peteg's blog 2006-10-05-Neuromancer.autumn

Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

More introspection from the Czech master, a dry run for his four-years-in-the-future Unbearable Lightness of Being. I have to say that Teresa and Sabina resolve into foxier women in the latter than poor Tamina does here.

This is fairly standard territory for him, combining sex, politics, literature and authorial interjection in a ramble about the necessity of memory and the power of laughter. He gets the big quote from the book out of the way on the first page:

It is 1971, and Mirek says that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Kundera is never short of an idea or shy in defending one. What sticks in my memory is his characterisation of "the two types of laughter" in The Angels (the first one, p61 in my English translation):

...

Angels are partisan not of Good, but of divine creation. The Devil, on the other hand, denies all rational meaning to God's world.

...

Things derived suddenly of their putative meaning, the place assigned to them in the ostensible order of things ... make us laugh. Initially, therefore, laughter is the province of the Devil. It has a certain malice to it (things have turned out differently from the way they tried to seem), but a certain beneficient relief as well (things are looser than they seemed, we have greater latitude in living with them, their gravity does not oppress us).

The first time an angel heard the Devil's laughter, he was horrified. ... [U]nable to fabricate anything of his own, he simply turned his enemy's tactics against him. He opened his mouth and let out a wobbly, breathy sound in the upper reaches of his vocal register ... and endowed it with the opposite meaning. Whereas the Devil's laughter pointed up the meaninglessness of things, the angel's shout rejoiced in how rationally organised, well conceived, beautiful, good, and sensible everything was on Earth.

... And seeing the laughing angel, the Devil laughed all the harder, all the louder, all the more openly, because the laughing angel was infinitely laughable.

Laughable laughter is cataclysmic. And even so, the angels have gained something by it. They have tricked us all with their semantic hoax. Their imitation laughter and its original (the Devil's) have the same name. People nowadays do not even realise that one and the same external phenomenon embraces two ompletely contradictory internal attitudes. There are two kinds of laughter, and we lack the words to distinguish them.

His extended meditation on Litost (ask Google) is quite amusing in a Eurocentric way.

Helen Garner: Postcards from Surfers

A collection of short stories. I enjoyed Postcards from Surfers and Little Helen's Sunday Afternoon. Her closing The Children's Bach is the best piece of fiction I've yet read by her, but the standard Garner complaints of being a sketchy journal write-up and pedestrian-of-plot apply. Indeed, there are some parallels with Altman's Nashville. She describes Melbourne quite beautifully, though again I wonder how it would strike someone unfamiliar with the city. Her non-fiction has been more to my taste.

Raymond Smullyan: Some Interesting Memories (A Paradoxical Life)

Smullyan's autobiography-of-sorts, or extended ramble through his interests. I quite enjoyed it, probably because I was fully prepared to indulge him, though it could have used a decent edit (quite a few typos). I don't think there are any new puzzles in this book.

Helen Garner: Monkey Grip

Somehow I ploughed through this book. Again, Garner is repetitive and so little changes from one angst-inducing event to the next that I lost interest in the questions she fails to answer, such as what she sees in the men she feels compelled to be with. (She says a lot about how she feels and how communication fails, but not much on the non-horizontal shared experience.) The characters that wander in and out of the narrative rarely have independent lives and few have any identifiable impact on the story, beyond being competitors for a man, or a man. Her engagement with junkies and drugs is drab and uninspiring, never failing to point out the obvious failings of each, while the transient benefits, the "why?" of her narrative, goes mostly unshared.

Historically this novel may be of interest insofar as it brings an Australian (if unenlightening and unerotic) bluntness to matters sexual and narcotic in 1977. Anne Summers must have seen a lot more in it that I did, in branding it the nation's best novel of that year.

I wonder if the Anglo fascination with the I Ching made it out of the seventies; Douglas Adams made hilarious use of it in The Long Dark Teat-Time of the Soul in 1988, so I guess it must have. (You can try an internet incarnation of Adams's version here).

John Clarke: The 7.56 Report

These are the scripts for John Clarke and Bryan Dawe's recent 7.30 report shows on the ABC. Some are just plain funny but most serve better as keys to remembering the original interviews.

David Malouf: Every Move You Make

Another excellent collection of short stories from David Malouf. I especially liked Valley of the Lagoons, Every Move You Make, Elsewhere and the closing The Domestic Cantata. He's at his best in Australian settings, mining the coming-of-age and kitchen-sink drama.

Helen Garner: The First Stone

mrak remarked, several years ago, apropos the author:

I only know her from the controversy over The First Stone. Feminists hate her like poison, apparently.

and I can see why, after reading it. A quick Google will turn up any number of snarky responses. I don't have a background in feminism and no real interest in the infighting, and as she herself says often here, the danger of overly codifying relationships is that the joy goes out of them. (A class of response seems to be that normal flirtatious interaction between men and women is fine... except when it isn't. Not such a helpful characterisation.)

Garner's prose is heartfelt and open, even as the central narrative is frustrated by a lack of cooperation. Her take on relationships, the university life and the stultifying effect of institutions (amongst other things) struck me as insightful and worthy of further development. I was a bit irritated by the repetition and the waiting-for-something-to-happen anecdotal structure, but I finished it in two sittings so I must be nickpicking.

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner: Freakonomics

Quite entertaining, but watch out for those "it turns out that..."s. I would have preferred something that made the research accessible rather than this overly-simplified popularisation. At times they get ahead of themselves, using the technical terms "controlling for", "correlated" and "causal" for most of the book before giving a rough explanation.

Levitt's talk at TED is well worth a watch. Indeed, the economics of a Chicago drug gang is the best story in the book. (The effects of baby name choice bored me senseless.)

Asimov: The Caves of Steel

Asimov: The Naked Sun

Asimov: I, Robot

Martin Amis: London Fields

Purportedly his best book, and yet, at 470 pages, a solid third of that is flab. Things go well for the first half only to slow right down as the mysterious, inevitable, clearly flagged climax is delayed, put off, sent to fetch some cigarettes, have a pint and be disappeared for seven days by the AFP on suspicion of sedition (or perhaps horrorism). At best his facile humour is laugh-out-loud, and that holds for most of it.

Barry Jones: A Thinking Reed

Took me a while to get through this one. Barry's writing style is a bit opaque, and the dry humour is welcome but unfortunately sparse. He has a tendency to explain his experience by referring to others', and then omitting concrete descriptions for those of us unfamiliar with his references. The book overflows with a self-aware immodesty, and the publisher's gamble is that the paying readership will indulge him on the basis of his historical place in the nation's bosom.

The last chapter is quite out of place in an autobiography, being a commentary on the post-reason, post-Enlightenment politics of 2006. Good to see John Quiggin get a guernsey though.

William Gibson: Neuromancer

This was quite a lot better than I remembered. (The copy I have cost me <$3 />.50 back in the early 90s.) I can't believe it hasn't been made into a movie, well, excepting The Matrix of course.

Asimov: The Stars, Like Dust

Urk, a sci-fi romance. Not one of his memorable works.

Greg Egan: Teranesia

Another from mrak's shelf. Again he goes in for the flaccid ending. I don't know enough biology or quantum mechanics to be too upset by the fast and loose narrative arc. Post modernism gets a big serve but the portrayal is too ludicrous to serve as a critique or satire.

Greg Egan: Luminous

A bunch of sci-fi shorts lifted from mrak's shelf. Some are kinda cute, pushing my latent geek boy buttons. I liked Luminous itself, modulo the manifest inconsistency of allowing theorems to change their apparent truth assignments after they'd been examined. It is these small noise-making holes that keep me from reading too much more of this. The last stories, Our Lady of Chenobyl and The Planck Dive, were somewhat irritating as they concluded tepidly.

Peter Carey: Bliss

This came as a pleasant surprise after an abortive attempt at Oscar and Lucinda. I found his prose largely prosaic, but he does turn out a decent sentence every so often. The opening one:

Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him, and it is this first death which we shall now witness.

seems to leave one unresolved by book's end.

This review makes the obvious connection to Vonnegut and I echo some of his qualms.

Will Self: Cock & Bull

I think the New York Times review is spot on; this is dross. Another from mrak-in-Qatar.

Joseph Heller: Good As Gold

Heller reputedly said:

"When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'"

I can't find an attribution for that so I thought I'd verify it by reading this one, stolen from mrak's bookshelf. It is, unfortunately, about as good as one would expect from the quote rather than would hope from Catch-22. There are some cute ideas and turns-of-phrase but these are the window-dressing of a shop where everything has been purloined.

Actually, some of the best comedy comes from the reviews on the back:

"I have little hesitation in hailing it as a masterpiece" — Auberon Waugh.
"Such is the dreadful power of Good as Gold that it requires us to revise our own imaginations." — New York Times.

and I did also like this, from p133, as Gold gets it on with his society girl:

Again, he was at a loss as to how to proceed with a girl like her. He moved his lips about her ears and neck as though in thirsting search of an erogenous zone. A waste of time, he knew from experience. Erogenous zones were either everywhere or nowhere, and he meant to write about that too, when neither Belle nor his daughter would be scandalized by his knowledge. With a guilty start he realized his mind had been wandering...

Julian Barnes: The Lemon Table

Well yes, I did read it through to the end. Here he refracts old age through his eternal preoccupations — sex and francophilia — in a series of short pieces. The splashing on the book's cover of an edited favourable sentence from an Esquire ("Man at His Best"?) review says enough.

Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim.

Here Kingsley is so evidently the coy predecessor of his son in his commission of sex, drugs and proto-rock'n'roll to enliven what is really a Wodehouse-esque tale of some fairly prosaic academicians. Not bad, just dated.

Martin Amis: Money

Not as good at The Rachel Papers, I reckon. Indeed, I can't see how anyone would think this is his best effort; perhaps the tawdriness of the nouveau riche was novel in 1982, but Will Self captured the effects of Thatcherism much better in Junk Mail (albeit after-the-fact): p17, apropos of the London drug trade:

It's an ethic of enlightened self-interest that isn't that dissimilar to any other rapacious free market where young men vie with one another to possess and trade in commodities. And, after all, isn't that what Mrs T wanted us to do? Tool around London in our Peugeot 205s and Gold GTis, cellular phones at the ready, hanging out to cut the competitive mustard.

Martin Amis: The Rachel Papers

mrak is leaving for Qatar so I stole a bunch of books from his shelf. This, Martin Amis's first book, is much better than the others of his that I've read.

Tom Wolfe: Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine

Not his best work, but what is? The chapter The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening and section Sex and Violence remain interesting to those born well after the chronicled generation, but he answers his own question on why scholars failed to delve into the society parties of the day with the now-disconnected Funky Chic.

Smullyan's The Riddle of Scheherazade (and other amazing puzzles.

I'll never get around to solving all the puzzles in this book, although they tend to be a lot easier than the ones in his To Mock a Mockingbird. The obsession with coercive logic wears thin after a while.

Per Olov Enquist: The Visit of the Royal Physician

A gift from Cath in September 2005 (read in Feb/Mar 2006).