Book 6: Great Expectations

Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens. It depicts the growth and personal development of an orphan named Pip.

– From Wikipedia

Great Expectations is a new addition to my 2012 26 book challenge list. I needed a replacement for Michel del Castillo’s La Guitare, which is sadly only available in French. I had considered dropping a Danny Wallace-style twist on myself and forcing myself to read the book in [my dreadful, GCSE-standard] French, but Great Expectations seemed a good fit for three reasons:

• The book representing New Zealand on my list is Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip
• During the longlisting process, Ben had suggested I read a Charles Dickens novel
• I’ve never liked Dickens and his paid-by-the-word verbal extravagance. For that reason I haven’t read anything by him in about 10 years, so it will be interesting to revisit his work.

So this is the second (or, rather, the first of two) books by English authors on my list (the other is David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten). Naughty, but justified, I think.

484 pages of Dickens, here I come. Does anyone else find the prospect stultifying?

1,111 pages down…

Happened to notice that as of this morning I’ve read a neat 1,111 pages as part of my 2012 26 book challenge.

8,247 pages to go…

Book 5: The English Patient

The English Patient is a 1992 novel by Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje. The story deals with the gradually revealed histories of a critically burned English accented Hungarian man, his Canadian nurse, a Canadian-Italian thief, and an Indian sapper in the British Army as they live out the end of World War II in an Italian villa.

– From Wikipedia

The English Patient is one of those books I feel like I ought to know so much about despite never having read it. Inevitably, I’ve seen the film, though I can remember very little of it, and Fia tells me it represents only a short section of the book (if I remember rightly, director Anthony Minghella only once read each of the books he adapted and wrote the corresponding screenplays without ever referring back to the source material again).

This is one of the most highly acclaimed, well renowned books on my 2012 books list. I’m really looking forward to it.

What are your (spoiler-free!) thoughts on The English Patient?

Book 4: The Uninvited

The fourth book in my 26 book challenge was Geling Yan’s The Uninvited.

This is the second book in the challenge that’s been authored by a woman. It’s interesting to note that, in the case of this and the first, To Kill A Mockingbird, for a time it was easy to read in ignorance of the author’s sex. But The Uninvited seems to take it further. With its quasi-erotic descriptions of “massage parlours” and general hormonal leeriness, it’s so clearly written from the point of view of the male gaze that it’s easy to forget who the author is. (Indeed, most of the comments people offered upon seeing the book – the few that weren’t “are you actually reading a book in Chinese?” – were about how salacious the cover appeared.) I don’t have any profound conclusions to draw from this observation, but I find it interesting.

But perhaps it’s unimportant. Why should a female author any less write with the male gaze than a male one? Is she better or worse qualified to do so? What do you think?

Book 3: Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Combining autobiographical and psychoanalytic elements, the novel was named after the lonesome wolf of the steppes. The story in large part reflects a profound crisis in Hesse’s spiritual world in the 1920s while memorably portraying the protagonist’s split between his humanity, and his wolf-like aggression and homelessness. The novel became an international success, although Hesse would later claim that the book was largely misunderstood.

– From Wikipedia

My poor fecundity means I’m introducing Steppenwolf having already read half of it. Briefly, it is blistering, insightful and brilliantly poetic, but such very hard work. One unique element of reading this book is that I can’t help but be aware of the person who recommended it. It is in its style and substance Adam all over.

A full write up will surface when I’ve finished the book.

Has anyone else read Steppenwolf? Has anyone else who knows Adam read Steppenwolf?

Book 2: Things Fall Apart

My reading is on schedule, but blogging about it is not. In the interests of catching up, I’m going to talk about my experience of the second book, and (in the next blog) introduce the third (which I’m already reading) before I look back at To Kill A Mockingbird.

Things Fall Apart is a 1958 English language novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first African novels written in English to receive global critical acclaim.

– From Wikipedia

A lot of people recommended I read Things Fall Apart. It is, I’ve been told, “a very Oxfam-staff sort of book to read”.

I can understand why Things Fall Apart is regarded as groundbreaking, educational and unique. It’s an important insight into a world and an experience that I otherwise would almost certainly never have been given. But I found it very difficult book to enjoy. It is, I suspect, not entirely intended to be enjoyed, but to be admired. Unfortunately the cold, almost biblical writing and thankless characters simply turned me off. And there was a pervading sense that the author was so much better educated than myself, and that I should be ashamed for my ignorance. This may well have been intentional and is almost certainly accurate, but the constant air of condescension ate at me from the very first page and never let up, such that I felt I wasn’t being invited to be involved in the story, only to silently and ignorantly observe it from too great a distance.

Did anyone else find the style of writing a barrier to their enjoyment or engrossment in Things Fall Apart? Or did you find it enhancing? Is my reaction to the content a perfect example of the type of cultural misunderstanding the book seems designed to highlight? Let me know in the comments.

Art and honesty: Truth in advertising

Yesterday at the cinema we were treated to a trailer for The Iron Lady. Having seen the film only a few days ago, I was struck by just how dishonest this particular piece of marketing was. The trailer clearly implied that The Iron Lady is the story of Margaret Thatcher’s political career, when the film is (as I’ve noted with great frustration) anything but political. In truth it is a film about a senile old lady recalling a series of newsreel montages.

I don’t pretend to be so naïve as to believe a film trailer is made with the intention of giving audiences a genuine sense of a film, to help them make an informed decision about whether to see it; I’m fully aware that it’s just another marketing tool carefully and conventionally designed to coax ticket buyers into parting with their pennies. But where is the line? Could the distributors of Michael Winterbottom’s sex ‘n’ songs docudrama 9 Songs have edited a trailer containing only live music performances, or only quasi-pornographic sex scenes – that is to say, concealing half of the nature of the film – and claimed to have honestly represented their product? This is effectively what the marketers of The Iron Lady have done.

I’m a wannabe film director. I find, when I think about the challenge of publicising my films, that my ideas fall into one of two categories: art or honesty. The few ideas I have for trailers are works of art in their own right; they (if successful) stand alone but invoke the same emotional responses as the films they represent. These ideas are rare; I’m a wannabe film director, not a wannabe film marketeer. My inclination regarding the films for which I have no such inspiration is to make some sort of mini-documentary in which the filmmakers tell the audience about the film. Here’s what it’s about; here’s why we made it; here’s why we like it. I would love it if all trailers were designed to conform to these categories. (But, of course, that’s not the nature of marketing. Most films are awful, and while I don’t expect distributors to be quite so frank as to admit that, it would probably be difficult to talk honestly about the concept and making of a terrible film without giving away some of its flaws.)

What do you think? Is the truth in advertising more flexible when selling art? If not, how could we ever regulate it? Do you have any other examples – cinematic or otherwise – of brazenly dishonest advertising?