Books: another update
Sep. 1st, 2013 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricWheee, books. I've also been reading the Dark is Rising series, but I'll review those en masse. Lodge's Campus Trilogy I won't treat as I usually do series', because they're so disparate.
This set of reviews could be summarised as 'unhappy with various endings / resolutions'
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince: I did not like this book as much as I expected to! I found it charming and poignant and first, but increasingly dull and sexist (oooh, aaah, bring tributes to the delicate flower, protect her from the nasty sheeps!) as it went on.
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Road: This was lovely, and fascinating, but... hmm, it felt like an overgrown short story, which is exactly what it was according to the acknowledgements/afterword. I enjoyed many things about it, especially Gaiman's knack with child POV. The POV character's observations are often wry and strikingly apt, and his self-absorbed world very believable. But I'd have liked something more to it, in the last third of the book.
David Lodge, Changing Places: Hmm. For the most part, I liked this book a lot. I really liked Lodge's writing style, and his interweaving of comments on literary technique with his own use of that technique. However, I think that got carried away with the ending - the switch to scrip and the comments on the ambiguity of film endings felt like a cop-out.
David Lodge, Small World: This is a much *better* book than Changing Places, and much of it is obviously right in my points of interest (genre, arthuriana, etc). However, I had some gendered/race-related problems with this book which were less evident in Changing Places. In Changing Places, I was willing to give Lodge the benefit of the doubt - his *characters* were sexist, but through Desiree's POV and Hilary's narrative he was able to critique that. To some extent he does this in Small World: I was pleased to see Hilary's POV expanded, although I'd have liked more of Joy's. I was relieved to find that Lodge did unravel Perse's bizarre fixation on Angelica, but he focused on another equally futile romantic object immediately after. I felt that Lily, the whore sister, was under used.
More important: there were consent issues in this book. Morris' encounter with Fulvia was played for laughs, and while it IS funny in a way to see Morris getting some of his own treatment, I'm not sure that Lodge was aware that the problem is *consent*. There was a long thread of 'professors will fuck students and/or other young women because that's what old men do' running through various PsOV.
Above all: Song Mi Lee's role was a terrible orientalist stereotype (deliberately, I'm sure, but he didn't pull off the conscious parody well enough). The one alternative view into her character, from a conversation with Perse, simply wasn't enough.
Petty: the Australian character was presented as boorish, unscholarly, and provincial. Hmmph. Oh, and sexist and all of the above problems, with no interesting insights or additions from his POV.
This set of reviews could be summarised as 'unhappy with various endings / resolutions'
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince: I did not like this book as much as I expected to! I found it charming and poignant and first, but increasingly dull and sexist (oooh, aaah, bring tributes to the delicate flower, protect her from the nasty sheeps!) as it went on.
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Road: This was lovely, and fascinating, but... hmm, it felt like an overgrown short story, which is exactly what it was according to the acknowledgements/afterword. I enjoyed many things about it, especially Gaiman's knack with child POV. The POV character's observations are often wry and strikingly apt, and his self-absorbed world very believable. But I'd have liked something more to it, in the last third of the book.
David Lodge, Changing Places: Hmm. For the most part, I liked this book a lot. I really liked Lodge's writing style, and his interweaving of comments on literary technique with his own use of that technique. However, I think that got carried away with the ending - the switch to scrip and the comments on the ambiguity of film endings felt like a cop-out.
David Lodge, Small World: This is a much *better* book than Changing Places, and much of it is obviously right in my points of interest (genre, arthuriana, etc). However, I had some gendered/race-related problems with this book which were less evident in Changing Places. In Changing Places, I was willing to give Lodge the benefit of the doubt - his *characters* were sexist, but through Desiree's POV and Hilary's narrative he was able to critique that. To some extent he does this in Small World: I was pleased to see Hilary's POV expanded, although I'd have liked more of Joy's. I was relieved to find that Lodge did unravel Perse's bizarre fixation on Angelica, but he focused on another equally futile romantic object immediately after. I felt that Lily, the whore sister, was under used.
More important: there were consent issues in this book. Morris' encounter with Fulvia was played for laughs, and while it IS funny in a way to see Morris getting some of his own treatment, I'm not sure that Lodge was aware that the problem is *consent*. There was a long thread of 'professors will fuck students and/or other young women because that's what old men do' running through various PsOV.
Above all: Song Mi Lee's role was a terrible orientalist stereotype (deliberately, I'm sure, but he didn't pull off the conscious parody well enough). The one alternative view into her character, from a conversation with Perse, simply wasn't enough.
Petty: the Australian character was presented as boorish, unscholarly, and provincial. Hmmph. Oh, and sexist and all of the above problems, with no interesting insights or additions from his POV.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-02 01:00 am (UTC)HI OVERSEAS FRIEND!!
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Date: 2013-09-11 08:39 am (UTC)One thing, though - I thought that one part of the end of Nice Work was too neat, too deus ex machina, but something elsewhere in the book took me off to read Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, and having come to the end of that, I see now that his neat, tying off the threads ending was not sloppy writing, but a joke reference to what happened in Gaskell's book.
That absolutely doesn't excuse the whole side-plot of old academic male/young female student though, or Lodge's apparent concern that what's most important is the return of all the males to their own (his own) comfort zone.
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Date: 2013-09-11 08:50 am (UTC)My appreciation of Nice Work was definitely enhanced by having read North & South first - ditto Small World and assorted arthuriana, in fact.