Books: Being a Good Soldier
Feb. 18th, 2003 01:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aIn the last couple of weeks I've finished reading a couple of novels.
How to Be Good is the third book that I've read by Nick Hornby, with the other two being High Fidelity and About a Boy. Each of Hornby's first two novels was a very fun, though light, look at the London dating scene. How to Be Good ... wasn't.
My main problem with HtBG is that Hornby made it much too serious. It's about unhappiness and discontent, infidelity and divorce. And, at its core, is the issue of how one can be good not just in philosophy, but also in actions, and how royally that can screw up your life.
I'll admit, one of my problems with HtBG is that the serious elements all struck too close to home. I see K. trying to figure out how to be good to other people and to the world without hurting herself in the process, and it's a constant battle. Thus, seeing the same struggle portrayed in book form wasn't funny at all.
But in any case, I think the seriousness of the topics contrasted poorly with Hornby's very light and humourous style. If this one gets made into a movie, I'm not going to be lining up to see it.
Soldier of the Mist, by Gene Wolfe, is in contrast a brilliant book by a brilliant author. This is the second time I've read this book, but really all of Wolfe's books are constantly on my to-reread list, because they're so rich.
Soldier in the story of Latro, a mercenary for Xerxes in the Persian War who is wounded in the head (and/or cursed by a goddess) and loses the ability to remember. He spends the book travelling against the landscape of Greece in 479 B.C., looking for his origins and his friends, a quest which meets some resolution by book's end.
The beauty of Soldier is in Latro's state ... he can remember things for about 24 hours, no more. Thus he keeps track of events in a book (the book we're reading), but there are gaps and events that we understand but that Latro doesn't (or that we don't understand because Latro had no context).
Soldier showcases two of Wolfe's strengths, which he enjoys playing with in most all his books.
First, you have the notoriously unreliable Wolfe narrator. In this case I don't get the impression that Latro is personally biased. Rather, he doesn't understand a lot of what's going on, and thus reports things to us inaccurately out of ignorance.
Second, you have Wolfe giving you bits of information, without actually putting it together for you. As a reader, you thus have to figure out what's going on, without the author handing it to you on a silver platter. For example (minor spoiler), Wolfe never says that Latro is Roman. But, he writes in Latin, and he's has an aquiline nose, and he grew up in a house with vineyards, and the Greeks all think he looks very different from him, but the Persians think he's a Greek. I find doing this type of detective work very satisfying, and I think it's why Wolfe has a small but rabid following. Decades later, people are still arguing over the significance of specific points in his books.
Me, I remember finding Soldier of the Mist extremely confusing the first time I read it, 5 or 10 years ago. This time, it made perfect sense, though I'm sure I missed some subtleties, and I did have to stop a few times to figure out what was going on.
There's one more book in this series, Soldier of Arete, which I need to move to my to-be-read shelf. Sadly, Wolfe has never finished the series. On the bright side, Latro in the Mist is coming out next month, and that's an anthology of these first two novels.
I haven't decided on a new novel to read yet, though I have read a few more sections in Lies Across America in the last couple of days.
The most interesting was on the statue that was erected in Hay Market Square shortly after the massacre there. It was of a policeman, calling for peace, which would have to have been thought very ironic by the families of the labor protestors killed by police officers on Mayday. Following its erection, the statue was "accidentally" hit by a streetcar, then blown up twice in Mayor Daley's time in Chicago, and was even under 24-hour police surveillance at one point. It was finally retired and the base ripped down, but it took something like 100 years to decide that glorifying the instigators of a riot wasn't the best thing to do ...
How to Be Good is the third book that I've read by Nick Hornby, with the other two being High Fidelity and About a Boy. Each of Hornby's first two novels was a very fun, though light, look at the London dating scene. How to Be Good ... wasn't.
My main problem with HtBG is that Hornby made it much too serious. It's about unhappiness and discontent, infidelity and divorce. And, at its core, is the issue of how one can be good not just in philosophy, but also in actions, and how royally that can screw up your life.
I'll admit, one of my problems with HtBG is that the serious elements all struck too close to home. I see K. trying to figure out how to be good to other people and to the world without hurting herself in the process, and it's a constant battle. Thus, seeing the same struggle portrayed in book form wasn't funny at all.
But in any case, I think the seriousness of the topics contrasted poorly with Hornby's very light and humourous style. If this one gets made into a movie, I'm not going to be lining up to see it.
Soldier of the Mist, by Gene Wolfe, is in contrast a brilliant book by a brilliant author. This is the second time I've read this book, but really all of Wolfe's books are constantly on my to-reread list, because they're so rich.
Soldier in the story of Latro, a mercenary for Xerxes in the Persian War who is wounded in the head (and/or cursed by a goddess) and loses the ability to remember. He spends the book travelling against the landscape of Greece in 479 B.C., looking for his origins and his friends, a quest which meets some resolution by book's end.
The beauty of Soldier is in Latro's state ... he can remember things for about 24 hours, no more. Thus he keeps track of events in a book (the book we're reading), but there are gaps and events that we understand but that Latro doesn't (or that we don't understand because Latro had no context).
Soldier showcases two of Wolfe's strengths, which he enjoys playing with in most all his books.
First, you have the notoriously unreliable Wolfe narrator. In this case I don't get the impression that Latro is personally biased. Rather, he doesn't understand a lot of what's going on, and thus reports things to us inaccurately out of ignorance.
Second, you have Wolfe giving you bits of information, without actually putting it together for you. As a reader, you thus have to figure out what's going on, without the author handing it to you on a silver platter. For example (minor spoiler), Wolfe never says that Latro is Roman. But, he writes in Latin, and he's has an aquiline nose, and he grew up in a house with vineyards, and the Greeks all think he looks very different from him, but the Persians think he's a Greek. I find doing this type of detective work very satisfying, and I think it's why Wolfe has a small but rabid following. Decades later, people are still arguing over the significance of specific points in his books.
Me, I remember finding Soldier of the Mist extremely confusing the first time I read it, 5 or 10 years ago. This time, it made perfect sense, though I'm sure I missed some subtleties, and I did have to stop a few times to figure out what was going on.
There's one more book in this series, Soldier of Arete, which I need to move to my to-be-read shelf. Sadly, Wolfe has never finished the series. On the bright side, Latro in the Mist is coming out next month, and that's an anthology of these first two novels.
I haven't decided on a new novel to read yet, though I have read a few more sections in Lies Across America in the last couple of days.
The most interesting was on the statue that was erected in Hay Market Square shortly after the massacre there. It was of a policeman, calling for peace, which would have to have been thought very ironic by the families of the labor protestors killed by police officers on Mayday. Following its erection, the statue was "accidentally" hit by a streetcar, then blown up twice in Mayor Daley's time in Chicago, and was even under 24-hour police surveillance at one point. It was finally retired and the base ripped down, but it took something like 100 years to decide that glorifying the instigators of a riot wasn't the best thing to do ...