Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

I wasn’t that impressed by Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord and I’m not sure why.  In theory it’s a book that I should enjoy but there was something about it that just didn’t click for me.  So, today’s blog is a laundry list of why I didn’t enjoy my second foray into the world of Louis de Bernières and a bit about the one part of the book that I did actually enjoy slightly.  Speculation will feature highly.  Strap yourselves in, folks, it’s going to be a mostly negative and theory-laden read.  If you’re looking for that standard fodder with plot summary and so forth, look elsewhere.

Reason the first that I didn’t like Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord is that it is part two of a trilogy.  I haven’t read novel number one (The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts) and I don’t think that I care to.  According to what I’ve read around the subject, all three books are separate and self-contained stories with only odd characters crossing over.  To be honest, if I hadn’t read around the subject I’d have probably ended up enjoying it more, because I wouldn’t have known about the first book and the feeling I was missing the larger picture of a greater universe would have been circumvented altogether.  But never mind.  Hindsight’s always 20/20 and all that.  I think the problem with knowing you’re only reading part of a trilogy is that, even if you’re not, you feel like you’re missing something, especially as I wanted to like this book.  It’s easier to say that there were bits I just didn’t get than to admit they weren’t there.

My wanting to like the book brings me onto my second theory for my not liking the novel: expectation.  I love Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.  It’s harsh and heart breaking and wonderful.  Better than that, Nic Cage is in the film version.  Naturally, I expected great things from this book because I know that de Bernières can be great.  Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord was never going to be as good as I wanted it to be.  It’s probably not a bad book.  I think I’m just judging it very harshly.  It’s suffering from an unfair comparison.  And it’s not just comparison to other de Bernières books that it suffers from.  Again, in my reading around the book I found a lot of people comparing the trilogy to Gabriel García Márquez’s books.  Gabriel García Márquez won a Nobel Prize for the writing thing and Love in the Time of Cholera is fantastic, despite the septuagenarian sex.  So my expectations were sky high and it’s just not a phenomenal book.

The last reason I didn’t like the book is that it just seems that de Bernières is trying too hard to be funny.  It’s a tale of magical realism with people who have cats for daughters and angels.  A problem that I find with magical realism is that it’s always at risk of straying into bullshit and nonsense.  It’s such a fine balance and de Bernières just misses.  I found it a bit awkward to read at times because I could tell the kookiness was meant to be funny but it was just annoying.  Admittedly, the one part of the story I did like were the numerous assassination attempts.  The anger of drug lord El Jerarca is actually pretty hilarious and the luck/ ingenuity that Señor Vivo applies is kind of inspired.  But it only comes in patches before drying up completely towards the end of the novel.

Maybe it’s just that I read this book at the wrong time, or that it just wasn’t for me- some books aren’t, but I didn’t get what was so great about it.  It’s an earlier novel than Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and it shows.  It’s not written with the same confidence or style and, as loathe as I am to write de Bernières off as a one trick pony, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord makes me think he is.  On a positive side note, the book also made me realise how many Spanish swear words I still remember.  It’s been years since I learned the phrase “chinga tu madre” and reading it again was a quick blast of nostalgia.  So kudos to de Bernières for that.

Next time it’s the turn of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.

Blonde

Blonde is an intimidating book.  Partly it’s the length.  At 939 pages it’s not the longest book I’ve ever read (I think one of the Harry Potter books is longer, in fact), but it’s been a while since I’ve settled into a proper epic.  Naturally, I ended up devouring the thing and read it in six days.  It’s also intimidating to write about.  There is so much I want to say but I just have no idea where to start.  This book might be a work of genius.  It’s, ostensibly, a fictionalised life of Norma Jeanne Baker and how she became Marilyn Monroe but naturally, it’s much more than that.  The story is also an exploration of American culture in the dying golden age of cinema and the construction of myths about its stars.

I quite like Marilyn Monroe films and so before tackling the book, I knew a bit about her.  To be honest, this was essential.  It’s a bit like Sentimental Education in that Joyce Carol Oates pre-supposes the reader’s knowledge of the subject.  It happens mostly in later chapters.  Once Norma Jeanne Baker becomes Marilyn to the world the level of detail put into the story alters.  This is clearly a literary device.  We know the basics of the tale, Oates seems to being saying, we can read them anywhere, so she plays into this myth.  Marilyn’s later two husbands are referred to as the Ex-Athlete and the Playwright, Joe DiMaggio’s name never appears and Arthur Miller’s features only once long before the pair meet.  While she dates them, Marilyn herself becomes the Blond Actress.  In their overarching stories, these characters don’t have names.  They are blank archetypes of American pop culture- at one point Marilyn comments that in lieu of an American royal family, she and Joe DiMaggio are cast in these roles.  There are moments, especially evident in her marriage to the Playwright, where the Blond Actress slips back into being Norma Jeanne.  These are always moments of vulnerability.  She is not the icon when she is miserable.

The construction of Marilyn’s character is so tricky to write about.  Essentially, she is Norma Jeanne.  To Norma Jeanne, Marilyn is just another role she plays.  She talks about her in the third person, requests that friends and lovers call her Norma and thinks of her as someone else.  At least, that’s how it starts.  Throughout the book the two become confused and overtime Norma Jeanne is eroded away into Marilyn.  Of course, Marilyn isn’t real.  She’s a property of The Studio and Oates reflects this in the writing too.  In the beginning we’re given snippets of Norma Jeanne’s thoughts but as she becomes Marilyn these change.  There is still the odd snatch of what Norma Jeanne thinks here and there, but there’s also a lot of what other people think of her.  As she becomes the icon, she loses the privilege of autonomy.  Yes, some of this is the drugs (there are a lot of drugs involved) but mostly it’s not.  The ay the myth works is that the truth- Norma Jeanne- doesn’t matter, it’s only people’s perception of her that is important in cultivating the icon.

The only issue with Blonde is that despite by and large portraying Norma Jeanne as a victim, it buys into the cult of Marilyn.  It’s impossible to avoid when writing about her, I guess but because it is a fictionalised account, it turns both into characters in a story rather than real women.  It’s really the way it does this to Norma Jeanne I find myself objecting to.  Oates changes the name of her first husband from James Dougherty to Bucky Glazer but keeps the rest of the details the same.  It alters details of her relationship with Charles Chaplin Junior (if she had one at all), and changes the year of his death (in reality he died in 1968, not 1962 as the book suggests).  There’s a disclaimer at the beginning of the book in which Oates asks us to consider the whole thing a work of fiction, but it’s so difficult to do when so much of the story is recognisable fact.  Rather than telling the clear story of Norma Jeanne, Blonde ends up muddying the waters of what we know of Marilyn Monroe.

This is another book I could easily write an essay about.  I’ve enjoyed reading it so much.  This isn’t a surprise.  I love stories of old Hollywood.  What I really like about Blonde, though, is that it’s made me want to re-evaluate my approach to Marilyn Monroe films.  The ones of hers I like best are things like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire and Some Like It Hot.  The comedy roles, essentially.  I’ve seen her more serious roles- Niagara and The Misfits and wasn’t that taken with them.  Now I feel like I’ve fallen into the trap of only liking the things I expect from Marilyn.  The fictional Norma Jeanne at least considered herself a serious actress and her dramatic roles her best and, for no other reason that than I’m going to pay them a revisit.

I’m just about to start on Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord by Louis de Bernières.  I’m hoping it’s as good as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.  

Tarzan of the Apes

It's a strange thing, reading a book when you know the story so well.  A quick Google reveals that I would have been nine when the Disney version was released (thank you internet for being far more precise than memory).  I do remember seeing it at the cinema, though.  I think it turned me off Phil Collins for life.  In all seriousness, though, the story of Tarzan was one that I thought I was completely familiar with.  Naturally I expected Disney to have left out some bits, but Tarzan of the Apes is actually a pretty different story and what was more shocking were the bits that were left in.

First of all, the obvious.  In Edgar Rice Burroughs's book Tarzan really likes to kill things.  He only does it to hunt or in self-defense; he's not a savage, but he does it with a smile (according to Burroughs this accounts for his lack of frown lines).   Most problematically for a kids' film of the Nineties, Tarzan kills people.  Granted, they're cannibals but nonetheless he kills them and then precedes to basically just fuck with them.  He steals their arrows moves their stuff around unseen, eventually managing to convince them that he's a god for no other reason than to alleviate his boredom.  There's not much of the early 20th Century racism in the book, considering it's all about Africa but this is where it comes out.  Tarzan, the natural superior to the cannibalistic tribe balks at the thought of eating human meat despite never having been made aware that this is a cultural taboo.  He instinctively knows it to be wrong due to his breeding.

The ape society is also pretty different from the Disney version.  It's really brutal in the book.  Again, Disney clearly needed to cut a lot of this stuff out but Tarzan kills at least three of his ape family.  Including Kerchak.  For me, it completely threw a spanner in the works of what I was expecting.  Disney shows an acceptance of Tarzan by the Apes but in Tarzan of the Apes they can't stand him and he's not all that keen on them, eventually abandoning the tribe because he educates himself from books in his dead parents' cabin until he outstrips them intellectually and doesn't have any ties to bind him.  Most shockingly, Tarzan's ape-mother Kala dies in the book.  I have no idea why Disney dropped that element, they murder parents all over the shop.  It's not really a heart breaking moment in the book, but with a healthy dose of Phil Collins it could have been Mufasa all over again.

There's also quite a lot of sexual energy in the book.  This is carried over into the Disney version, undeniably, but it's much more obvious in the novel.   Until he manages to steal some pants, Tarzan struts around in the buff having his body described as hard and lithe and tanned.  Jane (surprisingly American in the book) stands no chance against his raw masculinity and is drooling over him from the first time she sees him killing an ape to save her.  She's obsessed with his muscles and handsomeness and power until she sees him in clothes.  As soon as Jane encounters Tarzan dressed like a gentleman, the spark goes out.  It's basically just a story about female lust, which is fairly remarkable for 1914.  Jane herself is the sort of useless that one expects from books of the time.  She screams and gets herself kidnapped by an ape and we're meant to believe her strong because she doesn't bend to every whim of every man.  Minnie Driver's version could have kicked her arse. 

I feel like I should address the book away from the film, but the truth is that my perception of the book was completely coloured by my experiences of the film.   This is why I prefer to read the books first; even if you spend an entire film crying, "it's not like that in the book," it's over a hell of a lot more quickly than reading a book.  I sped through in Tarzan of the Apes about four or five hours but even so, it was a touch jarring.  I won't give away too many spoilers, but the ending's so different that I just wanted to shake Jane Porter and ask her what the hell she was thinking.  

My next read (and actual last of the Christmas books) is Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates.

Jazz

So, according to Wikipedia Jazz is the second book in a trilogy about African American history.  I was unaware of this, but luckily Beloved is meant to be the first book in said trilogy and I've read that.  It seems to be one of those trilogies more linked by theme and ideas rather than actual plot too, so it seems that I lucked out a little.  I wasn't that keen on Beloved, but I liked Jazz better.  It's maybe an easier read, it's certainly got a clearer cut narrative and, over Christmas (yes, this is still part of the Christmas reading) that's what you want.  It's no fun to overtax your brain when you're over indulging in your parents' very good wine.

Simply put, it's the story of Joe and Violet Trace.  The pair are both fifty and the love has gone out of their marriage; Violet is childless and unfulfilled and Joe is restless.  This restlessness morphs into an affair with an 18 year-old whom he eventually murders because he loves her.  Apparently the best way to show love is with a shot gun- start your Valentine's preparations early, folk.  All of this actually happens before the book starts, but it jumps around a whole bunch, switching its point in time and narrator every chapter.  I think the only consistency is that life is pretty bleak for pretty much everyone.  Not all the time, of course, there's an undeniable warmth to the book, but there are a lot of depressing bits in there too.  Take Dorcas, for example.  Not only is she the murdered teenager who kicks off the entire story, both her parents die violently- her father is "stomped to death" for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and her mother burns to death in a house fire the fire brigade have no interest in extinguishing.  

There's a healthy dose of feminism in Jazz too.  Or rather, the acceptance of the necessity of feminism.  Women are frequently shown as victims, not just Dorcas.   Once she is murdered, Dorcas's aunt focuses on newspapers and begins to recognise patterns of black women being victims but there is no solution offered.  Dorcas's aunt believes that any smart black woman arms herself so she is not defenseless and it is only those who fail to do so who fall into victimhood.  Similarly, when she discovers Joe's affair, Violet blames Dorcas rather than Joe.  There's a community of women which appears strong until it is tested by a man who is desired by more than one of the women.  Joe is almost entirely blameless, both for his affair and the crime he commits.  He is not even arrested for shooting Dorcas, even though it is common knowledge that he did it.   Admittedly, this is also partially linked to the racism of the police. 

This is another of those books that make me realise how ignorant I am about some things.  My knowledge of black American history runs along the lines of: slavery- Civil War- segregation- Martin Luther King- equality (but not really, let's be honest).  As you can see, there are a lot of gaps.  It's stuff like the role played by African-American troops in World War One and the way their treatment when they returned home led to riots that you're just not taught about in British schools.  I think we stopped studying American history at around the point the West was conquered; around the time that us Brits were still (sort of) the good guys.

Basically, this is a good book but I'm not sure what to write about it.  When I read books now I've started folding down the corners of pages I want to come back to when I blog (I know this is basically a cardinal sin, but it's cheaper than Post-Its).  Anyway, the copy I read was a cheap one I got off the internet second-hand and full of someone else's A-level notes.  I assume they were A-level notes- if they were degree ones, someone's definitely failed their degree.  It's so distracting to have someone else's opinion pushing into the book and a lot of the stuff I ended up bookmarking was the same as theirs.  So I'm just not sure if I've been going back and looking at the interesting bits, or I just got influenced by hastily scrawled notes about crap. 

My next read and last of the books to read over Xmas is Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs.  It looks a bit more serious than the Disney version.  

Sentimental Education

I’m almost certain nothing happens in Sentimental Education.  Okay, that’s not fair.  Things happen, the 1848 Revolution in Paris happens.  It’s more that the characters don’t do anything.  The main character, Frédéric Moreau, especially seems inclined to do nothing of note.  Strangely, this doesn’t make Sentiment Education a bad book.  It’s a wonderfully written hedonistic tale of a man who has more money than sense and a whole group of people who seem to make it their life’s work to do as little as possible. 

The main love story, if you can call it that, is mostly just a parody of romance.  On about page two of the book, Moreau encounters Mme Arnoux and falls wildly in love.  It’s the love at first sight kind of love that may be more accurately described as lust but the language that Gustave Flaubert uses is so ridiculously over blown that we’re in comfortable parody ground.  It continues much in this way throughout the rest of the book.  There’s one bit particularly that reminded me of my time studying the old Middle English courtly Romances; “he loved her with reservation, without hope, unconditionally… it was a longing for self-sacrifice, a yearning for self-destruction, and it was all the stronger because he could not gratify it.”  As I said, the whole book continues in this vein with Moreau leading on and then abandoning various women all the while pining for Mme Arnoux.  In the end, he discovers that his love is requited, but neither party has any intention of doing a thing about it.  Parody though it may be, it was dreadfully gloomy to read over my Christmas break.

I’m not really sure about the politics and the history of the book.  If I’m honest, my knowledge of French history stops after about 1793 and then restarts in a patchy sense around beginning of the 20^th century- and most of that’s based in films and world wars.  There are barricades in the book, in the revolution going on in Paris when the book is set so I assumed it was the same one that Victor Hugo bangs on about in Les Misérables, but according to Wikipedia it’s not.  The French had confusing amount of revolutions.  The main characters in Sentimental Education show about the same level of understanding as I do about the thing, so that didn’t really help further my knowledge of it either.  Moreau shows at best a passing interest, a morbid fascination with the corpses in the street and I find this amazing; that anyone can be so indifferent to the politics that affects them.  All the politics in the book is filter through Mademoiselle Vatnaz, the only character interested in the events and, in what is a pretty interesting and revolution view for a novel published in 1869, votes for women.  I like Mademoiselle Vatnaz.

This is another book that I’ve found it difficult to write about.  It’s very much a book of its time.  I think it’s one of those stories that would have been hilarious in 1869, but with time and distance so much of the humour is lost on me because I’m not aware of the things that Flaubert is satirising.  I don’t know that much about 1840s Parisian society and so my experience and enjoyment of the book are limited; had I not been taught about courtly Romance and so known how to spot it, this would have affect my experience of the love story between Moreau and Mme Arnoux too.  It’s so frustrating when I find books like this; ones that I know are good and want to enjoy far more than I can because it’s simply impossible to know everything, so really there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Next time with Christmas holiday read number four, it’s the return of Toni Morrison.  This time with Jazz. 

In a Glass Darkly

I know I was slagging off Irish writers a little while ago, but I think Sheridan Le Fanu might be the exception.  Okay, he's not modernist and- well, actually that might be why I like him.  He spins a hell of a spooky yarn.  In a Glass Darkly is something slightly different to the novels, it's a collection of five short stories from the files of the fictitious Dr Hesselius.  I'll be honest, one of the stories (Carmilla) I'd read before and actually studied at university as an example of pre-Bram Stoker vampire/ early Gothic literature.  So, I didn't bother to re-read it.  It's a taboo as fuck- at the time-Sapphic obession, but I've set myself a rather punishing reading schedule, so corners have to be cut.

The first two stories, Green Tea and The Familiar are very similar.  A well respected man is stalked by an apparition in both tales.  Green Tea's victim, Reverend Jennings is an apparently innocent man plagued by visions of a talking monkey.  Written out like that it does sound a bit like those PG Tips adverts, except Jennings's monkey encourages him to do evil rather than take the weight off and have a brew.  It's a pretty creepy monkey.  Le Fanu is a master of atmosphere, so it's not ridiculous it's gripping.  What's so wonderful about both these stories and the third- Mr Justice Harbottle- is that the men could simply be mad.  All the demons could be hallucinations of a guilty conscience rather than anything supernatural and this point is explicit.  Jennings seeks a medical explanation as his fear intensifies, however he is too late.  Captain Barton, victim in The Familiar is given the chance to rule out some of these options.  He thinks initially that the withered man who stalks him is part of a prank and only once he ascertains that there is no way that the man he believes responsible is still alive does he turn to a supernatural explanation.  Of course, he fails to question his sanity.  The titular Mr Justice Harbottle of the third as well, could have his experiences explained away by guilt weighing on his conscience; where it not for the fact that he seems to have none.

The fourth story, The Room in the Dragon Volant, feels a little out of place.  It's a great little tale about an arrogant Englishman on holiday in France.  He falls madly in love with a mysterious, veiled, married lady and naturally assuming that she loves him back, sets out to woo her.  Naturally, I was expecting a vampire tale.  She's pale and has piercing eyes.  Her husband and her both avoid sunlight.  And I knew about Carmilla.  Instead, the story reveals itself slowly as very clever long con.  It plays off horror narrative tropes.  Men have disappeared before from the Dragon Volant Inn, so we expect our hero, Richard Beckett, to do the same.  But it's not the room Beckett should be worrying about, it's the company he keeps.  There are no even potentially supernatural elements to the story, the cause of any horror is human greed and the lengths people go to for money.  This should make The Room in the Dragon Volant the scariest of the five tales, but it doesn't.  It's a good story, but it lacks the believability of the stories about hallucinations.  There is a set in stone and incredibly far-fetched explanation and true terror comes from the unknown, from doubt.  Also, spiders.  If Le Fanu had whacked a few spiders in there it would have been much scarier.  

I intentionally read these stories in the small hours of the morning.   The only one up in my parents' over-sized house, with all the lights turned off save the one I was reading by.  I think that's the only way to read scary stories, immersed in darkness so all you can focus on is the book itself.   Things that are frightening in the dark are common place in the daylight and it's the kind of book that I was happy to work with so I could get the most out of it.  I didn't really expect to read it as quickly as I did, but scary stories are impossible to put down after a certain point; it's like a good whodunnit.  I get to a certain point in the story and I just can't bear to not know the outcome any longer.  Of course, skipping ahead isn't the way to do it, so the 2 a.m. reading sessions become an inevitability.

My next read is Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education.  

                                                  

The Robber Bride

I love Margaret Atwood.  The Robber Bride probably isn't her best, but it's still bloody fantastic.  I wish I could of studied it at school, I could have written such an amazing essay on it.  The plot of the book itself is one of those that starts at point A, spends 400-odd pages on exposition and back story before shuffling along a few plot points to B, leaving you with simultaneous feelings of nothing having happened and that you've lived entire characters' life stories.  Of course, half of what you've been told probably isn't true.

The book tells the story of three women (Tony, Charis and Roz) and their friendship which takes its roots in their collective cuckholding (for lack of a better word) at the hands of the mysterious Zenia, but more on her later.  The trio believe Zenia dead and upon finding out she is, in fact, not the book recounts how each of them reached where they are now.  It's strange that a book that seems initially to be about the women's relationship turns into this.  The three of them appear together in very few scenes and are always discussing Zenia.  As much as they begrudge their men for being obsessed with her; they too are in Zenia's thrall.  The segmentation of the book also meant some parts were more difficult to get into.  Right off the bat, I didn't like Charis.  She reminds me of this woman I know who believes that all illnesses are caused by negative energies and that Western medicine is not to be trusted. So, I was dreading reading the 100 or so pages that form her narrative.  Sure enough, Charis believes cancer can be cured by eating right and thinking happy thoughts.  It can't.  But she grew on me nonetheless, there was a bad childhood involved, so I just felt a bit guilty about any ill will toward Charis.  The other two ladies of the novel are just as blighted by family tragedy in their pre-Zenia days; Zenia, it appears, has a type.

Zenia herself is a fantastic villain.  Her role in life is to befriend lonely women and then steal their men.  Only when she leaves does it become clear that she lies- inventing stories tailored to the sensibilities of each in order to earn their sympathies.  All this makes Zenia an ever present but unknowable figure.  She is an embodiment of the monstrous feminine to the point where she is almost a caricature.  She follows her own sexual appetites, refers to men as accessories, "pure latex flows in her veins."  She refuses to be contained, even by death.  And she should be wonderful for it, Atwood's a feminist and I don't know why she doesn't glorify a woman who does what she wants.  As I said, Zenia is the villain of the piece and not just because it's a story told by her victims.  Zenia is chooses to be a villain because of the lies she tells.  She claims a childhood of sexual assault, she says she has cancer.  They are unforgivable untruths.  There's a quote on the front of the book that compares her to Richard III, I don't agree with this at all.  Richard III becomes a villain because he is treated poorly- he believes he is not fit for anything else.  Zenia creates herself as a sexpot, as far as the reader is aware she chooses her own destiny; we don't know enough about her to think she has been forced into the role she plays.

The Robber Bride does cause problems for me though.  It's not just the whole way Atwood buys into the transgressive women are bad and must be stopped thing with Zenia.  The friendship between Tony, Charis and Roz is built entirely on the hatred of another woman.  It's kind of a slap in the face to second wave feminism.  Roz even acknowledges this at one point, but nothing can be done about it.  Roz herself is a character who is a feminist running a magazine for women which becomes diluted into another glossy fashion mag.  She is a frustrating character because she recognises the inequalities and wants to be above the gender politics of the office, but ends up buying into them anyway.  She feels she cannot be a boss in the same way as a man without being perceived as a bitch and so pretends to befriend the women she is in charge of.  She is so close to being like Zenia in this regard, only she cares too much what other people think.

As I said, I could easily write an essay on this book.  It's so wonderfully full of contradictions and themes.   I miss writing about themes.  I haven't even started on Tony.   And I think she might be my favourite character in the thing.  Short and geeky, I can relate to her- although I'm almost certain she's wittier than me.  The book is pushing 600 pages and I devoured the thing in less than two days.  Now I'm a little bit sad.  I want to go back and spend some more time on those wonderful themes.  Oh, and the foreshadowing...

I've just moved onto Sheridan Le Fanu's In A Glass Darkly. Mostly because I do love a good scary story over Christmas.