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dragojustineFannish randomness: I porned at wendy 's Porny Sentence-a-thon. Actually, I porned twice and I'm really quite happy with the results, despite my run-on-iness and predilection for parenthesis.
Yes, I am totally adoring the post-con J2 cuteness floating about the flist right now. I am so jealous, and so dead of cute! Here is a con-report of Samantha Ferris' panel. That woman WINS. Seriously. I am stunned at how bluntly she discussed the new girls this season, but it was completely beyond the pale the way she was bluntly booted off for young T&A and I totally back her there. As much as I am willing to like both Ruby and Bela in concept (and possibly Bela in execution), I dislike the casting of both on simple "You replaced the most awesome woman in the universe for THEM?" grounds. It is a crying shame that we will probably get a short season this year and so won't see Ellen come back (of course I support the writers, but I can still be sad), but I can only hope that means she comes back in a big way next season.
This cracks me up, and is completely why I'm so paranoid about Dustin reading my computer over my shoulder. Heh.
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
I adore Atwood. Frankly, I do not think any book has hit so many of my bullet-proof narrative kinks in one go since Absalom, Absalom, so I am in heaven here. Nested narratives! Unreliable narrators! Family secrets! Complete defiance of genre!
It is a puzzle book, with no less than four nested narratives and a major secret reveal at the end. As a puzzle, it keeps our characters at a remove- there is no emotional "in" for us anywhere but in the elderly Iris' attempts at quiet dignity in old age, but she is keeping many secrets from us so that in is only illusionary. Laura especially is utterly opaque, and it is unclear how much Iris understands about her and their relationship even in retrospect. It is not a book where the characters will remain with you, not a book where you cry over any death. It is a book you solve, not a book you read. I have a weakness for that, though of course one cannot live on puzzles alone.
The uppermost layer of narrative has Iris as the old Nurse, the fairy-tale Crone, setting down secrets and wisdom that will destroy as much as they will enlighten. The next layer has Iris and Laura as fairy-tale princesses, sheltered and locked away and passive and acted-upon, in the strange gauzy fairy-tale land of Avilion and money, even with evil step-mothers. Iris is an infuriatingly passive princess in this level of narrative, no matter how hard she directs our sympathies to her and points out her own helplessness. This is made worse by the fact that her only rebellion, her only active choices, are disowned, displaced, pushed away behind another level of narrative. The third level leaves the world of fairy-tale and instead is 30s noir, shockingly frank about sex for the 30s, with our unnamed lovers smoking and drinking and wearing long coats and fine stockings and meeting in grungy paint-peeling motel rooms hiding from the authorities. It is highly concerned with these ideas of worldly sophistication, of the ways the real-world is different from our heroine's everyday fairy-tale life, and yet that "real-world" is every bit as much a formalized, stylized story. Our heroine is self-consciously playing a role, playing a part, but she remains fundamentally unable to move beyond being passively cast in a role, unable to seize what she wants. The fourth nested narrative is another genre entirely, 30s style pulp Sci-Fi. It acts as metaphor for our lovers story, it meditates on the impossibility of happiness, and it provides our fundamental theme- the blind assassin, the one who unknowingly and uncomprehendingly and uncaringly causes the downfall and destruction of others.
The different levels of narrative are absolutely masterful. Each one is deeply opaque and stylized, not remotely truthful. Together, they reveal everything. In the tangled intersections of the stories, our passive, voiceless heroines find voices of a sort (The sacrificial victim through her sign-language, Iris/Laura through the book, and the confessional letter). The blind assassins do their uncaring work, causing death and destruction for reasons ranging from socialistic idealism and bitterness against the old order(Alex, Callie, the actual assasin) to pure lust and ambition (Richard, Winifred) to simple uncaring self-protectiveness (Iris).
As far as the Big Secret, there are indeed clues. Then again, there are also red herrings pointing the other way- a lot of them- and I don't think anyone could particularly be expected to figure it out too much before the reveal (you would suspect after the dancing, and Laura not dancing, on the Queen Mary- you couldn't really know until our unnamed heroin fails to break away from her family, which is the very last section). But Iris is actively duplicitous- this is her unfairness, not Atwood's. Atwood is fair- Iris never lies to us, save by omission. This is exactly the kind of unreliable narrator I adore. She is actively shaping her own life by subtle twistings of narrative, using her position of writer as a position of power. Concealing her own active destruction of others (Laura, Richard, Aimee), her own active choices, behind a slight of hand of powerlessness, despite the fact that the hand that holds the pen can never be powerless. She uses the forms and conventions of the narratives she knows as lenses, as ways of manipulating her own story to make it more believable, more the way it "should" be, and so to make the readers eyes slide right over the cracks and omissions, and yet at the same time using those genre conventions to reveal what she is hiding- because Iris is a fundamentally conflicted character. She wishes to destroy Richard for what he did, and yet she does not want to have to admit to herself that she is taking action, taking vengeance. She is seized by an urge to confess despite her inability to admit guilt.
Oh god I love this book.
wendy 's Porny Sentence-a-thon. Actually, I porned twice and I'm really quite happy with the results, despite my run-on-iness and predilection for parenthesis. Yes, I am totally adoring the post-con J2 cuteness floating about the flist right now. I am so jealous, and so dead of cute! Here is a con-report of Samantha Ferris' panel. That woman WINS. Seriously. I am stunned at how bluntly she discussed the new girls this season, but it was completely beyond the pale the way she was bluntly booted off for young T&A and I totally back her there. As much as I am willing to like both Ruby and Bela in concept (and possibly Bela in execution), I dislike the casting of both on simple "You replaced the most awesome woman in the universe for THEM?" grounds. It is a crying shame that we will probably get a short season this year and so won't see Ellen come back (of course I support the writers, but I can still be sad), but I can only hope that means she comes back in a big way next season.
This cracks me up, and is completely why I'm so paranoid about Dustin reading my computer over my shoulder. Heh.
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
I adore Atwood. Frankly, I do not think any book has hit so many of my bullet-proof narrative kinks in one go since Absalom, Absalom, so I am in heaven here. Nested narratives! Unreliable narrators! Family secrets! Complete defiance of genre!
It is a puzzle book, with no less than four nested narratives and a major secret reveal at the end. As a puzzle, it keeps our characters at a remove- there is no emotional "in" for us anywhere but in the elderly Iris' attempts at quiet dignity in old age, but she is keeping many secrets from us so that in is only illusionary. Laura especially is utterly opaque, and it is unclear how much Iris understands about her and their relationship even in retrospect. It is not a book where the characters will remain with you, not a book where you cry over any death. It is a book you solve, not a book you read. I have a weakness for that, though of course one cannot live on puzzles alone.
The uppermost layer of narrative has Iris as the old Nurse, the fairy-tale Crone, setting down secrets and wisdom that will destroy as much as they will enlighten. The next layer has Iris and Laura as fairy-tale princesses, sheltered and locked away and passive and acted-upon, in the strange gauzy fairy-tale land of Avilion and money, even with evil step-mothers. Iris is an infuriatingly passive princess in this level of narrative, no matter how hard she directs our sympathies to her and points out her own helplessness. This is made worse by the fact that her only rebellion, her only active choices, are disowned, displaced, pushed away behind another level of narrative. The third level leaves the world of fairy-tale and instead is 30s noir, shockingly frank about sex for the 30s, with our unnamed lovers smoking and drinking and wearing long coats and fine stockings and meeting in grungy paint-peeling motel rooms hiding from the authorities. It is highly concerned with these ideas of worldly sophistication, of the ways the real-world is different from our heroine's everyday fairy-tale life, and yet that "real-world" is every bit as much a formalized, stylized story. Our heroine is self-consciously playing a role, playing a part, but she remains fundamentally unable to move beyond being passively cast in a role, unable to seize what she wants. The fourth nested narrative is another genre entirely, 30s style pulp Sci-Fi. It acts as metaphor for our lovers story, it meditates on the impossibility of happiness, and it provides our fundamental theme- the blind assassin, the one who unknowingly and uncomprehendingly and uncaringly causes the downfall and destruction of others.
The different levels of narrative are absolutely masterful. Each one is deeply opaque and stylized, not remotely truthful. Together, they reveal everything. In the tangled intersections of the stories, our passive, voiceless heroines find voices of a sort (The sacrificial victim through her sign-language, Iris/Laura through the book, and the confessional letter). The blind assassins do their uncaring work, causing death and destruction for reasons ranging from socialistic idealism and bitterness against the old order(Alex, Callie, the actual assasin) to pure lust and ambition (Richard, Winifred) to simple uncaring self-protectiveness (Iris).
As far as the Big Secret, there are indeed clues. Then again, there are also red herrings pointing the other way- a lot of them- and I don't think anyone could particularly be expected to figure it out too much before the reveal (you would suspect after the dancing, and Laura not dancing, on the Queen Mary- you couldn't really know until our unnamed heroin fails to break away from her family, which is the very last section). But Iris is actively duplicitous- this is her unfairness, not Atwood's. Atwood is fair- Iris never lies to us, save by omission. This is exactly the kind of unreliable narrator I adore. She is actively shaping her own life by subtle twistings of narrative, using her position of writer as a position of power. Concealing her own active destruction of others (Laura, Richard, Aimee), her own active choices, behind a slight of hand of powerlessness, despite the fact that the hand that holds the pen can never be powerless. She uses the forms and conventions of the narratives she knows as lenses, as ways of manipulating her own story to make it more believable, more the way it "should" be, and so to make the readers eyes slide right over the cracks and omissions, and yet at the same time using those genre conventions to reveal what she is hiding- because Iris is a fundamentally conflicted character. She wishes to destroy Richard for what he did, and yet she does not want to have to admit to herself that she is taking action, taking vengeance. She is seized by an urge to confess despite her inability to admit guilt.
Oh god I love this book.