books
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. Follows three emotionally repressed generations of fathers and sons in the Austro-Hungarian empire, mostly concentrating on the sensitive lieutenant son and his stiff-upper-lip civil servant father in the years just before WWI. The Emperor makes a couple of appearances as someone who's both a cog and a person, in both cases quite irrelevant to the machine he's a part of. Women play stereotypical bit parts, though I guess you could say the men are stereotypical too and that's kind of the point. The reason we might be going to sympathise with anyone is their vulnerability to fate and society in general, and the massive upheaval headed their way in particular, and a lot of that is caused by the limitations of the roles society cast them in. It's mostly incidents in the army life of the sensitive son, as he has the misfortune to get disillusioned about the army and the point of it all even before WWI, which is when everyone is always portrayed as doing so. It's all very much about the poignancy of people who've outlived their world, and time passing, and people in general being quite small and helpless. There are a lot of exclamation marks and it makes everyone sound surprised and plaintive. It feels like if you look at it one way it combines mundanity with elegising people who didn't really have much to reccomend them, or if you look at it another way, it's quite a generous, tender acknowledgement of people's frailties.
The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner. 14th century nuns, about whom the point is basically that they don't do anything. And even when they do it's not treated any more dramatically than when they don't. But I liked it a lot, partly because I like reading about nuns, and partly because I like the author's style. She's crisp, and while she's not mean about the characters, she doesn't try to get you to like them either; the tone's matter of fact reportage. She doesn't exactly point out the absurd, either, but she leaves it there for you to see. When I think about books afterwards I'm probably too so what do you say about Life? but this kind of talks about how people both spend their lives absorbed in trivialities and periodically try do something that Means Something, or experience moments of trandescendence. I liked the place where it stopped, where the middle of things is made into an odd tableau just because Warner? Townsend Warner? doesn't go on, but because of that I was still in the zone and all, but what'll they say when she goes back to the convent? Will she ever be an anchorite? And who'll be the next Prioress?
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope. Alice feels her fiance John is too good for her and also leads a life that would stick her in the country and make her feel smothered, so she breaks it off with him and ends up engaged to her bad cousin George. Trollope seems to think we shoul forgive her for being a jilt, and for being indelicate in being able to engage herself to one man while loving another or something, but nowadays it's probably all the vacillation and mind-weighing. Remembering that whoever she marries is basically her life will probably aid you in forgiving her if her making a meal out of it annoys you. I like Trollope. Before I read him all I'd heard was how stuffy and bland he was, and I was surprised to find how much more grey he allows things to be, without nakedly awarding and punishing characters, and compared to Dickens and Hardy, wow his female characters are people. He makes a point of mentioning that they're intelligent and stubborn, and he acknowledges that marriage is a very different thing for a woman in his society than a man. And he has Glencora, a character we're supposed to like, seriously consider adultery, and sneer at "female purity" when she lives the life she's supposed to instead. I mean, Alice still ends up with the very superior John not because she decides to so much as because he does and she comes to admit that he is Just More Right than her. It feels the story is a bit different sometimes to it texture or shape or something. Which is probably to do with Trollope being himself more on the side of stuffy conservatism than anything, but trying to be scrupulously realistic, and having a story connected to characters he really knows, so sometimes he ends up with not what he would do but what they would do. One of my favourite things about the book was how Glencora and Palliser's marriage felt like the set-up for an arranged marriage fic, except even after she realises he loves her it's still not alright really, and it's awkward and argumentative.
The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Steampunk. Alternate history set in London. Not up to much at all. I was giving it credit at least for my getting through it, which doesn't always happen with adult f/sf, but with the end it became apparent just how much of a shambles it was, and I'm good at discounting ends. It hadn't been plotted out at all and it felt like it wasn't even first-draft status, it was just a snatch of notes. They hadn't the faintest idea what the point of it all was or what any of their characters' personalities was. Though I gleaned enough to dislike the one they spent most on. I also feel like at this stage, cheap shots at the problematic aspects of Victorian culture are pretty pointless. What about something that feels like intelligent critique and discussion that sounds like you have an understanding of the time you're playing with? And I wasn't happy with the fact they felt the need to show said main unlikeable character could go three times a night. I don't think the sex was supposed to be appealing, but why three times?
Room by Emma Donoghue. Jack is a five year old whose mother was abducted and imprisoned in a man's garden shed, for the purpose of rape. This was a very quick read for me. I feel like Donoghue was trying to do two things here: explore the perceptions of a child, specifically this idea she set up but then found rather complicated to carry out, that to Jack the room he's spent all his life in is the world and he doesn't understand the idea that most of the world is outside, and to treat sensational news stories a little more subtly, showing how that kind of perspective doesn't give victims much respect. The first part of the book was quite convincing; I didn't really like the way Donoghue tried to portray Jack's perceptions of his world by using Table and Carpet etc, but I could see what she was getting at. I liked how you could see how hard Ma was working to make his world. I went off Jack's perspective in the second part, partly because he was just too realistically annoying a child, unhelpfully selfish and preoccupied with different things to adults, and partly because his transition to the real world was a bit boring and felt like Donoghue wasn't willing to really push the angle she'd created or get rid of it. She probably should have switched to Ma, who felt like she was much more central to the points Donoghue wanted to make in this section.