As suspected when I was just about twenty pages in, Whitehead has become one of my favourite living authors. His writing is so suffused with humour while still being incredibly intelligent, poignant and powerful. The comparisons to Invisible Man were really spot on. I loved how much Whitehead used racism and to a lesser extent gender inequalities to amp up the tension.
The blurring of genres was also done really well, too. Part gritty detective story with a definite noir vibe, there was also a distinct British Sci-fi thing going on. The story was not given a definitive time, no real cultural markers outside of New York city but instead was a blurry mix of undistinguishable details. It could have been the past or future or some sort of alternate reality. Certainly our society has never given any such notice or interest to elevator inspectors let alone cared about the politics of their superintendents.
My favourite part of The Intuitionists (aside from all of it) was Whitehead’s propensity to use meat and pigs as descriptors for people.
Page 100: “(h)e reminded Lila Mae of an old, confident pig who understands his meat is too rotten for the slaughterhouse.”
Page 113: “He is fat and pink. On the United Elevator Co. advertisements, the airbrush away the pocks in his cheeks, the red slivers in his nose. In person he is too flesh, a handful of raw meat. Dogs have been known to follow him, optimistic.” (At which point while reading, I believe I squealed and kicked my feet a little with excitement.)
Page 146: “Quite the ham, Rick Raymond, but look at these pigs. This affair is a few bubbles short of champagne. The snouts of these men are up at their plates, nudging shrimp cocktails which look like bones floating in blood.”
And then there was this description of Lila Mae’s super unsexy sexy time with a travelling salesman on page 180:
“She recorded the details of the investigation, his fingers and kisses, his slow tumble on top of he, which was awkward, as if he was a seal and did not possess arms to steady himself.”
Ha! “As if he were a seal and didn’t possess arms”! Amazing! If I were a dude that one sentence would probably open up a world of neurosis for me.
I bought his new book, the one about zombies and it’s a testament to how much I trust and love his writing that I would spend thirty bones on a hardcover about zombies. That’s my endorsement right there.
So good! Too good? Maybe. It is distracting me from school…
Today, I embark on a journey that will culminate with me becoming the preeminent Nabokovian scholar. That being, I begin my course on my long-dead (*come on Zombie-apocalypse*) boyfriend. Oh, can you even imagine having Vladimir for a boyfriend? He’d be the one that you’d try and impress by being all serious and smart and never fart in front of.
Been there, bought the nerdiest t-shirt ever. A side-note, this picture was ridiculously hard to take with my computer without making my breasts look like watermelons hence the terrible, half-shimmy, “who’s your daddy” pose/face.
But, I digress… As you can see I am a little enamoured with the greatest writer of all time; his prose has actually brought me to tears; he is the kind of author in who’s novels you would write in the margins, underlining ferociously because while you had never perceived the world that way but now that image, that thought is branded in your mind and you will never be the same. John Updike described his writing as such: “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, ecstatically”, which incidentally also describes how I feel reading his prose; for reals, I get goose-bumps.
What I love about him is his unapologetic pretentiousness which is always masked as his character’s pretentiousness (well, except for Pnin, poor, sweet Pnin); his acrobatic word-play; the absolute hilarity (even Lolita while not quite a laugh a minute, is very, very funny); his despicable characters (again except for poor, sweet Pnin) and his refusal to engage in that Americanism: the happy ending.
It is refreshing to read novels by authors who decline the demand for appealing to the unwashed masses because they believe, as I do, that people are or can be a hellova lot smarter than they are given credit for. Like James Joyce (*very heavy Lucille Bluth-eye roll; gah that unreadable pile, Finnegan’s Wake*), Ol’ Vlad didn’t compromise himself so that the literary hoi polloi could read him absentmindedly. No, he wrote so that while his stories are rather simple the mind must really work to fully grasp the genius; nay, the mind wants to work to fully bask in the post-coital-like glow of brilliant prose. When reading Nabokov, you must be present.
I highly, highly (like, if you don’t like my man then I owe you my first born) recommend reading his work. Not much of a reader? King Queen Knave! Want to graduate from those misogynists, Palahaniuk and Bret Easton Ellis, to something morally corrupt but well written? Lolita! Do you like making intellectual love to a novel? Pale Fire! Not ready for all out, ankles to ears mind-fucking, but into a little intellectual dry-humping? The Real Life of Sebastian Knight! Twilight Zone fan into stories that are not all that they seem oooooooooo *spooky noises*? Invitation to a Beheading! Interested in faking your own death? Despair! Finished reading all of John Irving’s incest-tastic books? Ada, or Ardor! Are you into novels about colleges/college towns and authors like Robertson Davies?Pnin! Writer struggling to write your first novel? *Bam* The Gift! Don’t you love a good unreliable narrator or spiral into madness? Read all of them!
Shit yo, I’m so excited!
(This post originally appeared on my other blog, Once Again, to Zelda, but since this is a book tumblr, I felt it was appropriate to cross-post)
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“‘Do this for me: never say such words to me, and let us be good friends.’ These were her words, but her eyes said something different.” — Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
What to say that hasn’t been said about this magnificent novel? Even calling it magnificent is old news. I read War and Peace a couple of years ago and loved it; but I have to say that the love I felt, feel, for War and Peace now seems trivial and limp in comparison to the overwhelming passion that Anna Karenina has inspired. There is a similarity there to be drawn between Anna and her husband, Alexei and Anna and Vronsky. Except Alexei was a tool and weak and totally undeserving of Anna’s love and devotion.
The characters in Anna versus War and Peace can be compared thus: in Anna, they were real, relatable and likable but in War and Peace, while being real they were also tiresome, loathsome and full of self-importance that one often equates with the leisurely upper echelons of society. Anna, herself, was so lovely; her beauty, kindness and intelligence leapt off the page. I felt her pain, her sorrow at the bottom of my own soul. So often, I cried for her and for all women who have been and are in horrid situations without hope of relief. To have to pick between love, passion and happiness and one’s child seems like the most cruel of choices.
And it wasn’t just Anna who was fully fleshed out and lovable. The whole range of main female characters were ladies who I’d want to be friends with; Kitty, Dolly and their mother; and Levin was just as lovely as the women. The rest all fell under the usual Tolstoy umbrella of take ‘em or leave ‘em where their complexities and inward struggles were brought on by their own stupidities and not by society’s constraints. I have to say, though, it did not seem as though Tolstoy like Anna (the character) very much.
After her tragic death (I hope this is not a spoiler because that would mean that whomever it was spoiled for has been living under a rock in the world of literature), there seems to be no regret or mourning except for on the part of Vronsky, who in my opinion should have followed suit. I suppose that for a man who wrote of the struggles of the mid-nineteenth century Russian feminist unsympathetically, Anna was a “vile, irreligious woman”. Knowing Tolstoy’s history (vicious, cruel and unforgiving husband and later a total religious crank) this is not surprising.
But I loved Anna, as perhaps only another woman could. To be half the person that she was would make me the life of any party, the most desirable person in any room.
I totally have a crush on Anna Karenina.
I want to decorate my next apartment with the pages from Moby Dick; wouldn’t it be so nice to curl up and read in this little corner?
