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Memoirs of a Survivor is slow going—not that it's difficult, exactly, but it's so rich, so dense and heady and abstract, that I can only read ten or fifteen pages at a stretch; and then I have to read something else, like eating a sorbet between courses.
So last night I cleansed the palate with another children's book, The Bad Beginning—the first volume in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket a.k.a. Daniel Handler: read the first few chapters aloud to Claire, then the remainder after she'd gone to bed. Mixed results—she's not yet equipped with the proper irony mechanisms to fully appreciate the authorial voice at play. And that voice is pitch-perfect—just impeccable in its mordant prissiness. My only disappointment—and this is mostly due to my preconcpetions and expectations—is that Handler hasn't exercised the same extremity in his plotting as in his style: though the voice is so reminiscent of Edward Gorey's, he never quite achieves the Goreyan absurdity for which I'd hoped. Perhaps things pick up later in the series. Then again, maybe it's best if they don't, considering the audience: Claire doesn't care for Gorey—The Gashlycrumb Tinies left her appalled: her lack of ironic distance, again.
Also drank in another volume of Lone Wolf and Cub. I forget the number. But it's the one in which a million zillion people try to kill Ogami, and he prevails by being smarter, stronger, faster, harder, more disciplined, more patient, more determined and more honorable than everybody else  . Ogami is such a superman, you'd think the schtick would start to wear thin after a while... but nine volumes in, it hasn't: because the focus isn't really on Ogami, but on the people he encounters in his wanderings. Kazuo Koike said that the key to creating a great manga is to create great characters, and in story after story, he does—all of them real and human and flawed—and then sets them, in all their pettiness and flaws, against the unattainable ideal represented by Ogami. It occurs to me now that Lone Wolf and Cub not really Ogami's story at all—it's the story of traditional Japanese culture in decline, and Ogami is not so much a character as he is a yardstick by which to quantify that decline—an ideal of Japanese culture against which to measure the reality.
Have also been reading bits of Wm S. Burroughs, but that's for research: the "Seven Souls" section of The Western Lands. Found the text online, and I'm using my word processor to rearrange it to suit my needs. Cut-ups. William might approve, or not.
And I'm also skimming—er—Managing Your Career... For Dummies, okay? There, I've said it. |
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