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Author Topic: Rate the last book you read.  (Read 194329 times)

FifthCityMuse

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #180 on: July 12, 2009, 08:22:54 AM »
Push (Sapphire, 1996)
Occasionally you stumble across a novel and have no expectations of what's to come. I first heard of this when the film adaptation played Sundance earlier this year. It took me a while to find a copy, and then a little longer for a space in my reading schedule to clear. Going in, I had a brief idea of the plot (uneducated African American girl is taught to read and write), and expected something reasonably visceral.

It is, without doubt, the most visceral novel I've ever read, and one of the finest I've read ever. I can understand all the complaints related to the use of voice in the text, and I had some of them myself, initially, but I found myself so engrossed in the characters and the story that was being told that I could easily overlook them. It is incredibly difficult to read, and I actually, for the first time ever, found myself having to put the book down and walk away at one point because it seemed too much.

Luckily, this is mixed with the incredibly uplifting story of her education, and while in any other situation I would rail against it for being unrealistic or somesuch, it is necessary here.

I don't want to say too much, beyond that this actually has potential to be the best book I've ever read. I need to read it again to separate the initial feelings from the actual admiration, but it was one I thought was very, very good.

worm@work

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #181 on: July 15, 2009, 07:22:02 AM »


I picked up Banville once in the past and gave up within a few pages because of all the arcane vocabulary he likes to use and how dense the narrative seemed at the time. Having to look up words in the dictionary annoyed me then and I decided that he was just showing off ::).

I picked this book up again recently and this time my experience was completely different. The number of random excerpts I end up posting usually correlates pretty well with how much I like a book. I could've easily posted a dozen more from this one.

It tells the story (if I can even call it a story) of a man who takes a trip to a seaside town, where he once spent a childhood vacation, to come to terms with the "delicate business of being the survivor" after the death of his wife. The entire novel is this man's interior monologue, his recollections of the past colliding with the awkwardness of his present day grief.

Banville's stream of consciousness narrative intertwines several stories at once but does it so seamlessly that one barely notices when he switches from his recollections about his life with his dead wife to the childhood vacation where he grew enchanted with this other vacationing family, The Graces, and fell in love for the first time. Colliding with these memories is the harsh reality of the present - his disapproving daughter who comes to visit and having to deal with the other people in the house, his landlady and the aging and friendly colonel who is the other tenant living there. The way Banville brings these different narratives together is nothing short of brilliant and when it happens, the conclusion feels like a gently-delivered knockout blow, if there is such a thing. I am still not quite sure how I feel about the ending. For a book that seems to eschew a traditional narrative so vehemently, the culmination of the book, the multiple 'discoveries' we make right at the very end, felt a little out of place to me. I probably need to re-read it to see if they feel less abrupt on a second reading. That's a minor criticism though. I think I just got too used to the 'plotlessness'.

All of the above seems to imply that a lot is happening in the book, but that really isn't the case. If you have to be able to identify with a character, be entertained by a plot and satisfied by the ending, then this book really won't work for you at all. I am increasingly starting to realize that I don't necessarily need any of these to be satisfied to enjoy a book (exposition FTW, yet again). I just totally enjoy his use of language. Just his aesthetics leave me breathless and happy. I love his sentence construction, which is really rather stylized but also utterly lyrical and captivating.

I wouldn't recommend this to everyone but me, I just loved it.


« Last Edit: July 15, 2009, 08:27:25 AM by worm@work »

Ronan

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #182 on: July 20, 2009, 07:29:50 PM »
Fantastic, I liked it as well. I used to live next door to Mr. Banville and he speaks in that arcane vocabulary regularly

pixote

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #183 on: July 21, 2009, 01:09:18 AM »
Slaughterhouse-Five

This was your first time? I always thought I was slow reading it in 8th grade...

I need to read that some day.  I mean well.

pixote
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worm@work

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #184 on: July 21, 2009, 01:12:12 AM »
Fantastic, I liked it as well. I used to live next door to Mr. Banville and he speaks in that arcane vocabulary regularly

Wow, that is pretty cool! Also, I love that he speaks in that vocabulary :).

pixote

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #185 on: July 22, 2009, 01:19:43 PM »
     Presumed Innocent  (Scott Turow, 1987)
A good read.  A little spoiled for me from having seen the movie at some point, but still entertaining.  Having a prosecuting attorney on trial for murder makes for some really fun exploration of legal thinking, as he, narrating, debates strategy with his attorney, runs through how he'd prosecute his own case, etc. — with the most fun moments coming whenever he's caught off guard by some else's legal maneuvering.  All those process elements are really enjoyable.  The prose is readable and not uninteresting and the characterizations are serviceable.  A decent option for a plane ride, probably.
Grade: B

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Thor

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #186 on: July 22, 2009, 01:46:30 PM »
I like the way you format, pix
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pixote

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #187 on: July 23, 2009, 01:21:21 AM »
There's enough good prose in this novel to recommend it, but the story itself isn't all that engaging.  It's a fictionalized, first-person account of the loyalties, politics, and lifestyles of the Cambridge spies in the time before and during World War II, told from present-day perspective by Walter Maskell, a spy just exposed as a double agent for Russia.  Maskell is a wonderful narrator at times, especially early and late, but for long stretches he becomes overly dry and removed and too given to uninteresting details, bouts of showy erudition, and overuse of words like truculent and crapulous.  He might have set a record for litotes, too, with phrases like, "...but I will not pretend that I was not on the whole content with the arrangement."  I wasn't a fan of the cumulative irony of the book, either; it felt emptily obligatory.  But there is, as I said, enough good writing to offset those flaws:

  • Strange creatures, children.  That wary look they have when adults are about, as if they are worrying whether they are doing a convincing enough impersonation of what we expect them to be.  The nineteenth century invented childhood and now the world is full of child actors.
     
  • When was the last time I wept?  There was Patrick's death, of course, but that does not count—death does not count, when it comes to weeping.
     
  • There was simple delight in it, of course [...] but also a sort of grim, sad triumph, as if he had caught out the Creator in some impressive yet essentially shoddy piece of fakery.
     
  • I suspect he knew how much I hate my name—only bandleaders and petty crooks are called Victor—for he used it at every opportunity.
     
  • Violence by proxy, that is the thing: stimulating, satisfying, safe.
     
  • He had even taught himself the Irish language, and could swear in it—though to my ears, I confess, the language in general sounds like a string of softly vehement oaths strung haphazardly together.
     
  • He is pacing up and down the room, dropping cigarette ash on the threadbare carpet, telling us, as I have heard him tell many times before, of the event that, so he insisted, had made him a homosexual.
         "God, it was frightful!  There she was, poor Mother, flat on her back with her legs in the air, shrieking, and my huge father lying naked on top of her, dead as a doornail.  I had a hell of a job getting him off her.  The smells!  Twelve years old, I was.  Haven't been able to look at a woman since without seeing Mater's big white breasts, colour of a fish's belly.  The paps that gave me suck.  In dreams those nipples still stare up at me cock-eyed.  No Oedipus I, or Hamlet, either, that's certain.  When she threw off her widow's weeds and remarried I felt only relief."
     
  • Do not imagine, Miss Vandeleur, that Marxists, at least the ones of my variety, are gregarious.  Man is only lovable in the multitude, and at a good distance.
     
  • I confess I derived a certain nasty enjoyment from the task of censoring the men's letters home; a prurient interest in other people's privacy is one of the first requirements for a good spy.  But this pleasure soon palled.  I have a high regard for the English fighting man—I do, really—but his prose style, I am afraid, is not among his more admirable qualities.  ("Dear Mavis, What a crummy place this Bologne is.  Frogs everywhere and not a decent pint to be had.  Are you wearing your lacy knickers tonight I wonder?  Not a sign of Jerry"—the excisions, of course, are the work of my blue pencil.)
     
  • Love, I have always found, is most intense when its object is unworthy of it.
     
  • More heresy, I know, more apostasy; soon I shall have no beliefs left at all, only a cluster of fiercely held denials.
     
  • The fifties was the last great age of queerdom.  All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but these young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamoring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear.
     
  • Nick does not really laugh, it is only a noise that he makes which he has learned to imitate from others.

Despite touches like these, and despite how well researched the book seems to be, at certain points I found myself thinking I'd rather be reading a nonfiction account of these spies instead and cut out the middle man.

pixote
     
The Untouchable  (John Banville, 1997)
Grade: B-
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maņana

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #188 on: July 23, 2009, 01:32:51 AM »
There's no deceit in the cauliflower.

pixote

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Re: Rate the last book you read.
« Reply #189 on: July 25, 2009, 11:55:02 PM »
     The Sweet Hereafter  (Russell Banks, 1991)
Much to my surprise, I didn't really care for this.  None of the four narrators had a voice that felt very authentic to me, and the portrait of small town life reminded me a little of what I didn't like about Empire Falls.  The culmination of the story seemed cheap, and the prose was never that impressive.  It was a quick and painless read, but that's almost all I can say for it.  [sad face]
Grade: C+

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