The Wide, Wide Wednesday
May. 24th, 2017 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay.
Four girls and their teacher disappear from a school outing a few hours from their school. Two of them come back; neither one remembers what happened. The others are never found. The school falls apart and death and disaster climb over it like vines. Spooky and suspenseful, but also tongue in cheek: we are invited to laugh deprecatingly at the little green gardens and white gloves and the Hanging Rock Picnic Grounds and Appleyard College, perched delicately and self-importantly on the edges of a landscape that can’t help but swallow them up.
What I'm Reading Now
The Clan of the Cave Bear is so incredibly frustrating, I can’t even tell you. So many epithets! So much thesaurus abuse! So much repetition and clumsiness! I can’t believe Auel had her National Geographic narrator sail in to infodump all over the Clan’s first sighting of a mammoth herd, dropping a load of Cool Facts About the Mammoth Body Plan at our feet, literally three pages before the mammoth is butchered – which would have given her an iron-clad excuse to describe the subcutaneous fat, layered fur types, pelvic shape, and skull to her heart’s content. I can’t believe she described one of the mammoths as “the panicked pachyderm.”
For all that, I’m still reading, because I care enough about Ayla and her adopted family to keep reading, and at every turn in the story, however awkwardly written and cluttered with Cool Facts, I’m curious enough to want to know what happens next. Will Ayla find a mate despite her ugliness? Will the Clan accept her as medicine woman? Will we ever meet the Others? Will the one Iago guy who resents Ayla for being better than him at everything ever stop Iagoing around?
The narrator has a theory about why Ayla is such a disruptive wild card for her foster people: the Clan, we’re told, has racial memories – their gestures, social conventions, hunting practices, and medicinal knowledge are all inherited, along with a wealth of stories. Ayla’s people, the Others, have to learn everything from scratch, but make up for it by being better with numbers and abstractions. I don’t think I buy it. I’d be happy to buy it as a story the Clan tell about themselves, but as a declaration of the narrator, no. That goes triple for the narrator’s constant asides about the Clan having reached “an evolutionary dead end.” What? Who thinks that? Who are you and why are you following us around?
One of the biggest missed opportunities in a book full of missed opportunities is Ayla’s ugliness. Ayla looks like a young Daryl Hannah, but to the people of the Clan she’s hideous: none of the normal brow ridges, weird jutting chin, too tall, freaky straight-stick legs, weird skull and nose, weird piss-colored ghost hair, cloudy blue eyes like a blind person. She looks like an evil spirit with a melted face! She looks like someone reached over and rubbed out her features, like a water-blurred painting. So why, when Ayla catches a glimpse of herself in a pool and is dismayed by her own ugliness, does the narrator describe her like this?
Jean M. Auel: the M stands for missed opportunities. But I’m still reading because there are still things I like; if there weren’t, I wouldn’t be so mad.
What I Plan to Read Next
Picnic at Hanging Rock is Australia Book Number One; should I be lazy and count The Ladies of Missalonghi as number 2? The main virtue of the Ladies is that it kills two birds with one stone, since it also counts as a Mount TBR book (current count: 36 of 60).
On Sunday I dropped off some books at a free book exchange and found The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater, the darling of my friends list a few years ago. It doesn't look tremendously appealing, but I'm just curious enough to read a free book if it's directly in front of me.
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay.
Confronted by such monumental configurations of nature the human eye is woefully inadequate. Who can say how many or how few of its unfolding marvels are actually seen, selected, and recorded by the four pairs of eyes now fixed in staring wonder at the Hanging Rock? Does Marion Quade note the horizontal ledges crisscrossing the verticals of the main pattern whose geological formation must be memorized for next Monday’s essay? Is Edith aware of the hundreds of frail starlike flowers crushed under her tramping boots, while Irma catches the scarlet clash of a parrot’s wing and thinks it a flame amongst the leaves? And Miranda, whose feet appear to be choosing their own way through the ferns as she tilts her head toward the glittering peaks, does she already feel herself more than a spectator agape at a holiday pantomime? So they walk silently towards the lower slopes, in single file, each locked in the private world of her own perceptions, unconscious of the strains and tensions of the molten mass that hold it anchored to the groaning earth: of the creakings and shudderings, the wandering airs and currents known only to the wise little bats, hanging upside down in its clammy caves.
Four girls and their teacher disappear from a school outing a few hours from their school. Two of them come back; neither one remembers what happened. The others are never found. The school falls apart and death and disaster climb over it like vines. Spooky and suspenseful, but also tongue in cheek: we are invited to laugh deprecatingly at the little green gardens and white gloves and the Hanging Rock Picnic Grounds and Appleyard College, perched delicately and self-importantly on the edges of a landscape that can’t help but swallow them up.
What I'm Reading Now
The Clan of the Cave Bear is so incredibly frustrating, I can’t even tell you. So many epithets! So much thesaurus abuse! So much repetition and clumsiness! I can’t believe Auel had her National Geographic narrator sail in to infodump all over the Clan’s first sighting of a mammoth herd, dropping a load of Cool Facts About the Mammoth Body Plan at our feet, literally three pages before the mammoth is butchered – which would have given her an iron-clad excuse to describe the subcutaneous fat, layered fur types, pelvic shape, and skull to her heart’s content. I can’t believe she described one of the mammoths as “the panicked pachyderm.”
For all that, I’m still reading, because I care enough about Ayla and her adopted family to keep reading, and at every turn in the story, however awkwardly written and cluttered with Cool Facts, I’m curious enough to want to know what happens next. Will Ayla find a mate despite her ugliness? Will the Clan accept her as medicine woman? Will we ever meet the Others? Will the one Iago guy who resents Ayla for being better than him at everything ever stop Iagoing around?
The narrator has a theory about why Ayla is such a disruptive wild card for her foster people: the Clan, we’re told, has racial memories – their gestures, social conventions, hunting practices, and medicinal knowledge are all inherited, along with a wealth of stories. Ayla’s people, the Others, have to learn everything from scratch, but make up for it by being better with numbers and abstractions. I don’t think I buy it. I’d be happy to buy it as a story the Clan tell about themselves, but as a declaration of the narrator, no. That goes triple for the narrator’s constant asides about the Clan having reached “an evolutionary dead end.” What? Who thinks that? Who are you and why are you following us around?
One of the biggest missed opportunities in a book full of missed opportunities is Ayla’s ugliness. Ayla looks like a young Daryl Hannah, but to the people of the Clan she’s hideous: none of the normal brow ridges, weird jutting chin, too tall, freaky straight-stick legs, weird skull and nose, weird piss-colored ghost hair, cloudy blue eyes like a blind person. She looks like an evil spirit with a melted face! She looks like someone reached over and rubbed out her features, like a water-blurred painting. So why, when Ayla catches a glimpse of herself in a pool and is dismayed by her own ugliness, does the narrator describe her like this?
The young woman studied her own face. It was somewhat square with a well-defined jaw, modified by cheeks still rounded with youth, high cheekbones and a long, smooth neck. Her chin had the hint of a cleft, her lips were full, and her nose straight and finely chiseled. Clear, blue gray eyes were outlined with heavy lashes a shade or two darker than the golden hair that fell in thick soft waves to well below her shoulders, glimmering with highlights in the sun. Eyebrows, the same shade as her lashes, arched above her eyes on a smooth, straight forehead without the slightest hint of protruding brow ridges. Ayla backed stiffly away from the pool and ran into the cave.
Jean M. Auel: the M stands for missed opportunities. But I’m still reading because there are still things I like; if there weren’t, I wouldn’t be so mad.
What I Plan to Read Next
Picnic at Hanging Rock is Australia Book Number One; should I be lazy and count The Ladies of Missalonghi as number 2? The main virtue of the Ladies is that it kills two birds with one stone, since it also counts as a Mount TBR book (current count: 36 of 60).
On Sunday I dropped off some books at a free book exchange and found The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater, the darling of my friends list a few years ago. It doesn't look tremendously appealing, but I'm just curious enough to read a free book if it's directly in front of me.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-24 06:16 pm (UTC)I am also aghast at the missed opportunity with the mammoth butchering. The perfect place for an infodump! For an author who has never met an infodump she didn't like! And instead she dumped her info three pages too early and couldn't be bothered to move it. :(
I am 100% in favor of counting The Ladies of Missalonghi as Australian Book Number Two. Why not? It fits all the criteria! Plus it's a delightful book in its own right.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-24 07:00 pm (UTC)The narration is super irritating because sometimes it's close-third and sometimes it's Auel's Research Notebook and there's no transition or distinction made between them. It's not actively confusing, but it's so disappointing. :(
I'm going to do it! I mean, it's already in my house, I might as well.
eta I want to read about an ugly heroine. :(
no subject
Date: 2017-05-24 07:43 pm (UTC)I mean, I can think of Jane Eyre and also Charlotte Bronte's Villette and that's about it on plain heroines. Even heroines like Valancy who start out plain always seem to have their ugly duckling moment when a famous portrait painter decides he wants to paint her.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-28 03:18 am (UTC)I think the second and third books in the series are much better than the first, if you end up having any interest in continuing the series. Auel continues to info-dump in the most awkward of ways, and Ayla continues to be the most Perfect Beautiful Heroine ever, but there's something charming about having a woman invent every single development and be part of the creation of every single important archaeological site of the entire Upper Paleolithic, even the ones that are ten thousand years apart and a continent away from one another. And even the ones that didn't happen until much later! I mean, (minor spoiler ahead!) she tames a pet horse in the next book, and that shouldn't be happening until around 3000BCE, much much much later.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-28 06:17 pm (UTC)Awww, Ayla. <3 It's rough when you're ahead of your time.
Honestly, I find Ayla and her burdensome alien intelligence really likable (I like Canon Mary Sues, and "human ancestor adopted by Neanderthals" is one of the best Sue-justifying premises I've ever seen). But Auel makes me tired. I don't mind the wacky racial memories thing in itself, either - if it were just an underlying theory of the worldbuilding/something the Clan believed about themselves, it would be fine! It's only the blissfully confident narrative voice banging on about it at every opportunity that I object to.
(How would you test that inherited memory theory, anyway?)
no subject
Date: 2017-05-30 07:39 pm (UTC)I don't remember the details of it, and it's turning out to be unsurprisingly hard to google a theory that went out of fashion forty years ago, but if I remember correctly, it originally came about from some bump on Neanderthal skulls, which was theorized to reflect a brain bump beneath it, which then was theorized to be the place where this 'racial inheritance' was stored. I suppose testing at least if the brain bump even existed would be easy enough, at least with casts and 3-D modelling and such these days, but what specific brain area relates to what specific behavior is difficult even with living people we can do MRIs on.
But the real argument against the theory is that Neanderthals clearly were capable of learning. Even though they do seem be different from us H. sapiens sapiens, their technology and art and diet and basically all the stuff they did changed over time and from place to place.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-31 12:39 pm (UTC)Thanks for trying to find this out! It does shed some light on what's going on in Cave Bear - Auel definitely bangs on about that extra brain area a lot, and even has a character who has a distressingly large head because he's got more memory stored in it than everyone else. (It was hard on his mother, which is one of the reasons cited for why the Clan are doomed to diminish and eventually die out).