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.

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.

The Goldfinch

We're one for three, people. Or one for eight, and I'll explain why, once I've led you on for a bit. We played poker the other day - remember? You still owe me 100 bucks. One of my hands was a three-of-a-kind, all queens. The rest of the game is fuzzy. My queens were Donna Tartt, Marisha Pessl and Scarlett Thomas, and even though they were all of a kind, Pessl got all the attention, dressed in black and sauntering in with creepy-as-heck film producer Stanislav Cordova on her arm.

Tartt and Thomas got a caption each, I'm embarrassed to say. This writer was too excited about the black diamond to appreciate the other two on behalf of her readers. Rookie mistake.

To recap (this bit stands out of the fog): I read the first novels of all three at roughly the same time. Like any parent will tell you, I loved them all the same. (Even though really I saw Tartt as a professional and the other two as up-and-coming amateurs.) So I loved them all equally, just differently.

I was finishing up my postgrad and internship, and settling into my first full-time job, in magazine publishing. I was still living in Jo'burg. I had the puffed-up naivette of a varsity achiever and the hangdog wariness of an intern (dust-covered, paper-cut, permanent marker-stained and all). Some things just stayed the same, like a troupe of mimes: my friends, social life, family, hangdog wariness and general sense of myself. Some things changed immediately, like a troupe of avant garde performance artists (tautology but anyway).

It was like trying to walk when the speed on the treadmill has been turned up. (Do you ever wonder what your ancestors would say as they watch you use a machine indoors to do something they did for survival and never paid for?) I was disconcerted... disillusioned... distraught... Ok, I'm all of these things on a good day, but add to this disconsolate, disorientated and distraught. (I was tempted to write 'deceased' and blame it on the dictionary, but this is probably not funny, though at the time I didn't think it was funny either.)

Let's get Ms Pessl down the red carpet first. As established, she wrote Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Night Film, and both have wormed their way into my heart (I should probably get a doctor to look at that) - Special Topics more so since I have seen how far Pessl could take improbable themes and twist them (and me) into infinity loops.

Look up a word for feeling isolated beginning with 'dis-' and that was me too. The book in my hand was a) a book club book, b) pink and flowery. But the character inside was neither. She might have been, under different circumstances, but the pink is scrubbed into a wish-washy grey and the flowers turn out to be those garden roses, that bloom quickly before the petals hang loosely for a while and leave behind rosehips. She has a mystery that isn't quite a mystery to solve, symbolism for solving scarier mysteries in your psyche.

 

Scarlett Thomas is next up. She wrote The End of Mr Y - that book that led to every publisher to incur the expense of dusting the block of the book (the ends of the actual pages) black, red and blue, maybe purple, in the hopes that readers would think they were original. Actually, we wondered how much that inflated the price by. Like Special Topics, Mr Y was a mystery solved by - or not solved by - quantum science, since for the last time, quantum physics and the laws of relativity exist on separate scales, unless you're saying you found the Unifying Theory?

I did not know any better either, and either way it is a good book. I read it in the dimmed lights of a house that has already gone to sleep until I was haunted again by the fate of the scribes in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red: they go blind. (This describes every night, really, but Pamuk is quite convincing.)

Thomas has apparently written seven other novels, of which I have read two: PopCo and The Tragic Universe. If this were a card trick, the cards would all be of one suite. You don't read an author's works for the same magic display; you're looking for their signature style. Personally I don't care where or when we go, just give me more of what you gave me when we met. By which I mean not anything illegal. Both novels felt like the journal of an anthrophobe, even in a crowd of anthrophobes, which is some kind of impressive.

I am also disturbed that the profile photo of Ms Thomas is a selfie. Where is the publicity team (or person) and why does she look like someone I know but don't like?

I wanted to tell you earlier but I don't like to tell you how long it will take to get to My Point because sometimes you wander off. It's dim in here and I only have the one light, so stick close, because we're here. It's dim so you of course can't see anything.

The real star of this show is Donna Tartt (no selfies, thank goodness). Her first novel (and the first one I read) was The Secret History. It is set in a top, uptight university, that in some obscure way reminds me of that of Stephen Daedalus, with more sentences that have objects, verbs and subjects. The mystery here is chilling, maybe because you know it's skulking around and that it will get you the second you least expect it. There is also the circle of friends within which everything happens, this time like the discombobulated voices in The Waves.

Of the list so far, The Secret History and Night Film are neck-on-neck. Don't shout so loudly! You'll burst my microphone. Most people will probably disagree with me, and yes, that's half the joy, but Night Film is well-crafted and delicately paced. I dare you or Ms Tartt or Ms Thomas to find another novel that suspends your disbelief from the moon and tells you to go get it (unfortunately Google stopped investigating the elevator and I'm not setting foot on a rocket not built by NASA or the Russians) and convinces you that you can and that you should because this belief or disbelief has become critical to your existence.

I dare it to do that, while keeping you hooked on the plot and playing with the conventions of Nancy Drew and ilk, through 500-odd pages.

The Little Friend came next and always reminds me of Caspar the Ghost, and actually there is something in the book that reinforced this. This time, the death is right up front. The mystery is the death of a girl's little brother but the ending feels like the beginning, just with three-digit page numbers. This novel is the middle child that will never be as talented or mature as the eldest, and for a long time is the youngest, until a younger child comes along that makes it feel even less talented. (I anticipate some bullying.)

Cue The Goldfinch. I finished this two nights ago. More deaths, upfront, and some more that float around. A mystery, but it only becomes a mystery at the end, although it could have become one earlier. Cryptic enough? The mystery has to do with a painting of the same name, but in French, I think. A boy is in a museum when a bomb goes off and pretty much everyone but him is hit by falling and flying things, including his mother. The remaining family members are nonplussed, so he is passed around a bit, gathering more, unlikely family members.

My favourite character is his best friend, Boris, as to be expected because he is the underdog. The type of dog that will always be under. The type of dog that chooses to be under, even when you pull his blanket out and put it somewhere warm.

My description is cryptic because this feels like three novels in one, except that the sentences are long and loose, and as an editor I find this irritating. As we are told in the narrative (another irritation), the story is compiled from journal entries, to justify the style but the style isn't immature enough to need explaining. Just annoying. Holes gape through the plot as they do when I attempt to knit.

My reviews always get meaner when I am disappointed. Or hungry. Or breathing in fishy cat breath especially when I don't feed said cats fish.

What I am really irritated by is the ending. (Don't worry, I won't spoil anything. Wouldn't know where to start.) The main character is fairly disillusioned with some deep emotional scars and minor nihilistic psychoses (but it seems like everyone in the book is at different stages bipolar). Suddenly he trips over a moral! Look, another one! Granted some of them are projections, because logically they can't exist in the real world. He's not exactly pulling out Hawaii shorts and tiny umbrellas, but he may be sporting a golf shirt.

Another dud. Which means it is probably a good book, but cannot possibly have been written by the same person who wrote The Secret History, unless it's the reader that maketh the book? Not buying it? Anyway, we have eight books from three authors with chocolate biscuits going to the three first-generations and one second-generation. While I stand by my reviews, readers' experiences make for capricious reviews. Who knows how I would feel about Night Film if I weren't binging on sci-fi and horror right now, and if I didn't get such joy from being contrary.

But as I pointed out, I am always varying proportions of various 'dis-'s, even words I'm just making up now (the ones in this post are real though, honest). Every story is a quest story (even yours, Mr Eggers) - which is an hour and a half or 400 pages of a human life. We roleplay a crisis, snatch up the resolution and discuss the thing to pieces. The crisis is half our own. So, I suppose, a great (according to me) novel is one I live. I can take that.

PS. You knew, didn't you? The book the conclusion alludes to? I'll give you a hint: it's set in Siberia, and features a cannibal and cult of castrates. Couldn't resist.

Night Film

Yesterday I posted on Facebook that I was suffering from a "serious book hangover", because every strong emotion must be validated on a social media network, followed by a couple of memes, because memes explain how we feel better than we do and they are usually funnier and have pictures. Within minutes, notification of the first comment rang from my smartphone, always a boost for the self-esteem. Then another and another. Yay! The memes worked! And my friends have been well-selected and therefore shall never be cullled. (Don't get any ideas of starting a competing blog, you.)

In a ripple effect, I will now explain myself here and then post the link on Twitter, thereby closing the circle (get it?). The book is Night Film by Marisha Pessl. In my mind the release of this paperback is linked with that of Donna Tartt's Goldfinch, because they have both come out at the same time and I read the previous releases of both authors at about the same time (which may have been years apart, actually, because memory plays poker with distance and then doesn't bother to put the cards back in the correct order) and they are both very thick.

Which brings me to Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas, which also belongs in this card suite of time.

To make this brief (and leave more time for meandering during which I contemplate My Point), the original books I read were: Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Pessl), The Secret History (Tartt) and The End of Mr Y (Thomas). My memory deals me a three-of -a-kind, all queens, when reminiscing about these books. Even if they weren't actually dealt in the same hand, I am jealous (in the words of a friend) that someone else (you, maybe) gets to read them for the first time, because they demanded my attention and rewarded me with something like the feeling of wielding magic, from somewhere around or in my intestines.

Context explained, let's waddle back to Pessl, because she is starting to kick up a fuss. (She is very famous now and doesn't have time to waste playing poker. Also, I am kicking her ass.)

Topics was a pink trade paperback (that understudy for the new-release hardcover, which broke its spine falling through our wallets), the cover textured (I think? My memory needs to be de Bono-ed), with a rose bundled with branches of leaves on the cover. It was a bookclub (yes, you heard me!) book, so the cover was fraying into sheets of paper. This cover is almost everything the book isn't, except for a sentimental corner of the protagonist's personality.

Night Film is a Kindle ebook, black and white. The paperback cover is cascading squares of black and white anyway, with a portion of a face starting back at us from the middle. It doesn't do the book any justice, except in the way the plot of the book sounds when summarised in the blurb. The book is more multimedia than 'hard copy', except that the price of the paperback poked holes in my wallet looking for lose change. (Always justifying my choice to download a book - oh, I admit it, I am guilty! And thrifty.)

Both books are murder mysteries, but Night Film develops and rediverts the acrobatics with quantum physics that Topics performs (perhaps because Pessl was lectured by a professor who explained the laws of atoms and Newton, and the different mystery of the Grand Unifying Theory). No, I am not going to tell you where it rediverts it, because that will ruin half the fun.

Night Film is about a disgraced journalist, Scott McGrath (great Scott!), who investigates the suicide of a young woman, Ashley Cordova, the daughter of the same man disgraced himself to get near. Stanislas Cordorva is a film producer with a cult following, in more ways than one. Both this man and his daughter are like fairytale animals appearing before you: they would fascinate, scare and probably disgust you.

In a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys twist, McGrath teams up with two youngsters who have both had encounters with Ashley. All three are desperate to catch that fairytale animal, as if it would foretell their fates. As a young'un, I would angle my open Nancy Drew into the crack of light escaping from the door or lie on the carpet before the threshold, ready to run back to bed when the real world came to check I was asleep. Night Film is like that Nancy Drew paperbook: it demanded my attention and then... left me. Gutted.

It has more in common with Nancy Drew novels: the three unlikely sleuths follow a cooling trail, each lending some trait to the investigation, smelling out even the cold leads. The mystery comes to seem mysterious, as if some dark magic is involved. Shadows hitch on splinters, children's toys are desecrated and then replaced, entire buildings of people vanish. Their lives are threatened, again by people who seem to have supernatural powers. When the mystery seems solved, the solution so simple and the one lead they didn't smell out, it isn't.

Loose ends flail like live electric wires.

Occasionally, I have recommended someone read Topics, but only half-heartedly. The power it had over me seemed like an anomaly. Because, you see, these novels have a plot. A Nancy-Drew plot, with post-modern Nancy-Drew characters and leads. Everyone knows that a Substantive Novel has no plot. Plots are for sorbet reads, classics or pseudo-substantive novels. Not Literature. The heart of these books are what made me desperate to investigate alongside my single-minded, justice-bound sleuth as a child and the questions without answers I am interested in as an adult.

If you have not read a Nancy Drew novel (bringing tears to my eyes), find the children's section in the nearest shop or library, and pretend it is for a younger cousin. Or don't pretend. Hold your ignorance and your willingness to rectify it as an adult, high. (Tell them I sent you. They won't care. But tell them anyway.)

I miss Scott McGrath (platonically, trust me) as if he were a neighbour who had moved away. I feel separations between the other characters just as keenly. The mysterious of the mystery doesn't bother me, though I would prefer if its pieces were sorted in piles and catalogued. The ending feels... right, even as it feels like a betrayal. What doesn't feel in balance is that I have been left behind.

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.

Neuromancer

Being culturally aware and intelligent folk, you know that the Matrix (starring that master of expression, Keanu Reeves) was based on certain premises in Neuromancer by William Gibson. Which in turn drew from a rich philosophy of talk and debate and drunken theorising about the nature of 'reality' and our place in it. Don't be fooled by Cartesian Maths. That Descartes didn't need drugs to see that our senses are fallible and perhaps wholly untrustworthy. (Insert the rest of Western philosophy here.)

I didn't know all of this. Some filtered through during first-and-only year philosophy class, some of it I live and the rest I looked it up on Wikipaedia.

One of the articles includes a link to various religions. What now (brown cow)? I think. Buddhism, ok, I can see that. Certain sects of Buddhism believe we are living in a dream state, from lesser to more degrees. Some types of Hinduism believe we are ignorant to the 'real' reality. Sikh's believe that the natural world has two states and that we see the superficial layer. Huh. Who knew? I didn't.

The two things I really gleaned from that first-year class are:

• Choose an object, like a table. Define that class of object so it is unique from every other type of object in the world. A chair has four legs that support a rectangular piece of wood. So does a bench. So do certain raised buildings. Anyway you'd have to prove that your senses are accurate and you can't. Philosophers have been arguing this for years and some of these were smart. The senses cannot be trusted, but they're all we have, so let's move on.
• What if we are strapped up to a machine called the Experience Machine? This machine generates only pleasant experiences and we could pre-programme these experiences before plugging in. Would you choose to live in that world? Why? And could you consider that world 'real life'?

These are serious questions, folks - look lively.

Neuromancer is set in a world of wealth and poverty, with no middle class to mediate between them. Case, our hero (such a loose word), is a freelance hacker for various types of smugglers (he doesn't question what of). He is recruited by a new cowboy in town, Armitage, and his leatherclad sidekick, Molly, whose superpower is using sex instead of expressing emotions (she's a liberated woman). 'Recruited' isn't exactly the right word, because it suggests voluntary consent. No, he has a surgically implanted timebomb in his belly and only Armitage knows how to turn it off.

Off the three go, and then three become four when they pick up a heinous character named Riviera whose real superpower is manipulating reality - well, your sense of reality.

Case has a past (involving a woman, obviously), Molly has a past (involving sex, obviously) and Armitage has a past (very Jason Bourne-like - book Bourne not Matt Damon-Bourne, not obviously (although he obviously has a past)). Riviera has a past but he is all past. In another context, this might be touching (a sad but witty comedy where three misfits and a scumbag tackle their demons) except this is sci-fi, where very little is touching, bar occasional revulsion. But this is a post about the real and simulated, about meaning and value, and the matrix.

Early in the novel, a character suggests that Case is a simulation. He hushes the man hastily - perhaps the author hushes the man hastily. Loudly suspiscious, but it is never addressed again. Except, Case is extraordinarily good at what he does. He actually dies more than once in the matrix, where even death is death. Case also recalls a simulation of his early mentor (the one who taught him to run drugs) in the matrix, and the simulation insists he is that a collection of habits and thought patterns. But he can adapt to situations and assimulate new information. He also arranges for Case to switch him off i.e kill him.

On the other hand, the matrix Case plugs in to seems inflexible; it reminds me of the old dos software: black screen, glowing green characters and flickering cursor. You couldn't use it unless you could translate words into a syntax of '\'s.  These characters form the outlines of a city on top of the real city.

Then again, someone implies that the digital city is the real one. What happens next seems so bizarre it could only take place in a simulation. Shying just short of a spoiler and just to muddy the waters, an artificial intelligence named Wintermute keeps interfering. He actually convinces someone to adopt another personality and periodically takes over people's bodies. From the matrix. A dos-like thing.

I sense a ruse - yes, a ruse, people! I have a theory but my theory is a spoiler, and I took a vow never to, uh, spoil. Again. Although no doubt my opinion is scattered all over the previous paragraphs.

Instead let's dabble in some minor philosophy, in questions that actually take up large chunks of my week, as if tomorrow someone will knock on my door or the partition of my cubicle and ask me to choose a coloured pill. (I will look at them suspisciously and tell them I don't do drugs.) But, yes, let's pretend these are not life-defining issues. My burning question (no, it's not heartburn) is: what is the exact relationship between Case's world and the matrix? And is there a third 'reality'?

Which translates into: what the heck is going on around here? (Here being the world in which you are reading this blog. If you are reading it. And if this isn't part of the multi-verse, which would mean there would be realities in which you are reading my blog spiking out all over the place.)

I will stop there because you know what I mean and if you don't you have your own ideas and that's fine too. I must know (what the matrix is - I can wait for the answer to the other question until Morpheus knocks on my cubicle wall)! Someone fetch William Gibson, bring him here and I shall force him to tell. I shall read the original manuscript to him and point out all the errors until he breaks down and tells me. Or until he lies. Then I will go easy and read him my manuscript. He will be so charmed he will tell me the truth (probably 'I don't know') and publish my book under his own name.

The book was phenomenal, astronomical, universinomical. Whatever, just read the book, kidnap Gibson and one of you tell me.

Seriously though, I couldn't put it down. You could argue that there was too much unexplored, but that's what cinched it for me. I laced up my running shoes and hitched a ride. I was on my own journey (I won't say quest because my object eludes me still; although I know there aren't answers, any more than the Holy Grail exists, Dan Brown), supported by mounds and mounds of talk and debate and drunken theorising. I like a mystery that has no answer, as much as I like a tragedy.

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.

The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog: Part 1 of 1

I promised. I offered up a handful of things I don't really want. Including My Point. My Point is like the law prohibiting jay-walking: it is a good idea but who really abides by it? Apparently there's a municipality nearby that is concerned about drunken people running across the highway. There are bridges, but I mean really, don't we all think we are invincible as squint at our shoes and concentrate on slowing the world around us down? We can't even sound out jay-walking then.

Granted I am still squinting at my shoes willing them to move while the rest of y'll impersonate Usain Bolt. Which still means you only have a one in four chance of making it.

However, now I am living up my to promise, which means I get to keep him. My Point. And all the rest of the things I don't really want. You can keep them if you want? I will hold on to the permanent marker though. When I am next incapacitated, maybe I can ink the world down. You gave that up too easily. What's your game? Or do you not care? Oh, you already have one? Both a point and a marker? A guinea pig?

My promise was to keep you updated about my reading of The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. (It's not exactly Reuter's story of the day, but I have promised you many other things, and none of them were any more enthralling.) I finished the book this morning. Approximately morning. Midday.

It is shorter than Mara and Dann, despite the lengthy title (try saying it as you're drawing wings on your shoes; question: if you are flying in the direction that the world is spinning, will it appear to stay still?) and its subject. The novel is concerned with history and the discipline of History. Rather, the protagonist is concerned - agitated - and incapacitated by the idea that records of the past have been lost.

In the prequel, Mara was the one concerned with the past. Now Dann has left her at 'the Farm' with her husband and is following the fractal perimetre of the coast as if he is looking for something he hasn't left behind. Maybe the search itself, the agitation, attaches to this concern of his sister's; maybe it is the proximity to the ice mountains that are 'Yerrup'.

I understand the anxiety: of not being able to hold... well, the world in my head. Of not recording every moment, as if the importance of the moment is in its living longer. Of not understanding why an ancestor has made something or done something. Of needing to understand because knowledge is an anchor - a resurrection of truth. Unlike Dann, I recognise that you can't create if you concern yourself with keeping the past alive. If you can't create, you weaken. If you can, you go to war over what is left.

Luckily we have Google so we can just sit back and let them run things. This reminds me of a book I once read, of a dystopia created by well-meaning politicians. Granted, I trust techies more than politicians.

Not to be flip, but being flip, Dann steals something else from his sister: crying at the drop of a hat. Or the shedding of dog hair. At first, these fits seem like a strength, of being able to recognise his traumas. But, as one character puts it, every refugee in the streams of refugees has suffered, but they route when given common cause and safety. Dann... needs a bib. Ok, that was flip. I am reluctant to replace this Dann with the Dann of the first book, however selfish and arrogant.

I can't decide whether the two books are similar or different. Is anything substantially new introduced? Does the second develop or resolve the themes of the first? Are the landscapes indicators of change or is the plot consistent despite their variations? Are the characters consistent or are the differences part of something else - the development of the themes, plots, pacing - or am I reading too much into what is just an happenstance of writing a sequel?

Mara and Dann is a few hundred pages short of an epic, but that's it. The siblings travel Ifrika, becoming exiles, refugees, soldiers, servants and royalty. Mara learns and analyses, inculcating her brother in her theories. Dann's knowledge (which he shares with Mara, more usefully) is that of survival. No matter how despondent the characters are, the reader always has the sense that knowledge is around the corner. Because this is an epic and this is how epics end. If seen on a movie screen.

 The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog feels like an exposition of just one scene from the prequel, even though it takes place mainly in two settings and only one of the main characters is the same. It is Mara and Dann concentrated but also expanded. Like orange juice, if the concentrated stuff were half as good. Dann still doesn't have the same power of analysis as his sister and sometimes seems to give up his knowledge of survival, but he has a new power over people.

And there is part of the answer to our conundrum. (Remember the one about history and recording the present while living it. Remember?) ('Part of' because first prize would be actually having all the records that were destroyed, but that's a bit like drawing wings on your shoes and expecting the world to stop.)

Why are you still staring at me like that? I'm not SparkNotes; that's as far as I walk with you. Or run. That highway there? Ok, you first. I need to squint at my shoes.

Parts 2 & 3: Reading Mara and Dann

Dear Reader, I cheated you. This spiderweb's thread of trust that twangs between us? I danced on it. Stomp-style, not Swan Lake. Oh, that's called taking the high ground by jumping up and down on a thread in the middle of a sandstorm? Ok, then that's how I cheated you.

It's a metaphor.

No, I can't really dance on a spiderweb thread.

See, we have an arrangement between us: I post and you read. Sometimes I post and you read a year later because it popped up in a web search and you thought, lookee, another angsty literature major/writer/editor/publisher/nihilist who has taken the option of publishing her opinions without being peer reviewed.

If you could read before I could post, would we be using quantum computers? Or would you be like Kevin Spacey in that movie called Sum'in' Sum'in'? Or Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys?

The pet guinea pig called My Point has nudged us home. While reading Mara and Dann, I wrote multiple posts. In my head. Yes, on the inside of my skull in smelly permanent market. Despite this, I can't recall a single one. Not so permanent, or so permanent they have sunk into the fleshy folds of my brain.

I finished Dann and Mara at least a week ago. Since then I have been restless. What now? The conclusion is double-edged: will we leave the characters in stasis or do we choose to hear a matching restlessness in the tone of Dann's voice? Also, what do I read next? I could choose Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, but I don't want to pollute either with proximity to the other.

I paced along my bookshelf, read a set of satirical essays, paced some more, eyed Ulysses again (now that would exorcise Lessing's dusty, starving refugees from my brain) and, without looking directly at it, pulled The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog ('General Dann' at least five times the rest of the type).

As I crawled into bed (lots of pillows to arrange in just the right geometric puzzle, y'know), I thought perhaps I had picked up the wrong one - the spines of a couple of other books look the same: dusted, with one or two purposeful figures, long titles. I was relieved. I would read whatever else it was because it wanted me to. (Self-justification is a wonderland of talking creatures and bullying objects. It's where the tooth fairy comes from.)

You know what happened, because you too come from this magical land. Or you are versed in the conventions of different types of text in different media. Or you just know I like to string you along, while really wanting to tell you my point. (Even reading is its own story.)

The average-sized, average-weight paperback with the sandblasted spine was The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. (While the cover of Mara and Dann is a classic Vintage design, with bars of gold and black, and one simple dominating image. The card stock is lighter, I think, but feels luxurious. The paper too: thinner but silky. A reader knows this is Literature of Some Weight (excuse the pun)).

Now, I was in my own sandstorm (you can replace 'sand' with an appropriate word), partly of my own making. But, and tell me if I'm alone here (knock once on your computer screen for 'yes'), deep in the recesses of my brain, next to the other posts I 'wrote', I believe everything is my fault. War, poverty, spilt ice cream. So, in my mind (but not in reality, because the upper echelons of my brain are rational), it is up to me to fix everything. Because clearly I am the only grown-up in sight. (That's 10-year-old me talking.)

At first the book was a paperweight I used to exercise my fingers and thumb. (A Kindle switches off after five minutes, which is an annoying reminder you aren't reading. Amazon can do many things, but not fix that.) Then I started to read because no one puts me in a corner, and gorged on images of war, poverty... and a puppy.

In Mara and Dann, the relationship between brother and sister is a powerful counter to the sandstorms of war and poverty around them. For me, it is the most important theme (but not the only - that would be dull) in the novel. This is up for some interesting debate, when you finish the book. The snow dog is that for me in the second novel (so far. If anything happens to that dog, I will find a portal of crazy into that world and maim the person who did it. And I don't have much (real...) experience in maiming, so it could get ugly).

Ms Doris Lessing's experiments in dystopian (is it postapocalyptic if you don't know what happened and whether everyone really did die and aren't holed up somewhere in Asia? And when an entire continent survived...?) landscape are dark but solidly knitted together. They accept the stupidities of human nature but offer some hope in the individual who is tried and found... to be a survivor. (This is a flash-summary (except, like, expanded) of what the posts stinking up my inner brain would have looked like.)

These books remind me that the world is, war and poverty aside, mostly a sandstorm (for many of us, at least). But that the world is also something to explore. If you are curious, you will experience many things, not always pleasant, but the trick is to maintain your distance, be an individual and be curious.

More to come. No, really this time. I vow on the twanging spiderweb thread. And my pillows and permanent marker. Ok and the guinea pig.