1 woman :(
I read for pleasure, not out of some misguided sense of duty to rectify socio-economic/racial/gender/nationalistic biases.
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1 woman :(
I read for pleasure, not out of some misguided sense of duty to rectify socio-economic/racial/gender/nationalistic biases.
Good post, Pompey. "Huckleberry Finn", though, is SOMETHING of a historical novel -- at least, it is not set in what was then the present. It was published in 1884 -- and depicts a time before the Civil War. It is probably set in the era of Clemens' childhood, in the 1840s -- 40 years prior to the novel's publication. "War and Peace: was published only 50 years after the era it depicts.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
"The Good Lord Bird" is a historical novel in that it features real-life people: John Brown, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman and others. "Finn" does not.
It was only a few years ago that I realised I mainly read male authors, and when I think about it I mainly listen to male bands. This was a surprise to me, but then in bookshops you often only need to look at the book cover to guess the target audience and the sex of the author - not so much I crime but in general fiction.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lykren
My wife and I read different things and I wonder how widespread that is.
Few people think that by reading the proper novels they can "rectify socio-economic/racial/gender/nationalistic biases." How would that work? In addition, most novel-readers "read for pleasure" (unless they are high-school students, reading to pass their English Lit. classes). Nonetheless, it's at least mildly interesting that your list contains works by only one woman. Why do you think that is? Random chance? An artistic taste and sensibility that finds more in common with that of other men than with that of women? Men are simply better novelists, poets, and playwrights than women?Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I glanced at the Booker Awards list and the National Book Awards list: both lists have 11 female winners in the past 30 years (I think -- some authors go by initials, and others by ambiguous first names like "Shirley" or "Hillary", and I don't know the gender of all of them). Since 1984, 7 women have been Nobel Laureates in literature (there are fewer than 30 winners, because some years no award is given). So, by comparison, stlukes' list is male dominated. 35% of the winners on these lists are women; 2% on stlukes' list.
p.s. Paulclem gives one possible explanation, which was cross-posted with the above.
You spoke too hastily. My comment was not a criticism of perceived gender biases in your list - in fact I believe you chose that list objectively and fairly. I was merely lamenting the fact that it is rather difficult to think of well known and respected modern female authors.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Interesting PB. I think I will now lay my hands on these two books as you have made them sound as if I would enjoy them - Lost Memory of Skin and The Good Lord Bird. On the point about historical fiction. To me that has to be set in an era before the novelist's birth in fact sometime before it as if it is his childhood he can remember those times and will have heard his parents talk. A true historical novel would be of the nature of Scott's Heart of Midlothian or Stevenson's Kidnapped.
A minor point about identifying modern classics. There are novels etc coming out now which may attain the status of genre classics. There seems to be nowadays fairly well-defined genres and some writers write within their chosen genre almost exclusively. I do not mean to suggest there were no genres in say the nineteenth century, only fewer and probably not so many really able writers tending to focus on a particular type of novel as in recent decades.
Okay, fair enough--in a way. I mean, Huckleberry Finn isn't anything like a historical novel, even a highly fictionalized one, because no historical characters or events are depicted (unless one counts antebellum America in a general sense). War and Peace is a historical novel not just because it includes fictionalized versions historical figures like Kutuzov and Napoleon, but because it presents Tolstoy's theory of history and destiny ("Life and Fate" as Vasily Grossman called it in his book), including a broadside assault on Carlisle's "Great Man" theory of history. War and Peace is not just a historical novel, it is a book about how history does and does not work. Distance in time from the upheavals it describes isn't really the point.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
But your point about Huckleberry Finn is relevant. Twain sets the novel in the America of his youth. He uses dialect from the time, and of course the humor of children. So maybe there always was an element of nostalgia to the story. But for me, Twain's genius (when he had his good stuff going) was to write in such honest and legitimate human terms that his work transcended its own nostalgia. That's why it has lived, and in my opinion, why we must guard against its Bowdlerization.
I haven't read The Good Lord Bird, by the way, although I have heard great things about it. I didn't mean to imply that it was necessarily nostalgic just because it's a historical novel (I can't imagine getting too nostalgic for John Brown), just that it is striking how often the two great American literary traditions come wrapped in the swaddling clothes of their 19th century births. It's important not to drift into nostalgia and genre (in a bad sense) if the meanings of new works are to remain relevant.
So does The Good Lord Bird work? Is Brown depicted as a freedom fighter, a terrorist, or something in between? In what way did it remind you of Huckleberry Finn? Was it a picaresque novel (I'll forgive a lot for that, but that's just me). Did it strike you as "politically correct"? Do you think it is likely to be read in the future? (Personally I think having a strong political orientation makes a book less likely to last simply because times change so much, but I don't think that's a very common view).
I glanced at the Booker Awards list and the National Book Awards list: both lists have 11 female winners in the past 30 years (I think -- some authors go by initials, and others by ambiguous first names like "Shirley" or "Hillary", and I don't know the gender of all of them). Since 1984, 7 women have been Nobel Laureates in literature (there are fewer than 30 winners, because some years no award is given). So, by comparison, stlukes' list is male dominated. 35% of the winners on these lists are women; 2% on stlukes' list.
I suspect that the choices made behind the scenes of the Booker Awards, The National Book Awards, and certainly the Nobel prize have far more to do with politics whether these be of race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, etc... I read for pleasure. I could probably add Toni Morrison and Wislawa Szymborska... but limited to Modern/Contemporary writers (of the past 30 or so years) I find myself honestly limited in my choices by what I am familiar with and what I think is truly worthy. Undoubtedly my choices are also biased in terms of nationality and linguistics (where I am limited to works available in quality translations into English). But at the same time, I don't buy into the notion that the arts are an Egalitarian endeavor where each nationality, gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc... has produced an equal amount of masterful works of art in every known genre.
I actually have far more female writers from earlier periods on my shelves.
Just to clarify, ecurb has read The Good Lord Bird, but not me. I read Lost Memory of Skin and highly recommend it. By the way, I just picked up The War at the End of the World on your recommendation. It looks amazing. Thanks.Quote:
Originally Posted by ennison
Thanks very much for sharing this information! :) I never knew Trainspotting was a novel. It's one of my favorite movies, although I can only watch it in pieces I'll definitely have to read the novel.Quote:
Originally Posted by sandy14
Is the book better than the movie?
That makes sense.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
"Ender's Game" is one I don't believe I've seen mentioned.
I think James Michener would make the list as well, although he does get a lot of help from his research team.
I have just a minute today -- perhaps I'll post more tomorrow. To answer your question, Pompey, John Brown is portrayed as an insane fanatic, and Frederick Douglas is portrayed as a lecherous blowhard (a portrayal McBride probably couldn't get away with if he were white). One of the fun things about the book, though, is that although Brown is insane and a murderer -- in the end his murderous madness is not so different from saintliness, and he is, after all, an honorable man.
To stluke: I'm sure the awards ARE political (I have no idea if feminist political goals have helped women's books win). Nonetheless, whether a book becomes a "classic" is also political. Isn't a thread about what modern books will become "classics" different (at least slightly) than a thread about which books someone personally thinks are the best of the past 30 years? The reality is that Booker and National Book Award winners have a leg up on non-winners in terms of whether they will attain "classic" status -- and Nobel Prizes are awarded by committees that think the author has ALREADY written some "classics".
Perhaps we should define what we mean by "classic", and what qualities a book must have to qualify.
Nonetheless, whether a book becomes a "classic" is also political.
Certainly. A brilliant writer who writes in Hungarian, Korean, Afrikaans, Swahili, Ndebele, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Azeri, Kurdish, etc... is at a major disadvantage. There is far less chance that his or her work will be translated into the languages spoken in the major socio/economic/cultural powers. For a work to be recognized as a "classic" it needs to "travel"... beyond its local confines. One may also have the advantage of having attended the "right" schools, made influential connections, been employed in the right place at the right time. Looking to my own area of expertise, I can immediately recognize that Michelangelo quite likely would not be as central a figure as he is in the visual arts had he not been employed by the Medici in Florence and the Popes in Rome, but rather had worked in a small or medium sized diocese in Hungary or Norway.
Isn't a thread about what modern books will become "classics" different (at least slightly) than a thread about which books someone personally thinks are the best of the past 30 years?
Is it? Perhaps slightly... but only if we recognize that what we "like" is not necessarily the same thing as what is "good" or "great". But the very idea of a "contemporary classic" seems a contradiction in terms to me... and predicting which contemporary works will eventually be recognized as "classics" seems little more than a shot in the dark... a sucker's bet at best.
The reality is that Booker and National Book Award winners have a leg up on non-winners in terms of whether they will attain "classic" status -- and Nobel Prizes are awarded by committees that think the author has ALREADY written some "classics".
But how accurate have these awards been historically? By most standards, the Nobel Prize seems to be the award most honored. The winners of this award from the first 60 years of the 20th century include:
Sully Prudhomme
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen
Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson
Frédéric Mistral
José Echegaray y Eizaguirre
Rudolf Christoph Eucken
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf
Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse
Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam
Romain Rolland
Karl Adolph Gjellerup
Henrik Pontoppidan
Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler
Anatole France
Jacinto Benavente
Wladyslw Stanislaw Reymont
Grazia Deledda
Henri Bergson
Erik Axel Karlfeldt
John Goldsworthy
Roger du Gard
Pearl Buck
Frans Eemil Sillanpää
Johann Vilhelm Jensen
Gabriela Mistral
Winston Churchill
Halldór Kiljan Laxness
Bertrand Russell
A good many of these Laureates I have never even heard of... and are probably unknown or forgotten by most others. Now there are a number of Laureates who unquestionably deserved their awards. Among these I would certainly include:
Rudyard Kipling
W.B. Yeats
G.B. Shaw
Thomas Mann
Ivan Bunin
Luigi Pirandello
Eugene O' Niell
Hermann Hesse
Andre Gide
T.S. Eliot
François Mauriac
Ernest Hemingway
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Albert Camus
Boris Pasternak
Salvatore Quasimodo
But even there... who among us can't come up with a list equal or better... or at least certainly better than 2/3rds of the list as it stands:
James Joyce
Marcel Proust
Ranier Maria Rilke
Eugenio Montale
Franz Kafka
Wallace Stevens
Federico Garcia Lorca
Jean Genet
Guillaume Apollinaire
Joseph Conrad
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Virginia Woolf
W.H. Auden
Graham Greene
Leo Tolstoy
Anton Chekhov
Vladimir Nabokov
etc...
I somehow doubt that today's critics are any more discerning as to what will truly stand the test of time and be recognized as a classic.
I find funny people are quick to point the "bias" of Stlukes reggarding gender and pointing to the solution using prizes who are even more biased towards the limited world of the limited english literature (or american).
I think the attempt to define what qualifies a book as a classic is more difficult to predict than it may have been in the past. Reading 1984 for example, you find a novel which is notable more for the effects of the ideas than the quality of the writing. There are new elements - will there be a film/ box set effect? Will how a novel interfaces with other media have an effect?
As for the relevance of the Booker or any literary award - it is merely a filter. The works tend to have a certain literary quality and with the recent inclusion of US authors, it does present a wide range of books from different cultures. Would the recent winner have come to the fore without it?
My point is not to you, Paul. You decided for a list and you are not nitpicking someone else list. It is absurd ridiculous to imagine anyone else will be able to bring on a perfect inclusive critery. There is a reason why Bouvard et Pecuchet works even unfinished; it is impossible to include all.
Anyways, the capacity to be translated to other medias is a good factor. That may be relevant for Harry Potter's series, for example. I think for example, Diana Wynne Jones Moving Castle is a superior book, but, despite a good anime, didn't had the same impact. I say, Terry Prachet's Discworld will be "damaged' the same way. In other hand, Trainspotting is a good book, has a good movie with cult following, but as the poster here suggests, the movie and the book are not linked so strongly. Cormac McCarty is already using movies-books relationship to the point it has changed his writing style, The Road for example was made to be movie already.
Some of the posts above are giving me the oddest feeling of déjà vu.
http://www.online-literature.com/for...New-Literature
"Modern classics" is an oxymoron. The Booker Prize is useful but corrupt. Literary canons are silly, or useful, or neither (I vote silly). But let's have fun trying to guess things we can't know (as with theology, new marriages, and the color of strangers' underwear). That pretty much sums up the other thread, right?
I read a rave review of that movie in Esquire, then nada. I'm not in a position to follow American cinema very closely, but if the thing was even released, I never noticed. I assume it merely tanked. Despite its video game potential ("Shoot down the cannibalistic mobs while putting tiny scraps of food in your supermarket cart!"), modern audiences just don't like to be depressed. Ridley Scott is perennially threatening to make Blood Meridian into a movie. (I guess audiences prefer that sort of thing). No Country for Old Men, of course, was "Oscar's fav" a few years back (but then the Cohen brothers have a lot of pull in Hollywood). I wonder if the guy from Sling Blade is still around. He'd make a great Child of God. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
It is not Deja vu, it is just the Avenger's of Paul's Iron Man.
Anyways, The road is a good book, nothing near the best of McCarty, of course. Also, more typical thrailler like (of course). The movie also. I think the reason of the lack of popularity was timing. Despite that I have sometimes the giggles thinking that the little boy is Jesus Christ, if you analyse you will see it is Walking Dead (a father trying to keep his son alive in a pos-apocalyptic world. The zombies are a detail - in both tv and comics - and in McCarty they are such a detail that they do not appear, but let's suppose they are a local color that the natives do not feel need to mention, like the famous camel in the koran - according to Borges - which was according to Gibbon, both wrong anyways).
No Country was also written with hollywood as a target, I meantioned the road because it is more a "finished package", since No Country still roams in some grey areas that hollywood would not consider typical, but there is no doubt the movie helped him to break out the american label and be a more well-know name outside america, so it will have some height on his chances of prosperity. As Ridley Scott... He probally thinks the Judge is some alien, hence he wants to make it as Prometheus 3.
I associate "classics" with Greek and Latin literature -- but making lists and rating things can be fun. In general, though, talking about the lists (What makes a book a "classic"? What qualities in a particular book help it make or miss the list?) is more fun than simply listing books.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
I'd forgotten that the early Nobel Literature Prizes have been so controversial to later generations. One reason: our concept of what constitutes "literature" has changed. Bertrand Russell or Henri Bergson would not win Literature Awards today -- and advances in academic fields being cumulative, their books are not as "timeless" as a work of art is. Personally, I think non-fiction literature can have as much literary value as novels -- but perhaps advances in academic fields and our current love of science and modernism makes this an unpopular opinion. Today, "Decline and Fall..." is as likely to be dismissed because of Gibbons' historical errors as it is to be lauded as a seminal literary work.
Joe Simpson, author of the mountaineering "classic" "Touching the Void", recounted a story about literary prizes in his second book. "Touching" was nominated for some major literary award, and his competition included some very famous writers (I forget who right now, and I forget which award it was). Sitting at the gala, he wondered how his book rated -- since he had dropped out of school at age 16 and never written anything before. He won.
I have a good opinion of The Road. I think some of the literati who go ape for Blood Meridian were a little hard on it, or at least too jaded. McCarthy stoked that fire a bit himself, though. He is notoriously reclusive and has made himself less than accessible to the Powers That Be over the years. But (a little hilariously) he made a point of "doing Oprah" when The Road came out, to promote his book to be sure, but also to just diss 'em. I kind of like that.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
Spoiler alert: If you don't want to know how The Road ends, skip the next three paragraphs. Skip the paragraph after that if you've never read or seen World War Z, and the one after that if you've never read or seen No Country for Old Men.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
I saw the man with the crossbow, who the boy goes off with at the end, as the Christ figure (crossbow, get it? And it's on his back). The boy and his father are just "carrying the fire," which has to do with the Valentinian gnostic concept about redemptive purity. Or you could skip the hocus pocus and just say that they maintain their humanity because they will starve before they join the "zombies." The father fulfills his duty by delivering the boy safely to an area where a community of like-minded people can find him--perhaps.
I would have ended the story differently. The sudden appearance of the Savior figure was too much of a deus ex machina for me (where were the "good guys" all through the rest of the book?) I would have made it more ambiguous. The father would have been teaching his son mushroom lore (or mycology, if that's the word) as they passed through the dark mountains: remember this kind because you can eat it; remember that kind because, if you ever really needed to die, it would do the trick; avoid this kind because it will make you go crazy and see things for a while. But the boy would have a hard time remembering the differences, and eventually his father would tell him to forget it. After his father dies, I would have shown the boy sitting beside his body eating a mushroom (the pistol would be out of bullets, which it is not in the book). Is he eating to live? In other words, left alone in the nightmare world, has he now taken responsibility for his own survival (by choosing the right mushroom this time)? Or with his father gone, has he chosen to die? And was he even capable of choosing the right mushroom? Was it one of the hallucinogenic ones?
At that point, after the boy had sat beside his father's corpse for some time, the man with the crossbow on his back would arrive. Is he what he claims to be? Or is he just a cannibal trying to con the boy out of the pistol, then lead him away be slaughtered and eaten? (That point is actually left slightly ambiguous in the book as it is--and to good effect, in my opinion). Or is the man Jesus, come to take the boy to be with his his father--in other words, is the boy dead, too? All that would be ambiguous in my ending, and made the more so by the potential that the boy's perception might be clouded by hallucinations.
I never saw The Walking Dead, by the way, but it does seem a little similar to The Road in some ways. (I watched World War Z on the back of a plane seat recently and was disappointed that at least one of Brad Pitt's little girls didn't get eaten up--but I guess that's what sequels are for. :) )
I had the very strange experience of finishing No Country for Old Men on an airplane, and then watching the movie on the back of the seat in front of me. Consequently, I have a little trouble sorting them out in my memory. They both (I think) had a Ford Madox Ford-style modernist ending, in which the climax happens "offstage." That was fine in the book (I think), but later I heard a lot of disappointed movie-goers say that they felt like they had missed a step on a staircase. People also complained that there was no reason for the wife to have been killed, too. But personally, I thought that was one of the more powerful moments in the book. The devil goes by karma, not mercy.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
Or the Glanton party's helicopter crashes and "the boys" have to fight their way out of Mexico while the UN just shrugs? Or the Judge is a secretly a Roman general who will have his vengeance--in this life or the next? (Actually that does sound a little like the Judge).Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
Is the book better than the movie?
As far as I remember, the book and the novel are quite close - the film adaptation is pretty faithful to the book. The book's humour is funnier- and uses the accents of the characters which can be a problem for folk who are not used to its cadence.
Sex Lives of the Master Chefs is worthwhile - his best book for a while.
That's usually what makes for good movies.
Thanks for the recommendation, I will remember it.
"Bloody hell, I'm going to die to Bony M!"Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
I think the main reason is "selling to hollywood" part. Considering this is a strategy for best-sellers as Dan Brown, etc. he went to a muddy water. Of course, the trade with popular art - which is what they do with movies - is not so unique. Happens a lot. But I guess the ivory tower trembles when this happens.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
Spoiler alert: If you don't want to know how The Road ends, skip the next three paragraphs. Skip the paragraph after that if you've never read or seen World War Z, and the one after that if you've never read or seen No Country for Old Men.
Well, I think the boy behaves in a way that make me think it, it is like he is leaving Joseph (the mortal father) to christianity, in the end of the book. Anyways, I just chuckle. In the end it is only about a father -son relationship.Quote:
I saw the man with the crossbow, who the boy goes off with at the end, as the Christ figure (crossbow, get it? And it's on his back). The boy and his father are just "carrying the fire," which has to do with the Valentinian gnostic concept about redemptive purity. Or you could skip the hocus pocus and just say that they maintain their humanity because they will starve before they join the "zombies." The father fulfills his duty by delivering the boy safely to an area where a community of like-minded people can find him--perhaps.
Like i said, the overall theme , specially in the comics, is the father protecting his son in a apocalyptic world. Most Zombie movies, have the zombies as irrelevant, a meeting by chance no difference from locusts to egyptians. The usual danger is the human, so the Road is pretty much like it. World War Z is more a super-hero movie which villain are hordes of zombies. I cannot even say it is an apocalyptic work, they basically win...Quote:
I never saw The Walking Dead, by the way, but it does seem a little similar to The Road in some ways. (I watched World War Z on the back of a plane seat recently and was disappointed that at least one of Brad Pitt's little girls didn't get eaten up--but I guess that's what sequels are for. :) )
The thing about the movie (good movie) is that the acting and audio-visual aspect steals some of those momments up for meditation that you find in a book. And with this, we would see the entire theme of the movie is how pointless all is. The killer does not play with a coin to scare people, it is a failed prophet, one that is afraid of cassandra and then take the risk for himself. Of course, the movie is inconclusive, of course, average viewers would complain about it.Quote:
I had the very strange experience of finishing No Country for Old Men on an airplane, and then watching the movie on the back of the seat in front of me. Consequently, I have a little trouble sorting them out in my memory. They both (I think) had a Ford Madox Ford-style modernist ending, in which the climax happens "offstage." That was fine in the book (I think), but later I heard a lot of disappointed movie-goers say that they felt like they had missed a step on a staircase. People also complained that there was no reason for the wife to have been killed, too. But personally, I thought that was one of the more powerful moments in the book. The devil goes by karma, not mercy.
meh (double, mods could delete it?)
I had forgotten that part!Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
One more (similar) mountaineering "classic" story, since I've attracted a little interest in the subject: many people think "Conquistadors of the Useless" (Les Conquérants de l'inutile) is the best mountaineering autobiography. It was written by Lionel Terray, the greatest of all French climbers. Terray was a professional mountaineering and ski guide in Chamonix, and had dropped out of school at age 11 (or somewhere thereabouts). As a result, many critics thought "Conquistadors" must have been Ghost-Written.
A recent book by David Roberts (True Summit: What really happened on Annapurna) investigates another mountaineering "classic", Maurice Herzog's book "Annapurna", which was the best-selling mountaineering book of all time until "Into Thin Air". Among other interesting discoveries, while rooting around in Terray's family home in Chamonix, Roberts discovered an original manuscript, handwritten in Terray's own scrawl, of "Conquistadors". Hardly a word had been changed for publication.
That line had me in stitches, though it must not have been very funny for Simpson at the time. I wonder what it is about the brain that makes it play music for you under extreme physical duress? Ages ago I had an experience, nothing like Simpson's (who was probably starting to die at the time), but bad enough, in a remote-ish part of central Africa, in which I keeled over from heat exhaustion. According to the friend who was with me, my pupils rolled back and I tossed about. All I remember--except for a thrashing sensation--is that my brain played Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA at an obnoxiously high volume the entire time. I think I would have preferred Bony M. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
Ecurb, I think you're a mountaineer.
Again, spoiler alerts for The Road, World War Z, and No Country for Old Men.
I agree. I think that's why this book will live in people's hearts when books like Blood Meridian and Child of God are being kept on life support by academics. Speaking personally, I remember turning over the last page of The Road (books had pages in those days), then driving to a bookstore (which we also had in those days) and buying my dad a copy for Father's Day. True, he later told me that he found it "Really depressing," but we had many good talks about it, too. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
I heard a rumor--I don't know how true it is--that McCarthy, no spring chicken, was inspired to write The Road after marrying a much younger woman and having a son with her. Feeling fatherly love for the boy, and realizing that he would certainly not be alive for much of his son's life, he had to confront his extremely negative feelings about human nature and the world. What kind of place was he abandoning this child to? And what was his duty before he left?
That is why, according the report, there is a question repeated over and over in the novel--Will the boy be okay? It starts when the son thinks he sees another little boy looking out of a window in one of the ruined towns he and his father pass through; but of course all he is really seeing is his own reflection in the window pane. His concern for this "boy" never leaves him, and the last thing that his father tells him before he dies is that the little boy will be okay--that goodness will find him.
I don't watch many American movies. I have only see them on airplanes for maybe ten years now--and then I usually watch the silliest ones I can find, like World War Z. When I was 18 or 19, though (in the pre-ceramic Neolithic), I used to go "with the guys" to see the old George Romero zombie flicks. Watching World War Z, I was really struck that what had once been a shocking cinema form, intentionally so, to the point of near-obscenity, had become, over the years--processed cheese? That's the best way I can describe it: the zombie movie reduced to family fare--starring the perfect husband, who was once a secret military ops guy (for the UN no less!) and who doesn't mind driving into the city to pick up the kid's prescription (despite the flesh-eating ghouls); with a nice soft focus on the people being ripped apart, and a jerky camera so you don't really see anything anyway. What a difference a generation makes! I did like the zombie who kept chomping his teeth at the end, though. Oddly enough that was a fairly well acted scene. The actor had obviously studied the behavior of mental patients. So like the boy from The Road, we look at the image looking at us, without knowing that it is just us looking at the image. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
My take on the scene with the coin was that it had to do with a kind of mindless karmic evil. The devil (here Mammon, from what McCarthy later says) has no real will. He'll kill the clerk or spare him depending on the toss of the coin. By the same token, there's no emotion about killing the wife. He kills her because he promised her husband he would. It reminds me of something I once read by the director of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington. In writing about the many unfulfilled promises made to Jews by various nations and other parties in the long run up to the death camps, he noted that the only one who kept his promises to them was Hitler.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
I have done some climbing, Pompey, and still occasionally bag a relatively easy peak (Shuksan, this summer. Whitney by the East face last summer). All those nights spent in tents are great for reading. What else is there to do? My ice axe and crampons went to the top of Denali this summer, with one of my son's friends whom I helped turn on to climbing, by the Cassin Ridge. I doubt I'll ever see them again.
Perhaps I'll read "The Road". McCarthy turned me off when I read "Blood Meridian". I recognize his talent, of course, but reading the book was not a pleasant experience I was eager to repeat. I emerged from the book feeling like the kid, beaten and abused.
Well done. I used to climb the Presidentials (the highest peaks of the White Mountains in New Hampshire), but mostly when I was a teenager or a 20-something. (I was at the summit of Mount Washington on July 4, 1976, which was a good way to spend the Bicentennial). My favorite peak in those days was Mount Lafayette, the second tallest after Washington (so named to honor the Marquis de Lafayette--without whom there would have been no United States--in his lifetime) But I climbed most of them and others besides in those days.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
In my mid-thirties, I decided to try to climb Lafayette again. I felt every moment of age that had gone by in the ten years or so since I had last climbed it. I got very near the summit, but turned back at the last minute in a sudden snow storm (it was Columbus Day which is a stupidly late time to try a fall climb on a big mountain like that). Nevertheless I consider it a victory of age: if I had been a teenager, I would have been dumb enough to have kept going. As you know, mountains don't forgive youthful folly--or any other kind.
In my mid-forties, I decided that I wanted one last shot at it (midlife crises are not pretty). This time, I made it to the summit and back, and retired with a single moral burnt into my soul: NEVER AGAIN. :)
I am in my even older now and borderline handicapped (not to mention old and getting fat). I have had to put beautiful mountains in the same emotional drawer I have long kept beautiful women (with the exception of the beautiful Mrs. Bum): been there, done that, not afraid to move on.
Ironically, Lafeyette was also getting old (and fat) when his name was given an honor second only to Washington. He was visiting America at the time, but there was no possibility of getting him anywhere near the White Mountains for the ceremony. Instead he was hoisted up tiny tiny tiny Bunker Hill (near Boston), the highest point he could still ascend. That I will accept as my mountaineering legacy. "Lafeyette, we are here." :)
Sounds like they are in good hands.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
I recommend it highly. It is not a cheerful book (far from it), but it has a humanity that some of his other books lack at times.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
Although I liked The Road - book and film - I felt it inferior to both Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men. This is because of what I felt to be an inconsistent ending. I also thought that whilst it challenged common heroic conceptions of what humans would do to survive, this challenge was not such a strong feature as in the other two.
I liked everything about Blood Meridian, but particularly this notion of challenging an accepted stereotype - the essentially good, independent man. The kid could have been this figure, but as the story progresses you realise that he is one of a company of murdering, raping, pillaging child killers. It's grimness is compounded by the factual basis which I found somewhat shocking.
Old Country I found to take this further. We see the psycho - Chigurh - becomes the antithesis of Moss, with an oddly consistent moral philosophy. What he says is what you get. There's no trickery in him. He doesn't kill gratuitously, and sees no problem in carrying out what is right absolutely consistently. This is what makes him a psycho. He cannot waver from his moral standards to a different set - the ones you and me hold.
In this sense he is superior to Moss who, whilst pursuing his aim has a confused morality revealed when he goes back to the shooting. Moss represents the capable independent American outsider. A Vietnam vet who relies on himself but who cannot begin to understand Chigurh moral worldview and represented by Moss being unable to pronounce his name.
Both novels for me challenge accepted views of US icons very successfully.
Well, I am never so sure about the motives why a artwork is alive. I like the road, but I think it was the less impressive book of McCarthy I read. This includes even the border triology last book. But this is a thread about immortality, so let's wonder a little. I wonder if all the motives why McCarthy will be remembered are remarkable in The Road, having a theme that provoke empathy or not. In one of triology books, he tells the story of a cowboy who saves a she-wolf. I am not saying the relationship between a man and his pet is the same as a boy and his father, but notice how both are about a mature person traveling to take his "cub" to safety. But see the difference, there is not a road for the wolf and the cowboy. The action is told from such perspective that is more unique also stronger than in the Road. Despite, perhaps, a less complex journey-relationship. I suspect that is where his genius is to be found. This is not saying The Road is bad, not this, more the evidence that McCarthy is good enough for minor works.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
As Blood Meridian, let's just say, it must survive because Moby Dick will survive and needs spawns that are not just Benchley's Jaws.
Well, we must be careful to not see much beyond the zombie movies. Sometimes zombies are just zombies in a zombie movie. As the changes, they are more suited for the comedy like Shaun of the Dead or the very interesting Le Revenants (the original, not the american version) tv series. However, zombies there do not eat anyone.Quote:
I don't watch many American movies. I have only see them on airplanes for maybe ten years now--and then I usually watch the silliest ones I can find, like World War Z. When I was 18 or 19, though (in the pre-ceramic Neolithic), I used to go "with the guys" to see the old George Romero zombie flicks. Watching World War Z, I was really struck that what had once been a shocking cinema form, intentionally so, to the point of near-obscenity, had become, over the years--processed cheese? That's the best way I can describe it: the zombie movie reduced to family fare--starring the perfect husband, who was once a secret military ops guy (for the UN no less!) and who doesn't mind driving into the city to pick up the kid's prescription (despite the flesh-eating ghouls); with a nice soft focus on the people being ripped apart, and a jerky camera so you don't really see anything anyway. What a difference a generation makes! I did like the zombie who kept chomping his teeth at the end, though. Oddly enough that was a fairly well acted scene. The actor had obviously studied the behavior of mental patients. So like the boy from The Road, we look at the image looking at us, without knowing that it is just us looking at the image. :)
Well, true, but let's think of the coin gimmick original user: Batman Two-faces. Two-faces gimmick with the coin is just a symbol of the duality, he is both evil and good. Chiurgh is not. He is just evil and cold. So, what he does? He knows what will happen and he gambles with fate. He is not giving the clerk or the wife the chance to live. He is giving himself the chance to kill or not. It is like he is adding this possibility to avoid to fullfil the prophecy (I will kill - as you said, he has not really a will, he is a killer so he would have no option), so he has some control, he has a dialogue with Fate. Hence why he is so cold - the victims are not relevant to him at all. His attempts to avoid to be caught in a 'system" however fail, does not matter how many coins he tossed, in the end he is a killer that keep killing and the occasional mercy of the coin does not change the scales. Does not matter also, he has no real options, no control and fate will rub on his face: all the time it was matter of a coin being tossed anyways, adding it didn't made any change. Adding to Paul, Moss is also the commun people, the modern people, Chiurgh plays with myth-like forces, which Moss avoid. Moss just accept the outcome without any hope to change it, like Chiurgh in vain tries to pretend to be doing.Quote:
My take on the scene with the coin was that it had to do with a kind of mindless karmic evil. The devil (here Mammon, from what McCarthy later says) has no real will. He'll kill the clerk or spare him depending on the toss of the coin. By the same token, there's no emotion about killing the wife. He kills her because he promised her husband he would. It reminds me of something I once read by the director of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington. In writing about the many unfulfilled promises made to Jews by various nations and other parties in the long run up to the death camps, he noted that the only one who kept his promises to them was Hitler.
Very interesting. You and Paul certainly have a higher opinion of No Country for Old Men than I do. I thought it was okay, mostly because Chigurh was an interesting character, but beyond that all I really took from it was McCarthy's view--articulated through Bell--that a moral evil, specifically a dehumanizing greed, was about to bring hell to the American Southwest. Okay. I mean drugs are bad. But in the decade or so since the book came out, it seems like drought has been the bigger culprit. The rest (except for the murder of Moss' wife) seemed like one long chase scene to me. The Road, for me, was about staying human in the face of evil. We don't all face Apocalyptic nightmares (or demonic hit men), but we all struggle to hold on to something sacred in ourselves. No Country for Old left me a little indifferent, but The Road moved me--to be honest to tears. But then I am predisposed to relate to its very low anthropology and its stubborn theology. I also love picaresque novels (which in a very weird way The Road is).
Heh heh. Amen! :)Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
Well, let's put this way, just like The Road may be just about a father-son relationship in a typical pop zombie apocalypse world, No Country maybe just about hell in Southwest in a typical mix of Serial Killer Hannibal Lecter Hollywood style mixed more than often with the Fugitive (with Tommy Lee almost reprising his role) and all the rest is merely a way to count the stars.
As I said, both were written with hollywood in mind and McCarthy shows to flirt with pop american culture in both. How good they are is another matter.
I've begun Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies. It is very good. Her style is polished though I am going to have to look back and see exactly how she achieves it.
Despite my general disdain of royalty, Henry VIII and the Tutor court is fascinating. She manages to bring forth a man through the writing rather than the myth and I find this fictionalised account very convincing. She does the same with Thomas Cromwell through whom we experience the court. Her descriptions are evocative but economical,and the dialogue is illuminating and funny - very funny at times.
Is it going to be a classic? Maybe, but of course I'll see how the book pans out. I'm impressed so far.
Of McCarthy's books that I've read so far that I think will become classic - I think it has to be Blood Meridian. All the Pretty Horses was interesting, and I've begun The Crossing. I'm also going to read Suttree - perhaps after Christmas.
The thing is that sometimes a book is a classic not for the whole, specially novels, but for a specific chapter (Like the impact of the Great Inquisitor chapter in Brothers Karamazov was higher than the whole of the book at first or those momments of Ahab in Moby Dick), perhaps for a writer's style (like Balzac for example) or sometimes for a character. Maybe Blood Meridian may go as his best work, sort like Madame Bovary is Flaubert's best work, but his overall quality we see in the detailed lists of Bovard and Pecuchet, the researches for Samlambo, etc.
I agree. And the potential for a work to last over time is dependent on a strange dance between the literati and the--populares? Bleak House is a much better books than Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, or A Christmas Carol. Is it as widely read or as beloved? If Dickens becomes neglected in future centuries, which do you think will be the last to go?
in my opinion A Christmas Carol would be the last to go as it embodies so much of what has become culturally prominent at Christmas - nostalgia, a kind of non-committal spirituality, and all the trappings of Christmas including Scrooge's benevolent capitalism.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
I agree that some aspect of the book finds prominence. The outstanding thing in Bring up the Bodies is Mantel's writing. It is very polished, but it is supported by a very popularly regarded period of English History. ( The more I find out about he restoration, the more intrigued i am about how the historical focus has been on the glorious Tudors and Elizabethans and not the rather gruesome retribution and re-instatement of the royals. I no longer think this is accidental. That's not to say that the Tudor and Elizabethan periods were not without their gruesome martyrdoms, but this seems to have been superseded by the power exhibited in the reign).