UNICORN PORN FOR ALL

Oh hey, it's a book about books. Okay!

Hesper says this one is better than his Book of Werewolves. It does sound kinda fun.

What, none of my GR friends has read this? Lotta help you jerks are.

This is a review of the play itself, not this particular translation. I read Roche's translation, which is good but (as has been pointed out by absolutely everyone already) includes made-up stage directions that are somewhat distracting.

Trojan Women is an anti-war play, performed in 415 as Athens prepared to go to war with Sicily and in the wake of Athens' brutal conquest of the island of Melos. It takes place directly after the fall of Troy and stars the captured Trojan women, notably Priam's wife Hecuba, the mad prophetess Cassandra, and that Helen woman. It's a little light on plot; there's mainly a lot of gnashing of teeth and being bummed out, and that's about it. Less of the subversive cleverness that I know and love Euripides for. But it certainly gets its point across: "Of all those seeming to succeed, count no one happy till he is dead."

Hey, remember when you were like "I guess I should read [b:The Tin Drum|35743|The Tin Drum (The Danzig Trilogy #1)|Günter Grass|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327945103s/35743.jpg|922581] but I wish it was much less daring and also that it was written by an old fuddy-duddy"? Well, so does John Irving.

Fine, Chris, you happy?

I'm afraid it's over between us, El. And Patrick. I read this whole thing all over again just because you said I'm an asshole and it's really very good, and guess who's the asshole? Dante. Dante is the asshole.

Here are the three problems with this book:

1) It is confusing. There are famously nine circles, right? Fine. But after the sixth, we start subdividing, so there are three rings in the seventh circle, and three parts of the third ring, and ten bolgias in the eighth circle, and you just kinda lose track. It's not a good story, because you get lost. In hell. Which is a bummer.

2) He is petty. He spends half the book taking potshots at various of his personal enemies, many of whom we still don't know who they are, and that's shitty of him and boring for me.

3) Dante is an asshole. You know about how Dante the pilgrim learns to scorn sinners as he goes, right? So when he runs into Paolo and Francesca in the second circle he's like "Aw, that's a bummer that you went to hell for fucking your sister," but then by the third bolgia of the eighth circle he's like ha ha, Pope, get back to getting your feet burnt. Dante the author's point is, no pity! Fuck 'em!

Also, one of the parts of the third ring of the seventh circle is sodomites - the other two are blasphemers and usurers - and even for back then that seems like he's super homophobic.

But, you're whining, everyone was an asshole back then! No, everyone wasn't. Boccaccio wrote The Decameron at basically the same time, and the vision of society he presents is much more forgiving of all kinds of sin. Boccaccio describes the same world Dante does, but with more humor, more humanity, more understanding. (True, Boccaccio himself later disliked the Decameron for basically that reason - he was like "This is totally immoral!" - but still. At least he wrote it.)

I'm sure the language is lovely in the original, and it's a wicked bummer that I can't read it. But I've now tried three different translations of this thing - Pinsky, Musa and Ciardi - and while each of them has moments of beauty, they're still translations of a story that, at the core, I find disagreeable.

I think I'm all set with this one, fellas.

According to a woman named Ana, this is a great introduction to Galdos; one of his best, and much shorter than Fortuna Y Jacinta.

Beloved has been more quickly and thoroughly canonized than any other modern book, so and because it suffers from two curses. The first is the curse of the classic itself, what you might call the Moby-Dick curse: everyone read it too early so no one liked it. It's not exactly difficult (nor exactly is Moby-Dick), but it's not easy either, and a high schooler forced to read it is going to suspect it of being good for her, which is no fun for anyone. When I polled my bookish friends about this book, I got a lot of "Er...I read that 20 years ago and it was probably okay," when I didn't get silence. In fact, I got more tepid comments about this book than any other I can remember, including Moby-Dick and even Sound and the Fury, which is immeasurably more of a pain in the ass.

The second curse - the curse that leads to the first curse - is that it's about slavery. It was canonized because it's very good, but also because it's the best novel everyone could agree on that was by a black person and about slavery. That's not Toni Morrison's fault, it's her credit. But because we in America are obsessed with race - with the legacy of slavery - and because we all feel pretty shitty about it, in many different ways - any book about slavery is going to come under fire forever and ever. Mark Twain probably knew when he wrote Huck Finn that it would never be talked about outside of the context of race; Toni Morrison most certainly did. When she wrote Beloved, she knew that every asshole in the country would take swings at it for as long as it lives, which looks like it's going to be a very long time.

So. Toni Morrison, a brilliant author at the height of her powers, writes a savage, no-holds-barred epic about the horrors of slavery, and everyone talks about its subject instead of its writing. Is it brilliant? Yes! It is brilliant. Does it deserve to be canonized, or is it in part canonized because it fills a niche that we needed filled? And the answer is yes to both.

What astonished me about Beloved is how fully in control of the narrative Morrison is. The way she hints at events, and then slowly returns to flesh them out again and again, from different perspectives. She sets up like ten different mysteries - what, to take a minor one, happened to Sixo? And she resolves each one in turn. Sixo gets the wonderful last line, "Seven-O! Seven-O!" as he smolders. This is mastery on a puzzle level that's Nabokovian.

And Morrison walks this tightrope throughout the book: she absolutely indicts slavery, she cudgels us with its reality - the incident this book is based on is real - but she stops just short of punishing us for reading the book. (Unlike her canonized peer, Cormac McCarthy, who is all about punishment.)

It's not a perfect book. There's an essential corniness way deep down inside Morrison, particularly when it comes to love, that made me roll my eyes several times: "They stayed that way for a while because neither Denver nor Sethe knew how not to: how to stop and not love the look or feel of the lips that kept on kissing." Barf, right?

And while she usually manages to keep her Faulkner fetish in check, there are moments where the postmodern gobbledygook surges up; particularly in a bit toward the end from Beloved's perspective. We didn't need to get inside her head to realize she was insatiably nuts; Morrison could have trusted that she'd already gotten that across just fine.

But these are judgments made in the context of a great book. I'm picking on minor quibbles because Beloved is great enough that it deserves to be picked apart thoroughly. It is a great book: rewarding, captivating, different, important. It deserves its place.

Susie's professor says to read this! Liz M does not say to read this. WHO WILL WIN?

I know, this looks wicked touchy feely, but people are saying it's a really good, balanced overview of...what all has happened over in Israel / Palestine. And since I have really had a lot of trouble understanding all that, y'know, maybe this?

I studied a lot of Shakespeare in college. I just like that guy. No one else can explore such huge themes so concisely and so beautifully, and I think he's the real deal.

And he's hard to biographize, partly because we famously don't know a ton about him, but also I think partly because he was just something special. Someone who wrote outside himself.

So, for example, in this terrific biography, Greenblatt points out that it's kinda weird that Shakespeare's son died and he appeared not to deal with it at all; he was writing some of his funniest comedies at the time. WTF, say people who would like there to be neat connections between things. And the answer isn't (I argue) that there's a big mystery that you should write your graduate thesis about. It's just that Shakespeare was a tremendous literary power and he wrote what he wrote.

Biographically speaking, there isn't much new in this book. If you knew that Shakespeare was sortof a dick, that he left his wife "the second-best bed," and that a lot of his sonnets were pretty gay, you won't get your world rocked here. But Greenblatt presents what we do know in a fun way. If you've read [b:The|10954979|The Swerve How the World Became Modern|Stephen Greenblatt|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327894518s/10954979.jpg|15872618] Pulitzer-winning Swerve, you know what an engaging writer he is.

It's around chapter 9 for me that Will in the World moves from good to great, as Greenblatt gets into the serious analysis of Shakespeare's best works. His comparison in this chapter between Merchant of Venice and Marlowe's terrific, savage Jew of Malta is the best I've seen. The essays that follow on Othello, Hamlet and Lear are brilliant, and they elevate this whole book from fun to indispensable.

If you're looking to know more about Shakespeare, you are now considering the correct book.

So...this is good?

The addition of this and Pastoralia to my TBR list comes courtesy of this quote from "Art of Fielding" author Chad Harbach, who says, "Since 2000, the battle for Funniest Writer in America has been a mano a mano mountaintop clash between Lipsyte and George Saunders, and everybody
else just stands around laughing." Weird that I should take his opinion so seriously, since I haven't even read his book, but there it is.

I guess this is funny? It's a great cover.

I went to prep school. Briefly. In Massachusetts. It was a place with a chapel and a headmaster who knew everyone's names.

When I tell people that, they're like whoa, really? Because, I assume, me and the place described in this book don't seem to go together very well - which, good point, we didn't - and then they say what was it like? And I should just hand them this book and say it was like this.

It was exactly like this, down to such uncanny details that I looked it up to make sure it wasn't the same school. (It wasn't, it was Groton.) So if you've been to boarding school, even for a minute, you'll enjoy this - and if you've ever wondered what it would be like, or at least what it was once like, it was like this, for better and for worse.

And it's most definitely like this to be on financial aid. I reacted to the feeling differently than she did, but I certainly felt her alienation - the invisible wall separating us from most everyone else. Some of the rich students were oblivious to our financial gulf, but I certainly wasn't. Not for a second. Later I would learn how to take a kind of aggressive pride in my not-richness, but I hadn't learned it then; I just felt disadvantaged. It made me feel bad.

I love Lee, the hero or the antihero of this book, because I think you can interpret her either way. I personally have a thing for quiet, smart, sarcastic girls, so I'm on her team, but her climactic act...well, it's villainous, isn't it? She is the bad guy, after all, technically, isn't she?

It doesn't all quite hang together as a novel. It's more of a series of vignettes. But it's awfully engagingly written, and wonderfully clearly seen. I dug it.