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freckles_and_doubtLurgi Strikes Back! The rising tides of nausea all weekend were apparently the overture (slow, melancholic, minor, with occasional unpleasant crescendos) to a dose of 'flu. I'm all headachy, chesty and generally miserable, having spent an unpleasant night drowning on the contents of my own lungs. Sigh. These encyclopedia entries are doomed, dooomed, I say! Although I am starting to wring something resembling sense from the Animation one, mostly by brandishing a three-legged stool and shouting "Back, you leechies!" to all the extraneous examples.
I did, however, manage to take advantage of the usual faintly surreal 'flu-space to finish reading Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I borrowed from the dreaded stv about three seconds after they got back to Cape Town, and hadn't read until now, what, eight months later? Naughty me. It's a very weird book, and the first couple of attempts to read it left me alternately baffled and bored. This time I fared better: usual slow Murakami pace, usual deadpan Murakami non-reactive hero, usual incursions of dreamlike surreality, usual weird, slow-motion grasping after elusive, illusionary meaning. Very cool, even if the book's extended metaphor is prostitution. I both enjoyed and marvelled at the novel, but I think I was happier with Hard-Boiled Wonderland's unicorns.
In fact, it's been a good week for books. I finished Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma, a copy of which I unexpectedly scored courtesy of one of the English department's Great Literary Luminaries, who cleared out a whole lot of books and invited the dept. to help itself. I now have three Douglas Coupland novels pre-owned by Andre Brink. I really enjoyed Girlfriend in a Coma, it's an amazingly trippy but very real exploration of life's inner meaninglessness, with added post-apocalypse, spirit guides and random ostriches and volcano eruptions. Coupland has such a sure touch with character and observation, he actually gets away with surprising amounts of sheer, unexplained weirdness.
Also on this week's menu: The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. Good grief. This crazy woman has, effectively, and with no sign of shame or remorse, re-written Bram Stoker's Dracula as one whale of a conspiracy theory, albeit in a 20th-century setting, and slightly upside down. Same multiple voices and points of identification; same strangely fragmentary narrative made up of letters, diary entries and oral accounts; same painstaking investigative process using the language and framework of science (or at least history, here) while unquestioningly accepting the reality of the supernatural. Where Stoker's hero meets the dreaded Count in the first chapter, however, and spends the rest of the book plotting his destruction, here the moment of confrontation with Ancient Evil is delayed interminably, until a rather pale and anticlimactic last chapter. I think these days we're all too postmodern about our Eeevil to actually be permitted more than a glimpse of it, lest we attempt to deconstruct. Like Stoker's novel, The Historian is a pretty gripping, schlocky and poppy sort of offering, although the scholarship also seems fairly genuine - lots of Vlad the Impaler and early Wallachian trade routes. Also lots of Romance, TM. Thoroughly enjoyable read - I devoured it in 24 hours - if somewhat inclining me to scratch my head and wonder why anyone would go to all that trouble to update a myth when the nineteenth-century original still works perfectly fine, thank you.
Shall stop the random book reviewing, lest witterers flee in droves. I had my over-literary English knuckles rapped last night, while braaing with jo&stv; I plead in mitigation that I was drowning the nausea in excess gin.
Jo (accusingly, after particularly verbose and slightly drunken outburst of pretention on my part): "Too much flighty language!"
Me: "I'm an English professional, what do you expect?"
Jo: "... Mercy!"
None, actually. None at all.
I did, however, manage to take advantage of the usual faintly surreal 'flu-space to finish reading Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I borrowed from the dreaded stv about three seconds after they got back to Cape Town, and hadn't read until now, what, eight months later? Naughty me. It's a very weird book, and the first couple of attempts to read it left me alternately baffled and bored. This time I fared better: usual slow Murakami pace, usual deadpan Murakami non-reactive hero, usual incursions of dreamlike surreality, usual weird, slow-motion grasping after elusive, illusionary meaning. Very cool, even if the book's extended metaphor is prostitution. I both enjoyed and marvelled at the novel, but I think I was happier with Hard-Boiled Wonderland's unicorns.
In fact, it's been a good week for books. I finished Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma, a copy of which I unexpectedly scored courtesy of one of the English department's Great Literary Luminaries, who cleared out a whole lot of books and invited the dept. to help itself. I now have three Douglas Coupland novels pre-owned by Andre Brink. I really enjoyed Girlfriend in a Coma, it's an amazingly trippy but very real exploration of life's inner meaninglessness, with added post-apocalypse, spirit guides and random ostriches and volcano eruptions. Coupland has such a sure touch with character and observation, he actually gets away with surprising amounts of sheer, unexplained weirdness.
Also on this week's menu: The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. Good grief. This crazy woman has, effectively, and with no sign of shame or remorse, re-written Bram Stoker's Dracula as one whale of a conspiracy theory, albeit in a 20th-century setting, and slightly upside down. Same multiple voices and points of identification; same strangely fragmentary narrative made up of letters, diary entries and oral accounts; same painstaking investigative process using the language and framework of science (or at least history, here) while unquestioningly accepting the reality of the supernatural. Where Stoker's hero meets the dreaded Count in the first chapter, however, and spends the rest of the book plotting his destruction, here the moment of confrontation with Ancient Evil is delayed interminably, until a rather pale and anticlimactic last chapter. I think these days we're all too postmodern about our Eeevil to actually be permitted more than a glimpse of it, lest we attempt to deconstruct. Like Stoker's novel, The Historian is a pretty gripping, schlocky and poppy sort of offering, although the scholarship also seems fairly genuine - lots of Vlad the Impaler and early Wallachian trade routes. Also lots of Romance, TM. Thoroughly enjoyable read - I devoured it in 24 hours - if somewhat inclining me to scratch my head and wonder why anyone would go to all that trouble to update a myth when the nineteenth-century original still works perfectly fine, thank you.
Shall stop the random book reviewing, lest witterers flee in droves. I had my over-literary English knuckles rapped last night, while braaing with jo&stv; I plead in mitigation that I was drowning the nausea in excess gin.
Jo (accusingly, after particularly verbose and slightly drunken outburst of pretention on my part): "Too much flighty language!"
Me: "I'm an English professional, what do you expect?"
Jo: "... Mercy!"
None, actually. None at all.
