persona (1966)

"all the anxiety we bear with us, all our thwarted dreams, the incomprehensible cruelty, our fear of extinction, the painful insight into our earthly condition, have slowly eroded our hope of an other-wordly salvation. the howl of our faith and doubt against the darkness and silence, is one of the most awful proofs of our abandonment and our terrified, unuttered knowledge." do you think it's like that?

(i just watched both this and seventh seal and love how the literal pains of a silent creator in the later are reintroduced in a more subtle way as the need for contact and communication in the former.)

books: chicago

my indifference toward this book could just be a matter of poor translation. al aswany is egyptian and the book is originally written in arabic, i believe.

the book follows the lives of several egyptian students studying histology at the university of chicago. each one represents a different axe in need of grinding and i think this is where a possible poor translation could be at fault. either that or its just poor writing in the first place as the characters are nothing more than flat symbols to a different horrible end. al aswany is not too confident in the american dream and uses his characters to tragically illustrate its failure in a variety of ways. if only they weren’t so shallow and stilted. backgrounds, motives, dialogue all feel crafted specifically to relay a message. you can feel al aswany’s clunky hand in everything; there is no subtlety here.

and thats too bad because the issues are very real and just as important as al aswany clearly wants them to feel. but instead of breathing life into these characters and their hardships he has essentially offered up a exaggerated chick tract versions of real life tragedies: two young egyptians corrupted by american lifestyle start an innocent love thats ended by an unwanted pregnancy and abortion, an idealistic new student is rooted out by corruption in both the egyptian government and our own and is sent to some kind of guantanamo situation for simply voicing a counter opinion, an egyptian man who loves the united states is betrayed when his daughter is killed by drugs…etc. its all very dramatic but in a way that soap operas are dramatic, an eye roll on every page.

this has close to a 4 rating on goodreads and i have no idea how or why.

books: through the language glass

from the title alone you know you’re about to embark on a heady adventure, don’t you? i’m actually not going to talk so much about this one because i plan on making a meatier post on language that references this book as well as another, seeing red by nicholas humphrey.

overall its a decent enough read if you have any interest in linguistics and have ever wondered if your mother tongue has an affect on the way you think. not that anyone can say with definitive proof either way but mr. deutscher makes some compelling arguments. many examples he uses come from native aboriginal languages of australia so it was kind of nice to be getting a glimpse into that while living here.

anyway, as i said, more on this one later.

books: bleeding edge

wherein thomas pynchon writes a jewish noir about the internet. for some i can imagine the writing will come off as too puny, a bit too smart, too woody allen. i for one loved how it read. are people really as sharp tongued as the stories heroine? i don’t know, but she was fun to hang out with.

the story takes place after the dot com burst and before 9/11 and mostly deals with the fallout of the digital sector after it soared so high in the nineties. maxine, a kind of financial detective, has to dive down into the deep web and in regular pynchon fashion meets a whole slew of characters while unraveling several interlocking mysteries. at some point aliens may or may not be involved.

there was a bit of embarrassment at reading pynchon describe the deep web like some kind of spirtualized second life, complete with fully rendered avatars and 3d spaces but i guess talking about lines of code is never interesting. hackers is a ridiculous movie and terrible representation of actual hacking but i still like it because it has fun with it. similarly i’m not that put out by the anthropomorphized web here. 

what you might call lesser pynchon but still pretty enjoyable. for what its worth i think one of, if not my favorite book is pynchon’s mason & dixon so if you’re interested in what i consider greater pynchon then thats probably a good place to start.

books: the goldfinch

it’s actually been quite awhile since i finished this so i suppose its a bit counter to the whole point of writing these little write ups, but for completion sake i guess i’ll make a few observations.

the goldfinch by donna tart is quite a dense book and features some lovely passages about craft. there are some obvious parallels between the description of technique, detail, and focus in regards to hobie's work and the book itself and ms. tart's devotion to the subject matter.

in reading commentary about game of thrones many of the books’ readers have complained about martin’s sometimes overly descriptive passages, such as his fondness for illustrating meals (not really that surprising), and although ms. tart does sometimes verge on providing too much sometimes it is in service of art. after all a picture is worth a thousands words and so on and this is a book about a painting. it does create some dull bits here and there however.

overall a dramatic telling of a personal tragedy sprung out of control. the end gets a little manic and the final act seems a bit too movie ending of a send off, but nothing to diminish the whole.