stuff i read 26 january 2020
LOTR Reread: Appendix A: Annals of the Kings and the Rulers: I don’t know why fifteen-year-old me skipped the appendices but it would have signficantly augmented my enjoyment if I hadn’t. I’m starting with them this time and it’s the best decision I ever made in my life
(why was I not apprised that like 25% of the Peter Jackson films are stitched from the appendices). Tolkien is clearly not here to tell a story in the conventional sense, because what kind of storyteller worth his salt would have shoved all that Sauruman foreshadowing, the juicy Denethor backstory, the Aragorn/Arwen courtship into the appendix??? Tolkien gives zero fucks if everybody, even walk-on cameo characters, has four different names and important locations are routinely renamed something else and this causes confusion & consternation in his readers. Because what Tolkien does care about is creating a lived-in world. Nuggets of info that stuck with me: The echoes of Pelennor Field in the founding of the Mark (which the Steward of Gondor granted to Eorl the Young to requite the late, unlooked for charge that saved Gondor’s hide), the divine origins of the breed of horses that spawned Gandalf’s Shadowfax, why they call it Helms Deep. Can you tell I’m a Rohan loyalist lmao. Amidst the babel of names that I defy anyone to keep track of one begins to discern a pattern, a self-perpetuating cycle of vengeance, an ancestor who didn’t receive his due, an insult that demands an answer, and round and round it goes. Catelyn Stark was right, and Ellaria Sand was right: Where does it end? Wow what happened to the Númenorians really brought home to me that LOTR is a story about the ordeal of exile. Kate Nepvu shares her thoughts on Tor.com and my sentiments are in line with hers, re: Appendix A was presented suboptimally and I would’ve preferred a combined A & B especially since I’m approaching this material for the first time and haven’t heard 90% of these names before. As for the other appendices … I glanced at them cursorily, and if someone as smart as Kate didn’t get much out of an exhaustive “Baggins of Hobbiton” family tree I sure as hell wasn’t going to.
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002) The consensus seems to be it works better as an immigrant narrative than as an intersex or transgender narrative. I’m not saying “he’s a TERF throw him in the dungeon with JK Rowling” i’m saying parts of this book haven’t aged well (the gender essentialism). When I was fifteen I bounced off it bc I didn’t vibe with the narrative voice but now? The only way I could be having a better time is if I was high on cough syrup. I still think Cal’s voice is overly precious but I can recognize the authentic sentiments he’s trying to convey: every few pages a line hits me like a freight train.
The humor lies in the incongruence between the high subject matter and the low register in which the tale is told. Using as his frame the kind of intergenerational family saga that’s gone out of vogue, Eugenides has given us a (partial, but not less true) history of the American twentieth century. And that’s the part that has aged well. It’s not a radical take, but it’s much more critical of the status quo than I expected (Lefty’s surreal experience at his short-lived factory job stood out to me for the ferocity with which it took the worker’s side over capital’s side; also the Detroit riots as “Second American Revolution” holy smokes). Cal doesn’t have a dating history; what he does have is a family history. I found the final third of the book tough going bc “identity” takes center stage while “family” fades into the background-look, if I’m going to read a book steeped in teenage angst I expect you to do me the basic courtesy of taking the subject matter seriously! This is where Eugenides’s playful tone tells against him (alas, it worked so beautifully in the first half). The ending was perfect and poetic and I cried but I wish I didn’t have to wade through 200 pages of “the trials of puberty” to get there. I think it’s pretty inarguable Cal did not so much discover his gender identity at age fourteen as discover that being a girl sucked in every possible way, and found the first available exit strategy. Can’t blame the kid.
Nina Allan, The Dollmaker (2019) “A court dwarf wouldn’t count as a lover though-he barely even counted as a person.” “Time was a device invented by humans to keep themselves sane.” I read Nina Allan’s The Race a few years ago and it has HAUNTED me despite my inability to grok what she was doing, or indeed what was happening. I had the same experience with The Dollmaker, only this time I managed to overanalyze less and enjoy it more. Nina Allan has the unsettling gift of the obverse-Guillermo-del-Toro: instead of making the monstrous familiar she makes the familiar monstrous.
I went back over the book in my head after I was done to confirm that there were minimal speculative or supernatural elements. And yet you feel the cold edge of the uncanny in the shape of the very sentences. The Dollmaker is about a dollmaker, and about repressed & lonely misfits generally, but what it really is is an experiment in the form of the novel. The sheer recursivity of it is gobsmacking, stories within stories like nesting dolls, and what are the recurring archetypes? Conniving dwarves, persecuted homosexuals, unfaithful one-eyed queens, uneven friendships and imbalanced relationships. I’ve never seen anyone integrate nesting stories to such devastating effect except maybe Juliet Marillier, who has the advantage of working explicitly in the fairy-tale-retelling tradition. What Nina Allan is doing is much closer to Ted “i will fuck you up without you even noticing” Chiang. At the end of the day I still couldn’t tell you what the book was about but I know two things: (1) Allan is a short story writer who is only lately learning to be a novelist, and it shows. (2) Allan has the courage to portray cruel people with grotesque desires who don’t apologize for who they were, and I esteem her forever for that.