The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 30 Dec 2012 12:06 AM PST Our columnist is in search of something more than a band of male creatures questing and fighting. SO the family went to watch Peter Jackson's The Hobbit today (Christmas eve). I didn't hate it, but at one point I forgot that it was the first part of a trilogy and felt acute distress that there was a lot more story left to be told. "How much longer do I have to sit here?" I thought. I don't think I shall go for the next film. (Tolkien/Peter Jackson fans reading this, your hate e-mail will not be forwarded to me so save your energy.) Gimli is my favourite character in The Lord Of The Rings books that follow The Hobbit and I disliked how he was portrayed as a figure of fun in Peter Jackson's film trilogy. In The Hobbit, when they're not fighting (or running from) orcs, the dwarfs generally behave like a bunch of clowns and look like the hairy, short and beefy creatures you imagine them to be (based on mythology and Tolkien's descriptions). However, Thorin Oakenshield, Fili and Kili are portrayed as handsome, vertically-challenged human men in The Hobbit, not dwarfs – and that's most definitely about PJ knowing that eye candy sells movie tickets. I read The Lord Of The Rings but did not get very far with The Hobbit, although it is said to be an easier read. I may give it another go if only in an attempt to remove the bad taste Martin Freeman, as Bilbo Baggins, has left in my mouth – I prefer him as John Watson in the TV series Sherlock. But, really, Freeman or no Freeman, The Hobbit is just a trifle too male and hairy for my tastes. Although he created a few significant female characters (for The LOTR, not The Hobbit), Tolkien doesn't allow them much space in his books. Perhaps he didn't know much about women and didn't feel he could portray them well or believably. Or perhaps he just didn't think they were terribly interesting (as a sex) and so didn't bother with them. The Hobbit was initially written for Tolkien's young sons who probably would not have cared for women characters. However, the author expanded and revised the book for publication and could have added to the cast to include women, but didn't. I understand PJ has included a female in his cast – an elf named Tauriel, played by Evangeline Lilly who was in TV's Lost. I'm sure a sexy elf makes good business sense and PJ knows that he can't rely on Cate Blanchett for that: Galadriel is just too unnerving with her mysterious smiles and the echo-y voice-overs when she's communicating telepathically with Gandalf. Still, those scenes would have at least added some variety to the book. I'm not interested in romantic sub-plots (my children expected Galadriel and Gandalf to kiss when she held his hands – horrors!), just something more than a band of male creatures questing and fighting. I wonder if there will be many books in the coming year about questing and fighting. Will The Hobbit movies encourage the publication of fantasies featuring dragons and (sexy) dwarfs? Rachel Hartman's Seraphina has dragons quite unlike what readers of high fantasy are used to and the sequel will be published mid-year, but we shall have to wait and see about the dwarfs. Perhaps someone will write a new version of Snow White in which the heroine falls in love with Grumpy instead of a prince? I'd read that! > Daphne Lee reads to wonder and wander, be amazed and amused, horrified and heartened and inspired and comforted. She wishes more people will try it too. Send e-mails to star2@thestar.com.my and check out her blog at daphne.blogs.com/books. |
| Posted: 30 Dec 2012 12:05 AM PST Joseph Anton – A Memoir An acclaimed author's memoir of living under a death sentence ruminates on some very important issues in today's world. SOME books make for great reading, others are important to read. Salman Rushdie's memoir, Joseph Anton, which recounts his years living under a death sentence fatwa following the publication of the infamous The Satanic Verses, is a book that fits both categories. Given that it is penned by the Booker Prize-winning Rushdie, considered to be one of the great writers of our time, it may go without saying that the memoir is an excellent read. What makes it an essential read, however, is the way in which the events outlined in the book continue to resonate so strongly today, almost 24 years after they were first set in motion. Intolerance, religious fundamentalism, and freedom of speech are salient issues that we continue to grapple with today, so Joseph Anton's publication in September seems very timely indeed. Rushdie's story is one of those real-life accounts that seems right out of the pages of fiction. The book begins on Valentine's Day in 1989, when he receives a phone call at his London home from a BBC journalist telling him that Iran's spiritual leader at the time, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had proclaimed a fatwa demanding Rushdie's execution. His crime was writing The Satanic Verses, which was seen as blasphemous against Islam. With a sizeable bounty on his head and the religious "call to arms" nature of the fatwa, Rushdie instantly becomes a marked man. This is the start of the author's life in hiding, as he is forced to live under special police protection while moving secretly from house to house. He is asked to choose an alias to conceal his real identity, and he picks "Joseph Anton": a combination of two favourite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov. Meanwhile, protests rage across the world against The Satanic Verses, people are calling for Rushdie's death, the book is banned in multiple countries, and within Britain public and political opinion is divided over whether Rushdie deserves the special treatment of police protection (at taxpayers' expense) or whether he has simply brought all this upon himself. The author would go on to live in this manner for more than nine years, and it would be 2002 before British Intelligence finally lifts the protection accorded to him. During this time, Rushdie struggles to maintain some semblance of a normal life, as he falls in (and out) of love, tries to be a good father, and of course, continues writing. Written in the third person – Rushdie refers to himself as "he" throughout – Joseph Anton may surprise those who are used to Rushdie's more dense and layered prose in his fiction. While the writing style amply displays his flair for language and dry humour, it is also very down-to-earth and relatable. The book is not without its flaws, one of which is a tendency to slow to a crawl in parts. As he himself says, long periods in his life during this time were spent in stasis, and not even a writer of his calibre can make reading about drudgery feel exciting. The book is also very much Rushdie's opinion of Rushdie, which can sometimes seem rather gratingly high. But for all his tendency to self-aggrandise, there can be no downplaying what the man has lived through, and you'd be hard-pressed to read Joseph Anton without keenly feeling the loss of all those years in his life. Things that we take for granted – visiting our parents, going on a date, taking holidays abroad, playing in the park with our children – are near impossible for Rushdie during this time in his life, and driving this painful point home is one of the book's fortes. As with most memoirs, the book also offers many voyeuristic pleasures, with Rushdie recounting his relationships with the women in his life. Here, he is often as brutally honest about his own flaws and failings as he is about his partners'. His accounts of his love for his sons, meanwhile, and his very real fear for their safety, are some of the most touching parts of the book. Also exciting is his hobnobbing with many famous names, ranging from the late Harold Pinter, the playwright, and celebrity chef and "domestic goddess" Nigella Lawson to rock star and humanitarian Bono. Rushdie's observations and anecdotes on those who share the literary scene with him too are quite delightful, encompassing everyone from Roald Dahl to Arundhati Roy. What comes through even more, though, is the efforts of those around him to champion his cause: the many officers who voluntarily put themselves in danger to protect him, publishers and booksellers who championed his works in the face of assassination threats, other writers who at great risk to speak up on his behalf. To them, Rushdie generously and repeatedly pays homage. They are fighting, he asserts, not just for his freedom but for freedom of speech itself. For at it's core, that is what Joseph Anton is about – that art can and should be questioned, discussed, praised and denigrated, but never curtailed. In weaving his own story with that of the fatwa, what Rushdie has done is put a human face to that issue; it may be relatively simple to disregard exactly what it means to call for the death of a person, but it becomes a lot more difficult to stomach when you think of that person as a husband, father, brother, son and friend, one who is blessed, like the rest of us, with all-too-human strengths and failings. |
| Analogue and ancient vs digital and modern Posted: 30 Dec 2012 12:03 AM PST Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore WHILE most of us have become enamoured of our gadgets and exhilarated by new technological development, I think it's fair to say that we feel a sense of unease when we contemplate what we might stand to lose from our headlong rush to embrace the digital future. As far as reading is concerned we are on the verge of a revolution as enormous as the one created in the 15th century by Johannes Guttenberg, the inventor of the printing press. But we also experience certain nostalgia for what we are leaving behind, including the physical book and independent bookstores, both of which are currently endangered species. Can we have the best of both worlds? Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore is a timely novel that takes these questions onboard. Clay Jannon is an unemployed web designer; his only job experience to date was a spell doing web designs for a Bay Area bagel company. As he wanders the streets of San Francisco (safely distancing himself from the distractions of the Internet), he happens upon a small bookshop in a less than salubrious street, and notices a card in the window advertising a vacant position. The proprietor of the bookshop is one Mr Penumbra who asks him, somewhat portentously, "What do you seek on these shelves?" Indeed, this turns out to be a very unusual bookshop, and Clay wonders how it manages to stay in business at all. Apart from some shelves near the front of the store which hold more conventional stock, most of the store consists of thousands of leather-bound volumes, stacked so high that Clay must shin up perilously tall ladders to retrieve them. Clay works the graveyard shift. There are almost no real customers as such, but a succession of elderly folk who come at night to borrow books from what is known as "the waybacklist". They never browse the shelves, but seem to know exactly what title they are looking for. Clay is charged with writing down in a log book the details of who came, what they borrowed, and how they looked. But Clay has been forbidden by Penumbra to look inside the books himself. He manages to hold out for a month before curiosity gets the better of him when his roommate comes to visit the store. They discover, to their amazement, that the volumes are written in some kind of code. There's clearly a puzzle to be solved and Clay sets out to crack it in ways the computer nerd knows best, drawing into the quest his friends. There's Kat Potente the ultimate geek girl and Google employee who wanders into the bookstore in response to a targeted ad Clay has placed to draw in customers; and Neel, Clays former online role play partner who has become a start up entrepreneur. Neel shares Clay's love for the Dragon Song Chronicles, a fantasy trilogy, which has a part to play in the unfolding mystery. The action shifts to New York and the headquarters of a mysterious society which the friends must infiltrate to find answers. Sloan keeps things moving admirably, and even though the plot is a little thin in places when you hold it up to light, it's an enjoyable read which includes many elements that are bound to appeal to a younger generation of readers who have grown up with fantasy fiction and computers. Sloan's tale very cleverly combines the analogue and ancient with references to online culture and high-tech fantasy. He is spot-on in his observations about our relationship with the digital world. But in the end, it is not the high-tech skills, impressive as they are (especially the Hadoop application that solves a complex problems by sending the data to thousands of computers for processing) that win the day. Instead, it is close attention to detail, and the ability to read between the lines of a favourite novel that solve the riddle. This is a rather comforting conclusion. What I enjoyed most about the book was its wry humour. You sense Sloan laughing at himself as much as at his characters, and there are some great throw-away lines. One that made me chuckle: "Kat bought a New York Times but couldn't figure out how to operate it, so now she's fiddling with her phone." It's fitting that Sloan's first novel was inspired by a tweet from a friend who mistook a sign for a 24-hour bookdrop (presumably outside a library) for a 24-hour bookshop. Intrigued by the concept of a bookstore that's open round the clock, Sloan wrote a short story that he self-published with Amazon Kindle (it is still up on Sloan's website, robinsloan.com) and the novel grew from that. While the novel could be easily read on the digital device of your choice, the publishers have struck a blow for the book as artifact: the attractive cover only reveals its secret when you view it in the dark! |
| You are subscribed to email updates from The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 ulasan:
Catat Ulasan