Tag: neal stephenson

It never rains…

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

This week has been awful. But at the end of it, I dropped my chemistry class, so maybe the rest of the semester will be less awful. Ironically, although I’ve been busy, I seem to have made it through a suprising amount of media works. There’s nothing that I particularly want to promote, or have the energy to write a full review of, so I’ll just give quick reviews here.

Jeff Lemire – The Complete Essex County

Essex County is a stark story expressed in stark style with stark technique. Interestingly, if I had to pick a single phrase to describe it, it would be “a Canadian 100 Years of Solitude comic book.” I don’t want to discuss the story for fear of spoiling it, but the graphic novel spends a lot of time showing what extended periods of lonlieness and solitude do to people emotionally and relating that to the geography and culture of rural Canada.

All of this is rendered in Lemire’s rough, monochromatic ink style, which perfectly illustrates the empty isolation in which most of his characters live. One powerful sequence shows the seasonal transitions on the farm, and we see that nothing changes, whether it is snow as far as the eye can see, corn rows as far as the eye can see, bare furrows…

Another aspect of the comic that I found interesting was the way in which it resembled Southern Gothic literature. This is not a perfect parallel; there is no Canadian analogue to the Civil War and race relations are much different there, yet as in Faulkner the rural isolation, long history, and buried secrets made me feel like I was missing something in every panel I read. I felt like because I am not from Essex County, I couldn’t really understand what was going on. Fortunately Lemire is humane and exposes those relationships (in a very exciting way, no less).

I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but the story gives plenty to think about and some of the artwork is worth it on its own.

Ned Rorem – The Paris Diary

Ned Rorem was a young, beautiful, gay, American composer who ran around in Parisian expatriate and artistic circles in the mid-1950’s. In short, he was the person that I wish I could be at the time that I wish I could have been. I was surprised to find that he does not talk a whole lot about his work, but there are some personal insights into other composers of the time that I can’t imagine one could find anywhere else, and Rorem’s youthful, neurotic narration is entertaining and provoking in its own right.  I did find the untranslated use of French somewhat annoying (thanks, Babelfish!) and at times I felt like I was intruding into Rorem’s beautiful-people problems (“It’s much harder to maintain one’s reputation for being pretty than for being a talented composer”), but I’m just bitching so that this review doesn’t read as me drooling all over myself.

Arturo Perez-Reverte – The Club Dumas

As I was reading this, I was struck by how similar this book is to Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club. Both involve clues embedded in the works of historical writers. Both involve brushes with the occult. But Dante is superior in every way to Dumas. It should be mentioned that Dumas was published a full decade before Pearl’s book, but in this case originality does not trump execution. Skip Dumas, read Dante.

Neal Stephenson – Quicksilver

This is my latest stop on my quest to read all of Stephenson’s works. Honestly, the book is just too long for me to feel comfortable reccomending it to anybody. It’s not that I don’t think it’s good (I do!), but at 900 pages (and don’t forget that it’s the first installment of a trilogy), I don’t want to be responsible for wasting anybody’s time. If you’ve liked anything by him before, you’ll probably like this.

The Big Sleep

It was weird watching this; I’ve seen so many neo-noir and parodies of the Bogart drawl, casual sexism and L.A. cool epitomized in this movie that I felt like I had seen it before. It seems to have scared me off of The Maltese Falcon, however. As one of the few people of my generation that has read quite a few of the classic pulp mystery novels, I can tell you that Bogart fits as Phillip Marlowe, but is completely wrong for Sam Spade.

The Exorcist

Meh. I was high and it wasn’t as scary.

My 1,300 Page Weekend

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I always feel bad when I don’t update regularly, like I am letting down the four people that read this blog. Today, I have my reviews of a couple of books that I have read this past weekend and half-week. As the good people at This American Life would say, a book report in three acts:

1.

I am incredibly privileged to attend Reed College. As a prospective student looking at different schools, I tended to pay way too much attention to features of the school that just don’t apply to me. For example, I still brag about Reed’s science programs, even though I really don’t want to complete the science requirement and resent the department for siphoning off music funds.

One feature of the school that I am glad now applies to me is the MILL, or comic book library and reading room (yeah, we know). It is an amazing room filled with extensive collections of golden-age franchises and a surprising depth of non-Japanese modern comics. I spent five hours of my Sunday reading the first volume of the complete collection of The Sandman. I don’t really want to go too much into it here, because I plan on giving a full review once I finish the omnibus. However, it does fit into the unintended theme of the post: religious speculative fiction.

sandman_no1_modern_agecomiccover

2.

Every once in a while, I fall in love with the story of the creation of a work more than the merits of the work itself. That is why I was so happy that Ken Follett’s novel The Pillars of the Earth was so entertaining and well written. I really love the idea of a pulp spy novel writer publishing a 600+ page historical novel set in 12th Century England and having it take off. I understand those who might not consider it highbrow literature; it is extremely plot heavy and the occasional winks to the modern reader in conversations among the characters, but I found it thoroughly enjoyable and well worth my time. Follett does an incredible job of dramatizing the scale and glory of cathedrals. I found myself doubting the idea that a cathedral would be completed within the lifetime of any person, but that only underscores the sheer ambition of those that were constructed over centuries.

It also made me a little sad that we really have evolved as a global society beyond such works on that scale. Can you imagine a building project that employs hundreds of workers for centuries being started now? The Notre Dame in Paris took 300 years to complete. The new cathedral in Los Angeles was built in 8.

3.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson is probably the largest-scale work I have ever read. The size of it is intimidating; the final page count is 890. Stephenson not only creates his own universe within the pages of the books, but four parallel universes that touch it. Every page feels like it is the synthesis of hundreds of pages of philosophical and mathematic research read while the book was being written.

Stephenson is a little bit like the Eddie Izzard of the science fiction genre. Like Izzard, he uses the tropes and conventions of his form, but he makes it such an intellectual exercise that it feels like nothing you’ve ever read before, even if its about, you know, aliens. Many times I found myself unable to distinguish between real philosophical ideas and the fiction part of science fiction.

Like everything else, I am a little bit late to the party on this one, but if you feel like you can keep up with the ideas in the book, and you have the time to read an almost 900 page novel, I reccomend it.