Little List of Reviews #1

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Little List of Reviews #1Title: The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick
Published by Harper
Published: February 11th 2014
Genres: Fiction
Pages: 304
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Library
Goodreads

I liked the premise of it, but like I mentioned in my Goodreads review, I thought the narrator made Bartholomew a bit slower than I probably would have imagined the character if I had read it instead of listened to it. It can be discerned from the story sometimes that the social awkwardness and social anxiety may place Bartholomew on the autism scale, but sometimes people who care for their overbearing, needy mothers in the way he did do end up being more socially reserved than others and not on the autism scale at all. I felt a lot of the story was too trite and stereotypical in a way that didn’t sit well with me. I don’t mind language, but one of the characters cannot speak two words before interjecting “fuck,” and the overuse of the word “retard” by the main character to describe himself got old and frustrating by the second time he used it. By about a quarter of the way through, I kept asking myself why I was still listening to it, and realized it was sort of like watching a train wreck. You don’t want to stop watching in case something better happens. Halfway through, I realized nothing better would happen and let it go.

Little List of Reviews #1Title: The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham
Published: August 11th 2015
Pages: 288
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Library
Goodreads

The premise sounded so interesting! It’s going to be made into a movie! I don’t read many books about Australia! Unfortunately for me, the characters fell flat, there wasn’t any connection among all of the characters introduced by the time I was halfway through the novel, and I didn’t feel like I cared about any of the characters or what happened to them. I might give the movie a go if it ever comes to Netflix because sometimes these kinds of stories work better on film.

Little List of Reviews #1Title: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
Published: September 30th 1999
Pages: 162
Format: Hardcover
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

I can’t believe this was released in 1999. I remember when it first came out, and it makes me feel a little bit old. I read this last year in hopes of reading all thirteen by the end of 2015, but that didn’t happen. With the announcement of Neil Patrick Harris’ casting in the role as Count Olaf in the new Netflix series, I decided that in 2016 I am going to read all of them. For whatever reason, I’ve never read the last three, so I’m excited to discover how this story ends. These are great books for everyone who likes a good deal of dark humor, word play, and shenanigans that play on popular tropes, so if you haven’t read them, do give them a go!

Little List of Reviews #1Title: The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories by Michel Faber
Published: September 7th 2006
Pages: 199
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
Goodreads

Faber apparently wrote these to appease himself and his fans who wanted to know what happened after The Crimson Petal and the White ended. To me, they read as deleted scenes of sorts. Good in their own right, but not good enough in the context of the novel. I liked the story with Sophie the most because it offered a peek into a relationship arrangement that would be considered scandalous even today by some people, but it didn’t offer the sense of completion I was hoping for. C’est la vie.

Little List of Reviews #1Title: The Night Manager by John le Carré
Published: November 7th 2013
Pages: 473
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

The things I do for Tom Hiddleston? I liked Tinker, Sailor, Solider, Spy, which admittedly I read after seeing the film and enjoying Gary Oldman’s and Benedict Cumberbatch’s roles in the film. I really don’t know why I took so long to read this (literally from March 2015 to February 2016), but I think I attribute it to the fact that I read it before I went to bed/fell asleep, so my brain got in the habit of wanting to fall asleep soon after picking it up again. It got really good in the last quarter of it, and the amount of building up that it took to get to that point might be why I let it linger for so long. I’m looking forward to the BBC/AMC mini-series, and I think it will translate nicely to screen as le Carré’s works tend to do.

I think I might make this a regular feature. Here’s a little list of reviews for books I’ve read up until now. Some of them are rereads, some of them are books that I didn’t devote enough time outside of reading to devote a whole review post (like write down my favorite parts, keep notes in a notebook, etc.), some of them are books I didn’t finish. I’m going to start with the ones I didn’t finish, just because I’d rather get the not-so-great out of the way.

Post-Modern Victoriana; Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White

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Post-Modern Victoriana; Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the WhiteTitle: The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
Published by Mariner Books
Published: September 1st 2003
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Pages: 901
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Purchased
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
Goodreads

At the heart of this panoramic, multidimensional narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Faber leads us back to 1870s London, where Sugar, a nineteen-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for escape to a better life. Her ascent through the strata of Victorian society offers us intimacy with a host of lovable, maddening, unforgettable characters. They begin with William Rackham, an egotistical perfume magnate whose ambition is fueled by his lust for Sugar, and whose patronage brings her into proximity to his extended family and milieu: his unhinged, childlike wife, Agnes, who manages to overcome her chronic hysteria to make her appearances during “the Season”; his mysteriously hidden-away daughter, Sophie, left to the care of minions; his pious brother, Henry, foiled in his devotional calling by a persistently less-than-chaste love for the Widow Fox, whose efforts on behalf of The Rescue Society lead Henry into ever-more disturbing confrontations with flesh; all this overseen by assorted preening socialites, drunken journalists, untrustworthy servants, vile guttersnipes, and whores of all stripes and persuasions.

Twenty years in its conception, research, and writing, The Crimson Petal and the White is teeming with life, rich in texture and incident, with characters breathtakingly real. In a class by itself, it's a big, juicy, must-read of a novel that will delight, enthrall, provoke, and entertain young and old, male and female.

Agnes lowers the latest issue of The Illustrated London News to her lap, offended and upset. An article has just informed her that the average English woman has 21,917 days to live. Why, oh why must newspapers always be so disagreeable? Have they nothing better to do? The world is going to the dogs.

Michel Faber’s vast expanse of a novel delves into the life of a nineteen year old prostitute named Sugar. And by vast expanse of a novel, I mean it’s a doorstop. I sometimes felt awkward bringing it with me wherever I went because it’s so large. But it’s one of those novels that doesn’t feel large and impossible at all. It’s so engaging and lush that you very nearly believe you’re right there in 19th century London.

I read The Crimson Petal and the White many, many years ago, before I decided to go for my degree in English and before I really knew anything about post-modernism and Victorian literature. When I read it for the first time, I read it for the historical fiction aspect of the novel. Historical fiction, especially fiction set in England, is one of my favorite things to read, so naturally, a huge one that’s vaguely scandalizing was something meant for me.

If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of post-modernism, a very concise way to describe it is that there are many truths to one story, that there are different perceptions and ways to know something, and that life is infinitely more complex than our puny human minds could ever fully comprehend. The University of Pennsylvania (found in a link from Wikipedia), in a course description, suggests that

Postmodernism articulates a world that is culturally one of multiplicity, diversity, contingency, fragmentation and rupture and accepts that we now live in a state of perpetual incompleteness and permanent unresolve.  Postmodernism promotes the notion of radical pluralism, many ways of knowing, and many truths. From a postmodern perspective knowledge is articulated from local perspectives, with all its uncertainties, complexity and paradox. This viewpoint suggests that knowledge is relational and that all reality is woven and rewoven on shared linguistic looms.

It’s one of those -isms that can never fully be explained because of the definition itself, but that’s one I particularly enjoy for a semblance of clarity.

Anyway, not to digress too much, Faber touches on this post-modern viewpoint in the terminology of itself and in the fact that one cannot return to Victorian England, so that viewpoint of that time is through the lenses of our own time. We, as readers, cannot help but interject our own views and perceptions of the world upon this as the author imposes his view of the time on us in tandem. The narrator plays with the reader on several occasions, dropping little bits about the state of women in that time and about authorship itself. Both Sugar and William aspire to be authors, but for William it’s an occupation, but for Sugar the prostitute it’s a means to pass the time with hopeful abandon; and Agnes writes vivid accounts in her diaries, which give major insight into her madness, only to discard them in a frantic act. Other characters speak about authorship, being an author, or even comparing their roles in life to roles in a novel throughout the course of the book.

A conversation between a poor man and Henry, William Rackham’s older brother, offers a quip that’s pretty clearly a dig at famous authors like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins:

“You ain’t a norfer, are ye?” he asks.
Henry repeats the strange word to himself silently, straining to divine its meaning.
“I beg your pardon?” he’s obliged to ask.
“Orfer,” repeats the man. “A fellow as writes books about poor men that poor men can’t read.”

Sugar, especially, having spent much of her time reading, compares her new role of governess to roles of governesses she’s explored in the novels she has read (which is a spoiler, my apologies):

Sugar steps back, confused: if she’s so superior in rank to the household servants, where does she get her deep-seated notion that governesses are lowly and despised? From novels, she supposes – but aren’t novels truth dressed up in fancy clothes?

The Crimson Petal and the White offers so much to a variety of readers, and that’s what I’ve enjoyed about it the second time around. My biggest frustration about it is the ending. It’s a bit abrupt, there isn’t much explanation as to why what’s done is done, and in some ways it reads to me as if Faber had to end somewhere otherwise it would continue on and on for ages. He’s apparently published a collection of stories set before and after the novel called The Apple that others have said read like “deleted scenes,” so I think I’ll have to find that in the library for further reading. I’m most desperate to know what happens to Sophie, William and Agnes’ daughter.

There is so much detail to delight in as you read this novel. Faber is a master at weaving those old world ideas and sensibilities with our modern perceptions in this, and you hardly know where one ends and one begins. It’s incredibly enjoyable, and I’m glad it’s my first read of 2016.

And, at the very end (more spoilers, but you’ve already made it this far), we as readers are offered the suggestion that someone we know, perhaps Sugar herself, wrote the novel, giving more rise to the post-modern ideas of authorship:

And to you also: goodbye.

An abrupt parting, I know, but that’s the way it always is, isn’t it?