The Stranger: Afterthoughts

/ N J Magas / 13 Comments

The Stranger
by Albert Camus
123 pages
three and a half

 

I was surprised how quickly I made it through this book. I read it on my kindle, though, so I didn’t actually know that it was only 123 pages, and sometimes it takes kindle a while to calibrate for my reading speed. So yes, this is a fast yet good read that I did enjoy in part because it was of a length and a quality that I could just continuously read until the end and feel the satisfaction of having received the entire story all at once.

The StrangerIf you scroll up and down really fast you may see an optical illusion!

First of all, I had to do some research into the life of the author and the meaning behind the book and in the process I learned some big new words such as existentialism. While Camus denied that he was an existentialist, he seems to have written enough pieces containing that philosophy that critics often shuffle him into that camp. Camus was born in French-Algeria which makes the vivid setting of The Stranger make perfect sense. He contracted tuberculosis like all the authors did, back in the day, and for a time was a member of the French Communist Party, though he was eventually expelled after being labeled a Trotskyite. He then became an anarchist.

Ok, enough of the author bio. Despite not considering himself an existentialist, Camus seems to have written a good example of existentialism in The Stranger. This might be one of the rare books in which an utterly boring, unassuming and unambitious character doesn’t sink the entire thing for me. In fact, much like Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim I found myself eerily connecting with the protagonist and his apathetic attitude to everything around him. (I certainly hope I don’t end up on death row for failing to show sorrow at my mother’s funeral.)

The main character is a man named Meursault, living in what appears to be lower-middle class Algeria, in an apartment complex with a host of interesting characters. He lives alone, though after having indifferently buried his mother he hooks up with pretty young Marie and the two of them hit it off rather well.

Unfortunately for Meursault, he gets involved in the feud his neighbor Roger has going with a group of Arabs over the treatment of an Arab woman who Roger suspects has been cheating on him. This sordid business eventually culminates in Meursault killing the brother of the Arab woman in the disorienting heat of the midday desert sun. This lands him on trial for premeditated murder. During the trial, the prosecution spends as much time analyzing Meursault’s apathetic behavior at his mother’s funeral as they do examining the facts of the shooting, ultimately to paint the picture of Meursault being a hardened, soulless criminal. He is eventually condemned to die as a result of this.

In the final scene of the book, Meursault is confronted by the prison chaplain who urges him to confess his sins and give himself to the mercy of God. Meursualt, who has up until this point been calm and indifferent to everything else going on around him finally loses his temper at this point and seizes the chaplain by the collar to tell him that no one has the right to judge him or his actions, and that God and religion both are a waste of his time.

Camus once said about his book,

I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: ‘In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.’ I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.

and it is very true of Meursault. He doesn’t play the game of society, at least, society as it was in the 1940’s. When Marie asks him if he loves her, he answers truthfully, ‘it doesn’t matter, but not especially’. When she asks if he would marry her, he answers that he would if she wanted it, if it would make her happy. He doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, or show much sorrow at her passing because they didn’t get on especially well in her later years and he had to send her to a home, because of a lack of ability to properly care for her himself. He doesn’t show any sort of moral dilemma when Roger beats his mistress, and no remorse at killing the Arab. Meursualt doesn’t conform to the normalcy of society, and for that, he is sentenced to death.

In this message, the existentialism shines through, the belief that only the actions of the individual with free will matter. The book also carries Absurdist philosophies in Meursault’s condemnation despite him not having been at all the man that the town paints him as, as well as Meursault’s belief that everything is ultimately meaningless.

For such a short book, The Stranger certainly packs a punch, and a lot of philosophical meaning. It was a good read.

The next book on my reading list is The Book of the Courtier by Baldesar Castiglione.

A Wolf at the Door: Afterthoughts

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A Wolf at the Door
166 pages
Edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
4 stars

 

Wow, I just blasted through two books in a week, so expect a couple rapid fire posts over the next few days. I also just succumbed to another fever via child, so these posts may not make all that much sense. We shall see. In any case, I highly enjoyed reading A Wolf at the Door, even though it’s a retelling anthology. Retellings, as anyone who reads my reviews regularly will know, aren’t really my thing; I’m usually disappointed. However, through a combination of clever twists, witty writing and the use of fairy tales I loved from my childhood, the stories in A Wolf at the Door manage to sneak past my reading bias and into my heart.

A wolf at the doorBe careful which talking animals you stop to chat with.

As I was reading the anthology, it was obvious where some of the stories took their roots from. Others not so much, but they were The bok of goodnight storiesvery familiar to me. So much so that I couldn’t actually continue reading until I identified what the original fairy tale was. Fortunately I have a lovely book from my youth to reference. The Book of Goodnight Stories had been my bedside companion for years as a child until it disappeared and I thought I lost it forever. I found it tucked away at my parents house again; thankfully it survived the purge of the children’s things after we youngsters all moved out. It was what first put a true love of fairy tales in me. The book doesn’t Disney it up (though I suspect that they chose the tamest versions of each tale to include). It helped put me in the mindset to write The Black Horse (forthcoming, I promise) and it helped me identify almost every single story in A Wolf at the Door. Needless to say, if you like fairy tales, I recommend this book as well. I’ll be referring to it throughout this review, with page numbers from the book where each mentioned original fairy tale can be found.

The Months of Manhattan
Delia Sherman
five-stars

Now, there are a lot of fairy tales out there that have a sweet, positively minded girl paired with an antagonistic, moody and cruel stepsister–particularly in which the former is rewarded for her kindness and the latter is punished for her crassness. That said, I got the feeling that this story had roots in The Three Wood Elves (p.31), though that could just be because The Three Wood Elves is one of my favorite fairy tales of all time. Sherman puts a nice spin on it though, by setting it tangibly in Manhattan and very cleverly weaves the city atmosphere into the story narrative.

Liz lives with her father in New York City, and things are pretty good. When her father remarries and Liz finds herself with a similarly named and similarly aged stepsister, at first she’s thrilled. Unfortunate, her new sister doesn’t feel the same, and really they’re not all that alike at all. While researching for a school assignment, Liz discovers a talking painting which takes a shine to her sunny, positive attitude. With her luck on the rise, will her stepsister be able to hide the jealousy in her already black heart?

Cinder Elephant
Jane Yolen
4 stars

At the school where I teach we occasionally show the children short, educational cartoons. One of these we show is called ‘Cinder Elephant’, which features a bunch of animal characters and compares animal foot prints as the prince searches for his lost elephant. In any case, Jane Yolen’s version of the original Cinderella (p. 71) story reminded me of that cartoon pretty much the whole time I read it. Yolen uses some wonderful imagery throughout the story, especially when she writes the two wicked step-sisters. She also sets the story in a curious mix of the typical fairy tale setting and a modern setting, a technique I saw employed a few times in this anthology and quite enjoyed.

Elly is… shall we say, big-boned? Not that it bothers her much. Elly dances to her own tune, and she’s quite happy about it too. But when her father remarries and introduces two stick thin step-sisters into her life, Elly’s happiness takes a dive. They are unimaginably cruel to her, however, even when they call her Cinder Elephant, she keeps a positive attitude and does her chores quickly, so she can read another book. Prince Junior, is having troubles of his own. He needs to find a wife, and his father organizes a ball to do just that. I’m sure you know where this story is headed, but there are some interesting spins along the way.

Instructions
Neil Gaiman
five-stars

Neil Gaiman’s contribution to the anthology is exactly what the title says it is: instructions on how to survive a fairy tale, preferably in your original form or better. While it borrows elements from a number of different stories, I felt that much of its inspiration came from The Magic Pot (p. 29). At least, that was the first story that jumped into my mind when I read it. If you’re familiar with a number of fairy tales, I’m sure that Gaiman’s instructions will come as no surprise, but his writing, as always, charms and delights.

Mrs. Big: Jack and the Beanstalk Retold
Michael Cadnum
three and a half

The story of Jack and the Beanstalk is a rather ubiquitous one, but we don’t often stop to look at its events from the point of view of the giants. I mean, Jack is essentially a thief, isn’t he? The giant lived in a castle in the clouds. How often do you suppose he was coming down and tormenting the villagers such to deserve to be robbed and then murdered? According to Michael Cadnum, the giant (and his wife) were nothing if not upstanding citizens, who happened to be unsuitably large for life around tiny, squish-able folk. So when a passing peddler offers them some choice real estate up above everyone else of course they take it. It doesn’t stop the thieves, of course, but revenge is a dish best served cold. And at the source of one’s miseries.

Falada: The Goose Girl’s Horse
Nancy Farmer
three and a half

The Goose-Girl (p. 136) is another one of the fairy-tales I loved as a child, but I think I enjoyed the original more in this case. While I agree that Falada got the short end of the stick for her loyalty to a spineless, stupid girl, the ending of Nancy Farmer’s retelling of the story sort of took the wind out of the story’s sails. Stories that end with a character having known all along what was going to happen, or characters who are revealed to have manufactured tension for the protagonist make me wonder why I spent any time being concerned for her at all. In any case, Farmer retells The Goose-Girl from the first person point of view of Falada, a fairy horse kicked out of the fairy kingdom for not putting up with abuse against her. She’s tasked with carrying the Princess Belinda to her betrothed, but along the way she and Falada are cheated further and dropped down a peg. The only way they’re going to get out of this fresh mess is if Belinda learns some agency and finally speaks up for herself. Sometimes, you’ve got to make your own magic.

A Wolf at the Door
Tanith Lee
4 stars

This story I couldn’t identify, (possibly Little Red Riding Hood? p. 241) but I liked it all the same. The setting and the concepts read uniquely for me, making it a very enjoyable story.

It’s the Ice Age. Glasina lives with her mother and father by the frozen sea shore, where shaggy lions which look like chrysanthemums have learned to speak and beg for scraps from the humans. They don’t speak especially intelligently, but a talking animal is a talking animal. When Glasina one day meets a very articulate wolf and invites him home for a meal, she and her family soon discover they’ve acquired a bit of an uncouth house guest. It’s not like they can just kick him out, either. I mean, what if he’s an enchanted prince? Is it really worth turning him back?

Ali Baba and the Forty Aliens
Janeen Webb
five-stars

I loved this retelling. I wasn’t so sure of it at first but I absolutely loved the way Webb changed the original story, while keeping the same elements of the old one.

Alberto’s got a bit of a short stick. For one, he’s ended up with the nick name Ali Baba, and for another, he’s kind of an outsider, which has nothing to do at all with being excluded from the other kids private jokes and games. No, Ali is a real loner. He likes his black shirts and spiky hair, and his excursions out to the old Australian goldfields–mines long abandoned by prospectors to the delight of tourists and tourist shops. But one day it isn’t a few flecks of gold that Ali stumbles upon at one of the mines. No, it’s forty not-people, and a strange door concealing unimaginable riches. Ali can’t believe his luck, but sudden wealth is hard to hide, and his brother Dean is sure to catch wind of his new fortune.

Swans
Kelly Link
five-stars

At first I could only recognize the origins of this story, but I couldn’t find it in my book. Then I realized it was because the book put it in a frame story and called it The Tale of the Lost Alphabet. I don’t know what the name of the original story is, but in the version I know, the protagonist’s seven brothers were turned into rooks instead of swans, and not because they were too noisy but because they were lazy. In any case, Kelly Link retells this story in another mixture of fairy tale and modern setting, and borrows elements from a few other tales as well to round off her story. She ends her tale strongly, giving the reader some much needed catharsis for the emotion she’s built throughout.

Emma lives with her father the King and her six brothers in a big palace surrounded by memories of her dead mother, and she doesn’t say a word. When her father brings home an enchanted step-mother, Emma soon finds herself with six swans instead of six brothers. Of course, as nice as it is to have a new flock of pets around, her new step-mother doesn’t stop there, and soon everyone but silent Emma is a swan. With her step-mother gone and Emma all on her own, she must find away to bring back her family and come to terms with the loss of her mother for once and for all.

The Kingdom of Melting Glances
Katherine Vaz
4 stars

This was definitely one of my favorites in the anthology. The imagery and the word-play both are amazing, and make the story as real as fanciful. I recognized this tale too, but it’s not in my fairytale book. Perhaps I read it on Faith Mudge’s blog, Beyond the Dreamline (another great fairy tale resource, if you’re looking). It’s a very sweet tale, sure to warm even the coldest hearts (by proximity to the Sun alone).

Rosa with the lily-shaped birthmark on her face has just lost her mother and father who she suspects have melted at last into a puddle of each other’s love Unfortunately, this leaves her alone with her two nasty, spiteful sisters who can’t stand that the kind-hearted Rosa might get anything good for herself. They thwart her every happiness, even going so far as to attempt to kill her hummingbird friend. Distraught, Rosa goes on a journey to find the injured birth. It will take her all across the sky, but Rosa is nothing if not determined.

Hansel’s Eyes
Garth Nix
three and a half

This is a pretty straight forward, modern retelling of Hansel and Gretel (p. 160). Nix gives us the same wicked step-mother and weak-hearted father, but shakes up the witch’s candy house for an arcade shop in an abandoned part of town. Hansel immediately falls under the spell of the flickering video screens, but Gretel is spared. She’s got the talent for witching herself, and the witch who snatches them offers to teach her the craft. The catch is that if Gretel refuses, the witch will carve up the both of them and sell their organs on the black market. Naturally, Gretel accepts the witch’s offer, and naturally the witch comes to an unhappy end, but the method of which is employed here might surprise you.

Becoming Charise
Kathe Koja
4 stars

If the author bio hadn’t said that this was a retelling of The Ugly Duckling I might never have known. It’s a very clever use of the source material to describe the gauntlet that is adolescence, and the balance between fitting in and being who one is meant to be.

Charise is a bit of an outsider. She’s picked on at school and called a nerd for her interests in Albert Einstein and science and reading. She finds her studies boring and lacking substance and longs to find herself in a place that can nurture her interests and accept her the way she is. Her aunt is mostly sympathetic to the girl’s pain, but when Charise is offered the opportunity to transfer to a high end school across town, her aunt’s answer is a soul crushing no. Stuck now in the unending torment of her school and her bullies, Charise must find out who she is: just another duckling, or a cygnet waiting for her snow white wings.

The Seven Stage a Comeback
George Maguire
3-stars-out-of-5

seven spiders spinningWhile I liked this story the least out of the anthology, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that George Maguire wrote what was one of my favorite childhood novels: Seven Spiders Spinning. In case anyone was wondering if my love of spiders just came from a whim one day, no. I’ve loved spiders for as long as I can remember, and this book is one of the reasons why.

The Seven Stage a Comeback is most definitely not a spidery story, though one does get chills and creeps reading it. After Snow White left the dwarves, a huge void opened up in their lives which cause pain that no one could predict. The narrative unfolds in dialogue alone between the seven of them, and quickly turns stalkerish. But they’re dwarves, not humans. No one expects them to act with human decency. If they want to kidnap their beloved Snow White back to them, well, who could blame them?

The Twelve Dancing Princesses
Patricia A. McKillip
4 stars

This story, as far as I can tell, doesn’t change anything at all from the original story of The Dance-Away Shoes (p. 104). While I loved the original tale, I’ve already read it, and perhaps expected a little more creativity for its retelling. Aside from the fairy princes being turned into the undead, really, nothing much else was changed.

A soldier returning home from the war shares the last of his meal with an old woman who in return tells him of a desperate king trying in vein to find out where his daughters keep going every night, wearing away their shoes doing whatever it is that they are doing. The king seems to have no trouble finding people to look into the task for him, which is amazing when we consider that it’s no secret he beheads those who fail. The old woman gives the soldier some advice to not eat or drink anything the princesses give him, and gifts him with an cloak of invisibility before sending him on his way. Figuring he’s got nothing else to lose, the soldier decides to give it a go, but what he finds out along the way will both delight and horrify him.

The next book on my reading list is The Stranger by Albert Camus.

Free Book, Guys

/ N J Magas / 6 Comments

This is just a quick post to let you know that Amok is free on Amazon for this weekend only. If you’re a fan of sci-fi, magical realism, or speculative fiction in general, click the cover below and see what sort of stories 24 talented authors put together, using settings from all over Asia.

coverFree, free, free! This weekend only!

Empires of Sand: Afterthoughts

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Empires of Sand
David Ball
770 pages
4 stars

 

Phew! I mean really, I can’t remember the last book I read that was even close to this long. It may have been something by Terry Goodkind, but even his books aren’t usually this long winded. Empires of Sand is the second (!) book on my 2014 reading list. Yes, I’m a little behind, I’m aware of this. Even as a seven hundred page instrument of blunt force trauma, the book fulfilled it’s purpose for me: it kept me entertained and it put me in a desert mindset to write Bone Wall. I enjoyed it, and if you’re the type who likes to get lost (literally) in a good historical fiction, I think you’ll enjoy it too.

empires of sandI hate to ruin history for you, but there are some spoilers here.

David Ball tells his story in two parts. The first is the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war. The second follows the adventures of the main characters, Moussa and Paul, a decade later and largely in the Sahara. If the afterword is anything to go by, Ball wrote his story thick with history, and his attention to detail shines brightly throughout the narrative. At no point did I ever disbelieve any of the events I was reading. His use of real people from history, even giving them agency within the story, adds realism and suspense that I greatly appreciated.

My sympathies were with Moussa from the start. As a half breed between a French count and a Taureg noble, he gets the shit end of the stick in pretty much everything he does. He’s gored by a boar in the first scene because the evil priest hates his mother, he’s beaten and tormented at school by his peers and his teacher, he’s forced to flee with his mother after she kills the evil priest who tries to molest him (haha, I bet you didn’t see that coming. Hold onto your hats, it’s not the first cliche we’ll meet along the way). In the desert home of his mother, he’s beaten and tormented by his peers for being half French, disavowed by his cousin for not taking up with the French cause,  slandered as weak by the other Taureg nobles for taking a soft position on the French, and sold out by his aunt who’s only mind is her own comfort and social advancement. I would have felt more sympathy for Paul, but at times I felt that he wore his PTSD a little too conveniently.

Paul is Moussa’s cousin, and very close to him in age. Much to his mother Elisabeth’s dismay, Paul will never be count as his father Jules is the second born of the family and Moussa is the heir. After Jules is disgraced, dishonored and dispirited enough to take his own life, Elisabeth takes matters into her own hands and pulls the strings behind the stage to see to it that Paul rises to success that will eventually elevate her as well. Paul himself idolizes his father and takes his death quite hard. The only other person he loves as much is his cousin Moussa. When his uncle, aunt and cousin are forced to flee the country, Paul is devastated but follows in the footsteps of his father and joins the army where he enlists on an expedition into the Sahara to survey the land for a possible railway. Driven by the stories told to him by his aunt and his own thirst for adventure, Paul quickly finds that life in the dunes is full of treachery, bloody murder, and hard choices. What he’s seen and had to do he won’t be able to shake easily from his psyche, and will ultimately carve a path of bloody revenge in the sands.

If you’ve ever seen the Disney adaptation of Daniel P. Mannix’s book, The Fox and the Hound, then you are already familiar with the plot of Empires of Sand. Two youngsters born of different worlds become fast friends and inseparable playmates. However, due to an accident caused by the wilder of the two, they are forced into separation. As adults they come together again, share a brief moment of happy reuniting before the stark differences in loyalties separate them again in blood. What follows is a violent chase through the wilderness that ultimately ends in absolution. While I didn’t altogether mind the familiarity of the plot, it did make the ending somewhat predictable. Fortunately, the characters and the setting do wonders at holding reader attention.

This is a very, very long book, with multiple point of views that hop around often, sometimes without the benefit of a scene or chapter break. In the beginning, this confused me a great deal, especially as these point of view hops coincided with time jumps, making it difficult to find myself in the story. As I got deeper into the book, however, the plot became more linear, and the point of view shifts a little more clearly defined, making it easier to anchor myself.

There are some scenes and even point of views that I felt were a little superfluous and tenuously relevant to the story. There are a great number of pages devoted to the backstory of Father Murat and Sister Godrick, Moussa’s chief antagonists in the first half of the story, yet, for characters who do not appear at all in the second half where the bulk of the actual plot happens, their history seems to be unnecessary padding for the book. The point of views devoted to the machinations of Bismarck and the rest of the Prussians also seems rather unnecessary, given that the siege of Paris plays its biggest role as setting in the first half of the book, and absolutely no role in the second half. The Prussians are never heard from again. Delescluze as well is an unfired Chekhov’s gun of a character. He shows up briefly in the story to set up the disgrace of Paul’s father, and then is forever gone from the story, despite several instances of mention that he is being searched for in the book. A little disappointing. In the end, each of these characters is a cog (if tiny) in the machinery of the story, however the convenience of them is very obvious. Almost deus ex machina obvious.

Another thing that sort of tweaked my buttons a little was the villain standard. To be a villain in this story, one had to either have a sexual taste for the same gender (Father Murat, Jubar Pasha), or be Muslim (Tamrit, Mahdi, the Shamba). To a lesser extent, a woman whose power of evil is granted via sexuality (sexual abuse in the case of Sister Godrick, and sexual manipulation in the case of Elisabeth). It’s not that I specifically take issue with people of these groups or having these traits being made villains in stories, more that I take issue with the pervasiveness of them as villains. It’s been done to death, and sometimes it gets a bit offensive.

Now that I’ve complained about the book for a while, here are some of the things I loved:

The setting: Ball writes his settings very tangibly. I could feel the dank of the catacombs, the atmosphere of the Parisian streets, the heat of the Saharan sun and the chill of the mines. Ball spares the reader no detail in placing them right where he wants them. There is no difficulty in painting the scenes of the book in the mind, and it does wonders for bringing the story to life.

The suspense: Whether it’s the playful antics of boys antagonizing both French and Prussian troops or a bloody massacre in the desert, Ball knows how to leave a scene dangling, or draw a scene out just the right amount to make page turning a must.

The characters: Despite their failings, Moussa and Paul are both fundamentally likable characters. Ball did such a good job endearing me to them that I was near tears at the fates of their families and their inevitable separation. That they were able to reconcile in the end was a relief, and allowed me to come away from the book with pleasant feelings.

Strong narrative: This story is stuck firmly in my mind. I have a book hangover at the moment that’s making it difficult to pick up anything else, but the list is long and ever growing longer. Onto the next great book.

The next book on my reading list is A Wolf at the Door, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

Welcoming New Books With Squee

/ N J Magas / 6 Comments

I know what you’re thinking: “Two posts in two days? Did some one die?” No. No one died, why would you think that? That’s horrible. Can’t a woman deviate from her regular blogging schedule without the internet rubber-necking for a look at the bodies? Yeesh.

Actually, this week has been a mix of awesome and frustrating. I’ll start with the awesome first, because it’s really, really awesome. Also because I’m sure people will read the whole thing if I promise some sort of emotional carnage at the end.

Starting at the beginning, way, way back at the start of this week, I came home from shopping to a failure to deliver mail slip from the embassy. Sweet! New passport, I can finally buy my Christmas plane tickets home! But there being no time to pick it up at that moment, I went after work to grab my stiff new passport. When I got home, I found yet another failure to deliver slip waiting for me. This one from a package sent from New York. GASP!

So I busted open the door and cried, “Alex! We gotta go to the post office. NOW!”

“Why?” she called back down.

“Because it’s here!”

“What’s here?”

“IT!” And then I ran outside and whined at the door until she sauntered out as if the post office were open 24/7 and I wouldn’t die of disappointment if I didn’t have it in my hands that very night. I think I might have violated a few traffic laws in rushing down there, but I was too much of a blur for the cops to see me running reds on my bicycle. It was 8pm. When did the post office even close? Would I be able to retrieve it at all that night?

The lights were still on at the main office, and no one had bothered to pull down the blinds. It doesn’t matter what office hours are printed on the door, post office availability follows the same logic as Halloween candy availability: if the porch light is on, we’re good to go.

Huffing and red-faced, and slapped my second failed delivery notice on the front desk. “So-Sorry. One- just one more- please.”

The lady at the counter gave me a pitying look as she took my slip to the back, but I didn’t care. It was back there. The good vibes could not be contained. When she handed me my package, I left her with my identification card. No time could be spared. I had to get home. Had to open it.

Magically we acquired food somewhere along the way, but that was secondary compared to the package I had in my hand. With the tender care of a heart surgeon I slit open the box, and with the energy and excitement of each of my twenty-eight Christmases combined, I lifted away the protective wrap. This is what I found:

IMG_1695

Books. Beautiful, coveted, signed books. I was not expecting such generosity. I wasn’t expecting anything for what was a small favor to an admired author. I’m delighted and anxious to start reading all of these, but I really have to be done with Empires of Sand first. (Honestly, I don’t know why I bother making a yearly reading list. Too many other books jump in, demanding to be read.) My most gleeful thanks to both Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman for the above gift. These will most certainly be numbered among my personal treasures.

Ends

Let’s now return to the aforementioned Christmas plane tickets. Due to some family concerns, I’ve decided to go back to Canada this Christmas again. Waiting another two years for another visit is undesirable at this time. My family had in the past expressed puzzlement as to why Alex does not travel with me to visit them, and the reason for that is purely economic. It costs on average about $1200 for a single person to fly from Japan to Canada and back. For the both of us to take the trip would be at least $2500, not including finding someone to take care of the dog. My family, inclusive as they always are, decided to raise the money among themselves to pay for the both of us to visit this Christmas. (This would make a terrific holiday special.)

In fact, I managed to find good plane tickets for the both of us that didn’t even use all the money they sent us. Huzzah! The difficulty started when, in the time it took for me to submit all my information to the travel agency, the price jumped up by $800. But when I say that the tickets were good, I mean it. They were really good tickets, with a fast airline and short layovers. I figured that they were worth the increase, and accepted the change. And immediately after I confirmed the whole thing I realized that the increase put the total price over my credit limit.

Naturally, the charge was declined, but the agency kindly informed me that I should double check all my information and try again, or call them to consider other options. Knowing immediately what the problem was, I called my credit card instead. The continuation of my problems was likely in part my fault. The company assured me that the increase would be easy and simple, rattled off the information they had on file for me, and without pausing to allow me to confirm or edit any of it, sent the short application. It was rejected.

So I was sent to another department for a long version of the application, in which I corrected all the information they had on file for me, and answered all their questions truthfully. Perhaps too truthfully. I probably should have mentioned my marital status, but they never asked for it. As a result, it likely looks to them that I am living way above my means. I seem to have been denied my increase.

But, no matter. The agency gave the option to pay over two credit cards. All I had to do was call them and request that the additional cost be charged to Alex. It was a flawless plan that had only one flaw: the agency call center appears to be abandoned. I waited on hold, listening to the same robot man informing me that they were experiencing an unusually high call volume, for thirty minutes. Twice. While calling on international rates.

So I sent them an email. It may have been slightly passive aggressive. I’m still waiting to hear back.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2014: Afterthoughts

/ N J Magas / 7 Comments

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2014
256 pages
4 stars

 

I finally have a weekend free to do some reviewing (for that matter, to do some reading for reviewing later). Weeks of stress and studying have come to an end. Time to get back into the literary saddle. My creative brain was wound so tight that when I sat at the keyboard last night, had one drink and next thing I knew there were 2,500 shiny new words before me. Awesome. If only they’d always come that easy. Not sure yet if they’re any good. Honestly, I’m afraid to look.

As with most issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction I enjoyed this one. While nothing in particular stood out and a couple stories didn’t do it for me, on the whole it’s a good read.

FSF May Jun

Which I’m going to do my best not to spoil. Promise.

The End of the Silk Road
David D. Levine
One-star-rating-1

I liked this story the least out of the issue. There are a few genres I don’t normally care for, but can read if they’re interesting enough. Detective mysteries are one of those genres, however The End of the Silk Road doesn’t have much in it to make it fresh. Several times throughout the story I felt I could skip whole paragraphs of familiar tropes that didn’t do all that much for the narrative. The story suffers an insufficiently entertaining first person protagonist, and wears its sci-fi skin like a bed sheet with eye-holes cut out.

Mike Drayton, PI has been hired to investigate the business of a Venusian drug dealer by his rival in love and life, Victor Grossman. If he can keep his hands off the dames and his head in the game, he stands to earn a tidy profit out of the deal, even if his employer is the last sleaze in the solar system he’d want to work for. But of course, it’s never that easy for a private investigator, and the past–both ugly and beautiful–has a way of stalking up on those lugging around too much baggage.

I rolled my eyes enough through this story to give myself eye strain, but if you’re a fan of detective mysteries and sci-fi settings, you’ll likely enjoy The End of the Silk Road a lot more than I did.

The Fisher Queen
Alyssa Wong
three and a half

Alyssa Wong’s take on mermaids in The Fisher Queen is both startling and intriguing. The story is as disturbing as it is poetic. Visceral without being graphic. Familiar and exotic. What I didn’t like about it came down to mechanics, specifically near the end where some things were left too unexplained to feel like the story concluded satisfactorily.

Mermaids are real. Lily knows it. Everyone says her mother was a mermaid, but she knows it’s not true. They’re just stupid fish, after all. She catches them for sale as an Asian delicacy. They’re ugly and dumb, and only worth what wealthy people will pay to eat something unusual. But there’s a seedy underbelly to the fishing industry that she doesn’t know about. Secrets, lies and questionable morals come to light when Lily joins her father on a deep sea fishing expedition and the truth is a deep, cold ocean.

The things I enjoyed and didn’t enjoy about this story surprised me but ultimately, I couldn’t connect with Lily’s motivations, especially at the end. I don’t like it when characters experience a light-switch of inner change. The transformation always seems too sudden to be believable. Still, it is a gripping story, perhaps to inspire a few nightmares.

White Curtain
Pavel Amnuel (Translated by Anatoly Belilovsky)
4 stars

This was a bit of a confusing story to begin with. It took a while for the scene to settle itself, and the characters who keep interrupting each other and vaguely hinting at the past make trying to understand the science fiction or even the premise of the story a bit of a challenge. However, once the reader gets their footing steady enough, this is actually a very pleasant read.

Dima has been having a difficult time of it. His wife Irina is a year dead and he has exhausted every avenue he can think of to bring her back. His final option is to consult with their old friend and colleague Oleg, now considered by some as a prophet. Dima knows Oleg is highly skilled at splicing together realities to alter people’s lives, after all, they used to work together, but will Oleg even agree to help him after Dima stole Irina away from him, all those years ago?

The prose in this story make it a wonderful read, as well as the sad procession of emotions that really tug at the heart strings. It is one of the best stories in the anthology, in my opinion.

Presidential Cryptotrivia
Oliver Buckram
4 stars

Like much of Buckram’s work, this collection of totally true secret facts about each American president is short, witty and entertaining. For that, I can forgive the lack of a story here. These little tidbits of shocking revelations gave me a few giggles of which I’m always thankful to Buckram for.

Bartleby the Scavenger
Katie Boyer
3-stars-out-of-5

A bit of a caveat to this review: I don’t care for retellings, I don’t like dystopias and Bartleby the Scrivener alternated between boring me to sleep and frustrating me into high blood pressure. That said, the fact that I could give Bartleby the Scavenger three stars at all has everything to do with Boyer’s skill as a writer.

If you’ve read Herman Melville’s original story, then there isn’t anything all that new in Boyer’s retelling. Even the names are very cheekily similar, if not the same. I’m fortunate to have read the story in the recent enough past that it hasn’t dissolved into obscurity from my goldfish memory, and I was able to connect the dots between the two works. There are many, many connections.

I won’t spoil it further though. Boyer weaves the original tale seamlessly into a post-apocalyptic landscape with several dystopian embellishments embroidered into the pattern, and comes out with something that is as original as it is derivative. I didn’t enjoy reading it any more than I enjoyed reading Melville’s story, but Boyer is clever enough to bring all the elements together in such a way that I could at least tip my hat to the talent that it took to do so.

Rooksnight
Mark Laidlaw
4 stars

As soon as I saw the cover of this issue I was excited. It couldn’t be, could it? A continuation of Bemused from the Sept/Oct 2013 issue? Oh yes it could! I wasn’t disappointed either. The characters still hold up, and though the plot is nothing out of the ordinary for a fantasy, it keeps itself entertaining.

It’s a tough life being a traveling bard, tougher still when you’re on a mission with a gargoyle. You never know where your next meal will come from. Sometimes you’ve got to steal it from a nest, and sometimes you’ve got to accept dinner invitations from suspicious folks. After the bloody events of Rooksnight, however, I’m not sure if Gorlen will seriously consider either option in the future.

One thing that did snag me a bit was that the prose–especially in the beginning–felt very self important. I wouldn’t have minded this all that much if the POV had been more closely attached to one of the characters. This not being the case, it stumbled my reading a little bit. Fortunately, this quirk seemed to be shaken off later in the story as the action picked up. Laidlaw is a master of evocative description, and the story ended very strongly, with a nice full circle turn-around that always delights me in fiction. I hope to read more of the adventures of Gorlen and Spar in subsequent issues.

The Memory Cage
Tim Sullivan
3-stars-out-of-5

I’m a little on the fence with this one as I find myself with a lot of Sullivan’s writing. On the one hand, the emotions in The Memory Cage are clear, crisp and painful. On the other, the mechanics of it, the drawn out exposition, the sci-fi necessary dystopian setting, and the overly familiar genre tropes bogged me down as I read it. I think I enjoyed it, but I can’t say that for sure.

Death isn’t the end, at least not definitively. Not any more. Not since the discovery of little pockets of revived consciousness, floating about in space, charged up by the interaction of particles. Jim can’t explain it–he’s just a technician, but he’s been honing in on his late father’s signal for a while now, searching for answers to the wrong questions while the those back on Earth destroy themselves.

There’s a lot of information in this story that I’m not sure all relates, but it is put together well enough that I can’t decide if it made the read difficult or not. Really, I think I liked and disliked this story in exactly equal proportions.

The Shadow in the Corner
Jonathan Andrew Sheen
3-stars-out-of-5

Despite a small victory up there with Bartleby the Scavenger, this is yet another story which I will have to admit ignorance of the source material. At least regarding specific details. The Cthulhu mythos is pervasive enough on the internet that it’s impossible to not have some knowledge of it.

Arnold Boatwright and Agrawal Narendra are just two scientists out of many who have tinkered with the secrets of the universe they’ve got no business messing with–as all good scientists do. It’s clear that the experiment (given the Frankenstein treatment of “the details are too horrifying to ever be made public”) has gone gone wrong, but no one knows just how horribly wrong. Well, Agrawal does. He saw… it. Directly. Everyone else saw… whatever it was second hand. Through a recording that they can’t get to play the same way again. Now Agrawal is convinced there’s something in the corner. A shadow. And it’s getting closer. And closer.

And closer.

Containment Zone
Naomi Kritzer
3-stars-out-of-5

I think the thing that kept me most from enjoying this story was the fact that I couldn’t pinpoint the protagonist’s age. In the end I placed her somewhere near to fifteen, but only because there were moments when I thought she was as old as twenty, and others as young as eight. This inability to accurately picture her in my head kept me largely out of the story, like an anxiety lingering on the fringes of the mind can ruin an otherwise pleasant day.

Rebecca is just like any other (?) aged girl, except that she lives with her father on a seastead off the coast of LA called New Minerva, free of things like national laws and regulations. When one day a mysterious illness strikes Min and several other seasteads, her father dumps Rebecca with one of their neighbors and disappears to fight the new infection, only appearing again briefly to give Rebecca and her host family a trial vaccine. But sitting quietly inside and waiting for the crisis to blow over is just not something that precocious children do, and confident that the totally untested vaccine will keep them safe, Rebecca and her friend Thor venture out of their quarantine to see just what the heck is going on. And boy, the skeletons are tumbling all the way out of the closet.

The pacing of this story is a little off from my personal tastes. It starts very slowly and ends in a sprint, to a sudden and unsatisfying conclusion that again made me question the protagonist’s age. The fact that I couldn’t decide if the story was supposed to be taken seriously or as a playful bit of fun at the expense of more melodramatic sci-fi also made reading this one a little uncomfortable, but in the end the characters were entertaining enough, at least to read it without much difficulty.

The next book on my reading list is Empires of Sand by David Ball. I swear I’m going to finish it this time, guys.

In the Black Abyss Without a Light or My Writing Process

/ N J Magas / 22 Comments

Last week Lori L MacLaughlin tagged me in the writing process blog hop. After I spat out my coffee and had a series of mini elementary playground flashbacks (I’m it, I’m IT. Crap, What are the rules? No tag backs? Is fist to chin a sin? Is the girl’s bathroom a safe zone? Is it?!) I realized I was only supposed to write about how I write, and then tag some other tormented writer souls to do the same. Damnit, Lori, you made me break my no talking about writing streak. So if there’s anyone out there who is sitting on the edge of their seats, biting their nails to a bloody nub waiting for this information, here it is, but I’ve got to tell you, I’ve withheld it this long for a reason.

Also, I’m stealing the questions from Alex’s blog, because then at least I have some structure. Structure is good. Structure is nice. Ooo, I should include that in my answers:

 

WHAT AM I WORKING ON?

Oh boy, what am I not working on? I have a novel that I’ve been starting and scrapping, and starting and scrapping again for over two years now. I’ve finally just ripped the delete key out of my keyboard to power through it without the nagging need to smear away everything I’ve written in tears and rum. It’s an other-world, dark fantasy set in the (a?) desert, because Europe is hella boring you guys. Seriously. I’m aiming for 150,000 words because that seems like it would produce a book of a decent clubbing weight.

Other than that I’ve got another two, or possibly three novel ideas bubbling around in my head including but not limited to, magical eye-worms and the psychedelic pictures they draw, outlaw priests saving the world, and tits and swords saving the world. Also with magical eye worms. Possibly.

Oh, also lots of short stories and novellas about death. That’s not an intentional theme, by the way, it’s just sort of happened that way. I write about death a lot. It fascinates me and I’m not even sure why. I guess that’s why I’m writing about it.

 

HOW DOES MY WORK DIFFER FROM OTHERS IN MY GENRE?

My work is different in that it’s not finished. Honestly, I haven’t had enough stories actually published to know exactly how my work is different from others. I’m still figuring that out. I’m still finding the me in the words I’m writing. I know that I like writing from unique settings. My travels in Japan and Asia have become closely tied into my writing. I also like to challenge certain roles in society in a lot of my writing: the roles of men and women, the role of religion and government, the role of technology, etc. Does any of that make my writing different? No, not at all. Maybe that’ll change while I continue to grow as a writer.

 

WHY DO I WRITE WHAT I DO?

I write what I write because I believe humans are terrible communicators. We are alike and connected in so many ways through a mutual human experience, and yet we’re shit at empathizing with each other. So when I write about a loss of cultural identity, I want others to look at their own lives and feel that loss. When someone reads one of my fundamentally good characters being a shitty person, I want to highlight that truth in our lives, that good people don’t always behave in good ways, and bad people don’t always behave in bad ways. When I write about death, I’m not doing it just to come to terms with my own insecurities and curiosities, but to reach through the pages and tell my reader, “we’re ALL gonna die, and isn’t that both terrifying and awesome?”. I guess I write what I write because we need more ways to connect to each other, and sometimes its easier to do that through fiction and fantasy than in real life.

Also, I like dragons

 

HOW DOES MY WRITING PROCESS WORK?

Now we’re getting to the meat of this, heheh.

First of all, I’ve been writing for a long time, since high school, at least, and before that I told my stories in doodles and typewriters without ribbon. So I’ve been writing for a long time, but actual, sit down, write a novel, with structure, polish it and send it out into the world, that part is still new to me. So bear with me if this all seems like a confusing jumble to you. Believe me, it’s no better in my head either.

I start with a character, or a concept for a character. Either I’ve seen someone or something inspiring, or a situation that calls for a specific sort of personality is chucked up from the sawdust under the thousand spinning hamster wheels that is my imagination. Then I let that character run around exploring a blank world. Usually they do a good enough job of populating and coloring it on their own (they mostly stay within the lines). By that I mean, I usually don’t have to work too hard to build a world around a character, once I have the basic premise for that character.

Once I have enough of the world and the character unraveled to have a few more points than ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ I sit down and start writing. I think most people call this pantsing, and I did too. I called myself a pantser for a long time before I realized that this was just the pre-outline stage. This is just the part where I’m testing out character voice and setting mechanics to see if I actually have a viable idea. Sometimes I don’t, though I like to salvage as much as I can from failed projects. Every idea is precious! I don’t know when I might run out (god forbid).

When I’ve pantsed far enough into the story that the plot holes are getting big enough to lose a blue whale in, I step away and start outlining. By that time I’ll have a point A and a point Z and a series of random binary code and Egyptian hieroglyphs in between. The outline then, is where I connect the dots between all that mess and try to make a sensible path between the huge gaping maw of empty plot and random events. Sometimes I have to change the course away from my first awesome idea, or sometimes I have to scrap large chunks altogether if they just can’t play nicely with the rest of the story. Sometimes I have to pound away at a single niggling wrinkle in the plot that disrupts everything else before and after it, but is crucial to the story. Sometimes I break out the poster board and sticky notes. Sometimes I draw character maps. Sometimes I sacrifice a chicken. The point is, I always have an outline before I start seriously writing, because the outline will let me know which is the next pitstop on my writing road trip that I need to hit. My outline will usually tell me (if I’m writing a novel) who the POV character is, what the setting is, what the significant events are, and what the consequences will be for each chapter. If I’m writing a short story, my outline will do the same thing, only for each scene.

After I’ve wrestled with my idea for long enough that we’re both sweaty and exhausted but I am the one ultimately triumphant, I open up a fresh document, stare at the beautiful white screen and panic.

The panic stage usually lasts anywhere from a few hours to a few days, and can also be accompanied by deleting paragraph after paragraph of unsatisfactory beginnings, and uncontrollable sobbing. Usually at around this time I completely forget why this idea was so awesome to begin with.

Once I have a few lines of dialogue written that I’m satisfied enough with to keep, things usually start falling into place from there.

I like to write in the morning, after Alex leaves for work. I have the house to myself, my creative juices are fresh from a nights sleep, it’s quiet and– ooh, she did not just post that on Facebook.

Yes, social media is a terrible distraction in my writing. I don’t turn it off, because when I do I inevitably feel the oppressive silence and expectation weighing me down. Loneliness eats at my soul and crushes my creativity.

Ahem. I keep social media open while I write, but I exert my tremendous power of will and allow myself only to check updates once every fifty words or so. I can usually almost make it that long.

I try to also stick to a daily word count. This was really hard in the beginning because there are always so many more interesting things to do than the thing you are supposed to be doing. I will leave dirty dishes growing their own self sufficient ecosystems in the sink for MONTHS until it comes to deadline crunch time, at which point I will become desperately in need of that potato peeler I used back in April when I was making homemade french fries. These days I’m not only achieving my daily word count, but every week I’m increasing it by another 100 words. So far so good, but I don’t know how long I can keep it up. I think I hear the silverware drafting their own constitution.

Hemingway once said “write drunk, edit sober”. I like to do things slightly differently. I write juiced out of my mind on caffeine, revise with a rum and coke, and take beta reader suggestions after half a bottle of wine. We all have our methods. Mine might not be the best one for you. I do recommend walking though. Not only because it’s ridiculously easy to put on pounds when your ass is stuck in a chair all day typing at a keyboard, but walking helps stimulate the creative mind. It’s a true thing, go look it up.

On the topic of revisions, I strike without mercy. Kill your darlings, burn down their houses, and club their baby seals. I’m not afraid to cut out large chunks of uncooperative writing. I cut and paste them into a ‘deleted scenes’ folder anyway, so they’re not really gone, just exiled. After the first cull, I’ll re-read it in a different font, then print it in an even different font and take a red pen to the physical copy. I may repeat this process a few times before it ever sees the eyes of a beta reader, or even an alpha reader. Again, it depends on how much loathing I’ve accrued for the project.

As for the number of drafts I’ll go through before I think a work is polished enough for a submission, I don’t have a set number. I’ve gone as high as eight and as low as two. I have some accepted works that I’m still tempted to take a red pen to–in the book they’re published in.

 

So that’s it folks. My writing process. Not sure if that was helpful, or if it even made any sense. Writing is a different beast for all of us, and you can really only do what works for you.

I also don’t think I know another writer who hasn’t already done this blog hop, so I don’t know who to tag. If you’re a writer reading this, and you’re burning to answer these questions yourself, consider yourself tagged.

Happy writing. :)

Finding Inspiration

/ N J Magas / 18 Comments

Being a writer in Japan, naturally one of the most frequent comments I receive is some variation of the suggestion that I should write about Japan (which usually follows the question “Do you write in Japanese?”). I find this amusing for two reasons. First, if “You should write about X” translated so easily into actually writing a story, the writing world would be populated with a whole lot fewer frustrated authors. Inspiration isn’t something that can be plucked out of a hat. Yes, this technique can be used successfully to ungum the works, to pump some creative juices and to flex the writing muscle, but I’ve found that ‘write about X’ does not produce my strongest work. It doesn’t grab me by the ears of my soul and shake me. The stuff that I really want to write about are the things that some inner eye within me has seen, and tells me “This is really beautiful/frightening/awe inspiring/disgusting and you need to explore how this makes you feel”. I like that feeling and I can’t borrow it from someone else.

Secondly, I do write about Japan, way more than most people know. And I’m not just talking about stories like Where the Fireflies Go or the zombie short that’s bubbling on the back burner–those stories I’ve set in Japan and reflect (with I hope some amount of truth) the culture and atmosphere of this country. I also mean the stories that Japan has brought to life. Bits and pieces of inspiration that light a tiny candle flame in my brain which, if left unattended, can grow into a creative wildfire. A sci-fi dreamed up amid the flashing lights of the never sleeping Tokyo, an ethical fantasy inspired by the pavilions of Kamigamo Shrine, an entire tribe of people to populate my fantasy world brought to life by a single festival at Tanukidani Fudoin. Just because I don’t set most of my stories in Japan doesn’t mean I’m not writing about it, or from it. I’m inspired by this country more often than even I’m aware of, I suspect.

And nowhere is this more true than in my current work in progress. I’ve borrowed heavily from historical Japan on this one, from costume design to social order to language structure. While it is absolutely an other world fantasy, the Japanese influence is strong, and I don’t care much to hide it, either. This is my home, after all.

Today Alex and I took a trip to Eikando Zenrin-ji, which is one of many temples along The Philosopher’s Path in Kyoto’s Sakyo ward. It’s not the first time we’ve been here and I hope it’s not the last. The complex is huge, with many gorgeous buildings to explore, and several gardens and ponds to reflect on.

The temple was founded in 863, ten years after the estate was purchased from a Fujiwara nobleman. It was originally dedicated to Shingon Buddhism, but later turned to Pure Land. Its most famous icon is perhaps its Mikaeri Amida, which is a small Amida Buddha which, instead of looking forward like most Amida icons, looks over its shoulder. The legend of this strange position has several versions: One says that once while the head monk Yokan was performing a ritual, the Amida statue came to life and stepped off its dais. Yokan became temporarily paralyzed with surprise, and so the Amida turned its head to look over its shoulder to scold him for being ‘slow’. The plaque at the temple explains the legend slightly differently. It says that instead of turning its head to scold Yokan, the Amida turned its head to invite Yokan to follow him. In either case, the turned head of the Mikaeri Amida is supposed to signify Amida’s compassion and patience for those who fall behind, or have not yet stepped onto the path of Buddhism.

The icon room itself is incredibly impressive. Glittering with gold leaf and illuminated by several spotlights, its hard not to feel a little bit awed in the quiet room, and to see the Amida in such an unusual position is itself a special treat.

But what I like the most about Eikando Zenrin-ji is its beautiful outdoor architecture. Perhaps because it started its life as a Fujiwara mansion, the design and layout of the buildings is unlike any other temple I’ve visited in Japan so far. Graceful arching bridges and open breezeways connect the different sections of the temple together, and sweeping staircases and balconies give a stunning view of the Kyoto mountains and the forested gardens that surround the complex.

It was these features of this lovely temple that brought me out of a creative slump on my current WIP, Bone Wall, when we first visited last year. The atmosphere and being able to walk through a place so beautiful, and with such amazing design threw my creative brain into ‘what if’ overdrive, and helped create a new starting point from which to tell my story that has made it, frankly, so much stronger than its original versions. Returning today, that feeling is still strong, and it pumps energy into my fingers that then drop words onto the page. Being able to sit in a representation of a setting I’m building is incredibly helpful, and brings things to life far more easily than sitting in my living room with my eyes squeezed closed really tight. In the end, this is ‘write what you know’. Write from your life and your experiences. Write about what speaks to you. Write that which sets fire to your creativity in such a brightly burning torch that you can’t sleep at night. I can’t write about your X, but you can.

Japan is the creative force that drives Bone Wall in lots of different ways. I am writing about Japan, even if I’m not writing about samurai, or geisha, or the technological apocalypse.

For your viewing pleasure: Eikando Zenrin-ji

The World’s Greatest Short Stories: Afterthoughts

/ N J Magas / 11 Comments

The World’s Greatest Short Stories
Edited by James Daley
236 pages
4 stars

 

I don’t usually review classic works for reasons I’ve spoken of before but which largely boil down to laziness. If I’m going to review classics it’s not enough to talk about how the story made me feel. I need to talk about the author and their lives, and how those lives reflect in their writing, what tools we can use to interpret their work and what, if any relevance do they still have today. If you want that sort of detailed analysis, then this blog isn’t for you. What you’re looking for is an English lit class. I’m going to review this book and its stories today because I don’t have anything else to talk about and I’m (still) avoiding talking about my actual writing.

Sometimes I like to spoil stories. Just so you know.

Sometimes I like to spoil stories. Just so you know.

 

To start with, this book introduced me to the writing of a few literary greats which I hadn’t had the chance to read yet: Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and John Updike. It also gave me a chance to form a firm opinion on some others whose work I’d read before: Rudyard Kipling, Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Chinua Achebe, and Virginia Woolf. Happily, it also introduced me to some authors who I’d never even heard of and in many cases whose works were a delight to read. Below are my completely candid, unsophisticated and largely uneducated thoughts on these stories.

Bartleby the Scrivener
Herman Melville

This was an infuriating story to read. Throughout the whole thirty pages of it I was tearing out my hair in the manner one does when watching a horror movie in which the stupid teenagers insist on investigating the suspicious sounds, completely alone, in the dark. “Don’t open the door!” you scream in frustration, flinging your bowl of popcorn at the television, spooking the dog and causing your spouse to roll their eyes at you. Similarly I found myself shouting, “Just turf his obstinate ass!”, throwing my bowl of popcorn at the book, spooking the bird and causing Alex to ask what the hell was wrong with me. I really couldn’t connect with the protagonist’s strange sense of charity toward Bartleby, which really probably says more about my quality as a person than the quality of the story.

The Necklace
Guy de Maupassant

I’m almost one hundred percent positive I’ve read this story before or if not it, then one very similar. It’s not a very unique story. O. Henry must have written dozens like them on his toilet paper. Chances are if you’ve sat through thirty minutes of any sitcom (I feel for you), you’ve seen this story. A financially strapped, yet high society minded woman borrows a diamond necklace from her friend, and then promptly loses it. She and her husband then work their asses off to buy a new necklace, during which time miss priss learns the meaning of hard work and sacrifice. Finally she works up enough money to buy an exact replica of the necklace she lost. But when she returns it and confesses what had happened, her amused friend informs her that the original necklace was a fake and worth only a fraction of the cost of the real one (cue laugh track).

The Death of Ivan Ilych
Leo Tolstoy

I liked this one. In fact, I loved it. I’d read it again, just not when I’m feeling sick. Or depressed. Or really any sort of melancholy. I was excited to read it as lately I’ve heard so much about it, and I can now agree that Tolstoy does know his way around words. Like, damn. The whole story is an account of a man from the peak of his life until his death. With emphasis on the death and the dying part. He goes through all the stages of grief as he degrades on the pages right before our eyes. I could most acutely empathize with his growing malcontent with doctors and their high-minded thought that if they can’t find anything wrong with a patient then there must not be anything wrong with the patient. Puh. If only Ivan had had webMD this story may have ended very differently.

The Man Who Would Be King
Rudyard Kipling

I’m going to take a stab in the dark and assume, without any previous knowledge, that Kipling lived in early twentieth century India. Am I right? Yeah? Hot damn. I mean, I had my suspicions after The Jungle Book and The Courting of Dinah Shadd but after reading The Man Who Would Be King I got to thinking that there may just be a bit of a pattern here. Despite Kipling setting his stories in one of the richest cultural environments I can think of, his writing is as dry as plain, stale toast. Buried in sand. Even a story that features a crucifixion and a bloody beheading takes way too long and three too many naps to get through. Not my favorite story in the collection.

The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

If this story were a person it would be of the sort that you back away from slowly while avoiding eye contact. I’m fairly certain it’s a commentary on postpartum depression, and the absurd way in which mental illness in women was treated back in the day, but damn. This story is just freaky. A lot of it calls up this quote from Jane Eyre:

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: But women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.

Basically it’s a story of a woman who went a bit loopy and is taken to the country by her husband to recover, except he pretty much confines her to her bedroom and won’t let her do anything that he feels is strenuous. Anyone who has ever had to spend three or more days in bed with the flu knows that by the third day it’s a special kind of mental torture to not have anything to do all day. Eventually the protagonist figures that the wallpaper in her room is out to get her and loses it entirely. It’s a good story, is what I’m saying.

The Fortune-Teller
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

If you look very closely at the last period of this story you can see M. Night Shyamalan winking at you. I’m serious, go see for yourself.

The Lady with the Toy Dog
Anton Chekhov

Does the Chekhov’s Gun rule apply to items within a story’s title? ‘Cause if it does, I’m disappointed that the dog in this story didn’t shoot someone in the face. For someone who has such an energetic piece of story-telling advice attributed to him, The Lady with the Toy Dog is actually kind of boring, especially coming after The Fortune-Teller. It’s a pretty standard story of an adulterous affair between a jaded older man and a beautiful, naive young woman. They meet, have a few twists in the sheets and then she returns to her husband. Only then does the protagonist realize how unfortunate it is that he is actually in love with his guilt ridden mistress. He crosses the country to see her again where they continue their affair for a time before both of them realize that they can’t continue on in that manner, in secret. The last paragraph ends the story in chilling vagueness. On second thought, maybe the dog does shoot them both.

How Old Timofei Died with a Song
Rainer Maria Rilke

This one had a frame story so disconnected from the actual story that I forgot all about it by the end–and the whole piece itself is only four and a half pages long. It kind of reads like a fairy tale except without any magic or fairies or enchanted sticks. So not like a fairy tale at all I guess. I’m not entirely sure what this story is about. It’s a lot of events stitched together and none of them have more prominence than another so, yeah. It’s a fairy tale.

The Path to the Cemetery
Thomas Mann

Or Old Man Yells at Cloud, whichever you prefer. In this story an ugly old man walks down a path toward the cemetery to pay his respects to the family he lost, along with everything else in his life. Along the way, a strong, beautiful young man rides by on his bicycle and old man flies into an apoplectic rage because symbolism. He chases after the youth and knocks him off his bike. The young man, understandably pissed shoves the old man down, gets on his bike and rides away, leaving the old man foaming at the mouth and raving about the nerve of young people who dare ride their bicycles on the path to the cemetery. Yup.

The Prussian Officer
D. H. Lawrence

Good god, the homoeroticism in this story! I mean, I know it was written by D. H. Lawerence but wow! Every single scene between the Captain and the orderly is absolutely charged with sexual tension. Even the last scene between them feels like a great erotic release of frustration. I can’t be the only one who read it this way, can I? Can I? (Cue crickets.)

Araby
James Joyce

Oh, Joyce, but you take a long time to get to a simple point, don’t you? This story seems way, way longer than four pages.

Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law
Luigi Pirandello

Ok, here’s a nice little mystery for you: a frustrated man says it’s his mother-in-law who is mad, yet the old woman claims it’s the other way round. This curious state of affairs has the whole town divided down the gender line, and yet the only person who can shine light on the truth is the wife, who validates both stories. Honestly, I care less about who is insane and more about what the wife is possibly getting out of being so coy. Unfortunately, I get no satisfactory answer to either.

The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf

Much like The Yellow Wallpaper, this is a story about a woman strangely preoccupied with what is on her wall. I understand that they didn’t have Xbox back then, but you’d think these women would have something better to do than stare at a wall all day. Even needlepoint has to be more exciting than that. The narrative is annoyingly stream of consciousness, which makes it difficult to follow. If I wanted to listen to an ADD wandering of random thoughts vaguely connected, I’d go sit in a quiet room alone for an hour.

A Hunger Artist
Franz Kafka

As noted, this one is written by Kafka, so I’m tempted to interpret it as commentary on the starved state of the literary soul forced to comply with so many rules and conventions in order to secure the means to sustain a meager life–even though it knows it is capable of so much more if only given the freedom of the attempt. Or maybe Kafka just had a soft spot for circus freaks. I’m not a literature professor; don’t ask me.

The Garden-Party
Kathrine Mansfield

So this is a bit of a depressing story. I read it last year in a different anthology actually, but I still remember the events pretty clearly. This rich family lives on top of a hill (the rich families always seem to live on top of hills) and they’re throwing this incredible garden-party. No expenses spared. I’m pretty sure there are elephants- Really? No elephants? Well, there could have been elephants, it’s that kind of party. As it happens, on the day of this party, one of the peasants living at the bottom of the hill has the gall to die, of all things–in a horrible accident, no less. It’s obviously a plot to ruin the party. Anyway, the only decent human in this story is Laura, who still has that innocent, child-like notion that holding a party literally a driveway up from where a man just died is kind of distasteful. Well, her mother needs to correct that sort of thinking right away, doesn’t she? Of course she does.

The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket
Yasunari Kawabata

I’ve lived in Japan for four years now, and with that experience well ingrained into my being I can say with confidence that I sort of understand this story. The protagonist is watching a bunch of kids play in the woods at night (nothing creepy about that), looking for bugs when one of the boys announces that he’s caught a grasshopper, and asks if anyone wants it. All the kids rush forward with their bug-baskets out for what is apparently a rare catch, but the boy holds out until the girl asks for it, at which point he drops it into her basket and low and behold, it’s not a grasshopper at all, but a bell cricket, which is apparently higher on the bug currency scale than a grasshopper, I think? While the protagonist is watching all this, he notices that the light from the kids’ lanterns is shining on each others shirts, and the names written on the lanterns have imprinted on the other child. So he reflects a little while on the nature of the name reversal, and grasshoppers actually being bell crickets, and bell crickets actually being grasshoppers and one day the children will grow up and find other grasshoppers that they think are bell crickets and visa versa. Yup.

The Sacrificial Egg
Chinua Achebe

This is pretty much Things Fall Apart from the other side of the fence. Told from the point of view of an African Christian convert, it paints the same struggle of tradition vs. western influence, though this time, arguably, tradition wins. I can’t say that it ends any happier than Things Fall Apart, however.

A & P
John Updike

Didn’t I just review this one like, two months ago?

Borges and I
Jorge Luis Borges

Thanks, Borges. Now you’ve got all the people in my head standing up and shouting about the unfair treatment of imaginary characters. How do you expect I’m supposed to sleep now with, “Why’d you have to kill me” and “You don’t even remember my name” and “You promised me my own novella”, huh? Puh.

 

5 Great Books For Writers

/ N J Magas / 16 Comments

I don’t have a lot to talk about at the moment, and the reality is I’m probably going to have to be absent from my blog for a little bit while I study for my kendo exam.

My time has been pretty equally divided recently between finishing the outline of Bone Wall and denying that I have any responsibilities in real life. I haven’t finished reading a novel since Beloved, so I don’t have much to review. In fact, the only books I’ve really been reading recently have been non-fiction. I also realize that, despite this being a writing blog, I actually talk very little about writing. Given the choice between discussing my deformed WIPs or my favorite writing related books, I’m almost always going to go with the latter.

So here they are, my top five favorite writing books:

1. Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint by Nancy Kress

I’ve been fairly impressed with all the books in Writer’s Digest’s Write Great Fiction series (for beginning writers, this is a must read collection) but Nancy Kress’ Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint is my favorite. Kress delivers her insights in a to-the-point manner, without the patronizing or over-exuberant encouraging that some of the other books have. Discussing everything from reader expectations to character motivation, from which emotions are most useful in fiction to deciding which point of view is best for your particular story, Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint gets to the heart of what makes a character memorable. Like the other books in this series, each chapter ends with a summary and a series of helpful exercises to do on your own. The book also offers character bio templates and answers to frequent road bumps along the road to building compelling characters. If creating believable, well rounded characters or gut-wrenching emotional scenes causes you problems in your writing, or if you just can’t decide on what point of view to use, Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint will absolutely bring your writing to the next level.

 

2. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick

As the title says, this is a dictionary so it’s not exactly easy to read cover to cover. It is, however, a great resource for reminding yourself of all those literary words you learned in high school English and then promptly forgot. Covering the jargon of poetry, prose, theater, and rhetoric this 361 page book will most likely contain some concepts you didn’t even know had words. In addition to going into detail about rhyme and meter, diction and narrative, most entries have a cross-reference resource for further reading, and some have web-link access for a more in depth description.

This book is unlikely to help you with your actual writing (unless you’re writing poetry; it’s very helpful for poetry) but it is handy to have around to keep up with the language of literary circles and critics.

 

3. The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White

It should be no surprise that this thin little volume is on my list. Most of the writers I know who are serious about their craft have read and/or recommend this book. The fourth edition has a foreword by Roger Angell that explains a bit of the history of the book and its authors, which I found charming. The Elements of Style is by no means an exhaustive guide to correctness in English grammar and form. Rather, it covers the most common errors and mix-ups of native English speakers in one easily portable book. Covering such topics as the correct use of commas and semi-colons, a defense of active voice, misused expressions, and some basic stylistic advice, having a working knowledge of the contents of The Elements of Style will save your editors headaches in the future.

4. 20 Master Plots and How to Build Them by Ronald B. Tobias

The question of which drives the other, character or plot will be answered differently depending on who you ask. Personally, I start with a character and build my plot around their personalities, but by no means is that the best or only way to go about it. Tobias makes a good case for the importance of focusing on a strong plot, but also reminds us that there are no more untold stories, only old stories told in new ways. In his book 20 Master Plots he takes us through twenty of the most common plots found in literature. It isn’t a complete list, and as the author points out, some of these plots have been combined or divided by different sources, but all in all, it’s a good place to start if you’re trying to pin down what your particular story needs to make the plot well rounded and believable. Each plot is given multiple examples from which to understand the key elements, as well as the usual (though not necessarily crucial) steps that the characters need to take to satisfy each plot. Chapters end with a check list, either to make sure you’re still following the same plot you started with, to find out which plot is dominant in your story, or simply to recap what you just read.

5. Thanks, But This Isn’t For Us  by Jessica Page Morrell

Of all the writing craft books that I’ve read, this is still the one I like the most, both for its content and for the way it is delivered. Morrell, a developmental editor, shares with readers what elevates or sinks a manuscript directly from her professional experience. She gives examples of the kind of auto-rejection errors she has seen in her work and insights into how to avoid them in your own writing. Item by item this book rolls through each element of fiction and not only highlights the common mistakes of novice writers, but gives reasons why they are so cringe worthy for editors. Witty, snarky, and brutally honest, Thanks, But This Isn’t For Us gives writers the tools for that final self edit before a manuscript goes off to be torn apart by other eyes.

 

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, I disappear into the despair that is constant, meticulous studying of a foreign language. Happy writing!