Omissions

Or, The Posts That Never Were.

Yes friends, it's that time again. That time when, before washing yourself in the Lethe of a few overpriced cocktails, you look back over the previous year and reflect on how very little you actually accomplished. Or specifically, in my case, you wonder how it came to pass that the number of dogs you own exceeds the number of blog posts you wrote in an entire calendar year. Not a leap year, thankfully, but nevertheless, still quite shameful.

So, as you probably guessed, I'm now going to round out the year with six shoddy, incomplete reviews of six books which, regardless of how I felt about them, deserve much better. In no particular order, these are the texts I failed to blog about this year:

1. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barabara Kingsolver (1998), 543 pp. Nominee, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1999.

Summary: Preacher Nathan Price moves his wife and four daughters from Georgia to the politically unstable Belgian Congo during the 1960s to pursue missionary work. Narration rotates among the women, showing how Africa and Price's zealotry shape their lives in profound and unexpected ways.

Review: Wowza. A novel of immense insight and scope, beautifully rendered emotions, and characters you can authentically love and hate. This one lingers.


2. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2006), 550pp.

Summary: Liesel Meminger, an adolescent girl, finds a new home with foster parents Hans and Rosa Hubermann and her other neighbors on Himmel Street. However, the setting is Nazi Germany, and the narrator is Death, which is everything else you need to know.

Review: Interesting for its portrayal of Death as a tender and sympathetic figure, this was a highly emotional book that nevertheless failed to draw my sympathies. A novel that changed many people's lives, but not mine.


3. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (2002), 276pp.

Summary: American writer Jonathan Safran Foer and his Ukrainian translator, Alex, attempt to track down a woman who allegedly saved Safran Foer's grandfather during Nazi campaigns in Ukraine. When they are joined by Alex's grandfather and dog, the plot turns madcap, but ultimately the story proves different than Jonathan expects, and the past resurges with lessons for all three men.

Review: Hilarious, imaginative, and penetrating--a marvel of a book. Safran Foer plays with the English language in ways you will still be thinking about when you go to manufacture Zs at night. Ignore the pretentious critics carping about historical inaccuracies (a book that is not a memoir but still has the author as a character is obviously taking liberties--as one can reasonably expect in a work of fiction); just find the book, read it, and love it.

4. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (1922; translated to English in 1951), 156pp.

Summary: Siddhartha, a young many of high social rank, leaves his life of comfort in a quest to find spiritual clarity and reach Nirvana.

Review: A canonical favorite that came highly recommended, this book just didn't have the effect I was hoping for. A novel that changed many people's lives, but not mine.

 

5. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951), 220pp.

Summary: Having been kicked out of yet another ritzy prep school, Holden Caulfield has two choices: return home early for Christmas vacation, which would alert his parents to his expulsion, or spend a few days wandering through New York City and expounding his general disgust for most of civilization. He chooses the latter.

Review: A book very much deserving of its status as a staple of American literature. As a portrait of growing up in the (post)modern age, the novel's investigation of identity and disillusionment are still extremely pertinent. Additional perks: it's funny! and you'll really get a bang out of Holden's mid-century slang.

6. Into the Wild by John Krakauer (1996), 224pp.

Summary: In September of 1992, the body of Chris McCandless, a 20-something from an affluent East coast home, was found in a bus in the Alaskan wilderness. John Krakauer wants to you understand how and--more importantly--why he ended up there.

Review: A really nicely executed work of nonfiction. I read this with a class of high school juniors, and we all enjoyed it quite a bit. Not only is it a page-turner but quite well-written and smartly structured, too. Highly recommend. (The film is also good if you can tolerate Emile Hirsch.)

The Great Gatsby (film)

The Great Gatsby, dir. Baz Luhrmann (May 2013), 143 mins. 

Bottom Line

Easily one of the most anticipated films of the summer, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is fairly evenly matched in terms of its successes and failures, leaving many audience members to regard it as a faithful adaptation yet a so-so film.

In my film as literature class, students break the analysis into three parts, so I’m going to practice what I teach and use the same categories below.

Narrative Elements

As far as book to film adaptations go, this is a very faithful one. In fact, I might argue that Luhrmann almost went too far in trying to make sure audiences knew he knew he was working with Fitzgerald’s material, leading to some questionable cinematic choices (see below). The one area where the film diverged significantly in terms of plot was the addition of a narrative frame depicting Nick in a sanatorium, where he is attempting to recover from his ordeal out East by writing about it. Despite forming a historically accurate link with Fitzgerald’s biography (his wife Zelda was in and out of institutions), I found this device little more than a hokey attempt to install Carraway as the narrator and justify his repeated narratorial interpolations. My questions here are: 1) how much justification does this really need, and 2) could there not have been a more elegant, less intrusive or obviously contrived way to go about it? (Morgan Freeman's Scrap in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby comes to mind as one of the best utilizations of the type of narration Luhrmann was shooting for.) 

Luhrmann is (perhaps?) a victim of coincidence here in that I could not watch Tobey Maguire at the typewriter without thinking of Ewan McGregor’s forlorn Christian in Moulin Rouge!, which used the same retrospective narration of a tragic death—in essence the same exact framing device. Also, the frame sequences recounting the conversations between Nick Carraway and his psychologist gave way too much information about how the audience was to view the characters in the story proper. The Gatsby mystique that persists through much of the novel is non-existent in the film because Nick instructs in the first few minutes that Gatsby is to be seen, specifically, as a figure of hope. Several times throughout the film, it seemed that information was given at the wrong time, making it that audiences were spoon-fed a “correct” understanding of the characters rather than being allowed to make their own decisions.

Cinematic Elements

The film’s direction has been an area of dissatisfaction with a number of people I’ve spoken to. Luhrmann has taken on high stakes literary adaptations before, but the stakes have risen even higher since and because of Romeo + Juliet. What I’ve gathered is that people have the expectation that Luhrmann’s films will show they something unexpected, essentially that he will take them places they didn’t even know they wanted to go. The problem is that Luhrmann has developed a highly specific and highly recognizable aesthetic, so when he employs that aesthetic a number of times, audiences get the feeling they’re seeing something that’s been “done.” I’m not saying this is fair, but I have to confess that at several points during Gatsby, I found myself being taken back to Moulin Rouge! via certain cinematic techniques. For example, the slow motion descent of Myrtle Wilson post-car-collision mirrors closely Satine’s fall from her aerial bar near the beginning of Moulin Rouge! The transition from extreme long shot to medium shot of a specific area via super-fast zoom is another device seen in both films (to clarify, this would be as if the Buchanans’ home were seen from across the bay, then the camera zoomed quickly to the butler at the front door, or if a shot of the Paris skyline zoomed to Satine inside her elephant). 

Now again, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with or inartistic about Luhrmann employing the same techniques across films. What I am saying, however, is that a slow motion fall or a super-fast zoom is the kind of dramatic editing technique that audiences are likely to remember. No one will ever complain about the frequency with which Spielberg uses eye-line matching because nobody even notices an eye-line match. Unfortunately, the audacity and innovation that first wooed Luhrmann fans might be the same that had them hoping for more from Gatsby. That said, the transposition of text onto the image at certain points in the film in order to remind audiences of the film’s textual beginnings is a choice I simply cannot get behind. Film adaptations shouldn’t bowdlerize source material, but neither should they try to become them. People interested in the text will read it, or—more likely—they already have.

Elements of the Misc-en-Scene

Actors/Acting: In my opinion, this was a well-put-together cast. Though I had some doubts when the castings were first announced, all the major players gave solid performances. In particular, I thought Carey Mulligan gave about as sympathetic a portrayal of Daisy Buchanan as possible. Given the fact that Daisy on the page is shallow and unsubstantial, Mulligan did a surprisingly good job of imbuing her with relatable human emotions and motivations. Leo DiCaprio’s Gatsby found the right mixture of cool detachment and irrational passion, Maguire embodied the Midwest with prudence but not prudishness, and Joel Edgerton, besides having the perfect voice and stature, appropriately captured Tom Buchanan’s banal greed and self-importance. Elizabeth Debicki was fine as Jordan Baker, though the screenwriters’ decision to reduce Jordan to a plot accessory in the film left Debicki without much meat to her character. [Recall that in the book Jordan’s comings and goings underscore the tension between Nick’s observation that she is “incurably dishonest” and Gatsby’s assertion that Miss Baker is “a great sportswoman” and therefore “wouldn’t do anything that isn’t all right,” a tension that dually confirms the dissolution of New York’s elite and Gatsby’s naïve denial of it.]

Cinematography/Costuming: Beautiful, lush, vibrant, decadent--what Baz does best. The shot of Gatsby with his soaking wet suit, red face, and blue eyes framed in Nick’s doorway was one of the best of the film.

Sound/Music: A lot was made of the soundtrack. For me personally, it was what it was, neither enhancing nor detracting from my experience of the film.

To conclude, I think Luhrmann took on a project perhaps more difficult than he even realized. Over the last century, The Great Gatsby has developed a symbolic meaning with almost as much force as (if not more than) its literal one. I can’t think of a harder task than trying to make a film about a man who is also the American Everyman trying and failing to restore a relationship with a woman who is also the Worthlessness and Unattainability of the American Dream. The bottom line is that the film isn’t the book, and no, it’s not even equally good in its own medium. But the book, to me (and I re-read it after seeing the film), is about disgust and decay, about a world that will only ever crudely approximate the one we’re looking for. The film doesn’t approach the profundity of the novel in this way, but it does, in my opinion, do a better job of illustrating the silly, frustrating, and often unwise longings of the human heart. Maybe there's room enough for both perspectives.

The Snow Child

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (2012), 386pp. Nominee, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2013.

On Christmas Day of last year, I came home to find an unexpected package on my front porch. An unexpected book-shaped package. It was from a good friend I met in graduate school in North Carolina, with whom I sat many stifling summer afternoons on the unscreened patio of a bar and, as flies sipped leisurely from the condensate of our beers, pondered books and how we came so many miles to that spit of a town east of Raleigh.

On several occasions, my friend mentioned that a woman from his hometown of Palmer, Alaska had written a book I should read. As much as I trust this person’s taste in books, everyone who has ever heard, “my friend’s got a script,” “my friend’s got a band,” “my friend wrote a book,” etc, knows that these kinds of recommendations can raise red flags in all but the exceptionally un-cynical. So, it was with curiosity and at least the tiniest bit of skepticism that I opened the package to find Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child.

The Snow Child is about a middle-aged couple whose most fervent desire—to have a child—has eluded them, and so they move from Pennsylvania to Alaska to become homesteaders and escape the constant reminder of their disappointed dream. On the first snow of the year early in their stay, Jack and Mabel leave their cabin late at night to build a small snowperson, whom they outfit with a scarf, mittens, and berry-red lips. Soon afterwards, a young girl emerges from the woods, and Mabel remembers an old Russian fairytale in which a couple much like Jack and herself create from snow the child they have so longed for. From there the book walks a delicate tightrope between realism and fantasy in a way that proves both beautiful and wholly engaging.

Though it is set in the 1920s, The Snow Child gives almost no indication of this, at least not in terms of the cultural touchstones normally associated with the post-WWI era. Mention of flapper attire and Ford’s Model A truck sneak into the last chapters of the book, but The Snow Child is not as interested in history on a large scale as it is in the personal histories of its few but finely crafted characters. Ivey seems to have an incredible clarity of purpose in the way she depicts her characters—each is complexly motivated but totally honest. If there was a single line in this book that rang untrue, I can’t recall it.

For me, Ivey’s novel is evocative of Willa Cather, Robert Frost, and John Steinbeck. It’s a story about a people and a place, and the relationship between the two. Like Frost, my attitude toward nature is often ambivalent. I am not really the type of person who accepts the “circle of life” with much satisfaction, and so it can be easy for me to look at the way one life preys upon another as evidence that nature is indifferent, if not cruel. The Snow Child, however, finds balance in all things: fantasy and reality, artistry and pragmatism, concealment and revelation, presence and absence, life and death, nature and culture, self and others, desire and the fulfillment of desire. The story is told in a way that neither romanticizes nor convicts but seeks to understand and appreciate the world as it is.

In short, The Snow Child a marvelous book that I highly recommend and a prodigious debut from an author I hope to read more from. It seems like it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to enjoy a novel without having to think about the burdens of political relationships of one variety or another. And while I do also frequently enjoy this kind of thinking, politics shines a light on what divides us, when there are so many other elements of human experience that unite.