• Monday, 9 Dec 2024 11:21 am

  Perfume

  by Patrick Süskind

  Published 1985 263 pages

  

  When I read Crash last year, I wasn’t prepared for a book grounded in monomania and a lot of what makes it good sailed over my head. No so with Perfume.

  Perfume is the story of a little smell goblin called Grenouille born with a preternaturally sensitive nose and his quest to create perfumes so exquisite that they transcend smell and start to verge on mind control. To this end he sinks to some pretty shocking levels of depravity.

  Perfume is fun. It’s not particularly deep, but it’s immensely sensual and plot bounces along at a quick clip, Grenouille moving from one master to another as he learns and grows and slowly works towards his plan of using smells to control people.

  But Baldini was not content with these products of classic beauty care. It was his ambition to assemble in his shop everything that had a scent or in some fashion contributed to the production of scent. And so in addition to incense pastilles, incense candles, and cords, there were also sundry spices, from anise seeds to zapota seeds, syrups, cordials, and fruit brandies, wines from Cyprus, Málaga, and Corinth, honeys, coffees, teas, candied and dried fruits, figs, bonbons, chocolates, chestnuts, and even pickled capers, cucumbers, and onions, and marinated tuna. Plus perfumed sealing waxes, stationery, lover’s ink scented with attar of roses, writing kits of Spanish leather, penholders of white sandalwood, caskets and chests of cedarwood, potpourris and bowls for flower petals, brass incense holders, crystal flacons and cruses with stoppers of cut amber, scented gloves, handkerchiefs, sewing cushions filled with mace, and musk-sprinkled wallpaper that could fill a room with scent for more than a century.

  The whole book is like this.

  Eventually Grenouille abandons humanity and achieves godlike powers via the perfume he's created—but finds this brings him no joy, no satisfaction, only utmost despair. Like I said: fun!

• ---

  Sunday, 1 Dec 2024 10:22 pm

  My Brilliant Friend

  by Elena Ferrante

  Published 2011 331 pages

  

  I read My Brilliant Friend on the strength of the no. 1 spot on the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century. I’d heard it mentioned on their podcast, and read later about the mania for Ferrante’s books that emerged from the first English editions of the Neapolitan quartet in the early 2010s.

  The book follows two girls as they grow up in a poor neighbourhood in the suburbs of Naples in the 1950s and 60s. Elena, the narrator, is diligent if uninspired; Lila is fiery and full of insight. Elena gets the opportunity to continue her schooling into adolescence, and thrives in the structured environment; Lila leaves school but (at least for a time) pursues an informal education by proxy, often mastering Elena’s subjects before Elena can. The two girls grow apart as they age—Elena investing more in studies and writing, while Lila attracts the (perhaps unwanted) attentions of the neighbourhood boys. By the end of the novel she’s cornered into a marriage she has serious misgivings about.

  It’s good—it’s heartbreaking in slow motion. Like in life, there’s no way to look forward to predict the end; but in retrospect the events of a life seem to unfold inevitably to produce the people that Elena and Lila become. Does that make sense? I’m trying to get at something here. Lila ends up worse off than Elena—and that’s not because Lila makes bad decisions or anything—but the things that happen to Elena, and the things that happen to Lila, add up to what their lives become.

  Some of the tension of the book—the tension of the friendship between Elena and Lila—comes from their underlying competitiveness, and from Elena’s implicit belief that Lila is somehow better than she is. For much of the book we believe that the eponymous Brilliant Friend is Lila—but late in the book (almost right on queue) we learn that to Lila, the roles are reversed:

  She was silent for a while, staring at the water that sparkled in the tub, then [Lila] said, “Whatever happens, you’ll go on studying.”

  “Two more years: then I’ll get my diploma and I’m done.”

  “No, don’t ever stop: I’ll give you the money, you should keep studying.”

  I gave a nervous laugh, then said, “Thanks, but at a certain point school is over.”

  “Not for you: you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”

  What else? The prose is very comma-heavy, though whether that’s an artefact of the translation or of the original work I’m not sure as I don’t speak Italian.

  I had the impression, from the way she used me, from the way she handled Stefano, that she was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being, all her own, that was still obscure to her.

  I enjoyed my time with the book, though at no point did I ever really feel compelled by it. Sometimes I struggle to put a book down and read to distraction. Here, I didn't.

• ---

  Friday, 11 Oct 2024 11:34 pm

  The Bright Sword

  by Lev Grossman

  Published 2024 670 pages

  

  There’s a lot to like in this tale-telling from post-Roman Britain! Collum is an aspiring knight from the Hebrides who makes the long journey down to Camelot (maybe somewhere around Gloucester?) only to find that Arthur is already dead and the Knights of the Round Table are dead and scattered (mostly dead) in the wake of the Lancelot-Grail cycle. Undeterred, Collum rallies the benchwarmers for a last adventure across the porous boundaries dividing our world from the world of fairies and gods.

  This world has much to recommend it! The magical world feels at once erratic but internally consistent, with such a distinct British twang to it that I struggle to believe that Grossman hasn’t spent time here. In the book (as in reality), the past remains eternally present: not something that happened and then got written down—but something that you can walk up to and touch. Standing stones, Roman roads, ruined churches, ancient oaks: these are high fantasy tropes but they’re also common features of dog walks within 25 minutes of our front door. The Bright Sword whisks me away to a dream of Britain, but it also plants me back where I am and reminds me that the place I live has been around for a long, long time.

  A handful of nitpicks:

  • Much like the world of fairy in which much of this book takes place, things get a little disorganised around the middle. The adventure sort of sputters and reignites, knights are picked off individually, characters swoop in on wings of magic and then dematerialise.
  • There are frequent digressions to pad out backstories—at times, it feels, only to underscore someone’s death.
  • The role of the Christian God waffles: He shows favour only intermittently and at one point declares that He is forsaking Britain entirely (the consequences of which continue to be felt among its people to this very day).
  • Grossman also falls into the trap of belabouring the attractiveness of the main love interest, sometimes to the point of distraction. I’m personally not a fan of that, but maybe some people need to be reminded when a woman is attractive.
  • I don’t know. What else?
  • There are maybe one too many “twists”. Most of them don’t pay off, like Collum’s fairy heritage; I wish I’d have just been told up front.
  • Finally, there were a number of moments in the book where it felt like there was a narrative pause to allow the audience to applaud, which doesn’t make sense because this is a book. They usually do it in superhero movies when a cameo happens. The narrative will work it's way up to a badass manoeuvre and then we'll get a one-line paragraph with a bit of ensuing filler.

  The battles are hard-won, though, which I appreciated. Collum is good at fighting but he’s not Chosen One-good.

  Overall: a romp. On the strength of the world of this book I wandered into a bookshop made out of a converted Methodist chapel and purchased a 60-year-old copy of The Once and Future King.

• ---

  Thursday, 26 Sept 2024 9:14 am

  Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

  by Robin Sloan

  Published 2012 288 pages

  Not a ton to review here. I don't generally knock books for being derivative—smart writers can do a lot of exciting things with established forms or narratives—but unfortunately, Robin Sloan doesn't. Maybe I'm not the target audience? I'm not sure what readers are meant to get out of this: the common fantasy tropes are so thinly veiled that even the protagonist makes repeated reference to them as they happen.

  Clay Jannon gets fired from his cringe design job and takes up as the clerk of a bookstore in San Francisco. It turns out that the bookstore is a front for a shadowy Secret Society with sinister vibes but which, it turns out, doesn't actually do anything but own a typeface and write a lot of autobiographies that no one reads. There's some weak inciting action and Clay has to rely on all of his friends to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding an encrypted old book. He does so, eventually.

  Google, the multi-trillion dollar advertising company, makes continuous and gratuitous appearances that in no way holds them to account. Characters get extended descriptions of what clothes they're wearing in lieu of proper development. Clay's love interest exists exclusively as a reason to go into Google's offices. Her personality is that she wears a red shirt that makes her boobs look good. Oh and Clay's Ron Weasley is a tech founder for a company that models boob physics. He is Clay's closest friend and his work is portrayed as being a bit funny but fundamentally toothless and also very lucrative. He spends most of the novel spending money and chatting up girls about how great boobs are. Boobs take up an inordinate amount of space in this book, which is ostensibly about secret societies at the intersection of art and technology, or whatever it was that Steve Jobs said that time.

  Peak 2012 content.

  Further reading: this comment about how Harry Potter would read if written in the style of this book.

• ---

  Saturday, 7 Sept 2024 4:30 pm

  Demon Copperhead

  by Barbara Kingsolver

  Published 2022 560 pages

  

  In short

  What I liked

  • All the pieces up in the air, spectacularly choreographed—inherited perhaps from the source material
  • The language, colloquial but poetic
  • Villains were oily and despicable

  What could have been better

  • Relationships between people were believable but lacked emotional resonance
  • Demon (and maybe David before him) doesn’t evolve as a character

  In review

  I read a little bit of Charles Dickens in high school, and in university I purchased a really nice edition of A Tale of Two Cities which I enjoyed but which didn’t rock my world. Somehow I came by the opinion that Dickens wrote illuminating but fundamentally unexciting books about poverty and child labour and coal and grime, with matronly characters called Mrs. Flitterbottom caring for, and villains called Squenchton Crunchly conniving against, a child protagonist who, in spite of insurmountable adversity, triumphs through personal grit and principle.

  That’s basically what’s going on here: Demon Copperhead is an Appalachian retelling of Dickens’s classic semi-autobiography David Copperfield, a book that I haven’t read but which by now I think I get the broad strokes of.

  Our hero, Demon Copperhead (born Damon, a name that nearly no one uses with him), is born to an teenage mom in rural Lee County, Virginia in the late 1980s. His father is absent (dead, it turns out) and his mother has no business being a parent; Demon takes up the domestic slack. He spends his first ten years in crushing poverty but he meets hardship with equanimity and develops a frank, but never despairing, relationship with his position in life.

  Like a little blue prizefighter. Those are the words she’d use later on, being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom’s life. And if that’s how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I’ll take it. To me that says I had a fighting chance. Long odds, yes I know. If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie. He’ll grow up to be everything you don’t want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week motel squatting well back from the scenic highway. This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart or Christian, nonusing type of mother. Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.

  He grows up close with his neighbours the Peggots, and particularly with young Matthew Peggot (“Maggot” to Damon—I mean Demon). The difficulties of growing up with a mom who can’t look after herself matures Demon before his time, but he doesn’t fail to appreciate his childhood where he can: a love of comics, superheroes, and an abiding urge to see the ocean.

  Me though, I was a born sucker for the superhero rescue. Did that line of work even exist, in our trailer-home universe? Had they all quit Smallville and gone looking for bigger action? Save or be saved, these are questions. You want to think it’s not over till the last page.

  Things take a turn when his mom takes up with an abusive trucker called Murrel “Stoner” Stone and relapses into drug use; when she dies of an overdose, Demon is turned over to the foster system at eleven years old. His case workers are by turns inexperienced, optimistic, wilfully ignorant, and worn thin that they can’t muster the effort to care. Demon is shunted between foster families—first to a farmer who uses (eleven-year-old) foster boys as free labour on his tobacco plantation, where he meets the charismatic but unscrupulous Sterling “Fast Forward” Ford and the totally incorruptible Tommy “Waddles” Waddell. When the tobacco harvest is over, the farm no longer has need for him and he’s turned over to a poor family who force Demon to take up a part-time job to help them make ends meet (again, the boy is eleven years old) sorting trash behind a meth lab (at eleven).

  When I was eleven years old, I went to Club Med with my family. When Demon is eleven, he learns hard lessons about chance, about relying on other people, and about his place in American society and among the people he grew up with—but never loses his conscientious streak. He also gets nicotine poisoning.

  The villains of these sections—first the tobacco plantation owner, then the operator of te meth lab, and, in an oblique sense, his foster family—are driven to oiliness in turns by desperation and sheer malice, and while the misery that they inflict on Demon’s life is inarguable, the fire inside of him never really seems at risk of going out. Maybe that’s just the nature of the character, both here and in Dickens’s original, but it serves almost to declaw the awful stuff that happens to him.

  When his foster family finally hits financial rock bottom and decides to alight for Ohio, Demon runs away to Tennessee, where he suspects he may have a living relative. His trip to Murder Valley, TN is the stuff of American nightmares: long empty roads, truck stops populated by the desperate and bored, nights spent in the sticky runoff of fast food dumpsters. At length he finds his grandmother on his father’s side, a knot of an old woman who helps raise young girls and who has low opinions of men in general. She doesn’t intend to raise Demon herself but puts him in touch with a family back in Lee County who can take care of him: Coach Winfield and his daughter Angus.

  Winfield is the coach of the local high school football team and a minor local celebrity; Angus (born Agnes) is a toughie with principles that Demon really connects with. In the Winfield house, Demon’s fortunes turn around: Coach sticks with him and Agnes grows to be a close friend and confidante. He finds a mentor in his progressive guidance counselor Mr. Strong, and starts to develop an keen sense of the social injustice perpetrated against the people of Appalachia. As Demon moves into high school, Winfield trains him as a tight end for the Lee County Generals, thereby reaching the upper echelons of high school society.

  Fortunes turn again on a rough tackle and a broken leg; Demon is prescribed opioid painkillers in the aftermath and develops a dependence that erodes his comfortable life out from under him. At the same time, Coach Winfield’s latent alcoholism worsens and the assistant manager of the football team takes progressive financial advantage of the situation. Fast Forward, from back on the tobacco plantation, re-enters his life and Demon eagerly takes up with him again, even as it becomes clearer and clearer how Fast Forward uses and abuses everyone who puts their confidence in him—culminating in the all-but-abduction one of the Peggot relatives, Demon’s erstwhile crush Emmy.

  Around the same time, Demon enters his first proper relationship with Dori Spencer, the first new character in like 300 pages. Demon is smitten at first sight. Dori’s life revolves around her terminally-ill father, at once caring for him and stealing his prescriptions to consume recreationally. When her father dies, Demon and Dori move in together and Demon finds himself on the cusp of an adulthood he was truly not prepared for.

  The one light in his world is a burgeoning partnership with Tommy Waddell (also of the tobacco plantation), who’s now working at a local paper and with whom Demon starts publishing a comic about an Appalachia-themed superhero, to critical local acclaim.

  This doesn’t stave off the worst, when it comes:

  It was April, not quite a year after Vester, and it happened the way I knew it would. I came home and found her. [...]

  I almost didn’t feel anything at first, cleaning her up like I’d done so many times, getting her decent. And then the house, cleaning up her mess and her kit. Hiding stuff, before I made any calls. There were few to make. Thelma had run out of reasons to know her. Like everybody else. I had no wish to see the aunt again, but the EMTs said they had to get hold of next of kin, so I turned over Dori’s phone. Aunt Fred was in the contacts. I’d erased some other number first, but nobody cared to track down any mysteries. Another OD in Lee County. There’d been hundreds.

  And just like that, I was “the boy that went in there and found her.”

  Without much of a reason to keep living, Demon moves in to a drug house and spends his days only semiconscious. This meagre existence is interrupted by a scheme to bring him low before Fast Forward at the place where his father died, a local waterfall and swimming hole. However, a complex set of circumstances, including a raging storm and the presence of a Peggot relative with a big gun, lead to the (to be fair, blameless) death of the relative and of Fast Forward himself—which for Demon marks rock bottom.

  The choreography of rock bottom, over the last 120 pages or so, is something to behold from a technical perspective. Demon’s relationship with Dori, his partnership with Tommy Traddles, the abduction of Emmy Peggot, and the ongoing misery of unbreakable addiction—all are held aloft with Demon’s head just barely above the water. And while they’re resolved separately, it never feels like tying up narrative loose ends. Things eventuate mostly naturally.

  With nearly nothing left to lose, Demon enters a halfway house on the urging of his sort-of-aunt (it’s a long story) June Peggot to get clean to get his life back on track. Not another ordeal on the long list, his term at the halfway house comes to him almost as a vacation from the rough life he’s led to this point. Almost as a reward. Unburdened by addiction, he starts a webcomic and finds a measure of inner peace. He reconnects with Angus, who has, throughout it all, made herself available as a friend and confidante, the one steady presence in his life. Together they set out on a trip to finally see the ocean.

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