Not So Much

The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees, Contemporary Fiction, +9, Colleen Mondor at Bookslut

You pick up a book about something happening in or near Israel and you kind of expect it to be about the Israelis, about how they're awesome, or about how they're evil, or about them in some way.

This book is about... Not the Israelis. It's about the Palestinians. It's about internal conflict in the West Bank community. Communities? That's really the thing the book is trying to make you think about. And it does.

It's a Euphemism

Wicked by Gregory Maguire, +17, Fantasy, Mandar Talvekar at Ink Scrawl

There's a scene in this book that really stuck in my brain. There's a club in the Emerald City, a "Philosophy Club," but it's really a sex club. It's a very surreal scene; the club is in the back room of a bar, the bar scene is all smoke and mind-altering substances and booze. The philosophy club, when we follow the characters there... The atmosphere becomes totally surreal. There are elfin creatures there, genderless ones, lovely and strange and possibly responsible for contributing the genes that gave Elphaba her peculiar coloring. There's also a guy, a lady and a talking tiger.

Then it turns into an awful porno. An awful porno with a guy and a lady and a tiger.

It's really a lovely book; I just could have lived without "teh pr0n."

Mommy, I Want A Pony!

My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara; +6; Literary Fiction; Carrie at We Read to Know We Are Not Alone

In the interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that I did not technically read this book. Many, many years ago, my mother read it to me. Every night, for several weeks, she would read to me just before I went to bed.

To be even more honest, I really only have a clear memory of the beginning of the book.

The beginning; all was good in my world. I had my awesome mother reading me a story that she loved. The main character had a bad relationship with his father. His father was distant, domineering and either unconcerned with his son's feeling or incapable or understanding them. Given my opinion of my own father at the time, I was just giddy to see an “accurate” representation of Fathers. I don't remember if I ever said anything about that to mom.

Speaking of moms, the main character's mother was pretty much perfect; rather as I thought of my own mother at the time.

Oh, and there was a horse. Yes, the boy at the center of the story was in rather desperately in want of a horse of his very own. He gets the horse, loves the horse and finally lets the horse go. There's also a bit about a cougar and also something about at thunderstorm. It's a whole big metaphor or growing up; or whatever.

All the subplots and subtexts aside, because of when this book came through my life, it'll always be about the mother and the father.

As much as the father is distant and, frankly, cruel the main character craves his attention, affection and approval. As marvelous and reliable as the mother is, the main character treats her as a throw-away; he mostly ignores, or tires to ignore, her. He can only be himself, be free when, he moves beyond them.

Oh, well. What do you know? I guess it is a whole big metaphor for growing up, after all.

Or whatever.

Note on Structure

This is supposed to be a one-post-per-day Monday-Saturday thing, but then I fell behind. There will be no playing catch-up. If I miss a day, I miss a day. I won't do extra posts to make up for it.

Sex Pigs?

Lord of the Flies; William Golding; Literary Fiction; +10; Lucy Snider at Look What I Found In My Brain!

There was a lot of sex involved in my reading of this novel.

No, no, I didn't have a lot of sex while I was reading it... Neither meaning of that, actually.

No, but reading a book about a group of violent young boys seems to make girls talk a lot about sex. Short version: turns out most of us would rather do Jack than Ralph. Even in fiction, nice guys finish last.

There's also a lot of weird sex stuff going on in the book. Aside from Piggy's sexual fixation on Ralph and Roger's sexual fixation on Jack, and Ralph and Jack's perverse and ultimately mutually destructive inarticulate, violent attempt at courtship, there's the whole thing with the pigs.

When Jack's band hunts and kills the sow... It's gang rape. The enthusiastic, crazed, myopic boys, frustrated and possessed of an excess of energy, chase, bring down and impale, repeatedly, the only female creature they've encountered. As if that weren't enough violent, sexual imagery on its own, Golding makes a point of spicing things up with descriptions of the panting and the squealing done by boy and sow alike. He also has an extremely graphic description of one of the boys' spears (subtle, I know) entering the sow's anus. Yes, it really was that gross.

Not long after the sow-hunting/gang-bang scene, we get the fainting at the sight of the dead pig, enacted by one of the more frail members of the tribe. I always thought it sounded like a variation the Oedipal complex. The pig has already been established as a metaphor for the sexual female, but this pig also issues condemnations and proclamations of its omniscience. Also, the pig is a source of nourishment. It just always screamed “fear of the sexualized mother,” to me.

New Life, In Various Ways

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino; Fiction; +12; Akshay at The Occasional Review

This is one of my all-time favorite books It's part fairy tale, part philosophical text; its got this whole freedom to be yourself, ease of self-recreation thing working. It's not without similarities to objectivist literature. Unlike Ayn Rand, though, Italo Calvino is more interested in telling a story than beating you over the head with his ideas. Beating, until the bleeding starts.

The really interesting thing, for me anyway, is that the book is actually narrated by the eponymous Baron's brother. From the very first page, the narrator speaks in adoring tones about his brother. I think that helps explain the fact that the Baron doesn't actually die. He builds a hot air balloon and sails off into the endless blue sky.

Okay, okay, I know. It's an obvious metaphor for death. But, it also protects both the narrator and the reader from the physical reality and the immutability of that death.

I think that's really what makes this novel seem like such a fairy tale. It's not just the ease with which fantastical things happen; it's not the relative lack of strife in the lives of the central characters, or the speed with which that strife passes away. It's the way that the story leaves the main character suspended in a state of contended existence, forever.

On another note, the Baron has several lovers, but never seems to build any Swiss Family Robinson-style tree-houses, nor does he ever leave the trees. So, I have to wonder... How do they stay balanced up there?