Book Review 4: Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
Short reviews of the books I read in January. Descriptions of the authors with regard to gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability/disability is based on their book jacket author bios and Wikipedia. If you have more information about how they self-identify, please comment and let me know, thanks! There are spoilers in these reviews.
Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris (white, gay, cisgendered, able-bodied, living) is a collection of humorous, autobiographical essays. Sahiya and I are going to a Sedaris talk later this year, so I read his book. The essays cover his adolescence and later years, and topics range from speech therapy to his dysfunctional relationships with his family to fixing up a house in France with his partner, Hugh. There’s an essay on performance art, in which Sedaris skewers his artistic ambitions and is upfront about admitting that his artistic inspiration was fueled primarily by drugs; when his dealer moves away, he ends his career as a performance artist. Anyone who has ever looked at an art installation with complete bewilderment, or sat through a tedious recital and spent the whole time daydreaming will see themselves reflected in this piece. The other essays that I liked had to do with moving to France and Sedaris’ culture shock and his difficulties with learning the language. In all, the essays reveal a self-deprecating, quirky personality (he collects grotesque taxidermy specimens). It’s worth reading for the laughs, but there’s nevertheless an overriding feeling of the melancholy that comes from mediocrity hanging throughout the book.
Book Review 3: Faro’s Daughter, Georgette Heyer
Short reviews of the books I read in January. Descriptions of the authors with regard to gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability/disability is based on their book jacket author bios and Wikipedia. If you have more information about how they self-identify, please comment and let me know, thanks! There are spoilers in these reviews.
Faro’s Daughter, by Georgette Heyer (white, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied, dead), is a Regency romance novel, although it’s so ridiculous and hilarious that it’s more like a parody of the genre. But Heyer established the genre in the first place! Hmm. At any rate, Faro’s Daughter is the usual Regency fare: an impoverished, good-hearted heroine! Mistaken identity! Aristocratic codes of behavior! Hapless first loves! Scathing insights into the conventions of romance novels! Etc.
The good: Deb Grantham, the aforementioned impoverished, good-hearted heroine, is intelligent, humorous, kind, and takes no crap from any man, be he a devoted young swain or a rude, insulting gentleman. Not only does she save a girl from an arranged marriage to a scoundrel and a certain future of marital rape, she also runs gambling tables in her aunt’s gaming house and holds her own in a battle of wits with the rude, insulting gentleman.
The bad: The book is surprisingly decent at avoiding gender stereotypes and showing that such assumptions are flawed. However, there’s an unpleasant scene at the end where Ravenscar, Deb’s antagonist, kisses her against her will, and in the end, she yields to him and enjoys it. Ugh. Also, it is Regency fare, which means it has class issues that are built into the framework of the story but never explored.
On the whole, Faro’s Daughter is an entertaining fluff read about a smart woman dealing with wit and élan with the variously infuriating men in her life: a hapless young swain; his cousin, who is determined to break them apart; and a self-absorbed, profligate brother.
Book Review 2: The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
Short reviews of the books I read in January. Descriptions of the authors with regard to gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability/disability is based on their book jacket author bios and Wikipedia. If you have more information about how they self-identify, please comment and let me know, thanks! There are spoilers in these reviews.
The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett (white, straight, cisgendered, disabled, living) is a Discworld Watch book. Murders in Ankh-Morpork; the disappearance of Sergeant Angua; the coronation of the new Low King of the dwarves; gender identity expression among dwarves; werewolf supremacists; a talking dog; and a missing loaf of sacred dwarf bread: all these are somehow linked together, as His Excellency the Ambassador, His Grace, The Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes finds out on a diplomatic mission to Überwald.
I loved this book! It’s that rarest of beasts, an ensemble novel with multiple plot threads that diverge and converge as needed without feeling contrived. Pratchett satirizes diplomacy, normative gender standards (it was accepted dwarf wisdom that all dwarves were assumed to be male, unless otherwise stated, and woe unto a dwarf who wanted to state otherwise…until Corporal Littlebottom came along!), cultural artifacts, and more.
I particularly liked Sergeant Angua’s prominent role in this book and how going home to Überwald forces her to deal with the complexities of her werewolf identity and her cross-species relationship with Carrot, her human lover. Angua’s struggle with both those issues has been mentioned in passing in previous Watch books, and it was good to see her finally have her say. In short, Angua isn’t human for part of the month and wolf for part of the month, she’s a werewolf all the time, and in The Fifth Elephant, Carrot sees her in the society of wolves and werewolves and comes to a better understanding of Angua and her personal history.
*Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s and has been an advocate for increased funding for Alzheimer’s research. While I don’t know if he self-identifies as disabled, I’m hesitant to go with the approach of treating being able-bodied as the norm.
Book Review 1: Cleaving, Julie Powell
Short reviews of the books I read in January. The authors’ identities with regard to gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability/disability is based on their book jacket author bios and Wikipedia. If you have more information about how they self-identify, please comment and let me know, thanks! There are spoilers in these reviews.
Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, by Julie Powell (white, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied, living), is a first-person memoir about learning butchery and having an affair. I expected the book to be interesting purely on the basis of its subject matter (butchery! affairs! drama!), but I’ve since learned that no topic is inherently interesting, and this is especially true when the writing is lackluster, as is the case in Cleaving. Summary of the book in five sentences:
- Julie looooooooooves her lover, D.
- But he haaaaaaaates her. [Understandable, as she stalks him with frightening intensity.]
- Julie’s husband is sooooo sweet and she just doesn’t know why she can’t be happy with him boo hoo hoo.
- She’s so toooooooooooortured.
- Meat is cool!
Snarking aside, the writing is sloppy and alternately vapid and tortured. Powell writes at great length that she loves D, but after a few hundred pages, I still didn’t have any idea why she loved him. He was never fleshed out as a character, attractive or otherwise, and that shallowness is typical of the book as a whole, whether Powell is describing her feelings for D or her motivations for learning butchery. In the meantime, her long-suffering, saintly, perfect, sweet, beloved husband Eric suffers, like D, from a surfeit of adjectives while also failing to be a fully-realized character. He’s more like a sketch of a Good Spouse than a living, breathing character with thoughts, motivations, and actions. When Powell writes about butchery, the prose perks up and becomes genuinely engaging–but then she tries to use the butchery lessons as analogies for the status of her non-relationship with D, with about as much sophistication as a fifth grader doing writing exercises. While the raw material for a good book is here, Powell fails to shape it into anything interesting. There’s no plot or developmental arc, and for all the self-recrimination about her affair and her flaws as a person, Powell’s character doesn’t grow at all over the course of the book, making it, in the end, a waste of time.
Trigger warnings: Attempted rape scene: a man crawls into Powell’s tent, assaults her, and tries to rape her. Afterward, Powell refuses to call it rape, although it blatantly is, at one point saying, “I don’t want to use that word.” That made me very uncomfortable; while Powell is free to use whatever coping methods she likes and write about them however she likes, I was sad that she decided to publish one that reinforces the too-common tendency to avoid labeling rape as rape. Additionally, people who are triggered by descriptions of stalking should also be wary of Cleaving, because Powell stalks D obsessively and writes about it at length.
Verdict: Thumbs down. If you want to read a first-person memoir about learning butchery, try Bill Buford’s Heat, which is hilarious and informative. If, however, you enjoy listening to people whinge pathetically, self-centeredly, and at great length about their tortured love lives, Cleaving is the book for you!
Book Link
Via Troisroyaumes, More than 50 books by Queer People of Color. I’m amazed by how few of those authors I’ve heard of, and how few of those books I’ve read (one, to be precise, Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred), despite considering myself a voracious reader. I’m looking forward to reading more books from that list, encountering new authors with a wide variety of perspectives, and doing my tiny bit to prove that there is a market for books by and about queer POC (Bloomsbury, I’m looking at you). First on the list: Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, which my college roommate gave to me–and which has been sitting on my bookshelf since then!
Books Books Books
After last year’s RaceFail, I vowed to read more books by and about people of color, women, LGBTQI people, and people with disabilities. It would expose me to a broader range of authors writing from a wide variety of perspectives and it would do my tiny bit to show that there is an audience for these books and authors. And then I promptly bought Ratio by Michael Ruhlman, who is, to the best of my knowledge, a white, hetero, able-bodied, cisgendered man. On the other hand, I also read Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred
In the past, I’ve made a number of resolutions about books and failed to adhere to most of them. There’s the bibliophile’s classic, “I won’t buy any more books until I read all the ones I already have.” (ha! Has anyone ever successfully adhered to that, I wonder? Circumventing the letter of the resolution by using the library doesn’t count.) There’s the bibliophilic blogger’s, “I’ll blog about every book I read!” (ha!) Etc. Grand, long-term resolutions like that don’t work for me; what works for me are short-term goals and lists, such as, “I will read the copy of Silas Marner
- Finish Anna Karenina
. I started it last year after finding a cheap copy in a used bookstore the year before that, and after reading Fforde’s Thursday Next series, which incorporates allusions to AK as a running gag. I like it, and the only reason I haven’t finished it is that it’s physically a large book, which makes it inconvenient for carrying around.
- Finish Sherry Turkel’s (ed.) Evocative Objects
, which, like Anna Karenina, is on the heavy side for carrying around. It’s a collection of short essays about objects important to the authors.
- Read more Octavia E. Butler. Kindred was brilliant and unsettling and I wish I’d read it when I was younger.
- Finish Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution
, which I borrowed from Sahiya ages ago, started, and didn’t finish for no particular reason.
- Read one of the Greenland books that M lent me in 2008, which have been through two moves with me.
I plan to mix these books with recs via Tari’s reading blog at Troisroyaumes and Google Reader shares (because she shares/blogs a lot–yay bibliophiles!); LJ recs; and other miscellaneous rec sources. Here’s hoping that in the next few months, I will (a) finish some of the partly-read books I have; (b) read books by authors who are of color, female, LGBTQI, and/or disabled.
Meme: Literary Personals
Idea via tarigwaemir:
While we were cooking, Steve and I listened to the recording of La bohème (Callas as Mimì, di Stefano as Rodolfo, orchestra and chorus of la Scala) because we had tickets to the SFO production on Saturday, and I wanted to familiarize him with the opera. I showed him the libretto for Mimì’s famous aria, “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì”, and he remarked that it sounded like a Craigslist personal ad.So…we made a Craigslist listing in the Casual Encounters section:
Subject: I like poets
They call me Mimì, but my name is Lucia. I live all by myself and I eat alone. I’m French (but I like to sing in Italian) and I’m prone to coughing.
Age: young but legal (I think)
Occupation: seamstress
Likes: things that have gentle magic, love, spring, dreams and fancies, poetry, praying (but not going to church), the sun’s first rays, April’s first kiss
Hobbies: embroidery, making silk flowers (that have no scent)
What I’m looking for: Someone who writes and lives in happy poverty. You don’t have to have a lot of money as long as you’re a millionaire in spirit.
Rules:
1. Choose a character.
2. Make a Craigslist personal post from that character’s POV.
3. Post a link in your blog.
4. Post any responses if the person gets the joke!
Alas, I haven’t gone through the CL postings in a while, and so I missed the opportunity to respond to tarigwaemir’s via email. But here’s late-20s man seeking wife:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. I am a single man with an income of £10,000 a year (~$15k U.S. at the current exchange rate, not adjusted for inflation). I consider myself handsome and intelligent, but some people think that I am overly proud and disagreeable. They are idiots.
My parents are deceased and I’m the guardian of my younger sister, who is dear to me. A former friend of mine–we’ll call him W–once attempted to elope with her. This is why he is a FORMER friend. Don’t mess with my family and friends, because I will protect them.
I enjoy horseback riding, dancing, and walking around on my estate, which is quite sizable and well maintained. I have a manor house and treat my staff very well. I do not enjoy tiresome balls at small estates in the country.
I’m looking for a woman of good family, someone who is handsome and not merely tolerable. She should be pretty and have fine eyes.
Thought of the Day
I can tell who the awesomepants people are because when they come over, they always go for the books.
Case in point: Sahiya immediately went for the bookshelves when she came for lunch and Tari’s eagle eyes picked out Nine Tailors from among a row of Sayers mysteries. Super awesomepants people are the ones who’ve also read, heard of, or can talk about the books they notice.
How do you tell who the awesomepants folks are?
Post in progress: looking for your thoughts on feminism in books
I’m working on a post on the portrayal of female characters in the fiction I’ve read this year, and I’m having difficulty setting the parameters of the discussion. Namely, how do I talk about this subject in a way that’s thoughtful, rigorous, and consistent? I think the problem is that first, I have to figure out what exactly it is that I want to talk about. The post was spurred by two things:
1. Sexist portrayals of women in TV and film. For instance, women being written as stereotypes rather than as fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters; sexist tropes (I can’t think of a better way to explain it, but for example, in The Devil Wears Prada, the Andy and Nate reconciliation scene reads to me as Andy crawling back to Nate, admitting that he was right all along and she was wrong, that she sold out for nothing but feminine fripperies, that she’s going to give up this job that made him unhappy–only to find out that he’s going to move to Boston, anyway); ridiculous standards of beauty and weight for female actors, while male actors are allowed to be short, fat, pimply, and otherwise conventionally unattractive; sexist themes (the normalization of rape in Superbad). This topic disturbs me a lot, but I don’t watch much TV, I see one or two new movies a year, and in short, I don’t have enough exposure to TV and films to talk about patterns and systemic sexism. TV and film aren’t my areas of interest, either, so I don’t have much interest in blogging about them, although I think the issues mentioned are important. Quite frankly, the awful treatment of female characters is one of the reasons that I haven’t picked up Heroes again this season, which leads to lacking the background necessary for writing about the show. A circular situation.
2. The realization that Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels are fantastically feminist. They are very well-written, aside from the first novel, which was had potential but was shaky, and the primary character is a woman. A capable, intelligent woman, who first interested me not because she was a woman, but because she was very well-written: complex, intelligent, morally upright, fallible, and devoted to literature. Thursday Next has her fair share of personal and professional troubles in a way that makes her real (Fforde shows her juggling the work/life balance, dealing with her overdraft, and putting up with car troubles at the same time that he shows her tackling vampires, solving literary crimes, and saving the world), and although I didn’t notice until very recently that she’s a strong female character, now that I have, I can’t stop noticing it and all the wonderful ways, small and large, in which Fforde lambasts gender stereotypes and addresses current gendered issues such as the working mom/stay-at-home mom debate (he also lambasts modern American politics, ignorance, and conventionality and is an all around wonderful writer). More than noticing it, it makes me really, really happy every time Fforde does not fall back on a stereotype when writing his female characters and that makes me wonder about the argument that strong female role models (in books, in TV, in film, in the real world) are important (as I mentioned in an earlier post, I never thought much about that argument because I’d always had strong female models and thus thought it was normal).
The combination of realizing that I didn’t want to write about TV and film, because I lack both the background and the interest, and mostly it would make me angry, and realizing that I do like books and have read books recently that have well-written female characters, led me to the conclusion that I should substitute books for TV and film and write about feminism in books instead.
That in turn led to a new set of questions:
What defines a strong female character? What makes her a strong female character? What makes her interesting to me?
Do I like well-written characters or strong female characters? They are not always the same. Have I come across a poorly-written strong female character in the books I’ve read this year? Does a well-written strong female character interest me because she’s well-written or because she’s a strong female? Is it possible to separate out those two things?
When female characters are poorly written and based on gender stereotypes, are the male characters poorly written and based on gender stereotypes? Have I read anything recently with poorly written female or male characters? Have I read anything recently where the female characters were well-written and the male characters were poorly written and based on gender stereotypes?
I think that out of everything I’ve encountered recently, including the real world, Jasper Fforde comes the closest to achieving gender equality, in his books. In his books, he writes all the characters as people: interesting characters with personalities of their own, and their interests, jobs, roles in the books’ themes and plots, and other characteristics form coherent wholes that don’t rely on their sex. I’m not sure how to explain it clearly, which is frustrating. I mean, I think of people as people: obviously, I notice whether people are female or male, but that doesn’t define how I think of them. If asked to describe Friend A, I would say, “Friend A is a Literature student. He’s an amazing cook, he enjoys Classical music, and he’s sweet and wicked funny.” If asked to describe Friend B, I would say, “Friend B is a daredevil. She goes surfing every weekend in the summer and she used to be an accountant before becoming a surfer bum.” I see their likes and dislikes, their interests, and their professions as being related to their personalities rather than related to their sexes. Obviously, some interests can be informed by sex, but I tend to think of interests as outgrowths of personality (I think Friend B is a surfer because she likes surfing, not because she’s female and therefore can’t handle the math necessary for accounting; I think Friend C is a pro-choice activist because she is a socially liberal, sensible person, not because she’s a woman–although that might influence her opinions regarding abortion). When reading his books, I get the feeling that Fforde sees his characters as people, too, as people with reactions, interests, and thoughts that are the logical outgrowths of their individual personalities. In The Eyre Affair, Thursday doesn’t pursue Landen because she’s a sad, lonely woman who needs a man to make her life complete, she pursues him because they were in love once and she’s found out that he’s been tending her brother’s grave. Fforde treats all his characters as individual people, without falling back on sex, race, class, sexual orientation, or age as the causes of their personalities. It’s the most egalitarian text I’ve come across in a long time.
Fforde raises another question, though: how is it that a male writer has managed to write what I think is a feminist text? Does the sex of the author matter? This question isn’t one that interests me much, as it goes into an area of debate that I detest (authorial intent), and it doesn’t fall within the same scope as the other questions. It’s food for thought, though.
A more pertinent question that the Thursday Next series raises, though, is the constraints of period and earlier literature on strong female characters. Fforde is free to write about a woman that is a former cop, a former soldier, and a detective-cum-literary FBI agent because the world of the series is clearly a modern society in a borderline fantasy setting. What makes a strong female character in period writing, such as Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond and Niccolo series, or in earlier literature, such as Austen, Fitzgerald, or, for kicks, Homer? What makes for feminism within those works? Is there a yardstick for feminism that can be applied to Homer as well as to Dunnett and to Fforde? Is it inevitable or necessary that period or earlier lit contain period-appropriate sexism for historical veracity? What was feminist in Jane Austen’s time is different from what’s feminist now, so how does that influence whether or not I read Sense and Sensibility as feminist?
Which brings me back to this: What constitutes a feminist book?
I think that my conclusion is that a feminist book is one in which the female characters are well-written without resort to gender stereotypes; one in which the female characters are as well-written as the male characters, without resort to gender stereotypes. A feminist book is one that treats the female characters as people as much as it does the male characters. This definition should work for period fiction, earlier lit, and contemporary fiction. What do you think of this definition? Is it meaningful? Is it too broad? Will it lead to productive discussion? It’s diverged from the question of strong female leads; should that be part of the discussion or should that be the topic of a separate discussion? I’d like to include the position of primary and secondary female characters vis-a-vis primary male characters (thinking mostly of Philippa in the Lymond Chronicles), too.
P.S. Sahiya, AYIJ (I feel uncomfortable calling you by your real name in cyberspace, nevermind that it’s in the comments [and IN YOUR BLOG URL OMG, I just noticed that]. It’s a weird twitch–I respond on blogs as pizzadiavola, even for people I know in real life, except for yours which for some reason doesn’t taken openID.), I’ll respond to your comments soon. They’re thoughtful and thought-provoking and I want to make sure that I’ve thought them through before responding. Also, I’m only good for limited doses of thoughtfulness at a time, and I think I’ve exceeded the limit for this week and last.
P.P.S. New readers who trekked through here recently, HI! *waves*
