Yaay for funny, quirky things!
Jan. 27th, 2009 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragojustineJust wanted to point out to everybody that A Dog's Breakfast is on Hulu. You guys, it's adorable. Seriously. It's totally, "David Hewlett calls his best buddies and says, hey, I found 20 bucks under my couch cushions, wanna put on a show?" The snarky meta commentary is hilarious. The writing is hilarious. David's physical comedy is hilarious. Christopher Judge's appearance is flailingly fantastic. The only disappointing part of the whole business is the fact that Paul McGillion has better legs than I do. For a movie made over hiatus with, like, six guys and their pooled lunch money? It's fabulous. Also, if my sister and I are half as adorable together in twenty years as David and Kate, I will be so happy. I just want to smish them.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
I absolutely adored this book beyond all reason. I've been working on it since... Thanksgiving, I think, which is weird for me-- despite how much I loved it, something about the pacing made it hard to get through, and then I ended up in a funk. But! Great fun.
This one got a hell of a lot of press one or two years ago. Everybody knows the premise, right? The alternate history of a Jewish homeland in Alaska plus the noir detective novel- a weird mishmash of genres with a startlingly compelling setting. So we end up with the despairing, alcoholic, workaholic detective obsessed with a case that leads him into the dark underbelly of his world...
The world-building is interesting at the very least. Landsman is a fairly politically apathetic character, which allows us to discover the setting as he does, and also keeps the book a lot less about the AU than it otherwise would have been. In some ways I think his world-building is pretty well done, even if slightly politically shocking at points (a person is either Jewish or American, in Landsmans's world, which follows from a history with drastically less Jewish immigration to the United States, and the political tensions and near-open hostility between American Jews and the community of Sitka also follows well, and Chabon is a good enough writer to make us believe that the perception of American Jews as scheming financiers is Landsman's prejudice and not his). It's overtly political at points (the peculiar relationship with the Christian Right, Sitka's political problems with dispossessed Indian tribes, yadda), which I'd say works reasonably well. But, honestly, he's a lot more concerned with maintaining his noir tone than reasonably extrapolating his AU.
My favorite reviewer of all time, Abigail Nussbaum, did a bit on it. She takes down that particular problem and criticizes the book more harshly than I would- she wants it to be something it's not, and while it may have been a stronger book if it was a more straightforward alternate history, I'm fairly enamored of what it was.
What it is, mostly, is funny. Hilarious, in fact, almost entirely because of how distinctive Chabon's sense of humor is. It's an incredibly self-deprecating, wry, distinctively Jewish sense of humor, combined with an absolute genius for word choice. I can't believe how many times he jolted me with a single, perfectly placed, unexpected, carefully chosen adjective.
From all I've heard, the wordplay is genius in the Yiddish as well. He does a good job with writing that works for people with less cultural background but also gets people with more of a clue to just rave about it. Nussbaum phrased it as: "For outsiders, the frequent forays into Yiddish become an additional layer of foreignness to be penetrated and explored, whereas insiders will feel courted by the novel, as though it had been written with them in mind—they get the joke when Landsman refers to his service pistol as a 'sholem'" Incidentally, I stared at that particular sentence for fully ten minutes before I got it. Because, Jesus, it takes, like, four steps in three languages to get to that pun. That's genius (and I am a dork).
In any case, the writing is brilliant and distinctive, the book is good, as far as being original and memorable, it's thematically interesting (all about territory- boundaries and borders around, hopes and fears about, claims on, political struggles over, the emotional need for, the historical lack of. Israel just looms over this whole book, a huge empty presence). The pacing is weird and the ending is predictable, perhaps because it drags out just a bit too long, and it may well have been a better book if it was less concerned with the form of the noir detective genre. But, overall? Well worth all the praise it got.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
I absolutely adored this book beyond all reason. I've been working on it since... Thanksgiving, I think, which is weird for me-- despite how much I loved it, something about the pacing made it hard to get through, and then I ended up in a funk. But! Great fun.
This one got a hell of a lot of press one or two years ago. Everybody knows the premise, right? The alternate history of a Jewish homeland in Alaska plus the noir detective novel- a weird mishmash of genres with a startlingly compelling setting. So we end up with the despairing, alcoholic, workaholic detective obsessed with a case that leads him into the dark underbelly of his world...
The world-building is interesting at the very least. Landsman is a fairly politically apathetic character, which allows us to discover the setting as he does, and also keeps the book a lot less about the AU than it otherwise would have been. In some ways I think his world-building is pretty well done, even if slightly politically shocking at points (a person is either Jewish or American, in Landsmans's world, which follows from a history with drastically less Jewish immigration to the United States, and the political tensions and near-open hostility between American Jews and the community of Sitka also follows well, and Chabon is a good enough writer to make us believe that the perception of American Jews as scheming financiers is Landsman's prejudice and not his). It's overtly political at points (the peculiar relationship with the Christian Right, Sitka's political problems with dispossessed Indian tribes, yadda), which I'd say works reasonably well. But, honestly, he's a lot more concerned with maintaining his noir tone than reasonably extrapolating his AU.
My favorite reviewer of all time, Abigail Nussbaum, did a bit on it. She takes down that particular problem and criticizes the book more harshly than I would- she wants it to be something it's not, and while it may have been a stronger book if it was a more straightforward alternate history, I'm fairly enamored of what it was.
What it is, mostly, is funny. Hilarious, in fact, almost entirely because of how distinctive Chabon's sense of humor is. It's an incredibly self-deprecating, wry, distinctively Jewish sense of humor, combined with an absolute genius for word choice. I can't believe how many times he jolted me with a single, perfectly placed, unexpected, carefully chosen adjective.
From all I've heard, the wordplay is genius in the Yiddish as well. He does a good job with writing that works for people with less cultural background but also gets people with more of a clue to just rave about it. Nussbaum phrased it as: "For outsiders, the frequent forays into Yiddish become an additional layer of foreignness to be penetrated and explored, whereas insiders will feel courted by the novel, as though it had been written with them in mind—they get the joke when Landsman refers to his service pistol as a 'sholem'" Incidentally, I stared at that particular sentence for fully ten minutes before I got it. Because, Jesus, it takes, like, four steps in three languages to get to that pun. That's genius (and I am a dork).
In any case, the writing is brilliant and distinctive, the book is good, as far as being original and memorable, it's thematically interesting (all about territory- boundaries and borders around, hopes and fears about, claims on, political struggles over, the emotional need for, the historical lack of. Israel just looms over this whole book, a huge empty presence). The pacing is weird and the ending is predictable, perhaps because it drags out just a bit too long, and it may well have been a better book if it was less concerned with the form of the noir detective genre. But, overall? Well worth all the praise it got.
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Date: 2009-01-28 12:02 pm (UTC)