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Book Club - by Luke

The Snapper

July 3rd 2006 03:57

The Snapper is Roddy Doyle's second book, and a damn fine one too. If you're looking for an easy read that will probably actually make you laugh out loud, then this is it.

The Snapper

The Snapper centres on the Rabbitte family (first introduced to us in Doyle's first book, 'The Comittments'), a typically Irish working-class bunch who live in the suburb of Barrytown, in Dublin. The eldest daughter of the family, 19 year-old Sharon, discovers she's up the duff and about to have a baby (or a snapper, if you speak the local language). She won't tell anyone who the father is, not even her friends, and it's her bluff and course Dad who becomes her saviour in what would otherwise be a troubled time.

Despite the subject matter - unwed teenage pregnancy in close-knit community - it's surprisingly light-hearted and not bleak in the slightest (though it doesn't sugarcoat anything and remains realistic right through to the end). The book's biggest strong point is in the character of Jimmy Rabbitte Sr, the hero of the piece, who would have to go down as one of the most engaging and loveable aresholes to ever grace the written page.

Like Doyle's previous book, The Snapper is pretty much all dialogue. There is a little bit more internal prose but it still remains very much a study in conversational language, and every line of dialogue is an absolute joy to behold. I read this book in the space of a few hours whilst on holidays, I didn't want to put it down - it strikes me as the kind of book I could re-read again and again.

So if you're looking for an uplifting but realistic comedy that doesn't sentimentalise life and is never boring, this is the book for you. And whilst it's the second book in Doyle's 'Barrytown trilogy' you don't actually have to have read the previous book, 'The Comittments'. The lead characters in The Snapper barely feature in 'The Comittments'. So go grab a copy!

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Lullaby

June 28th 2006 06:26

Lullaby

'Lullaby' is the first novel by Chuck Palahniuk that I've read. He's a fairly hip young dude as far as authors go and is most famous for the book 'Fight Club'. He writes anti-authoritarian/almost nihilistic stuff that riffs on pop culture and modern society, and he usually gets lumped in with authors like Brett Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh, which is fair enough I guess. To put it shortly, he's hip and cutting edge!

I wasn't really sure what to expect beyond what I'd seen in the film to 'Fight Club'. I guess the book is similar in that it follows a small group of people who make themselves outsiders by facing off against society as a whole. There are a lot of ideas in Lullaby.

The book follows a journalist, Carl Streator, as he investigates cot death across America. Carl is actually trailing an ancient African culling song - a lullaby that kills the person who it is read to. This is the cause of the cot deaths he is investigating. It was also the cause of the death of his daughter and wife twenty years previously. This idea, that of the culling song, is the seed from from which the entire events of Lullaby stems, but it only pertains to a small portion of the book itself.

Lullaby concerns itself with ideas like that of the nuclear family, necrophilia, absolute power and the corruption it causes, the homogenisation of culture, the power of words, Big Brother-as-noisemaker, the apocalypse, magic spells, trauma, the sanctity (or lack therof) of life, etc, etc. I could on and on. And the book only goes for 250 pages or so.

Now, while I easily prefer too many ideas to not enough, I think there is way too much going on in this book. Obviously, I can't comment on whether this is Palahniuk's normal style or not, but I think this story would've been better served by either focusing on a few of the excellent points it raises or extending it's page count to give all it's points a fair examination. Then again, I could be missing the point... Palahniuk may not care to exam his points, he may be on a one-man blitz of information saturation.

It's interesting to note that this book started as a kind of therapy for Chuck Palahniuk - his father had recently been murdered by an ex-con (for the circumstances, go here - Wikipedia page) and Palahniuk had helped get his father's murderer the death penalty. Some of this book's themes stem from his coping with that.

Anyway, I enjoyed this a lot. It's an entertaining read but also made me think, which is everything a good book should be, so I think I'll definitely read more. Also, the name 'Chuck Palahniuk' sounds so good when you say it out loud.

Chuck Palahniuk

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

June 11th 2006 07:24

This is almost a novella, very easy to read, fun and important and not at all a children's novel (as it's initial tone and size might suggest). Part coming-of-age story, part history, and part empassioned-ode to the power of storytelling... this is a simple, funny, bitter and moving story that can be read on several levels.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

I'm pretty sure the current edition of the book looks pretty much like this. My copy does anyway.

The story is told by an un-named protagonist (named as 'Ma' in the film version) who, alongside with his best friend Luo, has been sent to a remote Chinese village for 're-edutcation'. This is the Cultural Revolution, where Chairman Mao sought to root out elements of China that he felt threatened the current regime... various intellectuals were denounced, persecuted and imprisoned, and their children were sent to peasant villages to be re-educated (IE. used as a labour force). Ma and Luo are the sons of parents who have been labelled as enemies of the state and their chances of seeing their families again are very slim as a result. So they make the most of their time in their village, which is situated on a mountain known as 'The Phoenix of the Sky'.

Luo is a born story-teller, and is able to use his gift to entrance the villagers... soon the pair are able to buy exemption from various back-breaking tasks by telling stories that entertain the whole village. This in turn leads them to seek out more stories to tell and soon they get a whiff of a possible horde of banned western books, which they set about trying to gain access to at all costs...

The Little Seamstress of the title is the beautiful daughter of a rich and valued local tailor. Luo and Ma are entranced by her, and Luo begins an affair with her, seeking to educate her by re-telling the stories found in the classics... starting with Balzac. In order to do this, they educate themselves first by reading the novels in question, and through them we witness the power of a good piece of story-telling.

Here the re-education is twofold - the two boys are being re-educated by Chairman Mao so as to become tools of Communist China, meanwhile they are re-educating themselves and working against the system - learning to hate the oppressive nature of their world.

Working in tandem with this theme is a bitter and subtle examination of the flaws Chinese socialist system itself... we see up-close the hypocrisy of Mao's China, the ways in which exemptions and privileges can be bought, and the ways in which laws are dodged. One such sequence in the book makes the relations between the people and the law quite clear... we see how far people have to go to obey the system when some villagers are forced to drive a buffalo off a cliff in order to eat it, inadvertently mutilating the poor creature before killing it. Parrallels between this and the extremes our protagonists go to abound throughout the novel, and it's easy to see why Ma and Luo hate the system so much by the book's bittersweet end.

Author Dai Sijie

The structure is somewhat episodic but not without a fulfilling narrative. Where I expected predictability I instead felt surprise and satisfaction. Author Dai Sijie is a Chinese ex-pat and filmmaker who now lives in France... he himself underwent 're-education' in China during the early 70s, and I suspect that there are more than a few elements drawn from his own experiences to be found in this book and the various misadventures our protagonists bluff their way through. This is a very well-constructed and entertaining piece of literature, and a finer contemporary cheer for the cultural human spirit in the face of tyranny couldn't be found today.

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The Commitments by Roddy Doyle

June 5th 2006 08:12

The Commitments

The Commitments is one of my favourite movies. I've watched it nearly twenty times and it never gets old, and so - with this in mind - I was hesistant to read the book that spawned it. I've always been hesitant to read the books to which my favourite movies have been based on... what if the book is really good and makes the film seem weak to me? What if it takes away something I cherish?

Luckily, reading the Commitments didn't affect my enjoyment of the film in any way whatsoever. A sigh of relief!

The Commitments is the first novel by celebrated Irish writer Roddy Doyle. Prior to this he had written a couple of plays, and it shows very much in the style of this book... it's virtually all dialogue. Literally. The parts of it that are descriptive and not spoken by one of the characters probably amount to less than a page. It was a little jarring at first but easy enough to follow (and it was a very popular book so I mustn't have been the only one who found it easy to follow!) Doyle has an admirable way of re-spelling words to make them fit the Irish vernacular and how things are said, which makes for very entertaining and colourful reading.

It's said that Doyle (who was a school teacher) based this story on his students and the way they acted. The story itself concerns Jimmy Rabbitte Jr, a music-lover who decides to form and manage a Dublin Soul band. We follow the band from it's conception through to it's first show and to it's eventual demise. It's laugh-out loud funny stuff and a little moving at the same time, and Doyle even shows the band performing actual songs - using his curious way of writing to show the words being sung and the various instruments playing along. It's a little hard to explain without seeing it, but it's very energetic all the same.

The Commitments DVD cover

It's a rather slight book, clocking in just over 100 pages or so. The much celebrated film-adaptation isn't that far removed from the book - it manages to capture the humour and atmosphere and the book's short length gives it plenty of space to expand on characters and events (indeed - Jimmy's family is only shown in passing in this book. The Rabbitte family, especially Jimmy's Dad [who only has one line in this book] would go on to feature in Doyle's next two books. Despite this, they feature a lot more extensively in the film).

As I mentioned above, Doyle's next two books follow the further trials and tribulations of the Rabbitte family. These are 'The Snapper' (also adapted into a film) and 'The Van' (also adapted into a film, and nominated for the Booker prize). Together these books form what is known as 'The Barrytown trilogy', though 'The Commitments' isn't so connected to the other two. All three can be read on their own without prior knowledge of the other books. All three are immensely enjoyable and easy to read. Doyle's writing style expands and matures throughout.

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Eucalyptus, winner of the Miles Franklin Award

June 4th 2006 04:30

The edition currently available in Australia.

If Eucalyptus trees were as significant to humanity as the Bible then 'Eucalyptus' by Murray Bail would be their 'Da Vinci Code'. The 1999 winner of the prestiguous Miles Franklin Award (the highest Australian-conferred honour a fictional book can be blessed with) is littered with accumulated anecdotes and stories that illuminate and fascinate - much like the little pieces of trivia and forgotten facts that prop the 'Da Vinci Code' up. Okay, so the comparison might not really stand up all that well the more you think about it; the pieces that make up 'Eucalyptus' are altogether more geared towards exploring the nature of folklore and narrative, and the book is - on the whole - written far more eloquently and originally, and this is why you'll most likely find it in the literature section of your bookstore (and not in general fiction like the D.V. Code). If anything, this is the antithesis of 'The Da Vinci Code', but it uses a kind of history in much the same manner all the same.

Author Murray Bail attempts to create an Australian mythology here by using around 100 or so species of Eucalypts (gum trees) as a touchstone for his story/stories. The landscape is used as a metaphor for our national character, much in the way other countries have done for theirs', and whilst Bail might stretch the notion a little by going into so much depth he also saves it by approaching it from several angles

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Vernon God Little

May 16th 2006 05:24

Vernon God Little

'Vernon God Little' won the 2003 Booker Prize and is an exceptional and somewhat topical piece of modern literature that deserves to go down as a classic as the years roll by. It's a very readable book and calls to mind (and I'm by no means the first person to say this), the book 'Catcher in the Rye' due to it's unique style of first-person narrative.

Fifteen-year old Vernon Little is the surviving best friend of a boy who embarked on a Columbine-style shooting before killing himself. As such, Vernon Little remains the prime surviving suspect for the murders and the whole town is pretty much out for his head. He makes a rather nice scapegoat in light of the killer's suicide depriving them all of 'justice', and some of his own anti-social actions don't really help him, so he decides to do a runner to Mexico

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The God of Small Things

April 30th 2006 06:16

I decided to read this book a while back because it was a Booker prize-winner and I was feeling bouyed after my highly positive experience with 'The Life of Pi' - another Booker prize-winner that I had read just beforehand (more on that at a later juncture). Not completely illogically, a part of me thought that "Hey, if I loved one Booker prize-winner I might love another!" It was an optimistic assumption... one that wasn't completely grounded in the way the world works.

The 1997 Booker prize-winner.

I'm not saying that 'The God of Small Things' is a bad book. On the contrary, it would be a strange day indeed that any Booker prize-winning novel turned out to be 'bad'. I just didn't really dig it. Sure, it's a beautifully-written book full of quirky characters and an even quirkier rhythm in it's prose, sure it has tragic foreboding and simple humour in spades, sure it's exotic and fresh in it's foreigness to this Western Sydney suburbs boy... I just couldn't help but feel the dreaded 'meh' at the book's end

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