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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 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.
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Date: 2012-06-16 03:14 pm (UTC)Sam, I'm sure you don't need me to go on and on about how Garcia Marquez is awesome, so I'll try to refrain. :P I will also recommend you read some Julio Cortazar and some Carlos Fuentes (who actually just passed away a few weeks ago), if you haven't already. They both wrote a ton, but I'd specifically recommend their short stories. "Chac Mool" by Carlos Fuentes is my go-to "this is magical realism" story. I also just read a bunch of Cortazar for my Spanish lit class (about exile) this term - I'd recommend the super-short "Letter to a young lady in Paris" just because it's completely ridiculous and also serious and deep and such. Don't let anyone tell you you need to read Cortazar's most famous novel, "Hopscotch", though. Despite being regarded as the first novel of the "boom," it's really not magical realism. Also, it's kind of terrible.
*excited to see what you think of Garcia Marquez and such* *loves this genre*