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Last night, I (also) finally read A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and finished The Sandman Companion by (the named-by-viciously-sadistic-parents) Hy Bender.
I really didn’t like Farewell to Arms to begin with, Hemingway’s much-vaunted prose style seemed repetitive, artificial, obviously manipulative and constrictive – I felt as if I was chained and wearing blinkers as the language failed to sufficiently explain and focus on points I was interested in while droning its trees/bark/leaves, rain/roads/fields, bare/brown/muddy mantra.
...Then the sudden time lapse: I forgot I was reading a book and got completely lost in it, surfacing around two and a half hours later to wonder how I suddenly had thirty pages left and those gentle repetitions had slickly mutated into heavily charged, highly emotive imagery and a palpable sense of climax that had little to do with the war. Three hours well spent - I’ve no idea why I didn’t invest them earlier. Unfortunately, even despite its magnificent ending it still pales in comparison to The Naked and The Dead: but then, what modern book about war doesn’t?
Somewhat less thrillingly: each chapter of The Sandman Companion deals with one of the collected story arcs and is divided into three parts. The first part is a detailed summary of that story arc, its plot and its characters – useful, since if you’ve already read The Sandman then you get to read it again, but horribly condensed and written without Gaiman’s skill, artful dialogue and any pictures, and of course if you haven’t read The Sandman, it provides an invaluable resource of detailed plot spoilers for those who don’t like surprises in their fiction. The second part is an attempt to tease some of the underlying imagery, influences and layers of meaning from the story. I’m a little more forgiving of Hy Bender here as he’s up against authors like Straub, Ellison, Delaney and Wolfe. They’ve already done this type of analysis on The Sandman and it’s obvious that he didn’t want to repeat their efforts. Unfortunately, while occasionally making some good points he falls far short of the previously set watermark and it all just looks hopelessly amateurish, unperceptive and adolescent in comparison. Last part is an ongoing interview with Gaiman and this is actually pretty good. In conversation with Gaiman, Bender finally begins to convey his intelligence and attention to trivia and detail; and he asks some decent questions. Nice to find out the kind of books Gaiman was reading and to get a feel for the real seat-of-the-pants creative process that he was hurling himself through to create a monthly comic that seemed so serenely well-planned. Some nice little anecdotes and revelations, some stuff that would’ve been better kept hidden behind the curtain. I bought it for £3.99, reduced from £13.99. I wouldn’t recommend paying much more than that. Especially considering Farewell to Arms cost me 60p. And a disturbed night’s sleep. Listening to the rain.
[ 24-07-2001: Message edited by: ephemerat ] |
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Basically what she did was she started in Key West, which is where she lives, and she had x amount in the beginning for her rental deposit, also she got a rent-a-wreck car in every location and didn't include car payments in the budget.