Let me send you a Christmas card!
Nov. 24th, 2007 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragojustineLet's go with a list, shall we? [Poll #1094127][Poll #1094127]I have never done an LJ poll before, so let's hope that works.
5. I really want to get myself a snowy, frosty, crisp Christmas icon. But I am living in LA and there is going to be no frosty crisp Christmas for me and I'm really, really, irrationally sad about that. Will a frosty Christmas icon make it worse or better?
6. Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen
My most bullet-proof narrative kinks are unreliable narrators, nested narratives, family secrets, reconstructing the past. Recently I've been reading a lot of books that use a particular frame structure to get at that stuff- the structure of an old narrator, remembering and coming to terms with the dark family secrets for the first time as they stare down the prospect of their own death. When done well, like in The Blind Assassin, this structure is wonderful.
Water for Elephants uses the same frame- our narrator is now in a nursing home- to tell the story of a young veterinarian who ends up orphaned and homeless during the Great Depression and jumps aboard a circus boxcar. He falls in love with the wife of the paranoid-schizophrenic and abusive Equestrian Director, the woman who does the horse show, and the two of them care for the adorable Polish-speaking elephant Rosie. The story is not nearly as twee as that description would suggest. It is the Depression, after all, and everything about the circus is tinged with desperation. The workers don't get paid, suffer incredible callous cruelty at the hands of the ringmaster, but can't leave because if they leave, they starve. There are hatreds and rivalries and politics running through it all, and it's a struggle just to survive (for the people and the show both).
Gruen obviously did meticulous research on the life of the railway circuses. The book is littered with little anecdotes, and the charming thing is that the most unbelievable ones are the real ones. The book is filled with black and white circus photos from the 30s, both performers but also a lot of behind-the-scenes ones from circus museums. Her research alone sells the book to me. In short, this is a good story with good characters and good background and good writing- completely readable and I approve.
The thing that bugs me about it is that it tries to be something it's not. There is no real reason for the frame story. Thematically, it doesn't do anything- our narrator is reliable. His age and life since gives him no special insight or different perspective on the events. He is not trying to piece together a story known only incompletely. No, he's just telling a simple story, chronologically. They try to dress it up with the big reveal of who killed the abusive husband, but he doesn't die until the very end and the issue of who killed him simply isn't that important. It has no consequences, and our narrator's keeping of the secret has no real consequences. It comes as a mild surprise but it doesn't make us reevaluate anything we knew before. In short, there is no reason for this simple, straightforward story to need a frame at all, and so it bugs me that it has one. I just think that the fundamental rule of writing is that you can do anything, as long as you do it for a REASON.
5. I really want to get myself a snowy, frosty, crisp Christmas icon. But I am living in LA and there is going to be no frosty crisp Christmas for me and I'm really, really, irrationally sad about that. Will a frosty Christmas icon make it worse or better?
6. Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen
My most bullet-proof narrative kinks are unreliable narrators, nested narratives, family secrets, reconstructing the past. Recently I've been reading a lot of books that use a particular frame structure to get at that stuff- the structure of an old narrator, remembering and coming to terms with the dark family secrets for the first time as they stare down the prospect of their own death. When done well, like in The Blind Assassin, this structure is wonderful.
Water for Elephants uses the same frame- our narrator is now in a nursing home- to tell the story of a young veterinarian who ends up orphaned and homeless during the Great Depression and jumps aboard a circus boxcar. He falls in love with the wife of the paranoid-schizophrenic and abusive Equestrian Director, the woman who does the horse show, and the two of them care for the adorable Polish-speaking elephant Rosie. The story is not nearly as twee as that description would suggest. It is the Depression, after all, and everything about the circus is tinged with desperation. The workers don't get paid, suffer incredible callous cruelty at the hands of the ringmaster, but can't leave because if they leave, they starve. There are hatreds and rivalries and politics running through it all, and it's a struggle just to survive (for the people and the show both).
Gruen obviously did meticulous research on the life of the railway circuses. The book is littered with little anecdotes, and the charming thing is that the most unbelievable ones are the real ones. The book is filled with black and white circus photos from the 30s, both performers but also a lot of behind-the-scenes ones from circus museums. Her research alone sells the book to me. In short, this is a good story with good characters and good background and good writing- completely readable and I approve.
The thing that bugs me about it is that it tries to be something it's not. There is no real reason for the frame story. Thematically, it doesn't do anything- our narrator is reliable. His age and life since gives him no special insight or different perspective on the events. He is not trying to piece together a story known only incompletely. No, he's just telling a simple story, chronologically. They try to dress it up with the big reveal of who killed the abusive husband, but he doesn't die until the very end and the issue of who killed him simply isn't that important. It has no consequences, and our narrator's keeping of the secret has no real consequences. It comes as a mild surprise but it doesn't make us reevaluate anything we knew before. In short, there is no reason for this simple, straightforward story to need a frame at all, and so it bugs me that it has one. I just think that the fundamental rule of writing is that you can do anything, as long as you do it for a REASON.