2014 books: 1-4

[the_siobhan]

Tripoint ended up not being quite what I expected. Not so much adventures in space, and more a psychological depiction of somebody gradually succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome. Not something I would normally pick up, but an interesting read.

Axel got a Kindle for Christmas this year, and he generously offered to let me borrow it to read my next book so I could try it out and decide if I want to buy one. Which worked out great, because it gave me a chance to get this 1600-page bastard out of the way without actually having to cart it back and forth in my knapsack every day.

    

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace I first encountered Wallace when I read Girl With Curious Hair, which is a collection of short stories. I love his short stories, but a lot of them are based around taking normal circumstances and exaggerating them to the point of surreality, so I wasn't sure how this would work in a honkin' great novel. And when it starts it does read as a series of short stories written in parallel as the text jumps between unconnected characters and points in time. Eventually the plot kind of emerges gradually as we reach the various points of connection between where the characters plot-lines intersect and we figure out how they are related to a central event.

The story takes place in the very near future. (I kept thinking of Max Headroom's "20 Minutes Into The Future" byline.) Time is now sponsored by corporations. Most of the events take place in The Year of the Depends Adult Undergarments, although there are also flashbacks to The Year of the Whopper, The Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar and the Year of the Dairy Products From the American Heartland (among a few others). The USA has solved it's pollution problem by turning the northern portion of New England into a toxic waste dump and forcibly annexing the property to Canada. This zone is fed by catapults and giant fans and is known as The Great Convexity, or the Great Concavity depending upon what side of the border you are looking at the map from. The resulting strain in relations between the USA and Canada (known by the pejorative "'Nucks") has resulted in the reviving of the FLQ as an active terrorist organization.

This book is insane. I have no way of describing it. Brilliant, ambitious, sprawling, detailed and ridiculous. I kept swinging back and forth on my opinion of it. There are points where I was reading the 10th page in a row on the minutia of dawn tennis warms-up where I was wishing there had been an editor willing to chop out about every third sentence, and then he would drop in a paragraph or a closing sentance that was terse and perfect and ten times more hilarious because of the contrast with the text that came before.

It was the ending that made the final decision that I am not a fan. It just... stops. I get that Wallace doesn't do tidy closures, but at 1600 words at least give me a hint. Sheesh.

Oh, and I decided that I really like the Kindle.


    

Butterflies Dance In The Dark by Beatrice MacNeil This book, on the other hand, I polished off in about two days. This is the same author who wrote Down The Coalmine Road, which I loved. This book also takes place in Cape Breton, in this case in the fishing/farming hamlet Ste. Noire in the late 50s and early 60s. The main character is Mari-Jen and the story follows her life from childhood to mid-20s. All the reviews I have since read identify Mari-Jen as having a learning disability, I actually pegged her as possibly being on the mild end of the spectrum as she has trouble understanding what people expect from her and she tends to take the things people say literally. She and her brothers are already social pariahs because their mother in unmarried, because of her difficulties in school she is also labelled "retarded". She grows up incredibly socially isolated. The only adult who takes any interest in her and her brothers is a man who moved to Cape Breton after losing his family to the concentrations camps in Poland and who is also viewed with suspicion for being a foreigner and a non-Christian.

I found this hard to read. Being a child who is trapped by expectations one doesn't understand is a big button issue for me and I generally avoid stories about unhappy childhoods for that reason. Having said that, it's a well-written and extremely evocative book.

    

Waterlily by Ella Cara Deloria Aŋpétu Wašté Wiŋ, known as Ella Cara Deloria in her professional life, was a historian of Sioux culture, oral history and legends. As well as her non-fiction work, she published Waterlily as a fictional account of the life of women in traditional Sioux culture. The story follows the lives of the main character, Waterlily and her mother Bluebird. Most of the events are designed to show the complicated obligations and expectations of kinship. The time-frame can be estimated by the fact that the major conflicts with white encroachment have not yet started, but the characters are aware of the existance of white people and talk about them. One of the major events in the book is a smallpox epidemic.

One of the things I found really interesting was the extreme emphasis on virginity in women. I can sort of get why it would be important to be very clear on parentage in a culture where people from related tribes are intermarrying, but just the amount of policing that goes on of women's behaviour seemed really over the top to my dissolute 20th century sensibilities. Like, how did they have time to get anything else done levels. I also notice that given how much time and detail went into describing the different types of relationships, homosexuality and trans-identities were conspicuous by their absence, and I wonder if that was a result of the time that Deloria was working and what was considered acceptable to put into a novel intended for public consumption.

    

Dolce Agonia by Nancy Huston This is such an odd book. The entire story takes place over a dinner party. Gradually each character is introduced as they arrive at the house and we learn about their history and current situation, their secrets and their relationships with the other guests. Then after we have gotten to know them, we learn what will happen to them in the future - narrated by God or Death or Fate. Then back to the dinner party. It's an unusual format for a book. On top of that I don't really like most of the characters, not because they aren't well written, but because they are well-written as unlikeable characters. Yet it still manages to be a really interesting read.