Book Semi-Recs, as of 4/19/12 (With a side of movie crazy)
Thursday, April 19th, 2012 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
retsukoI've read two books lately that were bursting with amazing ideas and great language, but both of which fell strangely flat about two thirds of the way through. I'm hard pressed to understand why: in both cases, I was highly invested in both the plot and the characters; there was some top notch writing in each as well. But Zoo City (by Lauren Beukes) and Swamplandia! by Karen Russell left me feeling... a bit cold and wrung out, not at all what I expected after their dynamite beginnings and middles.
Both of these works are genre, although Zoo City wears its urban fantasy status on its sleeve/cover, while Swamplandia! is firmly in the "literary magical realism" camp and courted the Pulitzer prize this year. (To no avail, however, although now there's brouhaha about the Pulitzer for fiction being to *no one's* avail. Another entry for another time, though.) It's true that Zoo City is far deeper into the urban fantasy category. The premise reminded me a little of Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass series, except for the very grown-up conceit that the only people with symbiotic, magical animal familiars are those who've committed murder. Throughout the text, there are little bits and pieces of "zoo lore", like a fake IMDB entry for a documentary on the "zoo plague", or the abstract of an academic treatise on the mysterious "undertow"--a semi-sentient darkness that threatens Zoo-afflicted at times near death. (Like Pullman's Dust, the undertow is never fully explained, and I ended up thinking of it as a semi-sentient extension of hell that was looking for new residents.) Also through the text are little metaphors and turns of phrase that mark Beukes as a fantastic writer; for example, one of the great, scene-setting lines from an early chapter reads, "On my way home, the dull crackle of automatic gunfire, like microwave popcorn, inspires me and a bunch of other sensible pedestrians to duck into the nearby Palisades shopping arcade for cover." Every second page or so, there's a great little metaphor like that one, or an extended description of a character that makes me think, Wow. This is good.
Swamplandia! has a similar excellence with language. Russell is undeniably talented at giving her characters separate voices, as she spins the story of a white family masquerading as native Americans for so long that they've almost forgotten who they truly are, while running an alligator/Native American-theme park on an island called Swamplandia!. When the story begins, the mother has just died from cancer, and her daughter Ava and son Kiwi are about to have a rude awakening about how much their family is drowning, in debt and grief. Kiwi ends up leaving his family to go the mainland and work, where he ends up at a rival theme park, The World of Darkness (a Hell-themed theme park--what other kind is there? Insert jokey rim shot here.) Ava stays on the island with her sister and the alligators, but when her sister disappears into the swamp to marry her ghost boyfriend, Ava decides to go after her. Eventually, these two storylines intersect, but certainly not at the point I expected, or hoped for.
Both of these books hint at or explore sexual trauma. In the case of Swamplandia!, there's a sex scene that defines dubious consent and was rather appalling to read, especially in the pages that follow as Ava realizes what just happened to her was rape. Zoo City is set in a not-too-distant, semi-dystopian setting where violence against women is almost par for the course; fortunately, our heroine Zinzi was well prepared to defend herself. But around her in the narrative was the specter of women's bodies as commodities for sale, with the idea that everyone had a price.
However, my most major disappointment with these narratives was that they started to fall apart around one hundred pages before the ending. I wondered if both authors had some deadline that they got nervous about and they rushed through the endings. All the literary beauty in the world can't disguise the fact that you've written yourself into a corner. Swamplandia!'s Ava realizes that she's allied herself with a liar who is not, in fact, going to take her on a journey to the underworld to rescue her sister. Zoo City's Zinzi finds herself seeing a shaman (recommended to her by someone she doesn't trust) who creates some kind of custom-made drug that sends her on the wrong path. Of the two, Zinzi was able to get back on her feet more quickly, and although Ava has one extraordinary act of bravery, she ends up wandering through the swamp, lost and alone. (It's up to her brother to rescue her and reunite their family.)
This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy parts of these books. As I've said, they were well-written and often quite funny. I just wish... I don't know. I wish that things had turned out differently for both heroines. I wish that Ava had been raised as street-smart and not on an island with almost no exposure to the outside world. I wish that Zinzi hadn't been an addict, or that she'd abided by her own mental rules about what cases she would take. These two books are about women who fall victim to things--the system, their own weaknesses, and, to a large degree, masculine power. I want to read sequels where both women rise above what happen to them and smash the patriarchy, and then they live happily ever after. With lots of great metaphors along the way.
On an utterly unrelated note,yebisu9 and I caught In Time on DVD a few weeks ago. After the movie was over, we had a long and involved conversation about said movie's dystopian economy and how it made absolutely no sense at all. The premise--that time is money and the poor live on a day-to-day basis--is an intriguing one, but the execution was flawed at best. The prices were off on everything: a cup of coffee cost three minutes, up from the previous day's two? A bus ride that lasted an hour cost two? A stay in a swanky hotel for one night cost two months? The people in this dystopian future had apparently never heard of seconds, or simple laws of micro- and macro-economics. The whole moral of the story was incredibly belabored and, on the whole, too overdone for our tastes. In recalling it since, I've only thought about the ludicrous price schemes and wondered why, other than the obvious, plot-necessitated reasons, the people didn't rebel sooner.
Both of these works are genre, although Zoo City wears its urban fantasy status on its sleeve/cover, while Swamplandia! is firmly in the "literary magical realism" camp and courted the Pulitzer prize this year. (To no avail, however, although now there's brouhaha about the Pulitzer for fiction being to *no one's* avail. Another entry for another time, though.) It's true that Zoo City is far deeper into the urban fantasy category. The premise reminded me a little of Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass series, except for the very grown-up conceit that the only people with symbiotic, magical animal familiars are those who've committed murder. Throughout the text, there are little bits and pieces of "zoo lore", like a fake IMDB entry for a documentary on the "zoo plague", or the abstract of an academic treatise on the mysterious "undertow"--a semi-sentient darkness that threatens Zoo-afflicted at times near death. (Like Pullman's Dust, the undertow is never fully explained, and I ended up thinking of it as a semi-sentient extension of hell that was looking for new residents.) Also through the text are little metaphors and turns of phrase that mark Beukes as a fantastic writer; for example, one of the great, scene-setting lines from an early chapter reads, "On my way home, the dull crackle of automatic gunfire, like microwave popcorn, inspires me and a bunch of other sensible pedestrians to duck into the nearby Palisades shopping arcade for cover." Every second page or so, there's a great little metaphor like that one, or an extended description of a character that makes me think, Wow. This is good.
Swamplandia! has a similar excellence with language. Russell is undeniably talented at giving her characters separate voices, as she spins the story of a white family masquerading as native Americans for so long that they've almost forgotten who they truly are, while running an alligator/Native American-theme park on an island called Swamplandia!. When the story begins, the mother has just died from cancer, and her daughter Ava and son Kiwi are about to have a rude awakening about how much their family is drowning, in debt and grief. Kiwi ends up leaving his family to go the mainland and work, where he ends up at a rival theme park, The World of Darkness (a Hell-themed theme park--what other kind is there? Insert jokey rim shot here.) Ava stays on the island with her sister and the alligators, but when her sister disappears into the swamp to marry her ghost boyfriend, Ava decides to go after her. Eventually, these two storylines intersect, but certainly not at the point I expected, or hoped for.
Both of these books hint at or explore sexual trauma. In the case of Swamplandia!, there's a sex scene that defines dubious consent and was rather appalling to read, especially in the pages that follow as Ava realizes what just happened to her was rape. Zoo City is set in a not-too-distant, semi-dystopian setting where violence against women is almost par for the course; fortunately, our heroine Zinzi was well prepared to defend herself. But around her in the narrative was the specter of women's bodies as commodities for sale, with the idea that everyone had a price.
However, my most major disappointment with these narratives was that they started to fall apart around one hundred pages before the ending. I wondered if both authors had some deadline that they got nervous about and they rushed through the endings. All the literary beauty in the world can't disguise the fact that you've written yourself into a corner. Swamplandia!'s Ava realizes that she's allied herself with a liar who is not, in fact, going to take her on a journey to the underworld to rescue her sister. Zoo City's Zinzi finds herself seeing a shaman (recommended to her by someone she doesn't trust) who creates some kind of custom-made drug that sends her on the wrong path. Of the two, Zinzi was able to get back on her feet more quickly, and although Ava has one extraordinary act of bravery, she ends up wandering through the swamp, lost and alone. (It's up to her brother to rescue her and reunite their family.)
This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy parts of these books. As I've said, they were well-written and often quite funny. I just wish... I don't know. I wish that things had turned out differently for both heroines. I wish that Ava had been raised as street-smart and not on an island with almost no exposure to the outside world. I wish that Zinzi hadn't been an addict, or that she'd abided by her own mental rules about what cases she would take. These two books are about women who fall victim to things--the system, their own weaknesses, and, to a large degree, masculine power. I want to read sequels where both women rise above what happen to them and smash the patriarchy, and then they live happily ever after. With lots of great metaphors along the way.
On an utterly unrelated note,
yebisu9 and I caught In Time on DVD a few weeks ago. After the movie was over, we had a long and involved conversation about said movie's dystopian economy and how it made absolutely no sense at all. The premise--that time is money and the poor live on a day-to-day basis--is an intriguing one, but the execution was flawed at best. The prices were off on everything: a cup of coffee cost three minutes, up from the previous day's two? A bus ride that lasted an hour cost two? A stay in a swanky hotel for one night cost two months? The people in this dystopian future had apparently never heard of seconds, or simple laws of micro- and macro-economics. The whole moral of the story was incredibly belabored and, on the whole, too overdone for our tastes. In recalling it since, I've only thought about the ludicrous price schemes and wondered why, other than the obvious, plot-necessitated reasons, the people didn't rebel sooner.
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Date: 2012-04-19 11:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-20 12:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-20 01:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-20 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-20 03:11 pm (UTC)I dug Vincent Karthaiser's scenes, though. I completely bought him as an old man in a young man's body, and he exuded just the right kind of capitalist magnate contempt, with a hint of vintage Pete Campbell slime.