dukedom's 2009 reading

Plans? People have plans? My general method of choosing reading is to grab something from the infinite TBR pile when I see I have a book-sized window of time opening up - I tend to lose the thread of a novel when I've put it down for more than a day, and so try to have enough time on a weekend to read all of it. Short stories, poetry and short nonfiction I can read in an evening, and so I'll be reporting on those too. Expect I read less than most of you.

I will keep a list of books-read here.

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
The Luminous Depths, by David Herter
The Situation, by Jeff Vandermeer
The King's Last Song, by Geoff Ryman
The City & The City, by China Mieville
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin
Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon
Extraordinary Engines, Nick Gevers, ed.
Small World by David Lodge
Last Days by Brian Evenson
Flashforward by Robert Sawyer
Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson
City at the End of Time by Greg Bear
Grazing the Long Acre by Gwyneth Jones

According to avaland, the duke protests too much.

Expect I read less than most of you.

Not less than me. LT encouraged my book-acquisition tendencies, so lately they've been coming in faster than I can read them; and consequently I have stacks of "Hey, that looks sorta interesting" books all over the place now.

And as a result, I'm starting about a book a day, and finishing about a book a week....

Hi Michael! We're finally in the same group!

Hi amandameale! Amusing that it took so long.

I am going to jump the gun and start reporting on my reading now, if everyone's OK with that. Why wait? I am now about 1/3 through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and liking it so far.

That's on my TBR pile, and I've heard very mixed reviews: some loved it, some hated it.

Hello everyone, I just signed up having been invited by Avaland on the basis of some comments I made and a quirky background (I think). I am reading ‘The Buddha Of Suburbia” by Hanif Kureishi which has me sliding into memories I had forgotten I had. (When was the last time I thought about eating a Walnut Whip while watching Steptoe and Son?) Besides evoking my adolescence this book has me laughing out loud which rather amuses my wife but no longer draws the old ‘what are you reading?’ queries which makes me think I may be more easily amused now that I am in my upper forties.

I was listening to some Radio Four (BBC) Podcasts that documented the lives of people growing up as “English Asians”, and feeling the tensions in their voices I remembered having seen some of a BBC production of The Buddha of Suburbia a long time ago, which then had me keeping an eye out for a copy, and what do you know, I was in a ‘Crossword’ book store in Mumbai a couple of weeks back and there on the shelf was a copy waiting for me. It’s often a long and convoluted road to the books I choose to immerse myself in.

Hello BeesleSR,

Happy to have you here.

#3, I know what you mean - I usually have about six on the go...

Hi and welcome, BeesleSR. Re Kureishi, I also read The Black Album, which is, admittedly, no Buddha of Suburbia but was quite interesting in its portrayal of the experiences of a muslim college student in London. The burning of an unnamed, yet clearly identifiable book, lies at the heart of the character's profound ambivalence. Not especially humorous, but worth a look if you want a wander down the (memory) lanes of London...

(Checking in to see if you two are back yet....)

Plans? People have plans?

Seconded. My thing is that if any given book hits a boring patch, I will immediately reach for the next book. (And there's always another book within reach.)

So I have a zillion books started and (theoretically, at least) still in progress, but the number of books actually read through to the end is depressingly low.

>11 AsYouKnow_Bob: the power is back on and the internet works. So we are back - sort of. And you?

Yes, power came back Monday evening: about 90 hours in the dark.

(I'm taking the day off to play lumberjack and clean up some fallen trees.)

Edited to add Well, make that "to clean up most of ONE fallen tree", anyway. Bigger by the cold light of day than it looked in the dark. The biggest tree is now off the car, anyway. (Just a dented fender, no significant damage.)

I finished The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao yesterday. Liked it; will do a review and say more later. Started the novella The Luminous Depths by David Herter, a sequel of sorts to his On the Overgrown Path; so far it's fine.

Finished The Luminous Depths, and The Situation by Jeff Vandermeer, the latter via that tag-team method that avaland mentioned. Have started The King's Last Song by Geoff Ryman, my first actual book for 2009. I heard Ryman read a selection from it at last Readercon; the reading was very moving, so I want to read the novel now. Cambodia in the 12th, 2oth and 21st centuries.

Is the Ryman book a followup in any way (other than locale) to Ryman's wonderful the unconquered country?

AFAIK the novel is not SF/F. I haven't read the novella, but a quick glance at its first few pages doesn't show any character names matching those in the novel. Ryman has spent a lot of time in Cambodia, I understand.

Am still just partway through The King's Last Song; it's quite good so far, but I'm now about to start the excruciating part that I heard Ryman read, and want to have a solid block of time for it. Meanwhile, am reading online bits here and there, as usual.

Wow, someone who used the word "grok" in 2009! (re "here")

Off to check out "there".

If it's any comfort, that's not a common usage these days among SF fans. It does show his age, doesn't it?

and mine, for knowing it. hehe

I finished The King's Last Song, and liked it a lot. The excruciating part I mentioned was as sad as I remembered; the Cambodians suffered unimaginably during their wars (our Cambodian wars too, since we in the US kickstarted the Khmer Rouge into high gear, so to speak). Haven't written my review yet - sorry if that's becoming a refrain here. I'll probably have this review done before I finish the Oscar Wao one.

Meanwhile, the bookstore angels this weekend dropped off an ARC of China Mieville's next novel, The City & The City, upcoming in May. I'm about 60 pages in so far, and loving it. It's more like one of his short stories than one of the Bas-Lag novels or Un Lun Dun.

I think I now grasp the relationship each of Mieville's two cities has to the other, in this novel, and it's a lovely and gripping conceit. If you're a Mieville fan, I advise you not to read any review, nor even the jacket copy - the discovery of that relationship is most of the fun so far. Trust Mieville to come up with something like this.

thanks for the heads up and the warning. I've read everything of Mieville's and liked it all, so "the city & the city"* will have to be obtained. I thought un lun dun was charming and just the book for people who don't like Mieville's more grotesque flavors.

*corrected. nb.

The title has an ampersand (&), not an "and,", FYI.

>22 dukedom_enough: Dukedom's glowing delight with this new read and his gloating over it was so apparent last night, that his wife had to retreat upstairs to get away from it. She was trying to finish another book at the time and he knows she likes Miéville as much as he does. . .

Adding The City & The City to the groaning wishlist.

>26 avaland: Michael, watch out for her...I understand she reads YOUR books while you're at work.

Hah! I brought the Mieville to work with me yesterday.

Well done!
;-)

>29 dukedom_enough: You're a little sneaky, too!

#22 - finally tumbled to your copy being ARC. "This title will be released on May 26, 2009."
talk about a teaser post.
no, not at all. It was my obliviousness which didn't hit me over the head till i just went to Amazon and attempted to order "the city & the city."

bobmcconnaughey@32,

Sorry I wasn't clear. It'll be worth the wait. Afraid I'll be teasing people with my review, too - the novel is very susceptible to spoilers, and every reader should approach it without preconceptions.

>32 bobmcconnaughey: It's nice I still have friends at the bookstore:-)

My review of The City & The City:

\At the center of The City & The City, China Mieville's new novel, is a stunning, beautiful conceit that is revealed, in its basic dimensions, over the first six or so chapters. Reading these was about the most fun I've had with speculative fiction in years; then the book got better as Mieville developed his idea still further, from that point. The reader gets a taste of the lived experience of a world existentially very different from ours, or any world I've ever encountered in fiction. The development of his idea's implications is as thrilling as a well-paced chase scene. I repeatedly was left shaking my head in amazement as I read.

What idea? Here we have a problem. The novel is due for public release May 26, 2009; I have an ARC, an advance reader copy. The conceit is so central that most every review will outline it, thus spoiling the reader's joy in discovering it through the consciousness of Inspector Tyador Borlu, of the Extreme Crime Squad. As that suggests, this novel is in part a mystery, a police procedural starting from the discovery of a murder victim in Beszel, Mieville's imaginary city somewhere in Europe. The mystery, Borlu's encounters with his city, its people and the greater world - it's the 21st century, and Beszel is connected via TV, Internet and mobile phones to the rest of Earth - is well done. In contrast with his earlier novels, e.g. Perdido Street Station, Mieville uses a sparer, clipped prose style here, reminiscent of some of his short stories.

But the detection is perfectly integrated with the speculation, and can't be discussed separately. I can say that Mieville has attained a new, higher level of artistry in this novel, challenging his readers to keep up. In place of his usual flood of dazzling concepts and images is the rigorous working-out of one great, immensely metaphorically fertile, conceit. If you're already a Mieville admirer, that should be all you need to know - indeed, you didn't need to hear from me at all. Don't read a review first. If you haven't read him yet, Perdido Street Station or his YA Un Lun Dun should show you how good he is when writing fantasy, although those earlier novels are very different from the new book. If you must, read the reviews when they appear and miss some of the marvelous experience of the early chapters - but do read this book.

And I'll say more, later, after the novel is released in May.

"The City & The City" sounds fascinating! Mieville is an author I have never warmed to; what I've read of his work has reminded me of warmed-over Mervyn Peake, more concerned with grotesquerie than story. The news that he has amped up the narrative and put a sock in the rhetorical excess makes this new novel sound much more to my taste.

>37 timjones: I love his "rhetorical excess" in some of his previous books (I think him the illegitimate spawn of Angela Carter - among others), but mostly I love him for his sexy imagination. I have only just started the novel, but the prose is indeed spare and clipped and reminded me a little of Indridason's police procedural Jar City because of it.

timjones,

You could sample his alternate mode, I think, in some of the stories in Looking for Jake, without waiting for the new novel.

I'm rather a fan of his invention - don't know if that's what you mean by grotesquerie. There will definitely be people for whom the conceit of the new book does nothing.

un lun dun though aimed at the YA audience is excellent and doesn't display the "biological perverseness" that i enjoyed, but defn. turned off the 3 people to whom i loaned his books.

I may have been a bit harsh - it's just that I'd heard his work hyped to the skies before I'd tried it, so my expectations were probably set too high. Expectations duly lowered, I will take dukedom_enough's recommendation and try Looking for Jake. Thanks!

My Oscar Wao review, finally:

One reason to read novels is to glimpse worlds different from our own. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao presents two such worlds. Oscar de Leon's family is from the Dominican Republic, ruled 1930-1961 by the brutal dictator Trujillo - like much other history, a world not generally well known in the US. Oscar, raised in New Jersey, grows up as much Nerd as Dominican, loving science fiction, fantasy, comics, and gaming - a world perhaps somewhat better known. A proper nerd, he has zero success with women, in contrast with typical, male Dominican sexual charm.

The novel is as much the story of his family - especially his sister and mother - as of Oscar himself. A small act of defiance leads to Oscar's grandparents' ruin, and the family's subsequent, recurring ill fortune is ascribed to a curse placed on them by Trujillo, a curse that Oscar must encounter in his turn. The misfortunes of three generations make for a compelling story. The possibility of a curse puts the novel into the magical-realist realm, though one is never sure. The Dominican world, both on the Island and in its US diaspora, is interestingly presented and explained.

Explained often, but not always; many bits of Oscar's two worlds are not translated for us. The novel is in English, but numerous words, phrases and, sometimes, sentences in Dominican Spanish appear without translation. The online Spanish-to-English dictionaries I consulted did not have a translation for many of these. Similarly, Diaz uses geeky allusions, metaphors and similes throughout, without explanation. The meanings of these bits of nerdspeak are usually reasonably clear from context, but even this longtime SF reader - perfectly able to "differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman" - had to resort to Internet searches at many points. The pattern is established early on, when an elementary-school contemporary of Oscar's is said to be "so pretty she could have played young Dejah Thoris". It's clear that the reference is meant to be a superlative, but Google can't supply nonreaders of SF with the sort of emotional resonance - Dejah Thoris doubtless has figured in many geeky, adolescent-male fantasies over the past century - that they might have for a more widely known example.

We have, then, a novel the general story of which is clear, but with numerous parts that require research; this book might not have been entirely readable before the era of online search. Few readers besides (I presume) Junot Diaz can feel all these allusions, and the Spanish segments, with the same conviction he does. Wondering why, I speculate that Diaz is aiming at emphasizing a disconnect between what we know and what we should know.

Is "our" - most readers' - ignorance of the fine points of the geek world an ironic echo of our - certainly mine, and I think most US citizens' - ignorance of the Trujillo years and ongoing Dominican problems? It's no great issue that we might not know who Darkseid is, but a scandal that we don't know about Jesus de Galindez. Oscar does not get to escape history; we comfortable Americans often do. If we care about literature of the fantastic, then which is more fantastic, the green warriors and beautiful women of John Carter's dying Mars or the surreal Trujillo dictatorship and the diaspora from a living island? The Burroughs novels might well be better known than the Dominican history. This irony has been noted before, but it's one we ought not to forget.

I see the review posted previously to mine for Oscar Wao was by Club Read 2009's Iriley, amusingly.

I've read three very fine novels in a row. Not sure I can stand all this quality; I've started Extraordinary Engines, an anthology of steampunk stories, thinking to take a break. So far so good.

Someone commented last year that as I seemed to only read four star or up books, according to how I rated them, were my ratings high? Yep. Life is too short to read dreck. If it isn't doing it for you, slam it shut and pick up a good one. May your whole year be a four plus star one, dukedom.

Thank you!

Read an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal about designer babies; there's a fertility clinic that says it will soon offer parents a chance to select appearance traits in their embryos. I hadn't realized we were so close to this. Raises many questions, of course.

>47 dukedom_enough: I doubt they will be able to deliver on some of that. Certainly one is not going to get a red-haired child if both parents aren't carrying the recessive gene. And I don't know how they can guarantee the freckles mentioned in the title of the piece. Reminiscent of the movie "Gattaca", no?

Hmmm . . . we may be on the point of such choices, but there's always the law of unintended consequences. Remember Dolly the famous cloned sheep? Lots of cloning has gone on with larger animals, but they mostly seem subject to vastly accelerated aging.

Did you see the story about the couple in Florida who paid $150,000+ to clone their dog?

>50 arubabookwoman: aruba,

I wonder how long the dog will live.

#51--The same age as its parent dog?

>51 urania1: - highly unlikely - something weird seems to happen to the telomeres in the cloning process and cloned creatures generally have a shorter than normal lifespan for their species. "Telomere shortening" poses problems for the bio-ethics of cloning.

(need a real reproductive biologist here...i'm familiar w/ repro epidemiology, but it's hardly the same thing).

Now reading The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Victor Pelevin. This was a Valentine's Day gift from avaland. As for all Pelevin's work, it's very amusing, but full of satirical references to contemporary Russia that I'm sure I don't quite get. Example: "I'd noticed a long time before that nothing delights a member of the Russian intelligentsia ... as the purchase of a new electrical household appliance." Funny as it stands, but I'm sure I'm missing something.

And, a bit repetitive, the review:

Victor Pelevin is a great satirist of post-Soviet Russia, which we see in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf through two different sorts of paranormal creature, including the werewolves of the title. Pelevin captures a corrupt society driven by greed and illusion, with passages like:

The elite here is divided into two branches, which are called 'the oligarchy' (derived from the words 'oil' and 'gargle') and 'the apparat' (from the phrase 'upper rat').

I wonder what that bit is like in the original Russian; translator Andrew Bromfield clearly deserves a lot of credit. As with other Pelevin books, as an outsider I'm missing many allusions, but the story of A Hu-Li, ancient Oriental fox-woman, and her relationship with a werewolf who works for the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), is fun and interesting even so. From a collection of snarky observations like the above, the story moves to something like earnestness as A Hu-Li looks for meaning in the passing centuries she has lived through.

At the last Readercon, James Morrow read selections from his new short novel, Shambling Towards Hiroshima. Before starting, he noted that he had wanted to write something light, after doing a couple of big novels. For Morrow, light means a protagonist who contemplates suicide as he thinks about the morality of weapons of mass destruction, and his own career as a B-monster-movie actor who specializes in playing the monsters. The two themes connect more smoothly than you'd think, in a story that presents a secret-historical take on the actual possibility, considered but rejected in actual history, that the USA might have shown the Japanese authorities a demonstration of the nuclear bomb before using it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Morrow's bitter take is still very funny throughout, as he mixes Hollywood and Hiroshima in World War II, and throws in a bit of modern-day sci-fi fandom.

Now reading The Quiet War by Paul McAuley, which avaland just finished.

∞

Just what LT needed, review number 162 of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons:

Watchmen is a graphic novel as well written as a good ordinary novel, an intricate, memorable and thoughtful work, important, well worth reading and pondering, but not in the first rank of artistry.

Moore and Gibbon do tell a fine story here. I read it first in the 1980s, and recently for the second time. Most discussed in reviews is the book's critique of the very concept of hero/superhero comics, the value of an exceptional individual putting on a colorful costume and fighting "those who attest our ailing democracy"(1) with his or her fists and weapons. The proper word for such a person is "vigilante," and the book shows that working out just as poorly as it would in the real world. Per the graffiti we see, never in full, on various New York walls, who will watch these watchmen - a question always relevant, then and now.

But I think the book really centers on the nuclear age and the morality of mutually assured destruction. The true unwatched watchmen are the great powers, the US and USSR, courting annihilation for the sake of power politics - another relevance then and now.

The authors proceed via a remarkable integration of image and text, crowded with motifs and elements echoing and foreshadowing each other. Following both plot and themes requires close attention to the backgrounds of images, and cross-comparison of widely separated panels. Extensive panel-by-panel discussions exist; here I note one element I didn't see the first time: in the book's alternate year 1985, men's trousers are cut slightly close to the calf, echoing the costumed heroes' tight uniforms. This isn't emphasized, it isn't important, but it's an example of the authors' attention to detail.

However, many of these intertextual comments and echoes are too obvious, too insistent on their irony. If there's a fragile piece of glass somewhere, it will break; if there's a blunt echo of the main action in the comic-within-the-comic "Tales of the Black Freighter," it will show up in the same panel; if a character declares a cigarette "extinguished" in one panel, the next shows mourners gathered around an open grave; if there's a dead dog noted in the very first panel of the first chapter...I started to think "OK, I get it!". Surely this could have been done with a less heavy hand.

The book is very violent, more so than I remembered. The plot is generally advanced by these scenes, but the reader should be cautioned, and their translation to the current movie has reportedly made for a very violent film.

I did enjoy mapping out the crucial street intersection around which so much action occurs. No frame shows more than a bit of it, but comparison of the various views gives us a good picture by the end. This, of course, is itself a model of how the reader may put together the plot, and the book's themes, from the partial glimpses we are shown.

Moore and Gibbon's psychological acuity is much superior to that in the other graphic novels I've read. In particular, Hollis Mason, now retired Nite Owl I, is a very appealing figure in our brief acquaintance with him - psychologically conflicted, but still generously understanding about human weakness. That the entire costumed-hero saga up to Dr. Manhattan's advent may well be a side-effect of Silk Spectre I's publicity gives us an example of the authors' sharp social vision. Again, though, many non-graphic novels do this much better.

Despite my reservations, this story proved more memorable than most novels I read in the 1980s - it kept coming to mind over the years. It's a sign of the authors' achievement that I cannot simply call it the best of its sort that I've encountered, but feel compelled to compare it with better books, where it must fall a bit short.

(1) Quote from Firesign Theater, "Captain Equinox."

Steampunk is the only example I know of a movement in speculative fiction for which the design arm - the artists and artificers - is the main event. Steampunk fiction, though it may have started matters off, could be discarded at this point and not be missed by the inventive makers of keyboards, costumes, images, and other items where the look is the thing.

Still, I would miss the fiction, and am glad for the occasional anthology such as Extraordinary Engines. The basic spirit of creative anachronism and impossibly effective mechanical gadgets is interpreted in a number of ways in this set of all original stories.Standouts are by Margo Lanagan, telling a decidedly non-Young-Adult story of a beautiful clockwork maidservant; James Morrow, relating a tale of forbidden experiments; Robert Reed, finding the nineteenth century in American archetypes; and Jeff VanderMeer, giving us a dark look at the warlike uses of wondrous machines.

While packing to go to a recent professional conference, I remembered I had Small World on the shelf. The novel, one of David Lodge's delightful academic comedies, follows a number of professors and students as they fly off to ... literature conferences. So, a natural choice, and a good one, it turned out.

Small World is the second in Lodge's trilogy that began with Changing Places and ended with Nice Work, but it can be read in isolation. Our literary academics fly to destinations around the world, sometimes sumptuous, sometimes mean, where they always meet the same fellow professionals they met at previous conferences, who relate gossip from yet other conferences with more urgency than they discuss literary ideas. Lectures and conference sessions are there to be skipped, because the main point is the informal contacts to be made - jockeying for better jobs and breaking marriage vows seem to be the most popular of these. Lodge is himself an English professor, and knows this world well.

The year here is 1979, and academia is busily assimilating the critical approaches collectively called Theory. A new chair of literary studies will soon be announced, with no duties and the highest salary in academia. Its pursuit by an array of colorfully-drawn senior academics provides one of the novel's themes. The early-career academics are mainly represented by Persse McGarrigle. Attending conferences for the first time, he is a sexual virgin and the last English-speaking literary academic to hear about structuralism.

A certain ennui is felt by many. The problem seems to come straight from the top, where Prof. Kingfisher, literary critic supreme, struggles with both literal impotence and an inability to generate new ideas. We learn that Persse's name possibly derives from Percival; yes, Lodge is playing with Grail parallels. Persse's own Grail is the beautiful, elusive, and formidably well-read Angelica, who shows up at conferences with well-posed questions and leaves conferees wondering where she is from.

Lodge writes mainly from the viewpoint of the men; women have their say but we see less of their inner lives. The story's climax occurs, of course, at a Modern Language Association meeting. Lodge's wit provides more smiles than outright laughs, but provides plenty of both; I have only touched on some highlights here.

#64: hey, I know this world! I think I would love this trilogy, Dukedom. Thanks for the review and the tip.

tiffin@65,

The three books were written at widely spaced intervals; my favorite is Nice Work, wherein a young, feminist lit prof is more than a match for a powerful industrialist. As, I think, always in Lodge's comedies, marriage vows are broken.

Your Small World links to a Martin Suter book. I think this has got it. I've wishlisted all three.

tiffin,

Thank you; post edited to use an href instead of a touchstone.

If you like Lodge you should give Malcolm Bradbury a shot, especially The History Man.

There was a point that in the UK where it seemed that Lodge and Bradbury were almost interchangeable - they were more-or-less the same age, they both worked in modern universities, they both wrote fictional books about it, and they both published works on literature.

Thanks, jargoneer; TBR!

I love David Lodge's books about academia, but then I am a great lover of academic satire. If you like Lodge, you might like Ismael Reed's Japanese by Spring. Moo by Jane Smiley is great too. However, my two favorite academic satires are Richard Russo's Straight Man and Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell. I haven't read Slouching toward Kalamazo. Has anyone here read it?

I like David Lodge a lot too. Nice Work and Therapy are favorites. I read his latest, Deaf Sentence, earlier this year. It had Lodge's trademark wit and humor (and a non-politically correct protagonist), but was also a somewhat poignant meditation on aging and how we can deal with that.

Deaf Sentence is definitely TBR; as avaland may have said, my hearing is getting worse, and I can sympathize with the problems of the book's protagonist.

A moment of book-recommending pleasure: I had lent Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky to one of my co-workers, to read while he was travelling. He just dropped it off, and was very enthusiastic about it; we had a brief talk about its good qualities. We all love doing that for people, yes?

#74 - definitely - just loaned the constant gardener to our office manager who's off, w/ her husband, on a 3 week Euro junket to celebrate her 50th. I've had a small group of 4 friends among whom books have been physically shared/mailed for decades, now. Usually when i'm getting ready to send them out to Colorado, i try to have more than 1 book - just to keep postage down. But then Mary just sent me a surprise box w/ 5 books - 4 of which i enjoyed a good deal!

Last Days by Brian Evenson

I don't think of horror as something I read, but in fact I do read a certain amount because there are so many fine horror writers. Lucius Shepard, for example, writes dark fantasy that often shades into horror.

I tried this book based on a recommendation at last Readercon. A detective, having had to cut off his own hand to save his life, is recruited to solve a crime committed in a secret cult whose members consider amputation and mutilation a good. They gain status among their peers by progressively giving up ever more of their bodies. A "one", having cut off just one body part, has less status than a "three" who has done so three times; the elite count their mutilations in double digits.

Given this premise, Evenson's writing is about as muted as it could be; sensation is not the point, for all the dismemberments he describes. The normal detective-story interplay of human motivation and deception occurs, with detective Kline unavoidably becoming part of the story.

The novel has an introduction by Peter Straub. Its first part was published as "The Brotherhood of Mutilation." The afterwords note that Evenson's fiction has led to his losing a teaching job at Brigham Young University, and breaking with the Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) Church.

This is a solid piece of writing, but I can't say that anyone should pick it up in place of any of the other well-written, less grisly books out there - and don't really understand what Evenson is doing here.

If you're wondering here, it really has been several months since I read an entire book for pleasure (if that's what I experienced with the Evenson). Short stories, yes. Busy; sorry.

>77 dukedom_enough: yes, he has been conscripted to help with the nefarious project known as Belletrista. bawahahahaha!

>76 dukedom_enough: Just a thought, but could the mutilation be a metaphor for other kinds of self-sacrifice which I could see some people naturally getting competitive about?

avaland@79,

Maybe. I usually go for that sort of analysis, but I can't get enthusiastic about this book.

I've been reading to some extent, just not keeping up with the reviews; I now owe you three.

I just looked at your message #80 and read:
"avaland@79".

and I thought, yes, someday, but not this birthday thank you very much...

Better stay away from the really long threads! :-)

Happy birthday, dear.

Read Grazing the Long Acre by Gwyneth Jones. Review will appear in Belletrista in January.

Wonder how you got that gig? *nudge, nudge, wink, wink saynomore*

I'm sure I don't know what you mean.