On Haldeman’s “The Forever War”

17 May

imagesThe Forever War follows William Mandella, a conscripted soldier sent to fight the alien Taurans on the other side of the galaxy. Mandella and his fellow conscripts endure rigorous, sometimes deadly, training to prepare for combat in space against a virtually unknown species for virtually unknown reasons. Joe Haldeman perfectly describes the essences of senseless war, of being a small player in a massive military machine. He writes from the everyman’s perspective. Mandella is the failed pacifist, and he survives from battle to battle because of pure chance. He is promoted from private to sergeant to lieutenant to major because of longevity, not leadership skills, and the more he survives, the more Mandella sinks into apathy.

Part of Mandella’s apathy derives from the confusion caused by time dilation: in order for Earth’s spaceships to cross the galaxy, they use collapsars (wormholes, essentially) and travel as speeds up to 25 gravities, causing time for the spaceships’ passengers to move at a relatively normal pace while time on Earth passes in years, decades, centuries. Every time Mandella comes back into contact with humans from Earth, society has changed drastically. He quickly becomes a kind of relic, a quaint antiquity that new recruits must humor. I suppose soldiers in modern wars feel similarly–as if the world passes at lightning speeds without them while they’re at the front of a timeless war.

They call them Stargates, so how could I not think of this the whole time, child of the '90s that I am?

They call them Stargates, so how could I not think of this the whole time, child of the ’90s that I am?

As depressing as war novels can be (I think I cried at least twice while reading this [why the cat?!]), I’m always hungry for them. There’s something quite singular about the kind of sorrow a reader feels for this type of tragedy. It’s the way you lust for a heroic, romantically grimy life that can never be yours. A military life is a life I can’t possibly imagine, and that forces me to trust Haldeman as a knowledgeable author, which he is, having served and been wounded in Vietnam, and that trust allows the author incredible freedom and incredible power to carry the story forward.

But the best part about finishing the book? I can go look at the Wiki page, which says Ridley Scott is working on a 3D film adaptation. So what will the casting look like? Marygay Potter can be anybody but Kristen Stewart. Even a woman with a name like Marygay deserves better. And our apathetic, half-ass-hero Private/Sergeant/Lieutenant/Major Mandella? Maybe a lanky, brooding type like Andrew Garfield? Maybe the more macho Liam Hemsworth (just don’t give the kid many speaking lines)? Maybe Wil Wheaton???

Everybody's favorite boy-soldier!

Everybody’s favorite boy-soldier!

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On Fowles’s “The Collector”

16 May

imagesJohn Fowles’s debut novel certainly set the bar high. I felt the need to start by reading this book because it seemed to suit me (or suit my obsession with Law & Order: SVU, CSI, and Criminal Minds; a girl can’t have too much crime TV), and I stand by my choice. The Collector follows Frederick Clegg in his project to stalk, kidnap, and woo the object of his affections, Miranda Grey, a young art student of the upper middle class. If Clegg were a young gallant knight or the Earl of Rochester, this story could be romantic, or at the very least, kind of kinky. But Clegg is a loner, a man with little to no social graces who happens to really, really like collecting butterflies, so the story has to go the creepy rout. Fine by me, since Fowles can definitely pull off creepy and pull it off well.

In the first half of the book, the reader is place in Clegg’s head, and learns that our protagonist’s fascination isn’t with sex or any kind of affection that one human normally engenders for another. His is the morbid fascination of a scientist, an amateur entomologist who found the most beautiful variation. He wants to keep her, but as time passes he realizes keeping a living being is quite a bit different from pinning down a dead husk. He learns she isn’t going to cooperate, and the more she struggles against her captor, the more her captor uses force to keep her, and the more he uses force, the more he likes it.

In the second half of the novel, Fowles writes from Miranda’s perspective. She hides a journal in her cell-like basement bedroom and tries her best to stay sane through her writing. She records some of her thoughts of Frederick Clegg (whom she calls Caliban), but mostly ignores him. Instead she focuses on the usual interests of a young woman and artist: love. Or, rather, her crush on an older man.

"I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!" Miranda, the bleeding heart.

“I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!” Miranda, the bleeding heart.

Throughout her captivity, Miranda portrays herself as an entitled, spoiled child. Clegg obsesses over her elevated class, her fancy education, her overall superiority over him. Miranda’s attitude toward Clegg/Caliban is that of a burdened mother toward a petulant child. Even while reading passages of Miranda’s journal entries, I can’t help but root for Clegg. Maybe that makes me a bit sociopathic, but Miranda certainly doesn’t make the model damsel in distress, and in that she mirrors Shakespeare’s Miranda: an oblivious child, self-centered and filled with illusion of her own immortality.

By the end of the book, I’m thinking to myself, “I really hope she doesn’t win.” Does this make me a terrible person? But this isn’t the story of good pretty girl versus evil loner man. It’s the story of a young man coming into his own. It’s a story of an awakening sociopath. Frightening and fascinating. And it’s Fowles’s brilliant writing that enables this novel to both frighten and fascinate.

Call me a weirdo, but I was kind of rooting for Clegg. And on another note, when will this be a "Criminal Minds" episode? (From Polyvore)

Call me a weirdo, but I was kind of rooting for Clegg. And on another note, when will this be a “Criminal Minds” episode? (From Polyvore)

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On Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”

15 May

51ettPWhyFLI finally read Margaret Atwood’s dazzling The Handmaid’s Tale and got a bitter taste of how scary religion can be. From my comfy seat in America, looking through my blinders out at the world, I can safely say I feel pretty free in comparison, and that other religions (*ahem* Islam) have gotten a little out of control. But Atwood’s beautiful novel is more like a slap in the face: America, already a so-called Christian nation, is short skip and a hop away from a society mirroring modern-day Iran’s or Afghanistan’s, a society that forbids the interaction between men and women, that “shelters” women with thick cloth and heavy restrictions for their “protection” and “purity,” that uses indoctrination and propaganda to destroy hope, to remove all routes of escape. Atwood’s dystopia is, in the end, much more frightening then the dystopias I grew up with—1984 and Brave New World—because it’s infinitely more possible.

Can you imagine this on American women?! Atrocity! Only you can prevent burkas! No, but really, this book is a cautionary tale.

Can you imagine this on American women?! Atrocity! Only you can prevent burkas! No, but really, this book is a cautionary tale.

In a radically reformed America, now called Gilead, everything is about women’s castes: one for wives, one for maids, another for handmaids, another for “Unwomen” (the women who refuse to belong to a caste, the women who don’t fit, the women who lose the right to their gender for not fitting). Perhaps this is why THT may be more frightening to female readers. It elicited a gut reaction from me, a deep physiological sorrow, in a way that 1984 with its tragic romance and femme fatale didn’t.  Atwood’s leading lady, going by the unfortunate pseudonym Offred, is a handmaid, a woman who’s specific role in this society is to bear the children of older, affluent married couples beyond child-bearing age. The burden of saving society from death by infant mortality rates has been placed on this caste of women.

Offred, though, quietly attempts her escape. She savors the words she hears and every scrap of writing she comes across. In this imagined hell, it’s a sin for women to read. Language has been removed from public, reined into the private sector, which has become the male sector. Signs are replaced with images. Words captured on newsreels are censored out. The Bible is read aloud by the head of the household. Offred holds onto her literacy (and therefore her individuality and sanity) by playing with words in her head. Her narration of her tragic story is frequently interrupted with her wordplay, and when she finally comes across Gilead’s secret resistance, Offred learns the codeword for escape is “Mayday,” or “m’aidez” or “May Day.”

Because what better way to combat oppressive Christian patriarchy than a giant, gay, pagan pole?

Because what better way to combat oppressive Christian patriarchy than a giant, gay, pagan pole?

All I could hope while reading this was that Offred’s quiet resistance would pay off. That she would find freedom or at least peace through language. Atwood’s language, artistically and masterfully crafted, certainly did the job for me. And now I’ll feel like a raging feminist for the next few days, so be warned.

Just because.

Just because.

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On Stephenson’s “Reamde”

15 May

reamdeTo say that beginning to read Neal Stephenson’s thousand page-tome Reamde was a slow start would be to say Jay Gatsby throws large parties: accurate, but hardly due diligence. I think I started reading Reamde in 2011 and have been lugging it around New England for two years, wondering why I’ve been cursed with this particularly Sisyphean burden. Finally, having just left behind the mountain that was my soul-numbing desk job, I encountered the flat plains of free time, and I finished this epic novel. Reamde is a well-planned computer virus that targets the obsessive participants of Stephenson’s fictional massive, multiplayer, online role-playing game T’Rain—a sort of World of Warcraft integrated with economics and money laundering. The virus has infiltrated millions of users’ computers, holding their valuable information hostage in exchange for game gold that can be exchanged for real currency. And after hundreds of pages of T’Rain history and back-story, I figured out there were both plot and characters in the book!

Richard Forthrast—the billionaire, draft-dodger, former drug-runner, T’Rain founder—and his niece Zula find themselves invited to a figurative party of Chinese hackers, Russian mobsters, ex-military rogues, MI6 agents, and Islamic terrorists (obviously) that even Gatsby would envy, it’s so elaborate and wrought with confusion and angst. The plot that began with relatively simple, moneymaking scheme/computer virus becomes frightening and life threatening. But isn’t that how it always goes?

Three hundred pages in and neck deep in probably the fourth most convoluted plot in my reading repertoire, I realize this book isn’t actually about Reamde.  Reamde is a catalyst, one of the many dazzling settings our heroines/heroes scramble through, Stephenson’s novel would have been much better off and much more accurately titled if it had been called Makarov

makleft

or AR-15

Custom-AR151

or Don’t Fuck with ‘Murica.

(Thanks, Reddit.)

(Thanks, Reddit.)

In truth, Stephenson created compelling, (dare I say??) lovable characters that drive the story toward its epic conclusion, so aside from the book being poorly named, Reamde is a success in my … book. It creates a realistic human experience: people reacting to danger, people caring for each other, people trying to survive. Stephenson has, in his way (verging on the ridiculously verbose), accomplished this with flying colors.

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On Christopher Bernard’s “A Spy in the Ruins”

15 May

2365115A few months ago, I was contacted by an author and asked to read his debut novel. Being the avid reader (and much less avid reviewer) that I am, I accepted, excited that I could get my hands on something fresh and new. Christopher Bernard’s A Spy in the Ruins was not exactly what I was expecting. While some brief glimpses of beauty peeked through the foliage and crumbling edifices of Bernard’s tangled prose, ASitR was in all an extremely difficult and disappointingly dull book. Now, take this with a cupful of salt, because I put my days of academic reading behind me. I’m a reader who likes my books like I like my women: entertaining and (fingers crossed!) sensible. Bernard’s first novel, unfortunately, is neither.

I like commas. I love commas. Now that I think about it, commas may be my favorite punctuation of all time because of these reasons: I enjoy lists, I like them in my run-on sentences (the way I like copious amounts of salt on all my food), they are invaluable to the easily distracted reader, and they have a neat little asymmetrically beauty to them. Without them, I’m slightly lost (an affect that was probably Bernard’s intention), and without them the way we read, the way we English speakers digest language, is crippled. As you might’ve guessed, ASitR doesn’t have any commas. None. Well, that’s an exaggeration. Maybe there are three or four, but we can safely say Bernard has an allergy or at least a strong aversion to commas. We’re forced to hobble through this novel’s prose—galloping gayly in the lyrical sections, and then tripping over sudden, misplaced periods, congealed fricatives, and general booby traps of creative license.

It was a little like Monty Python.]

It was a little like Monty Python.]

I had to turn off the copy editor in me and try to enjoy Bernard’s poetry, but I found that harder and harder to do as the realization slowly dawned on me: this isn’t a poem. It’s a novel. Devices like abused periods, saturation with metaphors, and constant sentence fragments and/or run-ons (a la C.D. Wright or E.E. Cummings, et al) work when used in the pithy format of poetry. Reading ASitR is a lot like looking in on another man’s dream: all you see are someone else’s associations and inside jokes, and there’s no room for your own projections. In combination with Bernard’s literary high-handedness, the novel becomes more of a personal indulgence than an experience for the reader. I desperately wanted to take a red pen to every page, line, and word of this book.

This could probably be done to the whole novel. (From Echohub.com)

This could probably be done to the whole novel. (From Echohub.com)

Beyond my frustrations with its prose, though, I have to give Bernard a hand. This book is about disorganization. There’s no plot, which is why I haven’t mentioned it. The book is about a dystopian future where everything is falling into chaos. Even the order of language begins to dissolve. Sentence structures melt, and the only things to tie words to each other are sounds and comparisons: “Metaphors of immanent transcendence and other oxymorons. Flickering. Fritillary. A strange attractor graphs a butterfly.” There were moments where the simple juxtaposition of words was enough to carry a passage upwards to rare glimpses of linguistic transcendence. You think I’m being melodramatic, but it’s true. The kind of elevation I feel when reading my favorite poets. But then comes the descent back to frustration and confusion. Bernard isn’t able to keep me elevated, keep me transfixed with his obvious linguistic mastery. If this were a one hundred-line poem I would have gobbled it up.

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On Jeff Backhaus’s “Hikikomori and the Rental Sister

20 Feb

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Jeff Backhaus makes a valiant attempt at conquering the nearly impregnable fortress that is grief (I’m sorry, but I’m still reading Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, so fortresses and conquest have taken over my mind. Just wait until Game of Thrones is back on the air.), and he is mostly successful. The grief of a parent having lost his child is unimaginable, and it drives Backhaus’s protagonist Thomas Tessler into hiding–a particular type of hiding called Hikikomori. Thomas burrows away in his room, never speaking, even to his wife (who lives in their dead son’s room), and only leaves to buy instant mac at the corner store. This is Hikikomori: cutting oneself off from the world.

It turns out Hikikomori is actually rampant in Japan’s youth, and refers to a disorder caused by the extreme social pressures. Thomas’s Hikikomori is a loose interpretation at best: Thomas abandons his wife, his job, the world because he blames himself for his son’s death, but I guess this gets lost in translation.

Our second character is Megumi, the “rental sister,” someone trained in the Oriental arts of drawing someone Hikikomori out of his hermitage (also known as the Oriental arts of exotic seduction). There’s nothing like a little Orientalism to spice up your life of self-pity.

Thomas starts channeling all that energy for grieving into energy for an ongoing affair with a young Japanese girl.

Can anyone say, "fetish"?

Can anyone say, “fetish”?

Occasionally, Backhaus’s prose steals the show, and I’m a sucker for books about silence. As Megumi and Thomas are introduced to one another, silence is the magnetism that draws them together: “Silence is silence. It doesn’t sound like anything. But it’s also true that there are different kinds of silence, and one is the kind that draws you closer.” It’s Backhaus’s prose that will allow him to become a great writer, too. This was a daring first novel, but it takes more than ambition or even raw talent to create a true sense of grief in writing. It takes writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, Virginia Woolf, or Elizabeth Bishop to write convincingly about loss, and I think Backhaus could eventually reach that great, gloomy pinnacle of sadness. I look forward to reading his second novel.

On Rereading Your Youth

10 Jan

220px-Wheel_of_time.svgI mentioned earlier that I’m dredged up an old favorite series from my childhood. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series was my comfort food/safety blanket/imaginary friend back when I was a loner in high school. Well, now I’m a loner in the mid-market workforce, so I thought I’d pick it up again (especially since Jordan’s final, posthumous installment was just released) to enjoy myself a little old-timey escapism.

Here’s the thing about rereading the things you loved as a younger you:

Rereading these old favorites makes me feel like I'm failing to act my age. Like this guy. Buy yourself a cardigan and grow up, you punk!

Rereading these old favorites makes me feel like I’m failing to act my age. Like this guy. Buy yourself a cardigan and grow up, you punk!

You start becoming your younger you again. You start saying, “Whatevs,” and, “Eff that,” to your loved ones. You listen to only Green Day and Muse albums on repeat while a single tear poignantly rolls down your cheek. You believe again that everything revolves around you. And most importantly, you remember what it’s like to immerse yourself in a story, to sink below the line that separates analytical reading from emotional reading, bodily reading.

Robert Jordan isn’t a great writer. His novels will never be called capital-L Literature. But he takes the cake at creating a story (even if it is about magic and Dragons and ultimate evil embodied in a big fiery dude) that I not only find realistic but that I envy.

And just like last time around, I have a lady boner for this character. Don't ask me why, since she's as outrageous as a Red Sister in a frat house, but in my mind she's played by Natalie Portman. 'Nough said.

And just like last time around, I have a lady boner for this character. Don’t ask me why, since she’s as outrageous as a Red Sister in a frat house, but in my mind she’s played by Natalie Portman. ‘Nough said.

I won’t spend time reviewing each book of the series. I’ll leave that for the servants of the WoT fandom. The series begins with a poor facsimile of every great fantasy story preceding Jordan, namely Tolkien’s Middle Earth novels, but by book two of this hulking, fourteen-novel series, the author has hit his stride. Jordan takes a typical story–young people coming of age and discovering they bear the mountainous duty of saving not only the known world but the fabric of time itself–and zooms in to a level of detail no one else in their right mind would tackle. And in the end, Wheel of Time became an epic that outlived its author (may he rest in the most incredible peace). Jordan left a legacy that impacted millions of lives by the sheer vastness of his universe: in it, a place for everyone. As a teenager reading the series, I found myself becoming attached to the few female characters who struggled against the gendered roles Jordan created. I found myself (and find myself) growing emotionally with these characters, with these collections of words on paper, and this is the ultimate reading experience, the blockbuster of contemporary books.

Wheel of Time may not be canonized in future English majors’ Norton anthologies, but it reminds me of a crucial spirit among books that must not be lost: quality story. Plot–with all its complications and conflicts and climaxes–can’t be sacrificed even for craftsmanship (albeit there’s a line that can be crossed, and I’m looking at you, Stephenie Meyer) or theory (and now I’m looking at you, Don DeLillo) or branding (I’m looking at both of you, James Patterson and Nicholas Sparks, and now my neck is sore from looking accusingly at all these people, so I’m done). Now, aside from this reread, the only thing left in perfecting my fond childhood memories of the Wheel of Time series is for HBO to create a 14-20 season television series.

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