evelyn_b

What I've Finished Reading

The Clan of the Cave Bear ends with a cliffhanger and a sample chapter from Jean M. Auel's latest, but I'm not biting. I don't regret the time I spend reading it, but I also don't know when I've been this disappointed in a novel for not being the long short story it was clearly meant to be. I definitely can't handle another 500 pages. There's a scene toward the end where Ayla and her guardian Creb drink a narcotic ritual beverage and share a vision of the far future - one in which Creb's people diminish and die and Ayla's overrun the world and make it strange. It's an ambitious piece of writing that ought to be a major turning point in the book, but isn't. Why isn't it? Because our disembodied National Geographic narrator has been following us around this whole time, reminding us every 50 pages that the Clan are doomed, using phrases like "evolutionary dead end" that are totally inappropriate to the setting and the mindset of the characters. By the time the news breaks into the story itself, it's been stale for days. It didn't do us any good to hear it all those other times, and now the big cool prehistoric sci-fi moment is spoiled. Oh, well.

What I Gave Up on Almost Immediately

The Raven Boys is pretty emphatically not my thing. I told myself I was going to give it a hundred pages before I took it back to the free book exchange, but I barely made it to 75. It has a good opening line ("It was freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrived.") but unfortunately there's a prologue in its way, and the rest of it was nothing but a chore. I hope whoever finds it in the free box next has better luck enjoying it.

What I'm Reading Now

The Maias by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz.

This is a large novel about Carlos da Maia, a wealthy young doctor who is doomed to sleep with his sister (I know this because the frontispiece told me right away, and now it's impossible not to see the pieces being put in place). But doom doesn't hang heavily on Carlos yet, unless it's the doom of never getting anything done - he's just come down from Coimbra to set up a consulting room and a laboratory, where he's going to dole out medical expertise while he works on a monumental history of the past and future of medicine - but his boudoir-like consulting room furniture doesn't excite respect, and the workmen are taking forever with the laboratory building, and his friends keep making fun of him and dragging him off to the Drones Club South to fling themselves on couches and wail about their mistresses. Meanwhile, his friend Ega (whom I'm pretty sure is a self-mocking self-insert of Eça de Queiroz, even though I don't know anything about Eça de Queiroz) is supposed to be turning his brilliant idea for a book into an actual book, and finding it considerably harder than either talking about the idea or buying and wearing eccentric clothes:

It was to be a prose epic, he declared, and would describe through a series of symbolic episodes the history of the great periods of the World and of Humanity. It was entitled Memoirs of an Atom, and was autobiographical in form. In the first chapter this atom (Ega's Atom, as it was called in all earnestness at Coimbra) was still roaming amid the cloudiness of the primitive nebulae [. . .] After that, as it voyaged through continual transformations of substance, Ega's atom entered the primitive structure of the orang-outang, the father of humanity, and later it lived on the lips of Plato. [. . .] Finding itself at last on the point of Ega's pen, and weary of its journey through Being, it rested as it wrote its Memoirs

It's pretty charming. I don't know what the eventual incest is going to do to the charm, but I'm enjoying it so far.

Also Shirley by Charlotte Bronte - another sponsored post! That will go up at some point soon, if not this weekend, then shortly after.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Ladies of Missalonghi!

Crossposted to Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

"Women are strange little beasts," he said to Dr. Coutras. "You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you." He shrugged his shoulders. "Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls."

A version of this quote from The Moon and Sixpence was used in the movie poster - but instead of the remark about souls, it concludes that "in the end they get you and you are helpless in their hands," which is all wrong - no one ever "gets" Charles Strickland. After twenty years of perfectly ordinary life as a mediocre stockbroker, he decides to become a painter and to forgo all sense of social obligation forever. He leaves his family for Paris and never thinks of them again. In Paris he makes some paintings, is rude to his benefactors, breaks up a marriage, and flatly refuses to consider anyone but himself. Eventually he moves to Tahiti, settles down, paints a lot, and dies of leprosy - but not before making sure his mural-covered house is burned down, as a final "fuck you" to all those annoying sheeple who kept trying to buy his paintings, like idiots. Screw those guys!

( Other people are the worst! )

I enjoyed this book a lot. It's hard not to compare it to The Horse's Mouth, also about an asshole who paints pictures, and I don't think it's at all a great book in the same way, but it moves quickly and is full of quiet earnest epigrams, and it has that appealing ambiguity of intent that the good Maugham books have - that is, I never feel like I know exactly what the author thinks of all this, in spite of the best efforts of a frank and forthcoming narrator.

What I'm Reading Now

I don't know if Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear is any good or not. I'm leaning a little toward "not," but I'm interested to see where it'll go, and I think the attempt is admirable even if the execution is a little clumsy and heavy on the infodumps. Somewhere in the very distant past, a small child is separated from her family by an earthquake. She follows the river in search of help or food, gets mauled by a mountain lion or similar, and is eventually nursed back to health by the Clan, who are either Neanderthals or not Neanderthals - or maybe the child is a Neanderthal and they're the other one. Anyway, they're shorter and darker than her own people, suspicious of the odd-looking outsider but willing to help.

The infodumping is sometimes very jarring. I don't expect a book about cave people to use only language reflecting the knowledge and beliefs of cave people - we don't have any examples, for one thing, and this is a book written in 1980, for 1980. But when our new clan arrives on the scene, we get a lot of talk about "supraorbital ridges" and other skull-shape jargon. This is both too much and not enough. The transition between the POV of the characters and the POV of an author who has just got back from the natural history museum with an armful of new books is not always graceful. But it's possible that either Auel or I will get used to it eventually.

What I Plan to Read Next

I now have Picnic at Hanging Rock, a book from Australia! and also The Maias by Eça de Queiroz, which can be one of my books from Europe. I haven't forgotten my continents challenge, even if it seems like I have.