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Reading for pleasure! What a concept. A few thoughts on a couple of books:
Iain M Banks - The Culture
Having blown through Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Excession, Surface Detail, Matter, and the Hydrogen Sonata in less than three months, Banks' space operas have effectively taken over my sci-fi reading. I haven't yet found a properly eloquent way of describing why I love his work. It's highly original, superclever, not boring at all, written with genderbending and social economics in the marrow of its bones, and takes itself so un-seriously that it gets away with the really serious stuff; the stuff you can only squeeze in between hundreds of words of crash-bang action and sarcastic repartee.
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
It's taken me a shamefully long time to come around to reading this. As per Wiki:
It draws mightily from Conrad's own experiences from his brief time in colonialist Africa. Many people cleverer than I have written about it from post-colonial/race-related angles; all that I can say clearly is how difficult it was to read.
Using Marlow as a frame narrator is fantastically clever, but it's hard to pay attention to his ellipses and his responses and his tangential asides. It's hard to figure out where he is in the linear chronology of the story. It's difficult to understand why, as the reader, you seem bombarded by adjective after endless adjective even as you seem to be missing critical information about Kurtz and the general context of Marlow's employment on 'the Continent.' Ironically, that's perhaps the aspect of the novella that rings truest to me: the difficulty in relating something foreign to anything that one knows at all. There's a struggle to put personal experience (much less an experience of another culture, race, &c.) into words when vocabulary seems both insufficient and inefficient.
There you have Marlow, telling his story in almost pitch-darkness to an audience of one unnamed narrator and three others. He's been speaking, and the narrator's been listening, but neither one is quite aware of how Marlow's voice is being received. Is he speaking to himself, or to the audience? Marlow seems terribly alone. The narrator, too, seems more like a man reading a book in private than a part of an active, listening group. There's no communal interpretation, no shared signs of understanding. Not between Marlow and his listeners, and not between the listeners themselves.
Perhaps we all want convenient signposts in our texts and our stories: things that mark the way, make the moral come easily into our grasp. But that's the one thing Marlow doesn't have -- he hasn't the word, or the clue, or the sentence to wrap up the uneasiness of this story about wandering into some other place, that "heart of darkness". So instead we get many words; many insufficient, inefficient words.
Critics could easily find reason to accuse Conrad of racism; I'm not here to argue against that reading, nor to defend Conrad -- just that Marlow's eternal grasping for words feels to me like a grasping at how to treat very complicated topics of race, imperialism, first contact, and so on -- and I don't think that grasping is an evil. I feel like I'm constantly grasping myself.
Iain M Banks - The Culture
Having blown through Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Excession, Surface Detail, Matter, and the Hydrogen Sonata in less than three months, Banks' space operas have effectively taken over my sci-fi reading. I haven't yet found a properly eloquent way of describing why I love his work. It's highly original, superclever, not boring at all, written with genderbending and social economics in the marrow of its bones, and takes itself so un-seriously that it gets away with the really serious stuff; the stuff you can only squeeze in between hundreds of words of crash-bang action and sarcastic repartee.
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
It's taken me a shamefully long time to come around to reading this. As per Wiki:
Heart of Darkness (1899) is a short novel by Polish novelist Joseph Conrad, written as a frame narrative, about Charles Marlow’s life as an ivory transporter down the Congo River in Central Africa.
It draws mightily from Conrad's own experiences from his brief time in colonialist Africa. Many people cleverer than I have written about it from post-colonial/race-related angles; all that I can say clearly is how difficult it was to read.
Using Marlow as a frame narrator is fantastically clever, but it's hard to pay attention to his ellipses and his responses and his tangential asides. It's hard to figure out where he is in the linear chronology of the story. It's difficult to understand why, as the reader, you seem bombarded by adjective after endless adjective even as you seem to be missing critical information about Kurtz and the general context of Marlow's employment on 'the Continent.' Ironically, that's perhaps the aspect of the novella that rings truest to me: the difficulty in relating something foreign to anything that one knows at all. There's a struggle to put personal experience (much less an experience of another culture, race, &c.) into words when vocabulary seems both insufficient and inefficient.
"This simply because I had a notion it somehow would be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not see -- you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream -- making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams..."
He was silent for a while.
"... No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence -- that which makes its truth, its meaning -- its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream -- alone..."
He paused again as if reflecting, then added --
"Of course, in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know..."
It had become pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might have been asleep, but I was awake. I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night air of the river.
There you have Marlow, telling his story in almost pitch-darkness to an audience of one unnamed narrator and three others. He's been speaking, and the narrator's been listening, but neither one is quite aware of how Marlow's voice is being received. Is he speaking to himself, or to the audience? Marlow seems terribly alone. The narrator, too, seems more like a man reading a book in private than a part of an active, listening group. There's no communal interpretation, no shared signs of understanding. Not between Marlow and his listeners, and not between the listeners themselves.
Perhaps we all want convenient signposts in our texts and our stories: things that mark the way, make the moral come easily into our grasp. But that's the one thing Marlow doesn't have -- he hasn't the word, or the clue, or the sentence to wrap up the uneasiness of this story about wandering into some other place, that "heart of darkness". So instead we get many words; many insufficient, inefficient words.
Critics could easily find reason to accuse Conrad of racism; I'm not here to argue against that reading, nor to defend Conrad -- just that Marlow's eternal grasping for words feels to me like a grasping at how to treat very complicated topics of race, imperialism, first contact, and so on -- and I don't think that grasping is an evil. I feel like I'm constantly grasping myself.