Monday 30 July 2012

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

Started: July 22, 2012
Finished: July 29, 2012
Pages: 326

The pull quote on the front cover says "Should have won the 2009 Booker Prize". While Kim Stanley Robinson is perhaps not the best judge of that, this is definitely a smart, well-written book.

The narrator,Konstantin Svorecky,is a veteran of the Great Patriotic War who's eking out a living as an English-Russian translator in the dying days of the USSR. There are only two remarkable things about Svorecky: he no longer drinks vodka.  And he used to write science fiction.

His incentive to stop drinking vodka is a terrifying accident involving vodka, his beard, and a drunken miscalculation with a lighter.  His incentive to stop writing science fiction is no less terrifying:  a personal encounter with Joseph Stalin. In the wake of the Second World War he and 5 other science fiction writers are summoned by Stalin and ordered to invent an alien invasion that could be used to unify the Soviet peoples.  ("I give the Americans five years" scoffs Stalin).  

Against all expectations, all six writers escape with their lives when the top secret project is abruptly cancelled.  Svorecky abandons writing, abandons his dreams of the future, and spends the next 40 years religiously following his orders to forget the very existence of the project.  Until 1986.....when the Challenger disaster, a chance encounter with the lone other surviving writer from the project, a meeting   with two American Scientologists, and an unexpected visit to the Pushkin chess club lead him to the fantastic supposition that the story that they invented 40 years before might just be starting to come true.

Not that Svorecky believes this for a second.  He is an ironist, as his KGB interrogator so furiously expostulates, and his ironic outlook on life infuses this first person account with a very Russian world-weariness.  "I drank more than most Russians.  That, I am perfectly well aware, is quite a boast." "Writers you see, daily inflict the most dreadful suffering upon the characters they create, and science fiction writers are worse than any others in this respect.  A realist writer may break his protagonist's leg, or kill his finance; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying."

I found this book in the science fiction section, but it could be enjoyed by any reader of historical fiction who has the patience to follow the meanderings of an elderly and skeptical former writer of science fiction.

Saturday 21 July 2012

Death comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

Started: July 9th, 2012
Finished: July 17th
Pages: 291

Well, I should have known better.  And I did know better. But again....I've been working long hours, and need something to relax with when I get home after, say, 11 hours of work and a 40 minute commute.  Which is okay the first time you do it, but does get old after a few weeks.

Anyway, I knew what I was getting in to, so there are lots of criticisms I have absolutely no right to make.  When you read a book that picks up the story of Mr. and Mrs. Darcy several years after the wedding that concludes Pride and Prejudice, you have to expect that it will spell out altogether too much about their subsequent lives.  And it isn't surprising that it might unnecessarily revisit key scenes from the original book, while drawing in every single major character and some of the minor ones too, irrespective of the demands of the plot.  But I do wish that James hadn't gotten quite so involved with the legal aspects of the mystery. It dragged, particularly towards the end.

Thursday 19 July 2012

The Diviners by Margaret Laurence

Begun: 27 June 2012
Finished: 14 July 2012
Pages: 462

I first read The Diviners as a teenager. At that time, there were two Margarets in Canadian literature, and Laurence seemed somehow the wiser and more eternal. It still feels that way.  Maybe because Laurence gets me in the gut every time.

The Diviners says something new to me every time I read it. As a teenager it was about the need to get away. In my twenties, the story of Morag and Jules spoke to me of the importance of enduring connection. Today I see the cost of all of the choices, the story of Canada told through the person of Pique (Scots and Metis), the power of story to shape our lives, and how where you are from makes you who you are.

And somehow that feels like just the start.

I wonder what I'll think when I reread it 10 years from now?

Thursday 5 July 2012

Killdeer by Phil Hall

Started: June 16, 2012
Finished: July 5, 2012
Pages: 118

The last book of poetry to appear on this blog went slowly because reading it was so intense.  Every poem had a lot to offer,  and each one demanded some space and time to absorb.

This one....well, for most of the time I was reading it, I was actually reading 3 other books (The Diviners, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, and The Nonesuch).  That hinders progress. But the real reason this one went slowly is that I didn't enjoy it all that much.

I was initially puzzled as to why this book is a GG award winner.  It hardly seems like poetry:  more like short boring essays written to scan like modern poetry.  You know:
"I read the first poem--
and couldn't understand
why
anyone
would
ever
read another"

My initial working theory was that the book won a Governor General's award because it is self-consciously "Canadian Literature".  For example, one early piece in the collection is about the "writer" meeting Margaret Laurence, and there are multiple other callouts to Irving Layton, George Grant, etc. etc.  I think chances are even that this book won a GG because the judges of the GGs are Canadian authors.  It reminds me of an experience I had as a young woman.   Just for fun, I "competed" in a blitz poetry competition at my local public library that was sponsored by the CBC.  Every competitor drew a page of a dictionary, and had 10 minutes to compose a poem that used one of the dictionary words they'd drawn.  The 3rd prize winner confided to me that the sure fire cheap-ass way to get on the winner's list was to use the names of the judges and CBC personalities who were present in your poem.  It worked for him!  And while the prize jury did not include the named authors (I think they're all dead),  if you're competing for the Griffin Prize, it probably doesn't hurt to appeal to the Canadian judges.

I did warm slightly to the book as it drew to a close.  I enjoyed some of the later poems, like the scathing "The Bad Sequence", and the seemingly autobiographical "A thin plea".  But.....I still suspect that the book is a prize winner because it appeals to prize judges.  The subject matter is often writing, writers, and the writer's life.  Many of the references are to the work of other authors.  I think I'd have gotten more out of it if I were a professor of English literature.  In other words....even the best poems are not really for general reader.

If you're looking for poetry, read Memory's Daughter, whose imagery and some of its subject matter is drawn from the world of science.

Tuesday 3 July 2012

The Nonesuch by Georgette Heyer

Started: June 20, 2012
Finished: June 28, 2012
Pages:299

What can I say?  I've been working a lot of long hours leading up to the long weekend, and found myself unable to concentrate when I got home.  Brain, tired.  Need to relax.  Thank you Ms. Heyer, for providing something that keeps my brain from going in circles long enough to relax into sleep.

The Nonesuch is on my top 10 list of Heyers.  It features a well-born governess who uses guile to control her beautiful, spoiled, and wilful charge, winning the heart of an incomparable beau and making her way back into the class into which she was born.  The end.