alias_sqbr (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alias_sqbr) wrote2011-10-23 03:41 pm
alias_sqbr) wrote2011-10-23 03:41 pm
Entry tags:
Stories for grownups
For the most part the fiction I consume tends to be fairly low brow, lots of scifi and romance novels and what have you. Literature tends to leave me cold, while I'm not entirely immune to Metaphor and Subtle Meditations On The Nature of Human Existence etc they usually aren't enough to keep my interest unless combined with a happy ending, likeable characters, dragons etc.
But sometimes I expand my horizons a little!
Fire (a movie): A young woman moves in with her husband's family after an arranged marriage. She and her sister-in-law fall into a relationship.
A series of fire metaphors and striking orange tinged set pieces held together with melodrama. I liked the characters, but the emphasis was skewed way too much towards Unspoken Feelings and Making A Statement About Modern India and away from simply telling a story and in the end I was left emotionally unsatisfied. Some of the Statements were very anvil-icious, too, like the writer had forgotten to go back and replace all the telling with showing. Also I'm not a huge fan of f/f romances which are more about escaping the evils of men than romance, it felt like a metaphor aimed at straight people (YMMV). Very pretty though.
Harboiled and Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto: Two unrelated stories (novelettes?), both with an air of melancholy lightened by quiet optimism. In the first a woman has a strange encounter while visiting a small town on holiday, in the second a woman deals with her sister having a fatal aneurism. The prose is sparse and the tone laid back but they're well written and I enjoyed them. In some ways they were the opposite of Fire: the characters felt like they were just going about their business quite explicitlynot being shoehorned into a Statement About Modern Japan or the conventions of any particular genre, even though they did end up doing both to some extent. I'm glad they were short, though, for longer stories I find I need something like the typical emotionally cathartic 3 act structure or I run out of steam. Both are about women and the protagonist of the first is bisexual, but they didn't feel like they were trying to Make A Statement about gender or sexuality either(*).
The other book I'm theoretically reading right now is "The Making of the English Working Class" by E. P. Thompson, but I'm only at page 26 (out of 831) Those 26 pages were quite interesting though!
(*)I have no problem in principle with stories that make Statements, but if they have to twist the characters to do it the statements ring hollow.
But sometimes I expand my horizons a little!
Fire (a movie): A young woman moves in with her husband's family after an arranged marriage. She and her sister-in-law fall into a relationship.
A series of fire metaphors and striking orange tinged set pieces held together with melodrama. I liked the characters, but the emphasis was skewed way too much towards Unspoken Feelings and Making A Statement About Modern India and away from simply telling a story and in the end I was left emotionally unsatisfied. Some of the Statements were very anvil-icious, too, like the writer had forgotten to go back and replace all the telling with showing. Also I'm not a huge fan of f/f romances which are more about escaping the evils of men than romance, it felt like a metaphor aimed at straight people (YMMV). Very pretty though.
Harboiled and Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto: Two unrelated stories (novelettes?), both with an air of melancholy lightened by quiet optimism. In the first a woman has a strange encounter while visiting a small town on holiday, in the second a woman deals with her sister having a fatal aneurism. The prose is sparse and the tone laid back but they're well written and I enjoyed them. In some ways they were the opposite of Fire: the characters felt like they were just going about their business quite explicitly
The other book I'm theoretically reading right now is "The Making of the English Working Class" by E. P. Thompson, but I'm only at page 26 (out of 831) Those 26 pages were quite interesting though!
(*)I have no problem in principle with stories that make Statements, but if they have to twist the characters to do it the statements ring hollow.