what i'm reading

I'm still reading Love in the Time of Cholera. I was going to finish it before I went to Greece but then I took on this textbook editing project (editing by hand! Totally quaint! Fortunately I remember most of the proofreader's marks so it's okay... but it does interfere with my pleasure reading).

Anyway. I thought I didn't like Marquez because I really didn't much like 100 Years of Solitude; I've never really been able to get behind magic realism. I love long meandering stories, I like a touch of the absurd, I like the idea that reality is in fact pretty flexible, but magic realism is the potato salad of literature: I love all the ingredients, I hate the result. Other than a weak spot for Tom Robbins, which he's doing his level best to eliminate, I really have never gotten the point of magic realism.

So I never bothered to read any more of Marquez's work, because, you know, why. You don't keep picking up Raymond Chandler if you don't like hardboiled detective stories. But then here I am with  ...Cholera and I'm reading it and I'm enjoying it and yet there is something in it that nags at me and I tried to explain this over beer last night and I thought I'd try again over coffee.

I really don't do well with adjectives deployed to describe characters. I need to be given actions and allowed to locate my own adjectives. And I've noticed this with Kundera, too, and it's why I have trouble with him, and why I have trouble with Klima, and why so many books that are otherwise delightful to me wind up flung across the room as if they were Hemingway clones (really, really hate Hemingway clones. Not a big fan of Hemingway either, but glah, the clones). I do not want to hear "she was a fierce woman" or "he was a man of firm principles" -- I want to know how she's fierce, what principles are firm. I think that this is why, ultimately, I find Kundera's characters (and am now finding the ones in Cholera) to be so unbelievable: because it seems these adjectives mean something different to me than they do to the authors, and so then the actions that are shown make no sense. I have noticed this problem with my friends, too, that the ones who tell me stories of "he did this and this" are the ones I can listen to for hours, but the ones who tell me "he is cruel" are the phone calls I have trouble returning.

I also have, and I realize this is a personal thing, trouble liking characters who leave their children. I will never, ever like Anna Karenina, although I've given it almost as many attempts as I have Lolita (another book I can never like, I finally realized after several miserable rides through Nabokov's hideous sea. I concede that the man can write words, sentences, paragraphs, but I can't stay in a boat with someone who hates his main character) and my conclusion is the same: I don't like Anna and I can't like that book. And I can't like Fermina now and I don't know if that's going to ruin the book for me, but between the adjectives, which are on a steady rise here at page 270, and the fact that things appear to be boarding a hot air balloon of unreality without showing any signs of actually cutting the ropes and soaring away... well, I don't know. You don't get a lot of first sentences better than "The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love," and it's not as if I'm not going to finish or that I'm going to hurl the book from me or anything but I'm a little frustrated.

And I wanted to talk about something other than my shameful craving for Ronald McDonald and the Deathly Hallows. 

Comments

[the patriarch]

I enjoy Writers like Kundera and Marquez for the pure, brute writing talent that is on display. Those guys can motherfucking write the shit out of sentence. But you're right, I think they get dazzled by their mastery over words and forget about the story. Still, I do enjoy them.

But Nabokov! I'm afraid we will have to disagree here. He is the best of both worlds. A writer with total and complete mastery of the language (his 2nd language! How the hell did he pull that one off!?) as well as a master storyteller. But yeah, he's also incredibly cynical. Lolita is probably the most cynical book ever written. But it's also one of my favorites. Humbert is despicable and yet I could listen to that character pretend to be remorseful all day long.

Hemingway is good only for the short stories. His novels are fucking awful. I don't think I'm being all that controversial here.

Also, I like the new ALL BOLD, ALL THE TIME typography you've chosen. Ha.

[tuckova]

Whoops. It is fixed. I want my OPINIONS to be bold, not my font.

I understand why Lolita is good. I understand why Anna Karenina is good. I just can't ever like them; with AK because I dislike her so intensely, and with L because I hate Humbert Humbert. I know Nabokov does, too, but that doesn't help me.