Winter Reading
This past winter here in Vermont has been about hibernating. After weeks of pining for snow in late fall and early winter, we finally got what we had coming, and man did we GET IT! I’d like to share with you some of the places I’ve went and people I’ve met while hibernating in my littlest apartment in beautiful VT.
FYI: I am the type of reader who likes to go into a novel blindly. I religiously avoid reading the back-cover of a novel once I’ve decided to sit down with it. So, that being said, I’ve include very little about the general plots and story-lines of the novels. You’re just going to have to trust my authority!
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The Autumn of the Patriarch: Gabrielle Garcia Marquez = amazing. The master of seamless magical realism! If you’ve never read anything by Gabo…get to it! Although, so far, Love in the Time of Cholera is my fave, Patriarch is definitely a close second.
This story follows unending dictatorship of a tyrannical….brat? This almost 300 page novel contains a mere 6 paragraphs. Read this book when you have days to dedicate to it because it’s so freakin’ hard to pick back up due to its (at times) six-page-long sentences; meaning, you can totally, literary get lost in the novel…I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
Anyways, I think I read the novel twice because I kept having to back-track pages and pages to figure out where I was. This is not a complaint because this book deserves all your patience. Its beauty is beyond explanation, even when it describes the rankest of bodily functions.
The Like Whoa D’At! Rating: * * * * *
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Winter’s Tale: This novel by Mark Helprin was the best book to read during a winter like this. His descriptions of the icy cold are lush and almost spiritual. This is the first North American author that I’ve read that uses magic realism (…maybe Tom Robbins does too; Are any of the human characters in his Skinny Legs and All weirded out by the fact that the spoon can talk? I can’t remember; that book was a total disappointment).
Anyways, this brick of a semi-epic novel takes place in a fantastical version of New York, not that there are unicorns and shit, although there is a flying horse. The book follows Peter Lake and the Penn Family – the most talented and gifted group of characters I’ve ever come across (their giftedness gets old, but I am a cynic!).
Winter’s Tale has a solid story and amazing settings; I’ve never been to NYC but now have a semi-magical illusion to hold onto. Also, a portion of the book takes place in a small (frozen) lakeside village upstate, which sounds like the most idyllic place to settle in all the land…(*spoiler alert*) until it is overtaken by angry, zombie-like men from the distant past who kill everyone (*end spoiler alert*).
The Like Whoa D’At! Rating: * * * 1/2
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Madame Bovary: As a student concentrating in Feminist Literary Studies, I’ve found that there is one identity-question that gets asked over and over: Can a man write from a woman’s prospective? Well, a Gustave Flaubert-man can. I think he sat in on some kind of secret women’s meeting where women discussed how effed-up and depressing their lives were. There were many times during this book where I had to OMG-OL (“Oh my god†out loud) because of the existential dread this book stirs. I’m talkin’ eeeeeeee-mo! But this book is your beautiful type of sad.
And structurally…let’s just say that if this novel was a boat, it would laugh at the Titanic. It opens with the story of Monsieur Bovary, who becomes a periphery character but inadvertently remains the main character because his role in crafting the narrative of Madame. Like any well-written narrative, there are no easy answers in this novel. There is no character specifically that the reader (at least this one) is rooting for and, at some point, you want to individually punch each character in the head.
The Like Whoa D’At! Rating: * * * *
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End Zone: Please allow me to create a scene. Ya know that person you watched Full Metal Jacket with, the one who busted out laughing when dude blasts his brains out on the potty and who then detachedly explained the humane beauty of the brains as they smudged down the pristine tiled wall? That person is Don DeLillo.
The paperback edition summarizes the novel perfectly on the back cover:
The story of an angst-ridden, war-obsessed running back for Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is a heady and hilarious conflation of Cold War existentialism and the parodied parallelism of battlefield/sports rhetoric.
So I’ve never watched a football game (in the engaged sense of the word) and I’m not a huge fan of war, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel. Although I could have personally done without the long, detailed explanation of one of the team’s more intense games, I’m sure that a reader who was more interested and knowledgeable would have thought it was great. Delillo’s characters are top-notch, unique, and likable because of their eccentricities. The dialogue will make you laugh out load.
The Like Whoa D’At! Rating: * * * *
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This Side of Paradise: There is something about Modern writing that is both nostalgically egoist and romantically immature. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s semi-autobiographic Paradise is, to me, the pinnacle of these things, perhaps because these traits are so diligently self-proclaimed by the author, who entitled an entire section of the novel “The Romantic Egoist†(it’s apparently okay for someone to be an egoist as long as they know that they’re one).
The best way to sum up this Old Boys Club novel culminates in it’s last line:
“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”
Thank Christ, Scotty, ’cause I thought you were going to continue to blame the wrath of the world on your unrequited mommy-issues. Perhaps this undo harshness can be attributed to my boredom with white-guy problems: “Princeton can be so oppressive,†“My debutante girlfriend wants to marry someone more stable,†“No one understand my love of poetryâ€. Bleep blurp…
But as I like everything I read, it was mostly enjoyable.
The Like Whoa D’At! Rating: * * *
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If had to pick one of these books as my favorite of the winter (and I have to, because Kyle is making me in order to have a “concluding†paragraph), I’d have to pick The Autumn of the Patriarch. So pour yourself some South American wine and enjoy.