Lookee

Subtitled: I should not be allowed into a bookshop unattended.

Trying to be Nietzsche

For those lucky enough to be my friends on Facebook (which is a whole new level of friendship discovered only in the last ten years), you may know I am in a slump. A book slump. That right there is shame. I am not slumped beneath the pile of books I am reading or will read. Not slumped in a fort made of books or with the weight (well, technically mass) of weighty words or against my newest fictional friend or in awe of a conclusion. I am slumped against the altar of books that is my only sense of meaning.

I mean, technically, do I even exist?

That is only half facetious. Those of you who know me via my blog (a new type of acquaintance-ship) and those of you who know me in the real world and some of you who know me via Facebook, know how caught up in my literature my identity is. Oh, I know the difference between characters and real people, although the line between fantasy and reality is (thankfully) more like the boundaries between countries: a line on a piece of paper, a steady stream of stolen cars, firearms, poachers dodging the law and refugees dodging lions, and officers who take the blame from every politician who has never stood in the sun (although they'd be familiar with accepting bribes) but really have no power so they exert what power they convince us they have.

(I speak from limited but very thorough experience. I once presented myself at the South African side of the Lesotho border post. I walked in past what looked like a schooldesk and two women talking. They ignored me, so they could start yelling at me ten seconds later. I have flown to other SADC countries ten times and been interrogated every since time: oh, and my luggage searched. Every time. Another time I was stopped by an officer who had been waiting for me. While I was on the plane, they phoned my place of work to verify I worked there.)

What I am talking about is boundaries, however, not border posts. Although sometimes the line between those two is thin, too. 

I have lived at least hundreds of lives - yes, you non-believer, this saying is true. Holden of Catcher in the Rye: I ran away with him when I was fifteen. Sula of Sula: not my favourite of Toni Morrison's books, but a brutality that doesn't need fists or words. Adam of We are Now Beginning our Descent: I heard the alarms and explosions and quiet senselessness when he broke those glasses against the wall. Nancy Drew, of course (you didn't see that coming): she taught me never to accept answers.

In hundreds of places. In Midnight's Children: India's break from British rule and - instead of the joy of freedom - the conflict that is blithely described as between Muslims and Hindus. In The Road, the bleakness of pure existence that made the fantastically possible world of Oryx and Crake feel like a romantic comedy. The stream of conscious of The Waves that was a sea of voices telling a story of loss. A New York that Audrey Hepburne (however epic) could never embody in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

"It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end." That quote is painted across the top of the altar made of all these lives that are to me tangible. Sometimes it reminds me of the stupidity of people, I have to be honest, for the exact same reason that it is startling. We cannot survive alone (although I plan to prove Faulkner wrong when I find some hidey-hole and then pay people to deliver my manuscripts without explanation). Although  the first meaning seems to me to be the blandness of life - a kind of existential determinism (hah! I coined that).

If you threw one of these books at my head and did the border officer thing, first I would demonstrate the correct way to handle books (with reverence) and then I would read a few pages and remember about a quarter of what I had read, place it on my nightstand (opposite the stack of bookmarked books on my dresser (which is the same thing as my nightstand, just not next to my bed)), baby bunny would chew the cover and eventually I would  move it to the stack of books I am not slumped under.

Yes, I am being melodramatic (not about the bunny - she chowed two covers and a sticky note with a reminder on). It would not be a first - shush you. But what if I made you watch The Matrix and then led you into a room where Laurence Fishburne is waiting with two colored pills? Your mind would shut down, right? Now reverse that. I have been coughed up into the world made of binary code and I can see it but I'm too tired to read it. Yip, my life without books is exactly like that. Without, you know, all of those characters and settings.

FYI the plot of The Matrix is loosely based on a thought experiment devised by some philosopher as part of the metaphysical and existential debates. There is an amusingly vehement argument between the two camps, mostly because after a thousand years we're still just yelling at each other without concrete evidence either way. He said, what if you are dreaming, right now? One day you wake up and find that every experience, belief, emotion (you get it, and so on) is a fiction. Not one of those people you loved exists. What then? Which life is meaningful? What does that mean? And so on.

Also FYI, the movie was partly based on Neuromancer, which was based on the thought experiment. And also also FYI, there is no way to prove one way or the other. Don't bother. People much smarter than us have tried.

Neo and Morpheus (and that annoying Trinity) just assume one is better than the other and most people would react the same way. But apart from being a traitorous creep, Cypher may have been right about ignorance being bliss. I was very happy living two lives and I am not thrilled about now living my own without any distraction. 

Granted, perhaps it is the material that is the problem. My last read was A Canticle for Leibowitz, which if you have read this blog before, I did not love. It was like going for a blood test. I get anxious, not because of the sting, but because I do not like the thought of intentionally breaching my skin. I don't try to get papercuts, they just happen. (Like, daily. I can get a papercut just holding a book or opening a cereal box.) In other words, because I lost myself, so I think I lost you, it was bad because I struggled to pay attention, which made the rest of it awful, because I knew I was going to finish a book I didn't like and it was going to take a long time.

For now, I am going to continue to read magazine articles a page at a time, flick through books I know I won't finish, listen to podcasts, and do crossword puzzles and Sudoku (I have a timed app - at the moment I veer between less than one star and more than three stars (I award myself these points) - it's fantastic). I will think about the books I have read with longing, like the longing Neo would have felt for his life if he had lived in a lovely apartment like mine with three bizarre animals and shelves of books that are here when I get my life back.

Also also also FYI, while I was trying to be Descartes, Sartre and Nietszche, just without the famous part, I forgot to tell you my next attempt (you should know I never give up). Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. I read Purple Hibiscus about six years ago and was thrown around in her character's emotions like dead leaves - the pretty yellow kind that kids make terrible and very unimaginative art with. My theory is that if I throw enough emotion at the part of my brain that is slumped over, I may push it right over. Either I'll then leap to my feet, view literature from a different angle, or close my eyes and pretend Morpheus isn't there.

MaddAddam: Part 1 of 2

My introduction to the works of Margaret Atwood was Oryx and Crake. I used to work at a bookshop which hosts a huge sale every quarter. It is a good place to pick up hardcover first editions. (Sorry, peeps, but if you can't find anything good on sale, it's because the staff nabbed them while they unpacked boxes.) Deckle edges (when the page edges are rough and uneven) are a red flag. This habit is mostly for novelty value than for any misplaced hope that this one book of thousands will become valuable. Anyway, I have this book and I have read it.

Let's retreat even further in time and test your patience. Because it is entertaining to imagine anyone is reading this and that you are on tenterhooks to see where I am going with this.

I read Dorothy Lessing's The Golden Notebook in high school (y'know, as normal learners spend their free time) and adored it. It opened up a new world of politicised literature for me, as a natural and nurtured feminist, although I didn't know where to find more of the same or how to exercise it.

Later I would read AS Byatt and fall in love for the same reason - together with her representation of the post-Modern psyche: by definition ultimately and completely apathetic. The last few pages of Possession sealed the deal.

Around this time, a friend was surprised that I hadn't yet read any Margaret Atwood. 'As a feminist of your own devising, I would think you would have devoured her work.' (Or something as cultured.) I am otherwise like that, as you know (as above), so I didn't read any just because he said I should (a reflection on our friendship, too). Until, while rooting around in my collection of books, I found the book and couldn't resist those deckle edges (they get me every time).

I was ambivalent. I was also confused. I was ambivalent because I was confused. The ideas of Oryx and Crake rooted around in the recesses of my brain and unravelled things I did not want to see in the dark of an alley or in the light of day. (An older me is more comfortable in alleys than sunlight.) So I ravelled those things up again while Oryx, Crake and Snowman-the-Jimmy weren't looking, and packed those three characters along with them.

Burying them didn't help. They kept popping up in my mind, while I was thinking about genetically modified anything (not often), overgrown grass (more often than you'd think), apocalypse (very often), the destructiveness of the human species (very, very often) and things that have little to do with the book, like apples. Each time, I would wander down one of the many paths in that greenhouse and whisk myself out when I realised what half of me was doing while the other half wasn't looking.

Excuse the pun but it grew on me (actually, don't excuse me - that's a pretty good one). One day I realised that other half have shoved my dislike over onto the 'like' side and closer to 'craving'. Muttering under my breath, I read others, like The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale. To be honest, I can't remember what any of them are about. They weren't Oryx and Crake. They were too packed with ideas and my brain kept overheating (it does that. Even a bibliophile has limits).

Lucky me, Oryx and Crake was about to become... wait for it... a trilogy. Even an author needs to make money. Thank you, JRR Tolkien. Again, I was ambivalent. I don't like being coerced into spending my money (although, let's be honest, that's how capitalism works). But I craved more.

I caved and read The Year of the Flood, fairly recently, although it had been out for several years. Hammer - nail - head. Down to the squirming ambivalence. Except, as I mentioned, the older me is far more comfortable with squirming and finds it more comforting than the safety of ignorance. Oryx, Crake and Snowman-the-Jimmy didn't play as crucial a role, appearing mostly as backstory. While Oryx and Crake was set after the pandemic that wipes out a very destructive human race, The Year of the Flood is set around it.

Now came MaddAddam! I waited and waited for the Kindle version but eventually couldn't handle the suspense and went with the hardcopy. Which poses a problem because I have two of the three in hardcopy and other as .mobi. Hmmm I also object to the waste of paying for something twice. Hmmm

Conundrum aside, I am halfway through. This book knits together the two stories, in a different narrative style: one character takes centre stage. His story is told as a story to his lover who turns it into a (almost Biblical) story for a species of not-but-almost-human beings, who are depicted as childlike in their ignorance but are probably better suited to the world, honestly.

All of these stories tell the story of how pre-pandemic society became further divided than ours (pre-pre-pandemic) into haves and have-nots, both brainwashed (sometimes violently) into maintaining the status quo. Except, as we all know, sometimes wolves make their way into the herd and these wolves were called the MaddAddamites, and named themselves after animals we have made extinct. Whatever, because the pandemic happened and now they're telling stories in the aftermath.

No spoilers there, I promise.

I haven't finished the book so cart - horse, y'know, but based on The Year of the Flood, there is none of the same crypticness and magic of Oryx and Crake. That book punched me in my stomach, because Snowman-the-Jimmy's story was impossible to fully untangle. It also ended with another punch that physically made me blink and try to block the memory out. Although there have been moments of unveiling, where clues have fitted together, there hasn't been the same kind of (almost Biblical) revelation.

That said, I can't get enough of Zeb's story in MaddAddam, where he (so far) plays an incidental role in the pandemic, although we already know he is critical after it. (It's always the people prepared to hit under the belt that survive in a pandemic. Remember this, peeps, when you play guns and crossbows in your minds.) This is exactly the reason I am slowplaying my reading. (No, not to learn how to use a crossbow, because I am comfortable with the under-the-belt people doing it for me.) Because, based on my experience of Oryx and Crake, I will have to manage the craving after I have put it down.

Forget the apocalypse, this is a far more important (and imminent) problem.

All of the books are narratives within narratives: told first by the character (almost self-consciously because they are pretty much telling their stories to themselves, old loud, which is not considered crazy in an apocalypse), and then revised for an audience, even if we aren't always privy to the telling. Although AS Byatt hits - nail - head with Possession about post-Modern society, universally people enjoy stories. In a story, you are the maker of your own destiny.

Stories lead you into the garage of your mind, to topple the piles of things you prefer to ignore. That may be as damaging in the lead-up to a pandemic than how it is executed. With stories, and in the toppling, we imagine the means of our destruction into being.

Discworld

Generally (except for the writings of a good friend, which is why I say 'generally'), I do not enjoy satire. I am easily riled, upset, impassioned. "Silly women drivers" is enough for me to train the beady little eyes on you like the laser beads of a sniper rifle. So you can imagine what happens when someone is turning my pet issue into a seeming joke. Even if they are unpacking an argument using humour as a kind of common ground.

I care not. By the time I see an empty suitcase, I am already peeved, anywhere in a range from sniper rifle to air attack.

See, I am facetious; which is like being satirical except the satire is a prank (a stapler set in jelly being a favourite), intended to give the writer room to explore the cupboard drawers of the position while everyone else is looking in the other direction. Which is not the same thing. A satirer knows what her position is.

Generally... Remember that disclaimer? Yep, I have packed away the rifle and begun being facetious.

Terry Pratchett gets away with it because his novels double as fantasy, which I have always been a fan of. Meaning that like any child I dreamed of a dragon who was more friend than pet - he hangs around because we enjoy each other's company. He is not a fan of other people though, and my instruction to generally not burn people into shadows is the only thing he doesn't like about me. I prefer not to think about how he feeds himself.

The world is divided into People Who Have Read Pratchett and Those Who Haven't. We each feel sorry for the other, but my side has a dragon, so...

Pratchett, for those of you on the side of Haven't (pitying look), has created a world called Discworld. Even the name is satirical. The world is literally a disc, but as per some legend or other, the disc sits on four elephants who stand on the shell of a giant turtle who is swimming through space (according to Book 2, there are may be a few turtlettes swimming alongside the erm adult (gender is indeterminate here)).

The joke is layered: Most obviously, this is a dig at people who used to think the world was flat. Less obviously, it is a dig at the mentality of the people who thought the world was flat. Because human nature isn't many things but (contrary to popular opinion) it is stuck in juvenilia. Those people still exist (not literally, maybe as atoms) but now they voraciously argue against global warming (FYI, a natural occurrence, peeps, else we would be (not) breathing nitrogen right now) and believe in democracy (that is a long story).

And that's just the name!

My favourite characters are the Patrician and Captain Vimes of the Watch. The Patrician is the for-all-intents-and-purposes the Prime Minister of Ankh Morpork (a city, not a state, because maintaining just the city is enough of a job). He never seems exhausted though. Or surprised. He is mildly amused sometimes, but usually that means someone is about to regret being amusing. Vimes is sometimes amusing, and often exhausted, but seems to be protected by rubber tyres, like a go-cart track.

Why am I reminiscing? For your edification. No. It's my blog, so unless I am educating you (another pitying look) on civil rights and recycling, I am not really interested in your edification, you.

No, I am reading my way from Book 1 all the way through to wherever in the 30s we will be when I get there. No, this is not a case of a trilogy with 30 books or 10 trilogies. Discworld had solidified from the giggles of the readers long before this trilogy fad set in. Pratchett writes one book a year (sometimes two) and releases them round about Christmas. Clever bugger.

Why am I rereading these books? Full of questions today (whatever day it is that you are reading this), aren't you?

I hadn't read a Discworld novel in yonks (which is a year or two). Then I picked up Making Money, as sorbet (which will (perhaps) mean something to you if you have read this blog before or understand words). What surprised me was the simple way he picks up an idea and turns it inside out, so it's still the same shape but it looks different. (Mostly all the threads are poking out and there's fluff along some of the hems. I am picturing a fleese-lined onesie.)

In this case, the gold standard. The protagonist points out, in a matter-of-fact way, that gold doesn't really play any large part in our daily lives or in the grander life of society, unless you are a jeweller. It is meaningless when compared with, say, iron. Genius. (He then goes on to apply that concept to bank notes, but let's not quibble.)

I enjoyed the satire (which is not as high-brow as that in the quality daily publication of your choice, perhaps, but definitely funnier), so naturally I thought, let's read all of them. Again. In order. Of course. This was about two months ago. I am on number 4, Mort, which is generally agreed to be a favourite (I'd put the odds at 1:8, so place your bets now folks, before it slips down). The reason being my third favourite character: DEATH. (That's how he speaks, WITH EMPHASIS.)

DEATH in Discworld is a pragmatic man - he isn't fussed about whether you are a good or a bad person, because he has seen the (very dull) infinity through which the turtle swims and lost that sense of morality like a coat. On the other hand, he named his horse 'Binky' (lower caps intentional). So he's not entirely lost to the dark side.

In this particular installment, DEATH has an apprentice (who seems, like the deceased, unsurprised to be visited by a skeleton in a black coat who SPEAKS WITH EMPHASIS). Like most of Pratchett's protagonists, poor Mort is insecure and trying to come off as a James Dean, but his tongue keeps giving him away. Also his shaking hands.

As with all Pratchett novels, the author sets up a moral or social quandary, and then shows you there is another, more natural way to approach it. (It usually helps if you are a bit dense but a good person, or have a suitcase made of sapient pearwood (perhaps the most terrifying... thing in Discworld).) Rather than let the apple of his eye be killed, Mort does away with the assassin trying to kill her and upsetting Fate. No, actually, Fate carries on as if nothing has changed, which is a whole other problem.

What now? Does he kill his apple and let her disappear into the afterlife? (This is one of those relationships where he was struck dumb by her presence and has now spent five minutes talking to her. Obviously they are meant to be together...) Does he carry on while Fate carries on and she is stuck in limbo? Well, I'm not going to spoil it for you!

And this is what I enjoy about Pratchett's satire: Him. He is an eternal optimist, in a world where it is healthier to be a cynic. He believes in good and bad, evolution, and people. He is genuinely indignant about people who exercise power over others, about decision making and about ignorance. Not in order of indignance - ignorance probably comes first.

So expect regular updates as I plow through 30-odd books and guffaw a lung (I find myself lightly snorting at the jokes before actually laughing). If you haven't read them yet, hopefully I can bully you into trying one, and if you have, hopefully I can bully you into reading another one. We could prove Pratchett right by guffawing the world until it rocks on the backs of four elephants standing on top of a turtle swimming through space with turtlettes swimming alongside.

The Elephant Keepers' Children

Peter Høeg gives away the plot of The Elephant Keepers' Children fairly quickly. In the first chapter. Which is ten pages long. Our protagonist (who is all of fourteen) and his sister (sixteen) have discovered the secret to zen, which is a mishmash of aphorisms such as living in the moment and pursuing your dreams, all mostly alluded to through the character's strained silences after epiphanic moments, which are, to be honest, about two pages apart.

Now would you be surprised if I said I enjoyed the book? No, because you are used to me being facetious and recognise the greater potential for humour (you say sarcasm; I say wit) in a negative review. And because my really negative reviews are often less humourous than just plain negative, maybe even mean (if you can't do, criticise!).

The first novel of Høeg's that I read was Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. Chances are you have watched the similarly laboured and Nordically dark movie, although that is pretty much all they have in common, if I remember the movie correctly, which it is entirely possible I do not. 'Laboured' here is a compliment. The book is intense, as is living in the confines of the darkness and then the sunlight of a northern country. So intense and brooding that my restless soul felt soothed.

Miss Smilla begins with the death of a young boy who lived in the same housing complex as the main character, which is ruled accidental but she reveals was not. The mystery story that follows is also (perhaps more so) an untangling of Miss Smilla's own fractured past and her acceptance of another loner into her life. The last few pages are a confrontation of intense meaning and brooding life (did you catch that?) that soothed this restless soul.

This is a good thing, unless you perhaps are happy-go-lucky, and believe good people deserve good things and bad people deserve bad things, or if you are on good terms with the universe. In which case I should like to meet you, hand you a glass of wine and interrogate you. For example, what should one do to pursue a meaningful career in books and make dollops of cash and give back to the community while maintaining a life?

Anyway, Miss Smilla goes down in my notes (I don't really keep notes, except this blog) as one of the most intense (intense in the sense of a plaster being ripped off) books I have ever read. Alice in Wonderland perhaps being the first because of the chapter where she has been welcomed into someone's house and then grows and grows until she rips the entire thing up, nevermind when she is being chased by cards because the queen says they must chop off her head. 

The second book of his I read was Borderliners, which is about an experiment in the 60s in a boarding school. Children with social and behavioural issues are being integrated with 'normal' children in a 'normal' school. The protagonist is one of the former, but he frames the story as a conspiracy of his own making (as opposed to the one really unveiling). Again the last few pages are so intense, partly because we finally realise the full scope of the real story, but also partly because of the boy's own realisations.

I suppose it is a bit like Alice realising the queen is her mother as she is being pursued by her brothers.

The Elephant Keepers' Children is Høeg's latest book. I was waiting for the paperback to come out (see above re the dollops of cash I do not earn as I suffer for my art blah blah schmak) but stumbled across a trade paperback in a local bargain book store. Yay!

The cover is simply drawn, probably digitally: a series of walls receding into the distance, ladders leaned against them, and on the foremost wall, a boy sitting on top of the wall and a girl climbing. If I were the publisher I may have asked for the perspective of the children and ladders to be reviewed, because the angles are not realistic: the ladders should poke through the walls at those angles and that boy should slide straight off. But maybe that is the point and I am looking past it.

It is about a family, set in the same darkly intense country as the other novels. It too is a mystery, but the story is (seemingly) lighter, almost dreamlike and the mystery is being explored more than discovered.

The family includes three long-suffering children; long-suffering because their parents seem to be uninhibited, autistic delinquents, despite being the curators of a local parish. The children, specially the younger children (Peter and Tilda), are tasked with keeping their parents in line and routinely project this on to other people, including a local entrepreneur who runs a fetish sex hotline and the local camp drug dealer, who is also a count. Their parents disappear and the authorities swoop in to lock them up in a rehab clinic - err, what?

Ok, not almost dreamlike; mostly, perhaps entirely dreamlike. I avoided this because I was afraid you would get the wrong idea. You have the wrong idea. The fantasy is made of symbols set on a real landscape. The boy describes his school, the local tourist trade, the mainland and a sponsored cruise, which are all realistic, except that he and his sister are resilient super-heroes, talking their way through adult conversations and donning disguises, with a pet dog in tow.

He also seems to understand his parents' behaviour (and all human behaviour, in fact) in a way that I all (all 30-odd years of me) could not. I will not disclose the rest of the mystery but this one is proffered up front: the elephant is your ego and super-ego, the parts of you that are grandiose, instinctive, uninhibited by social mores - in the parents' case, conniving. An elephant can be a couple of tons of destruction, plowing through thorn trees and rolling over cars. The keeper is the id, or the conscious part of you. The part that inhibits - that drowns the part of you eyeing dollops of cash being handed over at the teller next to you.

And that is nowadays generally reviled by the part of society that does not rely on the animals for an income, as cruel. Which includes me. But I am conflicted. About everything.

The boy perceives the parents to be uninhibited, autistic delinquents (that's not just a projection) but also reasons that his parents have their own elephants that he doesn't understand and that they are the keepers. He and his sister need to protect them from themselves. In this case the keeper is holding on for dear life, or playing along because he sees something here to his own benefit (no one ever said the keeper isn't conniving too).

Perhaps the parents represent his own elephant and his portrayal of himself his own keeper. After all, who doesn't harbour some kind of fantasy at the expense of their parents? Apparently this is what drives Disney movies: the cute and furry orphaned animal, which matches a dream of ourselves as brave orphaned children, free of the shackles of society. If you don't dream it now, deny you did when you were shorter than the counter in the kitchen. Even Alice is abandoned by her family in her own dream.

I confess (don't worry, not that kind of confession, although a blog is a good place for such things) I did not enjoy this book as much as I did Høeg's others. I confess (again!) that is an understatement. See, I enjoy tortured, intense, brooding, navel-gazing literature. See above. That is what I have come to expect from the author, in the same way that romance watchers expect to a happily ever after - or at least a smooch - imagine Eat, Pray, Love, without any romance (which was what I expected, actually).

I enjoyed the approach until mid-way, when the fantasy began to swing upwards and I lost track of the plot between all the slashes and diacritics (awful but true). It reminded me of Borderliners, suspended on the free living and loving of the same time period. But without the nihilism. Or romance. Were romance expected. Which it wasn't.

This isn't a negative review (truly) but it isn't a positive one. It is a halfhearted and a little confused one. I want to recommend this book to the stars (hyperbole), like I would any other f Høeg's (to the Northern Lights) (not hyperbole), but if you're reading this, you expect existential crisis as other people would expect romance. Well, not as, but you know what I mean. So read Miss Smilla and Borderliners, and if you enjoy them, don't read The Elephant Keepers' Children.

V: on hold

The real world has me in its claws but I promise not to let this become a habit. Granted, a mole can't do much against the eagle attached to the claws except become a very unpleasant meal. All this really proves is that this metaphor has limits. The real world has me surrounded but the Law of Cowboy Films says that the fewer the men, the craftier they have to be to survive. In this case, I intend to go down in a blaze of words and few inappropriate pranks.

For instance, is it safe to put a goldfish in a bowl in the fridge for long enough for someone to find it?

I haven't abandoned words in this stake-out - that would be just ridiculous. At the moment, all I really have brain real estate for is crosswords. Yep. You, stop sniggering. Quit - lay off - end - halt - cease - terminate - desist from snickering - simpering - sneering - laughing.

Really, I rarely finish a crossword without cheating: using dictionaries, thesauruses, and an app that allows you to match words and reveal blocks. But I can live with this because I get bored when I reach an impasse and rules are flexible.

Before my two-week hiatus from blogging, I was still ploughing my way through V and 1Q84. Ok, don't look at me like that - that's not exactly true because the latter has been kicked under my bed, behind my hairdryer. I had reached the point where one character's married girlfriend is pregnant and the other is recovering (in uncomfortable detail) from a night of debauchery she doesn't remember. I stepped on it as I got up out of bed and slipped.

V is on my Kindle, which is less slippery. However, it does not have a solution to being distracted. Every time I pick it up to read it, I have to flip back to find something I recognise. The novel is made up of stories that branch off from the main story. These branches usually handstand back in time, pulling certain characters with it. The point being that you have to pay attention otherwise you may find yourself unwittingly a soldier without a past on Namibia's Skeleton Coast.

The chapter set in Namibia is gruelling, as is another set close by, in an estate that houses one continuous party a la The Great Gatsby. Not only do events depict the brutal violations of human rights that were colonialism, but the protagonists experience a flux of emotions, from bravery to insipidness, activism to self-preservation, care to the need for care.

The main story is set in post-World War II America and follows an ex-naval officer. Although Wikipedia says he was discharged, I remember vividly that he went AWOL, although perhaps this insert is the reverse of my loss of memory. He is part of the Whole Sick Crew, an incestuous bunch of naval officers and some women. He describes himself as the most popular man among the women but also the most virginal, even though he and Rachel have something destructive going on.

Now we reach My Point - congratulations, pick up 50 000 Air Miles when next you visit your local bookshop.

V reminds me of Cloud Atlas, but only in the sense that Mercury and Jupiter orbit the same star. Cloud Atlas depicts several stories set in several genres, with no main narrative except that forced on it by the movie. Instead, it is the themes that bind them - themes that range from esoteric (producers of the movie) to literary and semiotic (me).

Having said this, certain elements recur, just as they occur in other novels written by the same author. Mostly, these elements are characters. They recur as actual characters, or just references or blurry pasts.

In V, the stories are more interbred, with a single protagonist, and more consistent voice and genre. I am twisting myself into contradictions now, which is fitting, because the author also experiments with genre, particularly historical drama. His prose is consistently highbrow, even when he is slinging slang between the Sick Crew and rival gangs.

Am I recommending fans of Cloud Atlas to read V? a) I can't because I haven't finished and who knows what asteroid could be hiding in the last few pages. b) These are two different but similar books, and it depends on whether you enjoyed the games the first played with genre (different) or that they played games with genre (similar).

Don't quote me on it. My opinion can only be trustworthy once I have finished the book and I haven't. I also cannot promise to finish anytime soon, since isolated synonyms and antonyms comprise the sum total of my attention right now, as I figurre out how to twist myself to bite the claws that hold me, or crawl out of the frontier cottage I am crouched in, in the hopes that my attackers will wait there until their toes chafe.

[Insert your name here] is a...

"Camilla is a hag." (For those of you with limited memory, that is my name - or my assumed name. Psych.) Followed by "Camilla is a commoner". The self-inflicted cruelty of asking Google who I am was sparked by Facebook. If Facebook says to do something, you do it. Or don't it, depending on your stance towards social media. In which case this cruelty is news to you. I didn't do it, not for any political reason, but because who has never Googled their name before? Apart from that new village of pygmies that discovered us recently. Or more accurately, discovered a race of helicopters.

Which makes me wonder about the helicopter maker. Upon discovering the helicopter hovering above them like she was going to lay ginormous eggs, did the men defiantly waving spears at her guess the object is human-made? Or would they have to take a closer look to pull apart wires and empty fuel tanks? Or would they assume the forest (being the source of all and named Djengi) created this really big dragonfly, like the Khoisan men in The Gods Must be Crazy who only showed up everyone's lack of sophistication.

They may have Googled their names having discovered us, because no doubt they are now clothed in Hawaiian shirts and begging poverty, while the forest is being cut down at a rate of one football field a day (I assume this is big, being (still awaiting its status as a standard unit) untranslated into soccer fields).

The Camilla referred to is Parker-Bowles. Even as a child, people used to tease me with that and think they were the first ones. To adults, I laughed and made a face. To people I didn't have to be respectful to, I asked if they thought I looked like a horse. So if I were Googling her name, that would be my contribution. How terrible, I know, but I don't know her and I was scarred by the whole Charles-love-letter thing as a child so I feel justified.

It's a silly game meant to point out the silly things people ask Google, as if Google were Djeni, the creator of the helicopter. I hope. But also we're saying who we're not and (in those cases where the result is blush-worthy) who we are, in our lifelong search to chisel out our identities. (No, I'm not saying you're Michelangelo. Or a sculpture.) Just to clarify, I am not a hag. Yet. I may be a commoner, but I think Marx and Engels had a point, before they wandered down the illogically violent path of Robespierre.

Most people know what their name means, even if it is so old we no longer use the name to mean what it means in normal (or in my case any) conversation. I am neither Russian nor more than one half (going back three generations, so ok, some fraction on either side) British. My name means 'attendant at a sacrifice', suggesting it's really old, because we don't sacrifice anything except our integrities these days. I could have done worse - I'm just there holding the sacrifice down and mopping up the blood.

Although, two things occur to me: I am more disturbed by the thought of sacrificing a sheep or something, and as with Robespierre, attending these things usually puts you on list to be sacrificed. When the winds change, they don't only bring the stench of the things you have done.

At this point I must remind myself (and you, you) that I have never participated in or sanctioned blood sacrifice (except of integrity). This chisel is faulty.

My name is not a common one (score). So there is only one other cultural reference to my name, but it is (mostly) worthy of one's pride in the character of someone who isn't you. Chisel-stuff.

This Camilla is a warrior princess favoured by the gods. One of them at least. She only takes up a few lines in Virgil's Aeneid, but she is almost totally who I wish I were. Kind of. If I could stay me and be those bits of her. Without any sacrifices. Because, as I think about it, there is at least one in this part of the epic poem. To clarify, deity of the helicopter, before you award me what I wish for and whisper be careful underneath your breath, I would like to still be me, as I am now, with additional qualities from the warrior-princess, as enumerated below, in a context-appropriate way (I don't own a bow or a horse), without sacrifices, except ones of integrity, but only if sacrifices are part of the deal, which I don't want them to be.

"Woodcut illustration of Camilla and Metabus escaping into exile - Penn Provenance Project" by kladcat - Woodcut illustration of Camilla and Metabus escaping into exile

She is a tot in swaddling blankets when the commoners run her father, a king, out of town for being a tyrant. He runs like a bat out of hell with his daughter until he comes to a river that he can't cross with the little one in his arms. Instead of looking for a more rational mode of transport, he appeals to the goddess Diana, promising her his daughter if she arrives safely on the other side. Well, lands safely, because (yip) he throws her across, tied to a spear, and then follows doing doggy paddle.

She lives. (Don't try that at home; this is mythology.)

Diana was one of those multi-tasking goddesses: she liked to hunt and could talk to animals, as well as being obsessed with the moon. Camilla grew up wild and hunted a lot, so she looked impressive when she rolled into the town of Ardea to fight the Trojans: "her hair/Bound in a coronal of clasping gold/Her Lycian quiver, and her pastoral spear... and her, the maid, how fair!"

Camilla and her band of merry hunters ride into battle without fear (a healthy emotion) and she proves why: she lays half a horde of men low with bow and arrow, and then ducks back when she sees the other half are intent on revenge. She is so effective in battle that the narrator asks: "Whom first, dread maiden, did thy javelin quell?/Whom last? how many in the dust lay low?" Then he enumerates them and their bloody deaths. Let's skip the sacrifices.

Then she forgets herself. She sees a man who looks like one of the Clegan brothers from Game of Thrones and gets greedy. She spears him and taunts him as he dies. "Yet take this glory to the grave, and say/Twas I, the great Camilla, made thee die." The blood-lust has her and the taunt becomes a battlecry. Instead of striking and then retreating, she chases her prey, yelling: "Fie! shall a woman scatter you in flight?/O, slack! O, never to be stung to shame!" Granted, the horde of dead men is piling up.

One of the Trojans who escaped her spear, stalks her and stakes her. These guys were more talented than modern mafia henchmen and zombie killers, because every soldier dies on first hit. She dies and Diana despairs. Because a goddess is involved, the story doesn't end (the epic is an epic for a reason, but this sub-plot too). Diana dispatches one of her nymphs to revenge the man who killed her (for all intents and purposes) daughter. Complaining about the waste of an arrow on such a cretin, the nymph kills him. He dies quickly, because we're distracted bemoaning Camilla's fate.

This goes on for a while, so I'm making an executive decision to end the story here.

Camilla is all the things a warrior should be, with all the merits of a princess. I'll take that thanks: speed, determination, bravery, strategic skills, beauty, poise, with the patronage of a goddess. But in the midst of battle, she becomes greedy and cocky. She yells taunts that are beneath her - what does she need to prove? And why?

There's something I haven't told you yet. Why are they fighting if Camilla's father lost their kingdom yonks ago? Who are they fighting for? Camilla and her soldiers needn't have marched into battle. Ostensibly, the king of the Rutuli is a good friend of hers (platonic, if you know anything about Diana), so they are marching to his aid. He has a kazillion soldiers of his own with those of other kingdoms - she and her crew are not a host, even if you squint, even if Camilla is pretty terrifying.

She goes to battle partly because she wants to prove something but also because she has fallen in love with the bloody end of the hunt. She wants to experience the power of taking the life of a man equipped to take your own. She imagines that, as a woman, she is underestimated and proving each man otherwise is part of the thrill. And remember that she survived being thrown over a river on the back of a spear. Who wouldn't feel immortal?

Trust me, I know this all because I share her name. I signed the contract assuming her identity (but I didn't check the clause about the sacrifice). Really, I did some reading, and some of it is just me and my chisel hacking away. The line between the two is made of salt and it just started raining. I don't feel guilty for misinforming you, because isn't that what reading is about? Making something out of clues? Carving yourself out of marble? Or making a helicopter?

For years, I disliked my name, because I thought it was out-modish and staid. Learning the meaning of my name cast it in a different light: a bit mystical - for ages, I struggled to understand what 'attendant' meant: someone who simply attended, was part of the crowd, or someone who participated but was not the ringleader or the actual sacrifice. I still don't know, really. That in itself is revealing, right? But would you rather be the one watching or the one doing something? There may be a strain of Camilla in me yet - be careful what you wish for.

PS. The Aeneid is an Epic Poem, in the sense that it is part of a genre and in the sense that it is Very Long. It ranks up there in the ratio between efforts and results with Chaucer. Or Franzen's The Corrections. Choose wisely.

The American greats, and Oprah

When Oprah added William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to her bookclub list as a summer read, said bookclub gulped and shrivelled in the path of The Establishment's raucous laughter. The plebs fell for it and sales of books by Faulkner increased (I know because I sold a few to unwitting fans of Marianne Keyes and Jodi Picoult). This was after the James Frey A Million Little Pieces, which he sold as memoir but was really almost entirely made up, and the 'almost entirely' is debatable.

This introduction is a red herring, but now you know that I know what I'm talking about. To add to your store of Oprah trivia, her bookclub really did shrivel (maybe not gulp). (Although it did come to life again a few years ago. Because, this is Oprah.) Put those two facts together, bind them with logic, and you realise Oprah rarely actually read the books she touted - they were chosen by assistants and publishers' publicists. (What they were thinking when they included Faulkner is a mystery.)

I recently tried to read The Sound and the Fury, but read no further than three pages (read being a misnomer: I daydreamed through three pages - I cannot remember a thing). I don't abandon books after I have committed to them, ever. Even Atomised, and that was at least as traumatising as something I saw in the supermarket the other day (and which shall forever remain wordless, so don't even ask).

Oprah generalised that 'Faulkner is the greatest American writer, like, ever' (sure, along with Hemingway, Twain, Poe, Steinbeck, McCarthy...). But I would imagine even the most stalwart Faulkner fan would harbour a teensy bit of bitterness at having to work so hard to read for fun. I felt that, at present, the only author deserving of that degree of effort is James Joyce. (We have a tempestuous relationship. He channels through the book on my dresser and I ignore his cursing.) He was using up my time with Joyce, even though I haven't so much as picked up the cursed (har!) book in six months (I was polishing the furniture).

Imagine if Oprah had nominated The Odyssey... Now there is a book to bury a bookclub near to the centre of the earth.

Having said this, I am a Faulkner fan (and a Joyce fan - I swear I will finish that book one day, you Irishman!). As I Lay Dying is on my list of books that will haunt me for life. Ok, no, it is silly to lay claim to choices in your future. It haunts me and I hope it haunts me for life (at least because there are way worse types of ghosts to be haunted by... Actual ghosts, for example). In two sentences, the characters sum up the world for me in a Cormac McCarthy-worthy musing:

"It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end."

The book is set in the American south, among a po' family, the matriarch of which has just died. The novel tells of the the family's efforts to arrange her funeral, which chiefly consist of couriering her body on the farm's wagon to another, more affluent part of the family. Really (because this is how literature works), it is about the relationships between the characters, how they live, their relationships with the matriarch and the wisdom that comes from being po'.

That last bit is facetious, but Rousseau's Noble Savage is still alive and well, just now living in shacks constructed from the cardboard of cellphone ads. Faulkner can be forgiven, by historicity, but what is our excuse?

To climb up that tree of great American authors (figuratively, because I tried to climb a tree the other day and found I no longer have the muscles), Faulkner inspires the work of Toni Morrison, the sun of Oprah's universe together with Maya Angelou and her dogs. We studied Morrison every. single. year. of my degree, largely because one of our lecturers was Obsessed with her. Because of this I can name every novel she has ever written, have read them, and know that she is a frightening woman who use to be an editor at Faber & Faber and now terrifies undergrads.

I would sell organs to be terrifying. Or to work at Faber & Faber (I would even volunteer my services as a fridge-cleaner. Someone would see the obsessive way I scrubbed at stains hidden under shelves and would know me for a perfectionist and would let me edit manuscripts so they could take the credit and I would be happy).

Morrison's characters are almost exclusively Southern, African-American, discriminated against, they discriminate against and tattooed with mythology. Slavery, chauvinism, racism, all the meaty -isms. Her novels are uplifting and inspiring, and (I'm going to be serious now) brilliant. Songs of Solomon is my favourite and Paradise my least favourite. Where Faulkner plays devil's advocate, Morrison pursues abuse single-mindedly, creating her own mythologies.

Now, along the way up that greatness tree, we missed two brown-tipped offshoots (like that of the bamboo in my bathroom), titled Zora Neale Hurston and Carson McCullers. I am starting to feel like I am trailing in Oprah's shadow - Oprah ('s assistant) picked books from both authors for her bookclub. In fact, Hurston is (allegedly) her favourite author. Huh, perhaps I and The Establishment have been overly judgemental. Though, still, Faulkner?

Carson McCullers has featured on this blog, more than once, so for equality's sake (it's election day!), let's stick to Hurston. I read Their Eyes were Watching God a couple of months ago, set in... if you have been reading carefully, you, you can guess... yes, the American south, that muddy well of discrimination and abuse (drinking game: take a shot every time this post uses 'discrimination' or 'abuse'. Or 'southern'. Or 'and') and muddied vowels. In this book, the abuse is persistent but limited to the background.

Written in the vernacular (like As I Lay Dying), the novel tells the story (a secondhand account of her telling of the story) of a woman from her childhood to the death of her husband. Based on your cultural dips into Faulkner and Morrison, you expect a certain theme and for a while Hurston gives it to you, until she begins to channel Faulkner, and soon we know that we are all abusing one another, which makes for another less than uplifting tale, but a poignant one.

Zora Neale Hurston, not on Oprah...

At this point, I am wondering why I have read so many of the American greats, when the first great South African title I think of is Cry the Beloved Country (partly because it is long and long equals great, obviously) and authors are Nadine Gordimer and Andre Brink (neither of whom write... enjoyable fiction). (JM Coetzee? This is one of the few instances where man and work deserve to be equated. In short, there is no need to bolster his egoism by acknowledging him.) Oh, and a couple of Fugard's workshopped plays.

(Please don't redirect me to African fiction, because Chinua Achebe is about as close to Nadine Gordimer as spaghetti is to curry.)

While I want to tell you that I am replacing my to-read list with South African greats, to rectify this situation, I would be lying, and why lie in cyberspace? Every culture seems to have an inflection in its writing, some style that is unique. American fiction is vast, given its very nature as a land of immigrants made up of many states. These four authors have been chosen, by me (and Oprah), artificially, by the links I make between them. And perhaps the same could be said for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Calvino and Eco, Marquez and Bolano.

South African fiction, especially the political works - sometimes it feels like they're all political - is dry. Metaphors are like kites tied to a fence, like wallflowers that can't dance, like colours mixed into a muddy brown. These works remind me of the Karoo, which I think of fondly but would not live there. When I read, I want to be tossed around, not by emotion, but by the acrobatics of the words. I read to read. To consume the experience and feel bloated with it - and the only way a plot can catch up is to jump and freefall.

We don't have an Oprah (I don't have a TV, but no, whatsherface who used to have an afternoon show on SABC 3 does not count), so there is no one to nominate setworks for the nation to read over the December holidays. If we did, what would she pick? Disgrace? Confessions of a Gambler? Agaat? Fiela se Kind? Maybe Coetzee would admit that his fiction is actually straight-up memoir. We definitely need an Oprah.

A pair of brackets is not just parenthesis

Something happened in my previous post. Something Happened. (By far my cheesiest and favourite opening lines ever.) In other words, I had just finished reading the book Something Happened by he of Catch 22, Joseph Heller. Is it coincidence that my psychoanalytic reading of Alfred Hitchcock's movies and my reading of the psychoanalytic book Something Happened coincided? Am I interested in both because I am psychoanalytically minded? (Now my favourite introduction and perhaps my best SEO-worthy.)

This is not a review and neither is it scrabble, so keep reading you!

As a writer, I am prone to using parentheses to insert a comment, joke, stage whisper or red herring. Maybe that is why I have found myself adopting the voice of the main character of Something Happened. Which somehow makes me a relation of Joseph Heller, I guess, who first adopted his voice. (I think this logic makes us married. I should look into his estate.)

Bob Slocum, the main character, uses enough brackets to move the keys from the top-right to the center of the keyboard, replacing 'f' and 'h'. He even uses them to begin (and break) paragraphs. Sometimes it seems as though these interruptions have rhyme and reason. That's a red herring. Sometimes the parenthesised comments are short: "(So who else does he have?)" And sometimes they are long: "Somehow the time passes (doesn't it, without help from us..."

Towards the end of the book, I lost a partner-in-bracket and had to move on.

My parentheses are usually jokes, sometimes self-deprecating ones. Occasionally they are instructions to you to keep reading. You. In the last post, I used the brackets to relay missing information. My sentence structure was otherwise quite normal. Conventional, I mean. Not normal. Something abducted my colons and semi-colons and long complex sentences used to convince the reader that My Point is within spitting distance. (Spitting distance?! That is not a term I'd use. I do not and never have, not even in diapers, spat.)

The legend of Oedipus is something I try to avoid contemplating, as with most of Freud's juvenile phase theories. (Of course, it is difficult to miss in Birds, but the birds are a handy distraction.) (Also, the sliver of the screenplay that I appropriated was, uh, appropriated. I did not write it. Wish I had, but did not.)

Slocum narrates the novel, in stream of consciousness. It doesn't take a horoscope to predict that a large part of the novel is about Slocum's fears. The ones he admits to and those he doesn't admit to thereby admitting to them. (With this novel in my back pocket, I'd argue that anyone's unconsciousness stream would filter into fear and the need for security. And the consciousness stream would be an algae mound repressing said fear. And somewhere in there, hunger, in the shape of fish. Too far?)

Even his humour has nestled in here. More hardy, less irreverant. Less unpredictable. (That's a joke, too.)

This has happened before. I get the tone and style, but never the award-winning books. Yet. (One day, I am going to have them write on the cover of my book, "The next Virginia Woolf/AS Byatt/Carson McCullers." And you will get the joke. But you won't laugh because it will be true. Because the Booker Prize council said so.) This is different from feeling like you have been abandoned in a book after you have closed the cover. This is like a habit. This is what comes from identifying with a character (which is oddly what Slocum does: he adopts the gestures of people he has been around). Arrgh! I must be living in a book, where all my thoughts are pirated from others.

That's it, folks. This post is about redemption. To confess to the above (initially I thought I was just confessing to appropriating a fictional character's voice). Soon I will forget all of this, until I re-read this post going through my archives (after the award-winning book in which I inherit the title of a ghost), and wonder who is appropriating the voices of my characters. And then I shall sue them for copyright infringement. After I invest in a patent troll.

The Prague Cemetery

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco is not on my list. Go ahead and check. The Name of the Rose is not on my list of 'books that never leave you'. I think. If it is, I didn't put it there. Then there's Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which I defend only because a polymath such as Eco is entitled to brag about said polymathical... polymathicalness... polymathicy. (FYI, spell check says the middle is correct. And this confirms that spell check knows everything. More than Eco, perhaps.)

Now, I can brag about having read these books because a) they were difficult and b) I wish I were an Eco or a Joyce or a Woolf. (At what point in your life do you become a polymath? Do you have to be able to read Chaucer at age 5 or are you suddenly gifted with a voracious appetite for learning on an auspicious birthday, like 21 or 25? Do you sleep? Do you eat? Do your children like you?)

Also, I just finished The Prague Cemetery, and once again, Ayn Rand and Neuromancer must move aside. Not really for any good reason except that I just finished it and have An Opinion.

If you have ever read Eco, you know that a flash mob's worth of characters break the waves of any protagonist's life. Sometimes as guest stars and sometimes as extras. It doesn't matter; we are expected to remember them all. The same applies to the Youtube channel's worth of actual flash mobs. I know, another reason Eco writes these novels is for his bookclub of learned colleagues who read it twice and make notes (not in the book, you, that's... sacrilege).

Speaking of sacrilege, the plot of the novel is a history of European sects in the late nineteenth century. Christianity, Jesuits, Judaism, Masonry, Freemasonry, nationalism and more. The joke is that most of these folks have a handful of cash hidden in their sweaty palms, in return for cheating someone out of something. Our 'hero' is no different and has a stack of neuroses to boot. We travel with him through Italy and France as he forges documents, particularly last will and testaments.

I call him a 'hero' because he is on a 'quest', an existential mystery around a series of black-outs. To colour those missing moments in, he appropriates Freud's then-untested strategy of psychoanalysis. In other words, he talks - writes - it out (pun!). Although it only really features at the beginning and end of the novel, psychology is also portrayed as a sect, albeit a divided one.

No doubt I was oblivious to many in-jokes shared between the types of people who 'post-it'ed the pages of the novel. I picture them tagging their favourite jokes and telling them at the next dinner party (which looks like a LAN party except there isn't any technology beside the microwave). I'm glad though, because the novel is dense enough (yes, the book is literally thick, too). As it is, I only just remembered most of the people's names. Unfortunately mostly not what roles they play in the plot.

Book reviewer cynicism aside (it's stuck on with superglue, so I'm just going to nudge it aside - there!) I enjoyed the superficial layer of the plot (or in other words, the parts of the plot I understood). It is less absorbing than Name of the Rose but easier to read and less self-indulgent than Mysterious Flame (although it does also have pictures).

Superhero costume back on (yes, reading is a superpower, you) the end of the novel - of the quest - caught me by surprise. I can imagine Eco has a dinner party that he doesn't want to go to, to get to by 19.00. He is feeling malicious because he has just written 400 pages about a man who is afraid of women, so he organises a set of bizarre, gratuitous events and ends with the obvious conclusion. He smiles because ending with the obvious is a joke in itself.

While I frowned in confusion and occasional realisation during most of the novel, it ended with my mouth open in surprise. Ok, not just surprise; horror. No blood, no explicit suffering, no violence, but some serious violation of society's moral code. And my personal one.

I read somewhere that Eco is one of the only polymaths - if not the only one - alive today. (As if they teach courses in this sort of thing. I wonder what the requirements are.) But be warned that being European and/or the last remaining member of an academical sect entitles you to be offensive. Perhaps the offenses are justified because they are realistic (ummm?) or are part of an in-joke (UMMMM?). Luckily there are no pictures showing these ummm's. Or the publisher wasn't invited to the dinner party and revenge is sweet and those pictures fell into the bucket of water being used to clean the floor.

Here's an in-joke: I am going to a dinner party and so I shall plop a slapdash conclusion here. I don't have in me to be offensive but to be obvious: I read the book, I finished it and I liked most of it except the ending. And the parts where I felt stupid. Bye.

The list of magnanimity

Dear reader, have you been paying attention? Have you? Here's a test: do I prefer chocolate or strawberry ice cream? You could answer: by 'I' do you mean the tapper of keys behind this blog or the one who just took a sip of coffee? When in doubt always answer a question with a question. (Just one of the many nuggets I have pilfered from The Office.)

That's not the test. The answer is obvious: chocolate. We'll tackle this later. Now, the real test is whether you have noticed that I have been speeding through some of the classics and some of the strawberry-flavoured books in my local library. Your reply? Should I have noticed? You learn well, my young padawan.

My number one survival strategy is lists, whether written down and colour-coded or mental and therefore quickly lost. This is core to my zombie apocalypse slash hunger games strategy, so I will tell you only that it involves post-its and a tree.

Anyway, last post I abused Borges' library, a really innocuous building that happens to have swallowed all eternity. Which should be paradise for us bibliophiles. (Dibs on 'F' in the fiction section. Ok, fine, 'M' then.) It isn't. It is terrifying. You've heard about the marketing study where they found that too much choice actually drives consumers away. And every salesperson knows to only give a person three options and to place the option that gives you a higher commission first.

The scale of published fiction in the last 100 years is like counting the human population since we first started practising pressing the buttons of video games with our thumbs. Confining the headcount to literary fiction, I mumble guiltily, still doesn't help. This isn't a choice between different scents of floor cleaner (FYI, no scent, especially not made-up ones like Bright Sunshine), no, this is literature!

This eternal library is a case of survival. Instead of killing zombies and other children, we must read everything. That's an exaggeration, you snort (I can hear you, through the microphone, so be please be polite about my bibliophilic delusion).

In the absence of chocolate and strawberry coloured stickers along the spines to guide my quest, I have made a list. Ok, many lists and some were colour-coded. Some are stuck on my fridge but are so faded and blotched with coffee stains you can't read them, others are pinned to a ribbon knotted onto my bedroom door handle, and some are lost in the right hemisphere of my brain, because that's where lost and found is.

The winners of this game are the titles posted on this blog, to the right >>, and those saved on my phone. The one occasion I deviated from this list ended badly, not in a zombie bite, but in disappointment. Point proven; lists are the key to survival. Also, apparently, technology.

Now that I have distracted you from the impending reappearance of the Dreaded List on this blog, here is a condensed list of my approved reads (and future reviews), gleaned mostly from the internet (the most trustworthy, obviously) and recommendations (a mixed bag, except for the ones on FB, obviously):

• 1Q84 by Haruki Marukami (unread; alternate history) I think I've bored you enough with my ravings about this and Kafka on the Shore. That's why bloggers use labels (below right)
• Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (unread; cross-genre) having read a couple of his other novels, I wouldn't rank him above David Mitchell in this category, but then I don't think many short of James Joyce could
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (read; dystopian) the character of the girl at the beginning cinched this novel for me, although I wasn't so thrilled with the book-burning
• Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (unread; literary) I hereby admit that I have never read this classic novel
• A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers (unread; post-modern look how smart I am) we studied A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and I hated it for exactly the same reason others adore it: the the iconoclastic, self-conscious self-deprecation, but I'm willing to give him another go. I'm magnanimous like that
• The Maddadam books by Margaret Atwood (two of three read; apocalyptic) post in proximity, so work, you
• The Member of the Wedding by Carson Mccullers (unread; literary) I'm magnanimous but not perfect. I hate Mccullers just a teensy bit because she published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which is beautiful, at 23. Pure jealousy. I will read this but I will feel sorry for myself the entire time, so prepare yourselves
• The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain (read; noir fiction) only 116 pages but perfectly paced. I don't usually enjoy crime novels but this was a satisfying, meaty use of the conventions
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (unread; satire) I have faith but I need it because I read Cat's Cradle recently. It is a few marbles short of Philip K Dick's drug-fuelled novels. So, yes, I need it
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein (partly read; science fiction) the beginning reminds me of A Brave New World, although I can't say why. Also reminds me of the soundtrack to Lost Boys: "People are strange when you're a stranger"

My closest library loans out books for two weeks at a time. That gives me 16 weeks to finish all eight of the unread books. But don't worry, I'll sneak in some unexpected reviews just to see if you've been paying attention. You.

The Year of the Flood

On a shelf in Borges's library is a box. (Ok, there are many shelves and many boxes maybe even many libraries). This shelf and box is the one on your right. The other right. No, no, his left. Three-hundred-and-sixty degrees from her right. Dammit, you lost it. Nevermind; we'll get another box and label it in permanent marker. Underneath I will write: "You, the reader, lost the first box" and I will tie it to you with rope that scratches the inside of your wrist.

So I write (stop crowding me) "Literary Science-Fiction". But the letters are small and there is a space to the right and below as if something should follow. This isn't necessarily significant: writing in permanent marker on an object is as difficult as writing in a straight line with chalk. Into this box we tip Margaret Atwood, followed by the world and her husband because nerds are the cool kids right now. Which is, in its own way, a blip in the multi-verse.

Ms Atwood hates the label on the box, and not just because of the handwriting. I don't know her personally, but in a way I do, because I follow her on Twitter. I know she hates the label because I would too (as confirmed by a Gargoyle search). It's not because the label suggests that science fiction is lowbrow. It's because writers don't like boxes. We imagine that we live around the box, spending our days decorating it with warning signs, like the Borrowers in The Borrowers but more cynical.

I bet the marketing department adore that label. I bet they invented it. I also bet (I'm going to be rich) that they adore that she hates the label. They hand her buttons and glue to make pretty patterns on the wall of the nearest box, and she looks at them and paces the length of said box dropping buttons along the way. And they cheer. Because, you see, we're all in boxes with boxes stacked on our heads and around our arms like bangles. We need boxes because otherwise we would suffocate in the chaos of the universe. Trust me on this.

Why am I taking Ms Atwood in and out of the box and giving her buttons to drop like breadcrumbs? You guessed it! I just finished The Year of the Flood. Now, you know reading about books is only worthwhile if we meander down hillocks and over rivers, because otherwise, you could just spend the time reading the book. You have also guessed the Ms Atwood and I have 'a history', albeit one she knows nothing about even though I follow her on Twitter.

The first book of hers that I read was Oryx and Crake, which is part of a set of three (not a trilogy, no; more like a puzzle but not all the pieces match) including The Year of the Flood. I was a bookseller and I bought it on sale because I had heard the surname Atwood whispered among my learned friends but mostly because it is a deckle-edged, first-edition hardcover.

I disliked the book at the time. Her writing style is precise, almost minimalistic, and so much is left buried under the rubble of disaster, because it is easier than digging it out and discovering that what you have your hand is a child's shoe. Or so I thought. I was quick to believe the worst because I needed some boxes. Or shoes. Anything to hold in my hands. This easy disdain festered until I wasn't sure how I felt about the book. Or the author.

Next I read The Blind Assassin and the The Handmaid's Tale. Neither of which I can remember. Here she buried me with boxes, took them away, put them back the wrong way up and dowsed them in water. I'd had it! By now, you and I know that protest is a sure sign that you have trampled on something you care about. Still, Oryx and Crake festered. By now, I thought the book was ok, maybe even good, perhaps by some fluke. Sometimes authors write things by accident. Although I have not experienced this.

Now we get to the actual topic. Eight paragraphs later. Honestly, you have travelled further in search of My Point before, so no whinging.

The Year of the Flood, as I mentioned is part of a set, with Oryx and Crake and Maddadam. Like Oryx and Crake, the book is narrated from just after the apocalypse, although most of the book is a reflection on events before it. Yes, this is a dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel and I said I would give you a break from this, but this is what's cool. Yo. Now button up your plaid and appreciate.

The first third (and I am being kind here) is no less confusing than Oryx and Crake, because both jump from person to place to time without always being specific. But the narrative of The Year of the Flood does even out. Characters begin to reappear consistently, as do places, and mostly in chronological order. It is almost as though the author is teasing us with the character Ren, withholding so much and then releasing it like the wall of a dam. (Get it? Dam... Flood. Har!)

This worked for me better than the unceasing teasing of Oryx and Crake. I was pulled along by the main characters, sympathising and even empathising with them, even when things got damn right weird and the characters seemed to have switched personalities with people not even in the novel. Even now I have soft spots for Ren and Toby, although the spots for Amanda and the boys are small. They have to balance on the sole of one foot.

But The Year of the Flood is not festering like Oryx and Crake did. It has found its place on my shelf and I would loan it out because it is a good book and you should read it. The narrative and characters are fixed, while those of Oryx and Crake swirl around like milk that never turns into cheese, not even blue cheese. Then again, perhaps I am judging it too soon. Perhaps it will sizzle rather than swirl or fester. Perhaps it will only be complete when I read Maddadam.

So, it's on my shelf - they're on my shelf, because it fits into a bunch of different boxes. I didn't intend this (I swear), even though I started off on a rant about genre, but none of my comments have anything to do with the label. What sold me on The Year of the Flood were the characters and what haunts me about Oryx and Crake is the discontinuity of the narrative. No mention of rubble or shoes or carnivorous pigs. Until now. Surprise!

Now I dare you to pick up all the boxes (use the muscles in your legs - yes, like that) and distribute them around the library. I won't yell at you this time or chain you to anything. I only did that the first time to see if you'd let me, oh passive reader you.