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Jun. 16th, 2012 08:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupIn trying to learn more about the genre I've chosen to pursue as a specialty in writing -- magical realism and the attendant light fantasy and urban fantasy that link up to it -- I've been slowly working my way through a list of authors. My latest attempt is Isabele Allende's "The House Of The Spirits", which is a sweeping epic novel of generations of a South American family rooted in the mystical by their matriarch, Clara del Valle, a woman who never grew out of the clairvoyance and telekinesis she possessed as a child.
And it's such bummer.
Don't get me wrong, it's a beautifully written and incredibly intricate book, but I got a third of the way into it and was just damn tired of tragedy.
I keep starting to enjoy the book and then stopping, and there are two separate and distinct issues I have with it. The first is the story itself -- the repeating cycle of tragedy and suffering -- which is a personal preference, not a criticism of the book -- and the fact that nearly none of the characters are likeable. Just when I start to like Esteban Trueba, it turns out he's a semi-paedophilic rapist who becomes an abusive tyrant; when I start to like his wife Clara, she becomes a disconnected, self-absorbed woman-child. Her daughter Blanca was kind of cool until she became an airy, somewhat hapless romantic. Over and over I get to a point where I'm so excited about what's going to happen next, and then something ruins it. And there's a reason for that, I can see purpose behind it, I just can't bring myself to enjoy it.
The other problem I have is the structure of the book. It's deliberately meandering, and tends to go off on pointlessly intricate tangents for pages at a time. These stories create a very detailed density to the book, but I just don't care. I found myself skimming pages because I knew I didn't actually need to know what was in them, I was just looking for the denouement of the story where I could pick the actual plot back up.
I say all these things, but I still want to say that it is a good book -- incredibly rich, addressing class conflicts across a span of decades from the 19th century up through the end of the second world war (when I stopped reading; it goes a generation further at least) and incorporating a vast number of characters that are both individuals and representatives of various strata of society. It's got some sharp wit to it. I just can't go any further, I'm tapped out.
As a lesson in magical realism, even the two hundred-odd pages I read were helpful, in various ways. I know what I want to avoid, but I also saw the way Allende used the supernatural in a representative way, which is something that I still need to refresh in my mind because it's a difficult technique to master. There's a very fine divide between fantasy and magical realism, and a lot of it has to do with worldbuilding: the best way I can fumble to describe it is that fantasy builds worlds and inhabits them with symbols that have meaning within those worlds (even if they also have meaning in ours), while magical realism uses symbols within a "reality" setting to enhance the depth of the story. This is not to denigrate fantasy at all, I heart me some fantasy and have written plenty, it's just that they're different.
For example, at the start of the book (well, near the start, after some serious digression) it is discovered that one character, Rosa, is a mermaid. There's no explanation for why she's a mermaid or how she came to be born into the reasonably ordinary upper-middle-class del Valle family; mermaids are never mentioned again. Rosa's status as an otherworldly being makes her unattainable, and she's there to represent the ideal love that Esteban can never have, in much the same way that Humbert Humbert, in Lolita, claims that Lolita is a representation of the lost romances of his adolescence. (Admittedly, the Rosa situation is far less creepy and Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator -- but then so is Esteban.)
Final Verdict: It's a good book, just not a book for me. It's definitely not beach reading, but if you're a fan of the denser Russian literature of the 19th century, or if you've ever made it all the way through a Michener novel (I didn't survive Hawaii) then you'll probably enjoy it more than I did.
ONWARDS! TO GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ!
And it's such bummer.
Don't get me wrong, it's a beautifully written and incredibly intricate book, but I got a third of the way into it and was just damn tired of tragedy.
I keep starting to enjoy the book and then stopping, and there are two separate and distinct issues I have with it. The first is the story itself -- the repeating cycle of tragedy and suffering -- which is a personal preference, not a criticism of the book -- and the fact that nearly none of the characters are likeable. Just when I start to like Esteban Trueba, it turns out he's a semi-paedophilic rapist who becomes an abusive tyrant; when I start to like his wife Clara, she becomes a disconnected, self-absorbed woman-child. Her daughter Blanca was kind of cool until she became an airy, somewhat hapless romantic. Over and over I get to a point where I'm so excited about what's going to happen next, and then something ruins it. And there's a reason for that, I can see purpose behind it, I just can't bring myself to enjoy it.
The other problem I have is the structure of the book. It's deliberately meandering, and tends to go off on pointlessly intricate tangents for pages at a time. These stories create a very detailed density to the book, but I just don't care. I found myself skimming pages because I knew I didn't actually need to know what was in them, I was just looking for the denouement of the story where I could pick the actual plot back up.
I say all these things, but I still want to say that it is a good book -- incredibly rich, addressing class conflicts across a span of decades from the 19th century up through the end of the second world war (when I stopped reading; it goes a generation further at least) and incorporating a vast number of characters that are both individuals and representatives of various strata of society. It's got some sharp wit to it. I just can't go any further, I'm tapped out.
As a lesson in magical realism, even the two hundred-odd pages I read were helpful, in various ways. I know what I want to avoid, but I also saw the way Allende used the supernatural in a representative way, which is something that I still need to refresh in my mind because it's a difficult technique to master. There's a very fine divide between fantasy and magical realism, and a lot of it has to do with worldbuilding: the best way I can fumble to describe it is that fantasy builds worlds and inhabits them with symbols that have meaning within those worlds (even if they also have meaning in ours), while magical realism uses symbols within a "reality" setting to enhance the depth of the story. This is not to denigrate fantasy at all, I heart me some fantasy and have written plenty, it's just that they're different.
For example, at the start of the book (well, near the start, after some serious digression) it is discovered that one character, Rosa, is a mermaid. There's no explanation for why she's a mermaid or how she came to be born into the reasonably ordinary upper-middle-class del Valle family; mermaids are never mentioned again. Rosa's status as an otherworldly being makes her unattainable, and she's there to represent the ideal love that Esteban can never have, in much the same way that Humbert Humbert, in Lolita, claims that Lolita is a representation of the lost romances of his adolescence. (Admittedly, the Rosa situation is far less creepy and Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator -- but then so is Esteban.)
Final Verdict: It's a good book, just not a book for me. It's definitely not beach reading, but if you're a fan of the denser Russian literature of the 19th century, or if you've ever made it all the way through a Michener novel (I didn't survive Hawaii) then you'll probably enjoy it more than I did.
ONWARDS! TO GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ!
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Date: 2012-06-16 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 07:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 01:46 pm (UTC)ETA - The first one in the series is Dreams Underfoot.
http://www.sfsite.com/charlesdelint/underfoot-desc01.htm
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Date: 2012-06-16 09:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-06-16 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 02:24 pm (UTC)Don't read Of Love and Shadows, unless you're pre-prepared for a cataloguing of the horrors of Pinochet, and The Disappeared. I think it's an incredibly powerful and important work, but it isn't light in any way.
To be honest, I think you'd like her young adult trilogy (-"http://suite101.com/article/review-of-isabel-allendes-young-adult-books-a103778") far, far more. They aren't flawless, but they're fun and evocative and lacking the deep tragedy that most of her adult books contain. They touch on the aspect of magic remaining in the untouched parts of the world. The young protagonist goes around the world with his lady explorer grandma. The first one's set in the Amazon somewhere, and the second is in the Himalayas and, from (possibly faulty) memory, has honest to god real yetis. :D
Have you read any Amy Tan? Some of her stories dance along the magical realism/supernatural line. It's probably been about a decade since I read it, but I think The Hundred Secret Senses is very much of that ilk.
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Date: 2012-06-16 02:34 pm (UTC)http://suite101.com/article/review-of-isabel-allendes-young-adult-books-a103778
But yeah, seriously consider looking them up. I think they're something you'd probably enjoy.
House of the Spirits was the first novel Allende wrote, and that and the four or five that followed are all in some way about the reign of Pinochet and the rape of Chile and its people by his regime. Allende wrote them while in exile in America.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 02:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 03:21 pm (UTC)Aside from Laura Esquivel, Mark Helprin (A Winter's Tale) and R.A. Lafferty (Four Hundred Grandmothers) used the tall tale approach.
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Date: 2012-06-16 06:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-06-16 03:25 pm (UTC)also, I keep lending Trace to people, and they keep liking it! just so you know!
(sorry I'm less coherent than usual. I randomly came down with an ear infection yesterday, and now I'm on antibiotics which will clear it up just fine, but I'm also on Percocet, which makes me very very loopy.)
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Date: 2012-06-18 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 03:34 pm (UTC)WOOOO!
*does not have anything more meaningful to say than that*
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Date: 2012-06-16 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 12:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-06-16 04:39 pm (UTC)I read a lot of Marquez in college too. Most of it has fled from my brain.
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Date: 2012-06-16 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 05:15 pm (UTC)Re: The House of The Spirits, it's by far my favorite Allende book, maybe because it's so intertwined with Chilean history. I didn't find it that tragic except for the final chapters, which follow Alba (Blanca's daughter) during Salvador Allende's goverment and then the Pinochet dictatorship. (Then again anything related to that period makes me cry my eyes out.)
Fun fact two: Salvador Allende was Isabel Allende's uncle.
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Date: 2012-06-16 05:36 pm (UTC)original Spanish.. Spanish is such a lyrical language it must be a gorgeous read.
Have a great time...
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Date: 2012-06-18 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 06:26 pm (UTC)Have you read Like Water For Chocolate? I think I enjoyed it - plus its all about food as well - which should appeal to foodie!Sam :D
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Date: 2012-06-16 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 07:35 pm (UTC)It's amazing.
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Date: 2012-06-16 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-16 09:03 pm (UTC)And if you're planning on taking a crack at One Hundred Years of Solitude, I would heartily recommend (read: must) getting a family tree chart of the main characters in the book, it can get very confusing and fast because they all share the same names in different combinations (seriously: the same names) When I read it in high school my teacher gave us one and it was incredibly helpful, otherwise I think it would have been quite frustrating keeping track of who's who.
Anyway, I hope you're not putt-off Allende's book, she has some pretty great ones, and enjoy Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez (though avoid The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor like the plague)
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Date: 2012-06-16 10:20 pm (UTC)And if you're really going for magical realism, you've got to give Julio Cortazar a try. He's done a lot of short stories (which I love) and a very strange novel, Hopscotch (which I do not love). But his short stories are glorious and tight and well-imagined. I think "A Letter to a Young Lady in Paris" might be one of my favorite stories of all time, perhaps because it involves a plethora of rabbits.
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Date: 2012-06-16 10:29 pm (UTC)And-- he's not really part of the magical realism thing-- although he hits a few notes in Everything and Nothing-- but I always push Jorge Luis Borges when I can. He's kind of tangled up in lo real maravilloso and the Boom writers for me.
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Date: 2012-06-16 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-17 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-17 03:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-06-17 06:32 am (UTC)And then there were the people who liked none of the characters except Esteban Trueba. Which, I just. What. That's so worrying that almost six years later, I still have no words.
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Date: 2012-06-18 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-17 07:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-17 01:37 pm (UTC)