Anders Loves Maria

Just came across Anders Loves Maria, a web-comic, which just came to a conclusion and I read through the entire thing last night.  It's a NSFW strip about relationships and is more complex emotionally than some other web comics that I've read before.
[Via Mefi - be wary of link to spoiler there]

Never Let Me Go : Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

I've never read Ishiguro's apparent classic The Remains of the Day and the local library didn't have that, but they did have one of his later novels, Never Let Me Go, so I sprung for that instead.

And I found it to be quite engrossing and ended up finishing it the day after I started reading it.  There's actually a review quote on the back by the NYTimes book Review, which states "[Ishiguro is] Not only a good writer but a wonderful novelist," which I think sums up nicely a couple of good points of this work.

First, the writing is well-done.  For example, the first section of the novel focused on the middle-school/high-school life of the protagonist and narrator, Kathy and other main characters.  And I found that the worries, ideas and dialogue of these characters in this section particularly reminded of female friends/classmates from my own middle-school/high-school life, in that he seemed to get the perspective of not only kids of that age right, but also particularly a female perspective.

I must admit that I initially found this scoped perspective to be a bit over-simplistic and worried whether whether this was a novel geared more for young adults, but as things progressed, the significance of the simple joys and dramas really shine through.  It isn't a simple glossed-over idealistic vision of that period in one's life.

I will note that Ishiguro has a trick that he uses throughout the novel.  It is narrated in hind-site by the protagonist, Kathy, and numerous times, he describes an event, then makes a leading statement to the significance of the event in the next chapter.  For example:

We started to walk back towards the main house then and I waited for her to explain what she meant, but she didn't.  I found out though over the next several days.

For one, it propelled the story forward, perhaps explaining why I breezed through the book.  But relating to more the "wonderful novelist" portion of the earlier quote, it allows Ishiguro to gradually crescendo the feel that a much larger and menacing context surrounds the initial facts being presented and constantly has the feel that a some sort of science/societal ethics question is about to be revealed.

The latter sections describe the characters developing beyond their school years and that initial time spent describing the joys, events, and relationships of the characters during their school gives weight and emotional impact to latter events and the end-reveal.

The only qualm I had and I am trying not to spoil the story, was that the ethical quandary in question seemed like a bit of a strawman situation.  Perhaps the best parallel to describe this would be certain Hollywood movies show a small, individual business-owner with heart and humanity, struggling against unshown, but absolutely heartless employees of a mega-corporation.  Well, I hate to break it to you, but every company is run by people with their own idiosyncrasies and human concerns.  There doesn't really exist a company with simplistic, evil motives.

In any case, the minor qualm aside, it was quite an enjoyable novel and I can picture myself reading another Ishiguro's novels in the future.

JD Salinger's unpublished short stories

Making my way through some of JD Salinger Unpublished Short Stories.

The Tin Drum

by Gunter Grass

I rather enjoyed this one.  The writing (and I suppose the translation work) was very engaging and was more or less broken up into chronological episodes.  The characters were many, yet memorable, starting with the narrator and main character, Oskar, who purports to have purposefully stopped himself from growing anymore at the age of three, has a talent for drumming and has the ability to scream and accurately break any glass in his eye-sight at his choosing.

If Oskar's character sounds a bit unorthodox, that's just the beginning, there's a rather surrealistic/humorous/dark skew to all of the stories and characters.  But not so much in the cartoony, overly done way that I think is so common to a lot of modern tv shows now.  It's just well much more subtle than that.

There's a musicality to the writing in a lot of places and I suspect that it must have been even more so in the original German version.  In the forward, they mention that Grass originally was planning for this to be a tone poem and I think a lot of that still comes through:

In blowing, my grandmother closed her eyes. When she thought she had blown enough, she opened first one eye, then the other, bit into the potato with her widely spaced but otherwise perfect front teeth, removed half the potato, cradled the other half, mealy steaming, and still too hot to chew, in her open mouth, and, sniffing at the smoke and the October air, gazed wide-eyed across the field towards the nearby horizon, sectioned by telegraph poles and the upper third of the brickworks chimney.

Intriguingly, there are frequent change-ups in writing styles throughout.  For example, there are occasional shifts in the narrator, such as shifting from Oskar's perspective to that of Oksar's mental hospital nurse.  There are also varied usages of rhythm and tone.   The chapter, "Faith, Hope, Love," in particular sticks out for its use of repetition to underscore the emotions of the burial of Oskar's friend Herbert, who was killed in a supernatural fashion by a beautiful but evil wooden female ship's figurehead.

I think also that Oskar the narrator can also be an untrustworthy one.  He claims his genius, yet throughout the stories, he's in a mental hospital, because he convinced a friend to turn him in for the murder of a nurse whom he had a crush on, but the act of which he did not commit.   His actions also are sometimes inane.  For example, for some time he lived across the hall from the nurse mentioned above.  One night, he woke up in the middle of the night and instead of properly dressing himself, grabbed a piece of rough carpet to surround himself with.  He managed to startle the nurse while she is in the communal bathroom, and instead of apologizing and clarifying himself, he instead convinces her in her fright that he is Satan and proceeds to sexually pleasure her with the rough carpet.

It's just a very striking novel in many respects.

Of course, one must mention that it is set in a city on the German-Polish border during the Nazi era. I mention this last, since these references were the ones that I had the least understanding of and I'm guessing having a basic grasp of the political and historical events of these times would have helped clarify why this book was such a bomb-shell of a book for Germans when it was published.

In any case, even without understanding the historical context of the story, it's still a strikingly interesting book to read.  I just wish I could more fully understand the history to get the full impact of it.

Old Filth : Jane Gardam

Old Filth
by Jane Gardam

Wasn't really a fan of this. It's a fictional life story of a judge which contrasts with the professional, dry image with which those who know him less well associate him.

The story is told non-linearly, starting with him as an old man and jumping rather disjointedly back and forth to earlier times in his life.

I thought some of the writing was rather clumsy. An excerpt from the first page:

The Queen's Remembrancer: I suppose we all know who that was?
Junior judge: I've no idea.
Senior judge: It seemed to be a famous face.
The Common Sergeant: It was Old Filth.
JJ: What? But he must have died years ago. Contemporary of F. E. Smith.
CS: No It was Old Filth. Great advocate, judge and-bit of a wit. Said to have invented FILTH-Failed In London Try Hong Kong. He tried Hong Kong. Modest, nice chap.

I will say that some of the random anecdotes that are supposed to elucidate Filth's life-story and personality are moderately interesting, mainly because the whole historical British angle was new to me.

But overall, there just wasn't much direction to the book. The end-reveal came too late to have much of an impact. And if this was a character study, there wasn't much depth on the characters either. I didn't quite understand Old Filth very much, nor have much interest in him at the very end.

Dream Chaser - Al Joyner & Flo Jo

ESPN has a story on Al Joyner and Flo-Jo. I always love reading about Olympians in general, but throw in a love story, and it's even more interesting.

He had first laid eyes on that woman in 1980, at the U.S. Olympic trials in Eugene, Ore. He can still remember the time (7 p.m.), the place (a sign-in table), their ages (both 20) and her face (gorgeous). She looked so elegant, he assumed she was a trainer. He was wrong.

He asked for her name, and she told him, "Florence."

[via mefi]

The Forgotten Astronaut of Apollo 11

The Guardian has an article on Michael Collins, the third astronaut on the Apollo 11, along with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.

Minutes later, Columbia swept behind the Moon and Collins became Earth's most distant solo traveller, separated from the rest of humanity by 250,000 miles of space and by the bulk of the Moon, which blocked all radio transmissions to and from mission control. He was out of sight and out of contact with his home planet.

"I am now truly alone and absolutely alone from any known life. I am it," he wrote in his capsule. Lindbergh's remarks were certainly accurate.

[via Mefi]