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Poutling posted:Honestly, the biggest issue I find with TBB is that everyone reads and talks about the same books, all the drat time. It doesn't matter if it's in a 'no genre' thread or in a thread like cosmic horror, there's like 50 books that TBB reads and talks about ad nauseam. If you look at the Cosmic Horror thread, 90% of the talk in there is about Laird Barron and Thomas Ligotti. Also, Cormac McCarthy!!!! Constantly. Right now, everyone talks about Dictionary of the Khazars. Yes, I read it. Yes, it was good. Yes, I've also read Cormac McCarthy. I wish we could talk about some new books. Also some female authors would be nice. Seconding The Accursed as a wonderful and bizarre book. Parts of it dragged a bit (and I could have done without CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR SORROW at the end), but I loved the way she developed a consistent set of details (Topaz eyes, the "Cannibal Sandwich," poisonous flowers, overt sexuality, and probably a few others I'm forgetting or missed) associated with the demonic and dispersed them through the characters, both historical and fictional. It gave a tremendous sense of atmosphere and really made me feel tense reading some of the interactions, since stumbling across a peculiar detail that you last saw associated with vampire murders in an otherwise mundane or harmless conversation completely changes how you read the scene and everything that preceded it. Writing a supernatural horror story where half of the characters were famous historical Americans made the question of the reality of the events a lot more fascinating and complex than it would have been if all the protagonists had been purely fictional. I'd love to see a thorough dissection of it on this forum or elsewhere since I felt like I was missing a lot when I read it a few months back. Though certainly not as much of a classic, it reminded me a lot of the Master and Margarita, where the devil himself shows up with a retinue of monsters in early 30s Moscow and everyone acts weirdly oblivious and unconcerned, since, even if it's never mentioned directly, Stalin's purges are going on and everyone is clearly far more afraid of that than they are of Satan, even when magic and murders are happening right in front of them. I felt like Oates was trying to achieve the same thing with the evils of the US in the early 20th century (primarily racism, lynchings, sexual violence and the general oppression of women) and at least somewhat succeeded.
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Jun 19, 2014 00:47
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Poutling posted:Wow, I'm so excited you popped up and have actually read this book! Totally agree with you on most of your touch points. I did find that it dragged a bit too, but I think that's kind of par for the course in the Gothic genre so I didn't sweat it overmuch. One thing I did wonder, if my lack of knowledge of American history affected my reading of the book at all, since I don't know much about Woodrow Wilson or Upton Sinclair. I thought Stephen King's review (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/the-accursed-by-joyce-carol-oates.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0) was a pretty good assessment, though I didn't read it until after finishing the novel-- and I'm glad I didn't, because there are plenty of spoilers. I guess I'd agree with the label of postmodern but I think that it's doing a bit of a disservice to some of the great gothic novels like Frankenstein or Dracula, both of which have innovative story structures, unreliable narrators, and fairly complex relationships textural between the characters and the reader. Frankenstein after all is told as a series of letters by an arctic explorer who rescues Dr. Frankenstein from an ice floe while they're marooned near the north pole, which is a similar level of distance and abstraction between the reader and the action to Oates' Van Dyck describing the Slades through their diaries. I guess the mixture of historical and fictional characters and the dense "puzzle box" feel of the story are fairly postmodern elements though, and given how complex it is I'm really surprised by how little discussion there is of it on the internet. Honestly, and this is something that only occurred to me now, months after reading it, Van Dyck is creepy as all gently caress. The fact that he (writing in the 80s I think) shares most of the retrograde and unpleasant views of the early 20th century cast is one thing, but if we accept at least some of the supernatural violence really happens then we should conclude that he is intimately connected to it and probably even complicit. This is obvious in retrospect from the opening passage ("They are all dead now-- there is only me.") but what really drives it home is the fact that there is no way Van Dyck could accurately relate a lot of the tales and action through the evidence he actually has; how could he, for example, know what went through the mind of a serial murderer who was never caught? Even if we assume that some of what he describes is his own imaginary reconstruction, it still feels like he knows way too much, and combined with the fact that he is the child of an affair, probably with a demon (again, if the demons are real), I think you could easily read parts of his narrative as a kind of confession rather than just an account. We assume toward the end of the story that the demon is vanquished after losing the game of draughts, but he wasn't the only monster in the Bog Kingdom (where time works differently from the rest of the world anyway), and some of that evil could be surviving to the present day in Van Dyck himself. In other words, we naturally assume when we're starting out that we're reading a tale told from the side of the humans and modernity, but by the end I think a lot of it could equally well come from the monsters' point of view. k-uno fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Jun 19, 2014 10:48
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Poutling posted:There are a *lot* of reviews of the book but not much discussion from laymen I think precisely for the reason of the 'puzzle box' feel mixed with the Gothic theme. It's a book that kind of defies categorization, and I think a lot of people don't really pick it up because they're not sure what to expect. People looking for postmodernism will pick up Don Delillo or Paul Auster but don't think about picking up what they're assuming will be a traditional Gothic novel which is unfortunate because they're missing out. Most of the people that *do* pick it up do so thinking it's going to be a traditional Gothic and end up hating it. Looking at the reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads you can see who did their research and knew what to expect and who picked it up looking at the cover and thinking they were going to get a dark historical fiction novel about vampires without any of the social commentary. I imagine to those people the narrative decision that Oates makes really throws them off. Wow, I didn't know she spent so long on it-- and this coming from a woman who can write a decent novel about once a year (some better than others obviously but her prose is generally excellent)! Honestly I hadn't given much thought to the question of who gets to come back versus who stays dead, but I don't exactly think Winslow Slade's death brings the world back into balance, given that all the social ills that are the subtext of the Curse become wrenching, multi-decade conflicts that dominate American life throughout the 20th century. Slade's death punishes him for the original, covered-up murder, but it doesn't exactly end lynchings forever, whereas the Bog Kingdom sort of dissolves upon the master's death-- if Van Dyck is a monster, when he says that everyone is dead on the first page he could be referring to his fellow demons rather than the Princetonians. It struck me as a really odd narrative choice to bring the children back, a weird take on the idea of original sin, since their lives are made whole again when their grandfather's crime catches up with him. But why punish the grandchildren, and not their parents? And plenty of other people die as a direct or indirect result of the Curse (Van Dyck's father, Princeton students, Adelaide Burr) who stay in the ground after Slade falls. The Slade grandchildren represent purity and modernity I think (doesn't the mistress of the Bog Kingdom say something like "And what is a child, but one who will one day replace us"?) and are certainly more moral and honest than the previous generation, but it's weird that they are saved while the collateral body count remains.
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Jun 20, 2014 00:47
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It is pretty sad how few women have been mentioned so far, so I'll throw in recommendations for Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. The Secret History is even better than The Goldfinch (which was also pretty great), as it's no small feat to take a novel ostensibly about a weird ancient Greek study group at a small liberal arts college in Vermont and spin it into an insane murder/suspense/conspiracy thriller that's paced and plotted like any of Hitchcock's best films; seriously, it's a literary work as entertaining and suspenseful as watching North by Northwest for the first time. Alias Grace is taken from a historical incident in 19th century Toronto where a woman was tried for murdering a man she was serving and his housekeeper. She was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in jail, while her alleged lover (who was tried along with her, and may have been her kidnapper) was put to death, but the details of the case against her are bizarre and the novel is focused on her life and fundamental questions about her sanity and whether or not she was actually guilty. It's somewhat slow moving at first but if you take the time to really get drawn into it the book has endless layers of ambiguity and depth, where every chapter adds a new detail that makes you rethink everything that came before it.
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Jun 21, 2014 21:04
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Poutling posted:The Secret History is one of my favorite books of all time. There's a reason why, over 20 years later, books still come out with a blurb proclaiming that it's the next 'The Secret History'. Always chasing that high, never quite making it! I haven't read The Goldfinch yet, mostly because I know I'll compare it to The Secret History and I'm worried it'll disappoint. I remember when The Little Friend came out and I hated the ending. The Goldfinch is worth it; I didn't love it as much as The Secret History-- though it would have been hard for me to, as I went to a weird liberal arts college where all the students took a year of greco-roman humanities, and "Hippocleides doesn't care" was and may still be an actual saying on campus-- but it was pretty great. A lot of people have described it as a modern day Dickens or Twain, following the exploits of an orphaned "artful dodger" as he schemes and flails his way through life, and that's not a totally unfair comparison. While it doesn't have the sort of atmosphere that The Secret History does, it's a pretty engaging story and the way Tartt walks a fine line between making you want the protagonist to win at all costs while finding him fundamentally repellant and disgraceful is masterful.
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Jun 23, 2014 00:00
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