposed to love you unconditionally?

So many routes of analysis in such a short work. Amazing. Weird. But amazing.

Sincerely,

Crystal

House of Leaves

Dear Ana,

This book messed with my head.

Okay, so maybe reading it in the dark at two in the morning wasn’t such a great idea.

Let me backtrack a little.

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is an unconventional mammoth of a novel. The further in you get, the more bizarre the formatting becomes. It has two interlocking stories, one by the late Zampano and one unfolding in the various footnotes by Johnny Truant who kind of came into? Zampano’s stuff. Zampano’s narrative is a well-written technical research paper, calling upon an impressive number of “outside” sources to present opinions, ideas etc. His story is a comprehensive analysis of a (non-existent) documentary called The Navidson Record, which further is about the Navidosn family’s experience with a house.

So to oversimplify a bit, this book is essentially about a house that’s “bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.” Cool! Like the tardis right?

No.

More like David Bowie’s Labyrinth once you take away all the fun colors/cool costumes/goblins/Sarah Williams and add a whole lot of psychological terror and then put all of it inside a seemingly nice suburban home.

Danielewski is such an adept fear-monger that I didn’t realize I was too terrified to sleep/have body parts dangling off my bed until about 1/4 way in. It was a gradual, cumulative process. There’s no overt monster, just a–and Danielewski brings this up a lot–sense of uncanny-ness. It digs deep and that fear of the dark we all have repressed somewhere? Well hello (fear of) darkness, my old friend.

And okay *takes a deep breath* Navidsons, there are random doors and hallways appearing in your house. Get the f*ck outta dodge. There are things called um, hotels. Also you have two kids who are gonna need serious therapy by the time this is over. Also freezing, pitch-black corridors that spontaneously shift and generate a growling noise are maybe not portents of happy things. Also have you even seen like one horror movie ever? Seriously.

And here’s the next important point: does this book think it’s smarter than you? Hell yeah it does.

But it’s actually okay because I also know it’s smarter than me. There are scattered symbols, a color key for specific words (house is always written in blue, and minotaur in red) deliberately missing parts, rather specific and repeated grammatical errors (I am getting an actual tic at Truant’s constant ‘should/could/would of’ where c’mon dude, it’s HAVE), a lot of references to certain words and myths (Interestingly all the references to the Minos Labyrinth myth are struck-out), slightly long-winded tangents on philosophy (ie. being/not-being and other-ness, also some Freud is thrown in for kicks), physics, and a healthy sprinkling of secret codes, etc.

Do I understand it all? Absolutely not. Do I understand it at all? This is also maybe a no. Or if it’s a yes, it’s a rather superficial one.

So if you can’t tell, I could probably write a dissertation on the interpretations of the various facets of this book, but I won’t. Here are some quotes instead.

“Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.”

“Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only God’s echoes and God is Narcissus.”

[After a lengthy interlude on the physics of echoes where Danielewski actually introduces all the requisite formulas:] “Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate. And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.”

“I’m afraid.

It is hungry. It is immortal.

Worse it knows nothing of whim.”

“I stood there tingling all over, a dangerous clarity returning to me, ancient bloodlines colluding under what I imagine now must of [sic] been the very aegis of Mars, my fingers itching to weld into themselves, while directly beneath my sternum a hammer struck the timeless bell of war, a call to arms, though all of it still held back by what? words I guess, or rather a voice, though whose I have no clue.”

*mild spoilers*

TBH it’s kind of frustrating to read. HoL might have more layers than an infinite mathematical onion, I dunno. I mean, there are forums devoted to it. Each seemingly concrete thing could be something not so concrete at all. Is the growling an actual monster? Is it the house? Is Zampano actually Zampano? Does Johnny actually exist? Is there real meaning to the wacky layout of the text? Will I ever be able to sleep again? (maybe in a day or two) What’s this house supposed to be? Monster? Labyrinth? God? The other? The self? A nightmare? The obliteration of everything except death?

Or maybe the point is that it is ultimately unknowable.

I’m left with more questions than I had at the beginning. So is the end a little unsatisfactory? Yeah. Did I like it? Well, define like…

But yes, if you have time, please read it. It’s pretty fabulous.

Sincerely,

Crystal

Deathless

Dear Ana,

I’m doing something of a whirlwind tour of the NE, and in all the downtime, I’ve finished Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless.

This novel is a Soviet-era-ish spin of a Russian fairytale involving Koschei the Deathless. I’m not familiar with Russian fairytales and/or Russian words so it was kind of like the experience I had while reading Junot Diaz’s stuff (ie. hello Google translate) although I’d actually say Valente, as a not-Russian, is much more accessible to not-Russians.

This book, writing-wise is phenomenal. Valente intersperses plot-advancing writing with revelation-inducing writing. It’s full of pithy truths and expressions. There are so many (so many) beautifully wrought lines and paragraphs that I basically want to commit the book to memory. Here’s a few: (*vague spoilers ahead*)

The stallion snorted, and his breath curled in the cold. “Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts…For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlor game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter.”

“They happen because Life consumes everything and Death never sleeps, and between them the world moves. Winter becomes spring. And every once in a while, they act out a strange, sad little pantomime, just to see if anyone has won yet. If the world still moves as it used to.”

“You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.”

“Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.”

“And if he did not want to die, all he had to do was never touch you once, never get on you the child he cannot have in the real world, for he is the Tsar of Life, and death always looks like a child–the end and only purpose of an animal body. But of course it ended as it always ends. Life is like that.”

So yes, Valente is something of a tremendous literary talent. But I won’t say she’s omnipotent. The plot of the book sprawled a bit and very often felt inexorable. Why does a thing happen? Because it must. Because that is the way it has always happened and will happen again and will continue to happen forever and ever. This rather circular logic gave me a sort of itchy discomfort. What is the point of something if the why of it is nothing? I’m fine with destiny being inescapable, but if destiny is inescapable and knowable, well then. That takes the fun out of things.

Also this book supposedly has strong undertones of feminism. But actually I didn’t realize this until Valente obliquely alluded to it much later on. It wasn’t obvious and the fact that Marya Morevna, the main character, was simply following a pre-written path made it that much harder to realize it was a pseudo-feminist retake of an old fairytale. After all, feminism is all about choice isn’t it?

Anyway, these issues weren’t dealbreakers for me, not when they were couched in such lovely, imaginative writing and such a lush world.

Sincerely,

Crystal

Howl’s Moving Castle

Dear Ana,

I hope your vacation is treating you well!

We’ve both seen Howl’s Moving Castle, which is as most Studio Ghibli movies, a cinematic masterpiece. (Apparently Studio Ghibli is shutting down in the wake of Hayao Miyazaki’s departure? I’m pretty upset right now.) But I had no idea that it was based of a novel of the same name, and when I found that out of course I had to check out said book.

Howl’s Moving Castle is a novel by British author Diana Wynne Jones. And it is as fantastical as the movie would lead you to believe (read: very).

The movie actually deviates quite a lot from the book, and whether that’s to its detriment is a debate I’m not going to get into. The print version and the movie are somewhat different atmospherically but both have their merits. The book does have the luxury of fleshing out the stories and characters more though, which is excellent. For instance, the Howl in the book is a chronic womanizer who falls in love with every pretty face but only until the girl falls in love with him, at which point whoa! suddenly cured of his lovesickness. This sets the premise of why the Witch of the Waste is so obsessed with destroying him. It also apparently has a reasonable explanation, but the point is that it’s a rather different Howl that we’re presented with in the movie. Additionally, the book Howl isn’t quite so suave. And book Sophie isn’t quite so mousy/timid. I can stomach book Sophie much better, as it were.

To sum up around 75k+ words in a sentence: the writing isn’t extraordinary but the world-building is.

Sincerely,

Crystal