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Aug. 6th, 2013 03:02 pmBOOK REVIEW TIME.
So, I have to tag a review onto this one, because I didn't really have that much to say about it but I try to review every book I read, if only so I can total them up at the end of the year.
The Ordinary Acrobat by Duncan Wall was recommended to me by Gorgas on Tumblr, at least I'm pretty sure it was tumblr. And it's a perfectly decent book about the history of the circus. It's not badly written, it's consistent, and it tells as complete a story as it can of the circus arts. I just...I couldn't summon up that much enthusiasm for circuses. Nothing against them or the book, but I found it so hard to keep plowing through.
So I didn't finish it, but if you do want a book about the history of the circus, The Ordinary Acrobat is a great place to start.
Onward!
I'm not sure where I found Exercises In Style by Raymond Queneau, I think in a Publisher's Weekly article; at any rate, most of the books on my reading list are now 'high demand' books at the library so this was the first one that showed up of the four I ordered. I have the Barbara Wright translation from the French, which seems standard.
The concept of Exercises in Style is fun -- Quineau takes a simple narrative and retells it in 99 different styles. It's one of those ideas that I have to explore mainly because I want to know how he did it -- much the same way I had to seek out fanfiction when I first heard about it so that I could work out how people actually achieved it. It's an interesting read, and certainly it's a swift one; the retold narrative is quite short and there's a lot of resultant whitespace between retellings.
The basic plot is this: the narrator observes a young man getting on the S-bus at midday; the young man has an extraordinarily long neck and is wearing a hat with a cord around the crown instead of a ribbon. The young man complains that the man next to him is deliberately jostling him, then bolts for a seat when he finds one. Later, the narrator sees the same young man being given advice about the buttons on his coat by a friend.
In a bleak, urban desert, I saw it again that selfsame day, drinking the cup of humiliation offered by a lowly button. --p. 24, "Metaphorically"
In the end he took to his heels, the milksop, before I could make up my mind to tread on his dogs to teach him a lesson. I could also have told him, just to annoy him, that he needed another button on his overcoat which was cut too low at the lapels.-- p. 42, "Another Subjectivity"
And heard his foppish friend telling him with dispassion:
"The opening of your coat is not the latest fashion."
--p. 75, "Alexandrines"
Because it's a translation, and a tricky one at that, not all of the retellings come through perhaps as vibrantly as they did in the original French. Some are wonderful and interesting, but others feel a bit like filler. Animism is one of my favourites because it has such a delightfully body-horror-esque moment. It's written from the point of view of the hat:
He expressed his ire by the inermediary of a human voice which was attached to him by a mass of flesh structurally disposed round a sort of bony sphere perforated by a few holes, which was situated below him... -- p. 48, "Animism"
Others, like the pig-latin retelling, just don't seem to bring much new to the table -- playing with the linguistics used to tell the story doesn't interest me as much as playing with the style in which the story is told. I also really liked Spectral, which tells the narrative as a ghost story:
We, gamekeeper of the Monceau Plain, have the honour to report the inexplicable and malignant presence in the neighborhood of the oriental gate of the Park, property of his Royal Highness Monsieur Philippe, the invested Duke of Orleans, this sixteenth day of May one thousand seven hundred and eighty three, of a felt hat of an unwonted shape... --p. 98, "Spectral"
There are a couple of versions that had to be totally redone, like the "Cockney" version standing in for the original French "Vulgaire", and the "French Tourist" version for the original "English Tourist". Some of the stories, like those, are a bit classist/nationalistic, but the books was written in 1947 and despite those moments holds up pretty well.
Final Verdict: It's a fun read, and I think especially for writers it's a good book to explore, but I feel like the book was stitched together a bit loosely. It would have been a tighter, more entrancing read with fewer retellings and a stronger throughline. Fifty stories with thematic retellings packed together with thought to order, rather than ninety-nine stories with both linguistic and thematic retellings scattered together, would have made for a much deeper impact.
So, I have to tag a review onto this one, because I didn't really have that much to say about it but I try to review every book I read, if only so I can total them up at the end of the year.
The Ordinary Acrobat by Duncan Wall was recommended to me by Gorgas on Tumblr, at least I'm pretty sure it was tumblr. And it's a perfectly decent book about the history of the circus. It's not badly written, it's consistent, and it tells as complete a story as it can of the circus arts. I just...I couldn't summon up that much enthusiasm for circuses. Nothing against them or the book, but I found it so hard to keep plowing through.
So I didn't finish it, but if you do want a book about the history of the circus, The Ordinary Acrobat is a great place to start.
Onward!
I'm not sure where I found Exercises In Style by Raymond Queneau, I think in a Publisher's Weekly article; at any rate, most of the books on my reading list are now 'high demand' books at the library so this was the first one that showed up of the four I ordered. I have the Barbara Wright translation from the French, which seems standard.
The concept of Exercises in Style is fun -- Quineau takes a simple narrative and retells it in 99 different styles. It's one of those ideas that I have to explore mainly because I want to know how he did it -- much the same way I had to seek out fanfiction when I first heard about it so that I could work out how people actually achieved it. It's an interesting read, and certainly it's a swift one; the retold narrative is quite short and there's a lot of resultant whitespace between retellings.
The basic plot is this: the narrator observes a young man getting on the S-bus at midday; the young man has an extraordinarily long neck and is wearing a hat with a cord around the crown instead of a ribbon. The young man complains that the man next to him is deliberately jostling him, then bolts for a seat when he finds one. Later, the narrator sees the same young man being given advice about the buttons on his coat by a friend.
In a bleak, urban desert, I saw it again that selfsame day, drinking the cup of humiliation offered by a lowly button. --p. 24, "Metaphorically"
In the end he took to his heels, the milksop, before I could make up my mind to tread on his dogs to teach him a lesson. I could also have told him, just to annoy him, that he needed another button on his overcoat which was cut too low at the lapels.-- p. 42, "Another Subjectivity"
And heard his foppish friend telling him with dispassion:
"The opening of your coat is not the latest fashion."
--p. 75, "Alexandrines"
Because it's a translation, and a tricky one at that, not all of the retellings come through perhaps as vibrantly as they did in the original French. Some are wonderful and interesting, but others feel a bit like filler. Animism is one of my favourites because it has such a delightfully body-horror-esque moment. It's written from the point of view of the hat:
He expressed his ire by the inermediary of a human voice which was attached to him by a mass of flesh structurally disposed round a sort of bony sphere perforated by a few holes, which was situated below him... -- p. 48, "Animism"
Others, like the pig-latin retelling, just don't seem to bring much new to the table -- playing with the linguistics used to tell the story doesn't interest me as much as playing with the style in which the story is told. I also really liked Spectral, which tells the narrative as a ghost story:
We, gamekeeper of the Monceau Plain, have the honour to report the inexplicable and malignant presence in the neighborhood of the oriental gate of the Park, property of his Royal Highness Monsieur Philippe, the invested Duke of Orleans, this sixteenth day of May one thousand seven hundred and eighty three, of a felt hat of an unwonted shape... --p. 98, "Spectral"
There are a couple of versions that had to be totally redone, like the "Cockney" version standing in for the original French "Vulgaire", and the "French Tourist" version for the original "English Tourist". Some of the stories, like those, are a bit classist/nationalistic, but the books was written in 1947 and despite those moments holds up pretty well.
Final Verdict: It's a fun read, and I think especially for writers it's a good book to explore, but I feel like the book was stitched together a bit loosely. It would have been a tighter, more entrancing read with fewer retellings and a stronger throughline. Fifty stories with thematic retellings packed together with thought to order, rather than ninety-nine stories with both linguistic and thematic retellings scattered together, would have made for a much deeper impact.
