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State of reading in list form

Books I’ve finished since the last time I made a reading update. I’ll be making reviews for nos. 2-4, uh, soon-ish:

1. The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru
2. To Play the Fool by Laurie R. King
3. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
4. Lord Peter by Dorothy L. Sayers (complete collection of Peter Wimsey stories)

Books I’m currenty reading (doing something novel by reading more than 1 book at once)

1. Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe by Alfred Yuson
2. The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
3. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
4. The Persian Boy by Mary Renault

*dies*

Another thing: I’ve decided to forgo writing my review of Iain Banks’ Complicity because I can’t seem to muster any braincells to start it. In fact, the mere thought of starting a paragraph about it grinds my writing process into a halt.  Wonder why.

The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru

My reading update will come, um, later. This one first.

I’ve been reading a lot about Britain lately, or at least novels set in Britain and its former colonies. The Impressionist traces the life of Pran Nath, boy with British and Indian blood, with his attempts to survive the societies that are alternately seduced and repulsed by him. He assumes different guises throughout his life: first, as the son of a wealthy Brahmin, then as Rukhsana, a eunuch-to-be in the crumbling Kingdom of Fatehpur, then as the adopted son of Scottish missionaries named Bobby. Finally, he assumes the identity of a dead man, giving him the opportunity to leave India for the rarefied life in Oxford. His final metamorphosis takes him to the deepest jungles of Africa, the darkest reaches of the British Empire. The novel is about the complete dissolution of self, gender, race, and culture, an anti-Bildungsroman.

“…Bobby is too intrigued to be offended. What do wogs smell like? Is there a typical English smell?… Face buried in burra mems’ smalls and burra sahibs’ dirty shirts, he finally puts a name to it. Rancid butter. With perhaps a hint of raw beef. The underlying whiff of empire.”

The premise itself has an amount of seduction to it, probably one of the reasons I picked up the book in the first place. Throughout reading, however, I could definitely sense an unevenness of tone. It seems as if the author couldn’t decide if it would become a piercing social satire or a dreamy tapestry of exoticism. Personally, I think he excels more in satire. The mixture may be a conscious decision, but even as Hari Kunzru occasionally manages to marry these elements exquisitely, it more often produces a discordant rhythm.

The one aspect that really resonated for me was the theme of miscegenation and how those who are born Anglo-Indian are anathema for both empires. As if the mixture of blood implies a possible weakness in their respective armors of superiority. Also interesting to note is how many of Britains empire-building projects–military, bureaucratic, even scientific endeavors–are not treated as a product of a rational society, but more as a collective neurosis. Perhaps I can discuss this at a later time, preferably backed up by anthropological texts.

For all the novel ’s faults, Hari Kunzru does know how to turn a phrase. Many scenes are laugh-out-loud funny, with many of the jokes made with deadpan delivery, a parody of the tone that Rudyard Kipling and the likes used to employ. And while Pran Nath himself is hit-or-miss depending on the identity he inhabits, the reader is drawn by his bumbling opportunism, as well as his despair at never fitting in.

Compartmentalization

I have a horrendous backlog of things to post and will do so after the Manila International Book Fair. For those who care to know, I’m participating as a member of the Read or Die Book Club in a program called Ang Bagong Libro. We’re neck-deep in on sale booths there, come and join us.

The radio silence in this blog should not be taken as an abandonment. You can find some of my literary ruminations (urk) at the Read or Die Blog. To be honest, I intended Tropical Marginalia primarily as an archive of my book reviews, especially those I read in response to certain reading challenges. My RoD entries have a sort of, well, meta quality to them, except for the official posts I make in behalf of the blog. I’ve also created a creative blog, the url of which I will not post yet because it’s still conspicuously empty. Keeping multiple blogs is a fairly new concept for me, because for the past 4 years I’ve limited my online interaction at my old LiveJournal account. Non-LJ blogging is fairly new as well, as Kristin Mandigma put it, my writing has always been fairly hermetic, and am still unused to the ah, public nature of conventional blogging. That is to say, I’m here, though I may seem like I’m not.

To the two of you who have dropped by my blog in the past couple of days, um, hi.

To Do List:

1. Write my review for Iain Bank’s Complicity
2. Finish reading Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist
3. Complete my presentation for the NWA Convention.
4. Start flagellating myself for agreeing to make a paper on Rio Alma and read it to HIS FACE.

Oh, and if people are interested in my review of Abner Mercado’s Sa Bubungan ng Mundo you can find it in the Libro.ph website here.

Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq

This novel succeeds in becoming both hilarious and sinister, a piece of social commentary disguised as an exercise in WTF. It begins with the story of an unemployed girl who gets hired in an exclusive Parisian perfume store by giving sexual favors to the shop director. She is then subjected to various acts of perversion by the boutique’s customers, all the while earning a pittance to support herself and her abusive boyfriend. Sounds like your typical “women are objectified and commodified in a consumerist society” novel so far. Then she turns into a pig.

No, really, the girl physically transforms into a pig.

Actually, writing a review for Pig Tales had me flailing for a while. On one hand, I did enjoy reading it, laughing out loud as every scene pushed the boundaries of believability. (Let’s just say an apocalyptic war, alligators, and the SPCA are involved in the story, okay?) It’s Darrieussecq’s more “serious” preoccupations in which I had certain reservations. Many scenes involved violence and the exploitation of women, particularly the protagonist. I felt that many of these were gratuitous, in did nothing to the story besides shock the readers and drill in the fact that man act more like pigs than the actual animals. In short, things we already know. XDDD And what’s with all these European writers and their urge to write obscene, jadedly intellectual novels anyway? Yes, Elfriede Jelinek, I’m looking at you.

Apparently, Pig Tales became an instant bestseller in France when it first came out in 1996. That says something about that country’s collective sense of humor, I guess. This book is big on satire and philosophical discourse, but I think readers will enjoy it more if they treat it as a simple bawdy tale.

poetry post

The first one here and a partial explanation of my blog title.

Marginalia by Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Source

The Armchair Traveler – Challenge List

A day late, but I’m still in.

The Impressionist, Hari Kunzru (India, Britain, etc.)
The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy (Los Angeles)
The Far Side of the World (Aubrey/Maturin novel), Patrick O’Brian (Malta, Atlantic Ocean, South America)
Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, Bebe Moore Campbell (Mississippi)
The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson (future-Shanghai, China)
The Reader, Bernhard Schlink (Germany)

I’ve repeated one book from my Reading Through the Decades Challenge List: James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia. Surprisingly, I can’t remember any American book I’ve read that’s even set in Los Angeles. Most of them are set in New York, or some obscure small town. Ha! I’ve read a few pages of the Kunzru, and am very optimistic about it.

Y Halo Thar

Good News: I’ve finished three books since Sunday: Sa Bubungan ng Mundo by Abner P. Mercado, Complicity by Iain Banks and Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq.

Bad News: I can’t be arsed to go and make proper reviews for each one. *throws a tantrum*

Watch me loiter around the Intarwebs looking for things to post on RoD Blog.

Books Read So Far

I guess it’s about time for me to list down the books I’ve read halfway through 2007. I’m slightly embarrassed about my low output. I need to do something to speed things up. Anyway, here they are:

Man Without Qualities vol. 1 – Robert Musil
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Boll
North China Lover - Marguerite Duras
Astonishing the Gods – Ben Okri
Zen in the Art of Writing – Ray Bradbury
Smaller and Smaller Circles – F.H. Batacan
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing – Melissa Bank
Salamanca – Dean Francis Alfar
The Consul’s File - Paul Theroux
No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency – Alexander McCall Smith
Fantomas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

So yes, 15 books so far. Despite the size, my reading has been satisfying. I was able to explore a variety of world writers (German, Nigerian) and got around to reading The Hound of the Baskervilles at last. Now I can profess my Holmes love with conviction.