missing dimensions

a journal of the plague year [confined reviews]

Watched TV series His Dark Materials produced for the BBC, which is much much better than the earlier film, as the actors are all fabulous—first and foremost Lyra, but also Ma Costa, the Gyptian Muter Courage—, the gypsy community is given a much stronger role, the characters are deep and complex, as eg Mrs and Mr Coulter, both ready to sacrifice kids for the greater “good” without appearing as absolute monsters! The special effects are a wee bit deficient as often with BBC productions but not enough to make a case. Although I sort of cringed each time a bear moved!

Read The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara trilogy by Terry Brooks, which I noticed standing on my son’s bookshelves. The original Shannara Trilogy was one of the very first fantasy books I read in English in my undergrad years (after Lord of the Rings of course and possibly The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant), which did not leave me with an everlasting feeling of superlative literature, to say the least. This avatar of the original Sword of Shannara trilogy did nothing to improve my feelings as the plot is lazy at best, with super-powered villains suddenly acting, last second deus ex machina rescues, endless internal debates, heavy hints at treacheries and double-treacheries, and, worst of all!, intrusion of 20th century technology, e.g., computers, AIs and robots, that the far future characters make sense of. Only suitable for a time of lockdown and even then… I should have left it on the bookshelf! Incidentally, one fight scene against a cyborg was highly reminiscent of the black knight scene in Holy Grail!

Watched by chance Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. For the first time. And was totally un-impressed. Highly pretentious construction falling flat from being a modern reconstruction of antique dramas, endless dialogues (which could have been cut by half if removing all the occurrences of fucking from them), boring and threadbare story, and artificial characters that essentially make no sense. I cannot fathom why this film is so highly ranked..! (And even less to witness it being compared with Rashomon!)

Read [part] of Jin Yong’s Legends of the Condor Heroes (射鵰英雄傳) but, lockdown or not, I simply could not finish it. Despite its fantasy approach to Chinese martial arts, which I usually enjoy (at least in planes!), and some proximity with the Judge Dee stories by van Gulik, the story felt very contrived and somewhat out of reach, plus [not yet] Genghis Khan being depicted in a fairly positive way [at least in the part I read]. Too irrealist for my reading buds, I presume…

Cooked plenty of new dishes, thanks to the delivery of weekly farmer boxes, from radish stems & buckwheat pancakes to celery roots purées, to fregola sarda (leftovers from ISBA 2016!) con acciughe, to chard gratins, to pea pod and cauliflower core soups, to flaxseed bread and buckwheat naans (as we ran out of wheat flour). We also managed to use and survive most of the out-of-date cans and bags that had stood forgotten in the back of our cupboard… Not visiting a supermarket for two months was actually most pleasant, living very nicely from the above mentioned farmer boxes and the occasional delivery from a cheesemonger, and supplementing weekly visits to the baker with attempts at home made bread.

Read Matha Well’s Murderbot diaries, my first read on a Kindle!, for free courtesy of Tor. Starting with All Systems Red, which won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novella, the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novella, the 2018 Locus Award, and the American Library Association‘s Alex Award. Very good if somewhat classical (Blade Runner anyone?!) trope of the rogue robot turned autonomous and human, so human! This is a sequence of novellas which means a fast-paced story and an efficient style. (Including a less exciting third novella, due to a lazy scenario.) More mind-candy à la John Scalzi than profound literature but quite enjoyable for a quick read during lunch or tea break! But which induced me to buy the first and incoming novel in the series,  Network Effect. (To be commented in a subsequent entry…)

Leading to (re)read the Interdependency trilogy by John Scalzi, the last volume in the series being just out. Very lazy buildup, in the traditional spirit of a few people driving the future of the entire Universe, with unlimited resources and unrestricted hacking abilities, but with funny dialogues, as usual with Scalzi. In this binge (re)read, I actually realised the frustrating intricacies of Kindle ordering as (i) I could not use my amazon.com account and hence none of my associate gains (ii) I could not merge several amazon.fr accounts and (iii) prices varied a lot between using directly the Kindle and ordering from amazon.fr…

And even growing some salads and radishes over the two months and eating them before the end of the lockdown, as the weather in Paris was quite mild most of the time. Although it meant a daily-basis fight with slugs. The arugula did not resist that well, though…

Reading Tade Thompson’s Rosewater for more than a month, having trouble keeping my concentration as the story goes in loops and not a particularly well settled plot. With a central idea of an alien race taking over humanity a few cells at a time. Which reminded me of Greg Bear’s Blood Music I read during the first year of my PhD. The book has some appeal, from being located in Nigeria 30 years from now to America having completely vanished from the map after Trump pulled the ultimate drawbridge. It won the 2019 Arthur Clarke Award after all! But I found it too hard to complete to even consider embarking upon the next two volumes on the trilogy…

the buried giant [book review]

Last year, I posted a review of Ishiguro’s  “When we were orphans”, with the comment that, while I enjoyed the novel and appreciated its multiple layers, while missing a strong enough grasp on the characters… I brought back from New York Ishiguro’s latest novel, “The Buried Giant“, with high expectations, doubled by the location of the story in an Arthurian setting, at a time when Britons had not yet been subsumed into Anglo-Saxon culture or forced to migrate to little Britain (Brittany). Looking forward a re-creation of an Arthurian cycle, possibly with a post-modern twist. (Plus, the book as an object is quite nice, with a black slice.)

“I respect what I think he was trying to do, but for me it didn’t work. It couldn’t work. No writer can successfully use the ‘surface elements’ of a literary genre — far less its profound capacities — for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it. I found reading the book painful. It was like watching a man falling from a high wire while he shouts to the audience, “Are they going say I’m a tight-rope walker?”” Ursula Le Gun, March 2, 2015.

Alas, thrice alas, after reading it within a fortnight, I am quite disappointed by the book. Which, like the giant, would have better remained buried..  Ishiguro pursues his delving into the notion of memories and remembrances, with the twisted reality they convey. After the detective cum historical novel of “When we were orphans”, he moves to the allegory of the early medieval tale, where characters have to embark upon a quest and face supernatural dangers like pixies and ogres. But mostly suffer from a collective amnesia they cannot shake. The idea is quite clever and once again attractive, but the resulting story sounds too artificial and contrived to involve me into the devenir of its characters. As an aside, the two central characters, Beatrix and Axl, have hardly Briton names. Beatrix is of Latin origin and means traveller, while Axl is of Scandinavian origin and means father of peace. Appropriate symbols for their roles in the allegory, obviously. But this also makes me wonder how deep the allegory is, that is, how many levels of references and stories are hidden behind the bland trek of A & B through a fantasy Britain.

A book review in The Guardian links this book with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I fail to see the connection: Tolkien was immersed for his whole life into Norse sagas and Saxon tales, creating his own myth out of his studies without a thought for parody or allegory. Here, the whole universe is misty and vague, and characters act with no reason or rationale. The whole episode in the monastery and the subsequent tunnel exploration do not make sense in terms of the story, while I cannot fathom what they are supposed to stand for. The theme of the ferryman carrying couples to an island where they may rest, together or not, sounds too obvious to just mean this. What else does it stand for?! The encounters of the rag woman, first in the Roman ruins where she threatens to cut a rabbit’s neck, then in a boat where she acts as a decoy, are completely obscure as to what they are supposed to mean. Maybe this accumulation of senseless events is the whole point of the book, but such a degree of deconstruction does not make for a pleasant read. Eventually, I came to hope that the mists rise again and carry away all past memories of “The Buried Giant“!

Orcs vs. Dwarves

A few years ago, I read and definitely enjoyed Orcs by Stan Nicholls. The fundamental idea of the book was to write a story from the viewpoint of a band of marauding orcs. If you ever read a fantasy book, like the Lord of the Rings, you will understand how unusual this perspective can be! Orcs are usually dull and stupid, The dialogues were quite witty and, despite a rather weak plot, the book was definitely a success. My son loved it and read the next volume as well… (The main criticism I could make of the book is that the orcs are too human to make the experiment a complete success.)