Books: an update
Feb. 1st, 2013 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricNon-academic books, that is. There's been a few academic ones of late, too.
Witi Ihimaera, Nights in the Gardens of Spain This was an interesting book.
Firstly: how much do you enjoy thinking about cock? Because this book is about 60% cock, and the cock ratio is even higher in the first half. Cock. The POV character thinks about cock a lot. His cock, other people's cocks, his cock again. COCK. If you don't enjoy sort of voyeuristically thinking about fictional cocks, this may not be the book for you.
Secondly: it took me a while to get really invested in the main character. He's kind of a generic white dude obsessed with cock. At first he didn't even seem to care about film studies, his academic discipline. He did care about his daughters, deeply; and about his wife, who is so awesome I'd read three books about her. So those were my initial hooks for caring about him.
Ihimaera endowed David, the protag, with a habit of referring to *everyone* by mental tags, not names. The Predator, one of his colleagues; The Noble Savage, a leader in the Maori gay community; Oh My Goodness, a fuckbuddy of his - and so on. This is really... alienating, I suppose? I assume Ihimaera did it on purpose, and it is notable that more people gain names as the book goes on - as David sorts out his relationships, I guess. I came to care deeply about Jack, a friend of his, and quite a bit about his young lover Chris. Chris' love for David's kids was really well-developed in the latter half, I thought. And the B-plot involving newly!discovered!primary!sources got me, obviously. PRIMARY SOURCES.
So. It was a gut-wrenching kind of story about reconciling sexuality, family and other kinds of identities. So far so good. However:
Thirdly: So much more interesting would've been a novel about the Noble Savage*. Here's this out gay leader who accepts an arranged marriage to preserve his lineage, but never entirely goes back into the closet. I want to know about him. Witi Ihimaera would probably also have been able to write a story with roughly the same arc as David's (attracted to men, but enjoys sex with women; marries woman, has children; decides he prefers men; cue angst) with a Maori character, and I bet it'd have been awesome. As Generic White Guys go I did come to care about David, but he was so -bland- for the first half of the book!
Fourthly: SERIOUSLY WHY HAS NO ONE HEARD OF BISEXUALITY. This guy is not unattracted to women. So he prefers men in the long run, ok, that's fine. But if bisexuality had been an available category in his youth, perhaps he could've sorted through all this instead of going waaaay into denial. The fact that I don't think Ihimaera ever considered that bugs me, too.
Fifthly: Wow, this main character has some skewed ideas about hetsex. On an individual level, if he sees gay sex as an exchange of equals and hetsex as a domination exercise, then perhaps it is as well that he's gay. On a meta-level, though, I think that's what Ihimaera actually thinks, and that I find distasteful.
~
* I guess Witi Ihimaera is allowed to use his own culture as a metaphor-foil to generic white dude? 'Cos he went all out with that, the one or two Maori characters and their concern for lineage and iwi serving to highlight David's investment in his family.
Victorian Women Poets: A New Annotated Anthology, ed. by Virginia Blain - I posted selections in my poetry updates here. I liked it! By and large I skimmed the biographies, going back to read more about the poets whose works I liked most. One thing which did irritate me was that at times Blain's commentary on the poets' sex lives got a bit... snide.
Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel - This was fun! Classist as all get-out and radiating English smugness. But Marguerite was pretty damn fabulous, which makes up for many things.
... huh, I'm actually reading faster than my sporadic three-book updates would suggest. I'm too sleepy to write a cogent review of the next book, though, so it can all stay backdated for a while.
Witi Ihimaera, Nights in the Gardens of Spain This was an interesting book.
Firstly: how much do you enjoy thinking about cock? Because this book is about 60% cock, and the cock ratio is even higher in the first half. Cock. The POV character thinks about cock a lot. His cock, other people's cocks, his cock again. COCK. If you don't enjoy sort of voyeuristically thinking about fictional cocks, this may not be the book for you.
Secondly: it took me a while to get really invested in the main character. He's kind of a generic white dude obsessed with cock. At first he didn't even seem to care about film studies, his academic discipline. He did care about his daughters, deeply; and about his wife, who is so awesome I'd read three books about her. So those were my initial hooks for caring about him.
Ihimaera endowed David, the protag, with a habit of referring to *everyone* by mental tags, not names. The Predator, one of his colleagues; The Noble Savage, a leader in the Maori gay community; Oh My Goodness, a fuckbuddy of his - and so on. This is really... alienating, I suppose? I assume Ihimaera did it on purpose, and it is notable that more people gain names as the book goes on - as David sorts out his relationships, I guess. I came to care deeply about Jack, a friend of his, and quite a bit about his young lover Chris. Chris' love for David's kids was really well-developed in the latter half, I thought. And the B-plot involving newly!discovered!primary!sources got me, obviously. PRIMARY SOURCES.
So. It was a gut-wrenching kind of story about reconciling sexuality, family and other kinds of identities. So far so good. However:
Thirdly: So much more interesting would've been a novel about the Noble Savage*. Here's this out gay leader who accepts an arranged marriage to preserve his lineage, but never entirely goes back into the closet. I want to know about him. Witi Ihimaera would probably also have been able to write a story with roughly the same arc as David's (attracted to men, but enjoys sex with women; marries woman, has children; decides he prefers men; cue angst) with a Maori character, and I bet it'd have been awesome. As Generic White Guys go I did come to care about David, but he was so -bland- for the first half of the book!
Fourthly: SERIOUSLY WHY HAS NO ONE HEARD OF BISEXUALITY. This guy is not unattracted to women. So he prefers men in the long run, ok, that's fine. But if bisexuality had been an available category in his youth, perhaps he could've sorted through all this instead of going waaaay into denial. The fact that I don't think Ihimaera ever considered that bugs me, too.
Fifthly: Wow, this main character has some skewed ideas about hetsex. On an individual level, if he sees gay sex as an exchange of equals and hetsex as a domination exercise, then perhaps it is as well that he's gay. On a meta-level, though, I think that's what Ihimaera actually thinks, and that I find distasteful.
~
* I guess Witi Ihimaera is allowed to use his own culture as a metaphor-foil to generic white dude? 'Cos he went all out with that, the one or two Maori characters and their concern for lineage and iwi serving to highlight David's investment in his family.
Victorian Women Poets: A New Annotated Anthology, ed. by Virginia Blain - I posted selections in my poetry updates here. I liked it! By and large I skimmed the biographies, going back to read more about the poets whose works I liked most. One thing which did irritate me was that at times Blain's commentary on the poets' sex lives got a bit... snide.
Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel - This was fun! Classist as all get-out and radiating English smugness. But Marguerite was pretty damn fabulous, which makes up for many things.
... huh, I'm actually reading faster than my sporadic three-book updates would suggest. I'm too sleepy to write a cogent review of the next book, though, so it can all stay backdated for a while.