Another lovely sentence

Another lovely sentence, found, last night, in The Children's Book:

Philip is learning, for the first time, how to ride a bicycle.

Philip set off and fell off and set off and fell off and set off and pedalled half-way round the clearing, and fell off, and set off and rode, a little wobbly, right round the clearing.

This time, when Byatt uses the "and this ... and that ..." construction, she misses out the comma, deliberately, so that you can see how quickly Philip is climbing up back his bicycle and attempting to ride again, without falling. But he keeps falling, of course, again and again, again ... till he manages to ride, succesfully, upright, for a little way, and then falls off, again.

Now, here, Byatt inserts a comma after clearing, to show us a delay in his falling down after riding upright, and another, in his getting up. Then no comma, when he rides, finally, well enough to stay upright. When he finally does get it right, though a little shakily, he rides triumphantly - and very rhythmically, when we feel the whirring of the R sounds in rode ... right round ... clearing. The repeat of clearing gives a sense of his riding round and round.

Byatt breaks rules, brilliantly

Just started reading A S Byatt's Children's Book late last night, for my review for Starmag this month. A couple of pages on, and I found a gem of a sentence. It put me in mind of the alliterative sentences I came across in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse:

The whole of the thick stem was wrought of fantastic foliage, amongst which men and monsters, centaurs and monkeys, writhed, grinned, grimaced, grasped and stabbed at each other.

Then, more pages later, another:

They drove between hawthorn and hazel hedges, along curling lanes between overhanging woods of beech, and birch, and yew.

But this last one, above, has a very unusual sentence construction, or syntax:

woods of beech, and birch, and yew

Your average English teacher - or editor - would red-ink over the first and, in indignation. The traditional rule of thumb for a list of items is a comma after an item and none before the last one, with just an and, to mark the end of the list.

Byatt, here, breaks a rule - brilliantly, I think - by, first, inserting an and after the first comma after the first item beech. Then breaking yet another, she added a comma before the last and.

For the last rule breakage, an American would pooh-pooh over it, because that's alright in American syntax. The New Yorker editor would never correct "beech, birch, and yew". The Guardian editor would, probably blue-pencilling out that last comma.

This unusual phrasing at the end of that sentence has an agenda, actually.

This sentence is in the first sentence of the second paragraph of a Chapter 2, where Philip is driven in a fly from the train station, to Olive Wellwood's house Todefright, in Andreden, with his new friend Tom, Olive's son. Philip, a runaway, who is discovered living in Tom's friend Julian's father's museum, has never seen the countryside in this way, from a moving carriage.

Byatt could have not used the commas: just "beech and birch and yew". But this wouldn't have lent an even slower effect to Philip's observance, as it would with the added commas.

The commas, like in poetry, give some pause to the way Philip is seeing the beech, the birch and the yew. He's seeing a wide expanse of these countryside trees, with wonder. Together with the and's, he's taking in the trees even more slowly, from the beech to the birch, to the yew.

I shall be reading more pages tonight, and keeping an eye for more constructions like these.

Oneness

Oneness

By Leon Wing

He’s fit - he won,
And flips a full fifty-one

To his feet and feels
His nose on his toes,

Wondering if this is
A one-time feat, not

A wont, a oneness if he
Still wants once won

Blackmoor's use of tenses

Quite an interesting argument gone on in Fiction Desk over Edward Hogan's use of the present tense in his award-winning novel Blackmoor.

The blogger there has issues with writers using the present tense, saying they often utilise it in long sentences. Hogan, however, redeems himself somewhat by not doing that, but he loses it with bits of his prose when he exhorts the reader to look at something, using words like 'Look' and 'Behold'.

Hogan defends back with:
'The instructions to ‘look’, ’see’, and, ok, ‘behold’, had several functions. There was a certain amount of restrained imploring in this storytelling voice on behalf of the residents of areas which had (and continue to be) ignored. Secondly, I was trying to describe an entire village, so these ‘establishing shots’ helped. I read Under Milk Wood, etc, and tried to use the change in style to distance the voice from any of the characters, behind whom I had been closely focalised pages before. It does tend to split readers.'

On my part I have issues with writers writing about the past of the past, using the past perfect had. The amateurs invariably fall into the trap of continuing using had when telling the reader of some event that happened in the past of the story's current past, when they could have just abandoned it altogether once they have established the fact that that bit is in the past of this past.

Another method is not even using had at all, if the writer knows exactly when this past has occurred. For example, instead of "She had been to see the show before, actually. Now she was seeing it again.", you can write "She went to see the show last Thursday, actually. Now ...".

Using "went" is perfectly grammatically. I actually learnt that from a grammar text in school.

Full 2666 review

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

My review

According to Reiter, the main character in Book Five, the last book, “Semblance was an occupying force of reality”. This is how a reader should approach Bolaño’s immense 2666, which comprises five books in all. As with the faux reality in most writings, from literary to chick lit, to crime, for instance, the reader expects to read dialogue that is encompassed between quotation marks, double in American books, single in British ones. However, with 2666, be ready to suspend your usual view on how good writing should look like.

2666 is actually translated by an American. So, do not question the spelling, of words like colour as color, and of punctuations like double quotation marks, in this British edition. Moreover, when you read up to Book Four (if you intend to begin your reading journey from Book One, instead of randomly) the part about the crimes, you won’t find a single, nor even double quotes, anywhere in the conversations. Bolaño’s unusual stratagem actually works here. The upshot of this is immediacy. The reader gets directly into the mind of the characters talking to one another, as if you yourself have taken on their roles – you have become their semblance.

Yet another stratagem is paragraph manipulation. And, with this, I’m not talking about the normally recommended device of cutting long paragraphs into shorter ones. In most writings, the writer (or his editor) would divvy up any lengthy paragraph and make smaller ones, for easier reading. But no, in the same Book Four, you would be hard pressed to find such paragraphing. Instead, you’d come across pages and pages of long, huge, blocks of writing not relieved by breakage. Better still (or, is it, worse still, for some?) in Book One, you’d read, sometimes, for two to three pages, of just one sentence. The strange thing here is, it works, so perfectly, that astoundingly the reader does not get lost in the long train of words, nor get derailed grammatically.

Most of Bolaño’s characters in this tome are displaced personalities. The critics in Book One are constantly flying around the world, attending conferences, researching a German writer, Archimboldi, their sole obsession. In Book Two, Amalfitano is Chilean (like Bolaño) but lives in Mexico, in a small border city of St Teresa. Like the critics before him, he travels to and from South America and Europe. His daughter Rosa gets to go through airport customs via the EU gate while he is relegated to the non-EU one. In Book Three, a black American reporter Fate is sent to Mexico to cover a boxing match, meant for the sports writer, who died. Book Four is all about displaced Mexican women who have to leave their villages to work in the city, and most get murdered there. Finally, in Book Five, Reiter has to fight a war away from German, in Russia.

Of the violence in the books, certainly the Mexican women are the ones directly affected by it. But all the other characters, too, have some involvement in violence, no matter how removed. The reader meets his first intimation of unthinking violence in Book One, when the critics beat up their London taxi driver and derive pleasure akin to orgasm. In Book Two and Three Amalfitano’s daughter has to be spirited out of Mexico by Fate when she is in danger from her lover. Book Four, of course, is steeped in violence. So many women are raped, tortured and murdered, that the telling of their stories is depicted as if lifted directly from police reports. Each incident is told in unemotional, detached reportage, beginning with where and how the victim is found, and then the coroner’s verdict in gross detail, and finally her body is unceremoniously dumped in an unmarked burial ground.

Of all Bolaño’s characters in this novel, the most rounded is Archimboldi. In Book One he is the writer whom the critics are looking for in Mexico. In Book Five, predictably, the longest of the five novellas, Archimboldi is fully fleshed out. But before his introduction to the reader, the manner in which he is told that his mother had one eye and his father one leg only is almost fairy tale-like, albeit darkly: “His mother was blind in one eye.” But this fairy tale goes up in smoke as soon as we find out more about Archimboldi, or Reiter, his real name, and his predilection for holding his breath under water. Reiter is suicidal, rushing ahead of flying bullets.

The ugly violence of the killings aside, Bolaño’s final novel before his own death is a surprisingly easy read for this reviewer, even with the occasional three to five pages of a single continuous sentence. Whether you are averse to long syntactic constructions or simply accept them, you have to view them, or the whole work, just as a character in it views an Arcimboldo painting: get differing perspectives from the same painting depending on how one angles it.

Don’t be put off by any of this, or by the sheer number of pages to get through, a little below 900 pages. Trust me, you’ll surprise yourself with how easily and quickly you’ll flip the pages in anticipation - you’d be having a gripping good read throughout. Also, you are getting five books in one package, at a one-book price.

--

An edited version appeared in the Malaysian Sunday Star paper on June 28 2009.


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Remembering Tianamen - alternative review of Beijing Coma

Beijing Coma by Ma Jian

My review

From the first page on, life literally flashes by the protagonist. He is told: ‘This is a clear sign that now on you’re going to have to take life seriously.’

Dai Wei, a Beijing University student, has been shot in the head in the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. The story proper begins as the narrator switches to Dai Wei, now in a coma.

We journey with Wei, from his birth, childhood and adulthood, to finality. We see him falling for his childhood love Lulu, who later betrays him; a Hongkongese A-Mei, who breaks his heart, is killed in Tiananmen Square and might have come back as a sparrow in his last days; and then Tian Yi, who escaped death and to the US. We read how he and his friends in Southern University in Guangzhou devour foreign literature, like Kafka’s, and ideas, like Freud’s. We follow him to Beijing University where he studies biology, and which is where he gets involved in student protests for government reforms. We experience his sensations while he lies in a coma, being cleaned and fed through a tube by a despairing mother, who even if she exhorts him to die soon still attempts to find him healers. Interspersed within Wei’s narrative is some rather clinical observation of his medical condition.

Life has never been easy for Wei, even at birth, when he fell out from his mother, into a ‘cold concrete floor’, his head splitting with pain. This is like a foretelling of his fate, of being shot in the head.

When he was a teenager, the police, interrogating him about a banned book he copied out and gave to Lulu, threatened him with boiling water from a flask. They told him: ‘If we don’t teach you a lesson now, you’ll end up with a bullet in your head.’ These words never took as he got shot later as an adult.

All that cannot compare to other horrors and turpitudes of a country’s regime. During the period of the one-child policy, birth control officers carried out forced abortions at family planning clinics, throwing foetuses into buckets, strangling new babies.

One kind of horror which traumatizes Wei was experienced by his father in internment camp: cannibalism. His father might have been eaten himself if he wasn’t moved out to Shandung. A doctor he talks to in Wuxuan, researching such atrocities, also adds that local citizens proved their loyalty to the Party by executing friends and neighbours. Wei learns that ‘revolution’ in Chinese characters is written as ‘elimination of life’.

Wei himself experiences cannibalization of a sort when his mother had to sell off one of his kidneys to fund his medical upkeep. Wei gives us a blow by blow account of how the doctors remove his kidney - without anaesthetics. The descriptions wouldn’t look amiss among cut-and-kill scenarios in American Psycho.

The reader can expect similar minute details throughout the entire novel, especially in the Tiananmen Square pages. Wei likens the scenes in the Square to some movie set. However the dialogue is not so much akin to a film as sometimes it can be a little stilted and formal. But, surprisingly, this works here, because the reader could be watching a Chinese opera, particularly one set on an immense stage with stage directions and asides aplenty, with a preponderance of characters. At best the writing can sometimes read like late 80’s New Journalism investigative articles you find in Rolling Stone and Esquire magazines.

However there are some moments of lyricism when, in love, Wei sees Tian Yi as a ‘celestial fairy about to take flight’. That aside, one of the most poignant passages can be found in a visit from Tian Yi when she touches comatose Wei’s foot, sending him into an almost erotic paroxysm.

Nearing the book’s end, things are looking bleak for Wei and his mother, who refuses to sign the demolition agreement to her house and receive a pittance of a compensation. She is slowly driven to insanity as she is persecuted for being a member of the Falun Gong; her electricity, water and phone cut off. Her neighborhood is being razed to the ground for a new shopping complex, whose chairman is none other than Lulu. Their house is the only one standing, bulldozed and rammed, just like Wei’s friends were by the Chinese army in Tiananmen Square. Nearing the end, Wei is now finally starting to see light behind his eye lids, when before, his entire Weltanschauung while in a coma has been through his ears and nose.

At the close of the book the reader encounters a déjà vu. Without disclosing the dénouement, suffice it to say, the reader may view this as Gestalt parallelism, yin yang, or karma - no matter which, all very similar and universal.

Also, Wei is finally told: ‘But once you’ve climbed out of this fleshy tomb, where is there left for you to go?’ Where indeed? If you believe in karma, when one does not have anywhere left to go, there is no cycles left to endure, one has reached the apex (just like Wei finally seeing himself in a public square with just one building standing, atop in an iron bed) – Nirvana.


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Note: This is the alternative review, different from the one published last year in Starmag.

A cool-er ebook reader is here

It's here, or rather there, in the UK and US only.

But, still, it's nice to know there is another one. (Drool, drool)

It looks like an iPod-dy e-reader, only 7.2 by 4.6 by 0.4 inches, comes in a few colours. It even has a little wheelie (well, not really) control on the right bottom corner.

One thing that's not a plus for me is it only reads PDF and text files.