The Books of My Numberless Dreams

Here are some vague details on what could possibly, maybe be his new book. At this point in the piece he and the interviewer discuss whether Ishiguro truly has “chameleon-like” story telling skill because he changes setting drastically from book to book. Ishiguro feels that thematically he’s retreading similar territory.

INTERVIEWER

I think that’s very particular to you. It shows a certain chameleon-like ability.

ISHIGURO

I don’t think it is that chameleon-like. What I’m saying is I’ve written the same book three times. I just somehow get away with it.

INTERVIEWER

You think that you have, but everyone who read your first novels and then read The Remains of the Day had a psychedelic moment — they were transported from this convincing Japanese setting to Lord Darlington’s estate.

ISHIGURO

That’s because people see the last thing first. For me, the essence doesn’t lie in the setting. I know that it does in some cases. In Primo Levi, take away the setting and you’ve taken away the book. But I went to a great performance of The Tempest recently, set in the Arctic. Most writers have certain things that they decide quite consciously, and other things they decide less consciously. In my case, the choice of narrator and setting are deliberate. You do have to choose a setting with great care, because with a setting come all kinds of emotional and historical reverberations. But I leave quite a large area for improvisation after that. For example, I’ve arrived at an odd setting for the novel I’m writing at the moment.

INTERVIEWER

What’s it about?

ISHIGURO

I won’t talk too much about it, but let me use its early stages as an example. I’d wanted for some time to write a novel about how societies remember and forget. I’d written about how individuals come to terms with uncomfortable memories. It occurred to me that the way an individual remembers and forgets is quite different to the way a society does. When is it better to just forget? This comes up over and over again. France after the Second World War is an interesting case. You could argue that De Gaulle was right to say, We need to get the country working again. Let’s not worry too much about who collaborated and who didn’t. Let’s leave all this soul-searching to another time. But some would say that justice was ill served by that, that it leads eventually to bigger problems. It’s what an analyst might say about an individual who’s repressing. If I were to write about France, though, it becomes a book about France. I imagined myself having to face all these experts on Vichy France asking me, So what are you saying about France? What are you accusing us of? And I’d have to say, Actually, it was just supposed to stand for this bigger theme. Another option was the Star Wars strategy: “in a galaxy far, far away.” Never Let Me Go went in that direction, and that has its own challenges. So for a long time, I had this problem.

INTERVIEWER

What did you decide?

ISHIGURO

A possible solution was to set the novel in Britain in 450 A.D. when the Romans left and the Anglo-Saxons took over, which led to the annihilation of the Celts. Nobody knows what the hell happened to the Celts. They just disappeared. It was either genocide or assimilation. I figured that the further you go back in time, the more likely the story would be read metaphorically. People see Gladiator and interpret it as a modern parable.

From “The Art of Fiction” No. 196 interview with Kazuo Ishiguro in The Paris Review No. 184, Spring 2008.

I’m posting this incomplete commentary on what I’ve called Walcott’s Frederiksted trilogy in Sea Grapes because if I hold on to it for much longer it will never be completed. First part here which should be read or skimmed in order to better appreciate the following.

The next three poems are a US Virgin Islands trio in which Walcott focuses on Frederkisted, in St. Croix, the island’s former centre now outshone by Christiansted. According to Wikipedia Frederiksted’s port was its major source of industry, tied in with the sugar trade, and when that collapsed it turned to tourism “with some success”. In all three the speaker stands as a critical observer of his surroundings, ever distant and, in the first two poems, cynical. These deal with the town’s economical and cultural depression, peaking in “Frederiksted Nights” before ending in the meditative anti-climax of “Frederiksted, Dusk”.

In “The Virgins”, the first of the three poems, things don’t start so well.

Down the dead streets of sun-stoned Frederiksted,
the first freeport to die for tourism,
strolling at funeral pace, I am reminded
of life not lost to the American dream,
but my small-islander’s simplicities,
can’t better our new empire’s civilized
exchange of cameras, watches, perfumes, brandies
for the good life, so cheaply underpriced
that only the crime rate is on the rise
in streets blighted with sun, stone arches
and plazas blown dry by the hysteria
of rumour. A condominium drowns
in vacancy; its bargains are dusted,
but only a jewelled housefly drones
over the bargains. The roulettes spin
rustily to the wind; the vigorous trade
that every morning would begin afresh
by revving up green water round the pierhead
heading for where the banks of silver thresh.

The title is ironic because the city Walcott describes, far from evoking any such youthful, dewy associations, is filled with “dead streets” that are “blighted with sun”. What’s particularly noticeable is how he inverts all the usual things tropical islands promote as attractive vacation features — sun, ocean, fresh breezes and warm, clear waters — and turns them into destructive agents. Besides the sun the condominiums “drown in vacancy” and “plazas” are “blown dry by the hysteria of rumour”. Walcott himself is in an inverted role — he is not a native here but a tourist in a different country. Even the slower, island stroll indicative of the locals’ less hectic take on life is taken “at funeral pace”. The picture is bleak and the absence of other persons or bustle of activity gives the impression of a ghost town.

What’s caused all this death? Walcott blames tourism and its pathological commodification. He writes that the freeport as the “first..to die for tourism”.

The last few lines are a bit of a puzzle for me. I theorise that “the vigorous trade…revving up green water” refers to the cruise ship industry. That interpretation allows me me to compare it the schooner in “Sea Grapes”. Unlike “that little sail” the cruise ship is not delineated as a physical object but as a less tangible “trade” that is set up to carry a negative connotation. It has no double nor is it linked to a more benign, local image. Walcott only mentions it at the end so the first and last impression readers get is of it leaving indefinitely whereas in “Sea Grapes”, although we have the boat “beating” out of the Caribbean the idea it represents, its link to literary history, returns in the figure of the giant releasing hexameters that turn up in “the Caribbean surf”. And in cruel contrast to the used up town it is the almost certainly foreign owned cruise ship which Walcott describes with prosperous, optimistic diction: “vigorous trade/that ever bright morning” starts “afresh” breaking “green water”; if it isn’t yet clear the “banks of silver thresh” — more lucrative connotations there — as its next destination make it obvious.

So there we have it, the islander’s contempt for cheap colonialism and tourism’s empty rewards. Like I said, when a Walcott poem appears straightforward something is up. That simplicity begins to unravel in Frederiksted Nights. The town is resurrected only to engage in desperate death throes before falling back to dead empty streets.

In the first stanza a band plays at (presumably) the same pier which witnessed the cruise ship’s triumphant departure. Nearby are the expected vendors selling food (”fish-fries”) or their bodies (”the Puerta Ricenan putas/or the lemon Dominican whores”). Walcott creates a highly energetic scene with all the players connected by electrical and sexual diction — the “charge” of the mixed musical style “ignites the fish fries/by the sizzling pierhead”; the line about the prostitutes runs into the one about the “electric guitars rocketing”. It is not a gay scene and electricity’s volatility is heightened by the anger that is similarly a part of the performance. One that ought to be more like the relaxing entertainment brochures promise guest; and the easy sexual pleasures spread by word of mouth. That danger is married in words like “bomb cock”, “crotch trap”, “thudding pelvis”. But what could have ended in a bigger blaze is cut, “short-circuited” and even the moon is a “blown bulb”.

Perhaps there wasn’t enough of an energy supply with all the empty hotel rooms. Again in this scene Walcott is the only observer except for his companion. He’s a little unsympathetic here as is simple small-island perspective sums up and dismisses his environs and the people in it as being at a dead-end. Further on he writes the area off as a characterless any-town with the requisite banks, hotels, poorhouses and “library full of dead books”. Yet that café’s name, “The Corner”, is not a chance inclusion. His lady companion leaves him for its “defeated Chicano proprietor” which is one indication that she sees something in him and perhaps the town that Walcott has missed or underestimated. From that second stanza his insistence on the simple, dismal tourist trap rings with a sullen obstinacy, the awareness that he may be wrong.

Strangely, or perhaps logically, what new dimensionality he affords the town is informed by his doomed romance. (Pretty funny, too.) It continues the pattern first noted in “Sea Grapes” of how the speaker projects his thoughts and moods on to the landscape. When he walks through the towns again he winces and feels his heart being devoured by places that once carried happier associations. He doesn’t look beyond himself and so the poem does not end with a clearer, brighter light source but with him feeling “vague as the moon in daylight”. Only Walcott, I think, can turn an amusing tantrum — kicking ashes at the “stupid pier” — into a graceful ending where he acknowledges that he, rather than anyone else, is the static one, stuck and frustrated.

Also interesting to note is the different takes on simplicity. In “The Virgins” its presented as the positive, sympathetic small-island underdog who just doesn’t get this rampant consumerism. In “Frederiksted Nights” it depicts a more worrying and deficient lack of complexity and depth. In “Frederiksted, Dusk”, the last of the bunch, combines the senses of the first two but broadens to take on more elevated musings.

I just left Dan Green’s blog where Augustine complained about blogs being “Bookworm MySpace” which makes me feel rather guilty about this post. (Sort of. Mildly.) But I’m still pissed about being duped by this Rothfuss fellow’s hype machine, at myself more than anyone else. So, before I take a long trek to the bookstore in order to purge all my negative feelings before I get my $7.99 + tax back, I’d like to poke more fun at what is basically a writer among legions ‘doing’ other people, doing Tolkien. They [are] faint photocopies. You get these great big books which are set in a medieval kingdom that is basically somebody’s impression of what they liked about Tolkien, combined with what they enjoyed about playing Dungeons and Dragons as a high schooler. Thank you, Neil Gaiman. Maybe I’ll try one of your books after all.

In this scene our wearied hero walks home with his drunken friends after the beaaauuutiful girl of his dreams turns out to be dating one of his school colleagues.

In the fullness of time*, and with considerable help from Deoch and Wilem, I became drunk.

Thus it was that three students made their slightly erratic way back to the University. See them as they go, weaving only slightly. It is quiet, and when the belling tower strikes the late hour, it doesn’t break the silence so much as it underpins it**. The crickets, too, respect the silence. Their calls are like careful stitches in its fabric, almost too small to be seen***.

The night is like warm velvet around them. The stars, burning diamonds in the cloudless sky, turn the road beneath their feet a silver grey****. The University and Imre are the hearts of understanding and art, the strongest of the four corners of civilization. Here on the road between the two there is nothing but old trees and long grass bending to the wind. The night is perfect in a wild way, almost terrifying beautiful.

The three boys, one dark, one light, and one– for lack of a better word — fiery*****, do not notice the night. Perhaps some part of them does, but they are young, and drunk, and busy knowing deep in their hearts that they will never grow old or die. They also know that they are friends, and they share a certain love that will never leave them. The boys know many other things, but none of them seem as important as this. Perhaps they are right.*******

*Ugh! I don’t care if he’s even trying for a but of humour here. Unless you are at a writing level no lower than A.S. Byatt do not use this phrase. Not even ironically.

**Wtf does that mean?

***No. I would have liked to accept this, it makes marginally more sense than what came before, but is this all flowing from the boys “weaving” before? That makes it a “no”.

****I’m getting nitpicky now but can stars give off that much light, really? I’ll give it a pass on the assumption that I could be wrong, so accustomed I am to city living, and that in Faux Medieval Europe all things are possible.

***** You never have any better words. Never. Ever.

******This entire paragraph was maudlin sap and the chapter should have been nixed because it adds absolutely nothing to the story and there are no great ideas or show of style here that justifies its existence. Nothing in this book justifies its existence.

Well. I feel a little better now. Slightly.

Hurray for statistics and psychology!

As a science and humanities student I find this article rather quaint (this person is hardly the first to suggest this). (Oh and are any of the theories he so manfully takes down en vogue anymore?) As one specializing in neuroscience (bioethics) I’m sighing at yet someone else rushing to the infant field (comparative to all other sciences) to provide all the answers. No doubt he’ll want to study brain images of a men and women reading Jane Eyre and then come to some farcical conclusion. I just e-mailed it to my biology professor (who loves fiction) and I think I still hear him laughing through my computer speakers…

Anyway, you tell me what you think about this delightful man’s attempts to humble the humanities before the great Science Gaze while retaining “what makes literature special”. (You will find no mention of what that is, btw.)

Measure for Measure by Jonathan Gottschall

Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science’s research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science’s spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.

[...]

The alternative is to let literary study keep withering away, and that would be a tragedy. Homo sapiens is a bizarre literary ape - one that, outside of working and sleeping, may well spend most of its remaining hours lost in landscapes of make-believe. Across the breadth of human history, across the wide mosaic of world cultures, there has never been a society in which people don’t devote great gobs of time to seeing, creating, and hearing fictions - from folktales to film, from theater to television. Stories represent our biggest and most preciously varied repository of information about human nature. Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition - no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, “the natural history of our species” is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.

Don’t they do this sort of thing in “Culture Studies” already?

How are you, dear readers? If any of you still exist :P. The premature summer heat of spring (which has now returned to seasonal temperatures) burnt away any and all interests in blogs and blogging. I decided to go with it until it ran out. My reading was not similarly effected. I’ve read the first two in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War…series? for he will continue to write for it as long as he is so inclined and sales are encouraging. One of the local stores brought in a pack of John Wyndham releases so I’ve spent a few days, eyes wide open, reading through The Chrysalids and The Day of the Triffids (whoa, just…whoa) and I hope to be able to share some thoughts with you about them in a few days. Wyndham appears to be fascinated with man’s ability to change and adapt to new ideas, new environments and the consequences of those who cling to static paradigms. And for an old SF writer his female characters aren’t bad at all. (Unlike others of which I recently learned.)

I don’t know if I’ll be able to write anything much on the Scalzi. I found them fun and entertaining (with The Ghost Brigades guilty of some wearying pages long info-dumping) but they didn’t seem to be saying anything. Not that Scalzi is obligated to do so but novels about such a militaristic society complete with very liberal bioengineering kinda beg for a little something but from what I observed he kinda dances around it, dips a toe in, and then jumps into another action plot line. I am unsure of myself, though, because I theorised that my limited SF experience may hinder my perspective, somewhat. For instance it is common knowledge that the novels were heavily influenced by Heinlein fiction but I’ve never read the guy.

How the Dead Dream proved elusive on a first reading so I’ve chosen to reread it again. Worries that it would read too familiar were not confirmed for reasons I have yet to refine. I find Lydia Millet’s characters, her main character at least, eccentric rather than quirky (the silly, unnecessary, waste of space, for-giggles type) because she takes that one extreme feature, places it immediately before, and explicates how it’s an extension of the character’s basic personality in a very non-showy yet arresting manner. She doesn’t try to wear you out with circus tricks. Because of this her humorous moments work a lot better because at first it’s unexpected. And though a critic described those moments as “asides” are more integral and necessary — without them this would be a boring, didactic lecture with unfulfilled potential.

Is it too late to comment on that Slaves of Golconda read? I couldn’t finish it. Cristina García did not seem so much interested in writing a novel as a series of character profiles (complete with headings) strung weakly together by a basic, uninteresting plot. (Uninteresting to me, at any rate. Woo woo Cuba-communist-intergenerational clash-fish-out-of-water-immigrants-in different country. Tell me something I don’t know or at least try and do something different with the damn thing.) Stuck in the middle of that was an amateur YA novel wherein a young girl struggles with her domineering, restrictive mother, giving readers the right dose of teenage rebellion and oh-so-unconsciously deep insights into human nature. Snore. I’ll try to see what the others got out of it as I think I’m the only one who wasn’t enamoured.

Villette: Nope. Sorry, I know some of you are fans but Brontë was in preacher mode far too often throughout the narrative. Things would just start to get interesting and then she would push Lucy Snowe aside to interject some pages long sermon on the follies of Catholicism and the wonders of enlightened English Protestants; also how stupid and frivolous the French are and how smart and noble the English. She even gave that stupid, self-absorbed English doctor — I count it a miracle that she managed to engage in near Austen-like sarcasm every so often — and her precious pet English whateverhernameis a charmed happy ending. Near the end I skipped pages just to see if the prof jumped Snowe or not. If Shirley is anything like that I’ll abstain.

I’d like to say the writing made up for it but some of her passages were uncomfortably close to Emily Brontë’s exhausting melodrama in Wuthering Heights when it came to depicting Snowe’s depression. That is what led to the skipped pages — near the end Snowe woke up in the middle of the night after being ineffectively drugged (I think?) and escaped out of the house wandering the streets. I thought to myself, Oh holy…I’m not going through one of your damn deranged moments again. Do the prof, slit your wrists, or I’ll slit mine. Later on I picked up that whatever festival she experienced during that night was an actual occurrence. No doubt it’s important but you’d have to pay me to get me to read it for any significant thematic developments.

I started The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. (Curse my inability to keep to my F/SF moratorium.) It is the latest fantasy sensation purported to be “one of the best stories told in any medium in a decade…Shelve [it] beside The Lord of the Rings…and look forward to the day when it’s mentioned in the same breath, perhaps as first among equals.” (Name of reviewer hidden to protect the hoodwinked.) I am at chapter eight. Let’s start ticking off the clichés shall we?

• Famous, brilliant, exceptional assassin tortured about his horrible, horrible past - Check
• Inn as prominent setting - Check (Seriously? I saw it on the first page and thought, Oh god not another faux medieval European setting, please [insert favourite deity here]. [Your favourite deity] didn’t listen.)
• Assassin accompanied by best, loyal buddy who is “dark” so of course he had to be graceful, moving like a dancer and blah blah blah. I bet he’s also noble and respects nature? Sidekicks are allowed that much. - Check
• Ignorant village locals - Check
• Dull looking sword that belies its true value as it is no doubt really famous and/or powerful - Check
• Innocent children’s rhymes that turn out to be totally true and significant! No one saw that coming! - Check

All of this would be forgivable — all of it– if Rothfuss made something new with those elements. Take it to a different place. Aforementioned hoodwinked reviewer implied this is what he does as the book is “a brooding, thoroughly adult meditation on how heroism went wrong”. In a 700+ pages it may be too early to expect all of this to pop up by page 63. The problem is that the writing is so mediocre, at times verging on hysterical, that I may not wait long enough to find it. Ursula K. Le Guin (who was no doubt threatened) wrote that “It is a rare and great pleasure to find a fantasist writing…with true music in the words”. Let’s have an example of this musician at work. (All formatting mine.)

Sunlight poured into the Waystone. It was a cool fresh light, fitted for beginnings. It brushed past the miller as he set his waterwheel turning for the day. It lit the forge the smith was rekindling after four days of cold metal work. It touched draft horses hitched to wagons and sickle blades glittering sharp and ready at the beginning of an autumn day.

Inside the Waystone, the light fell across Chronicler’s face and touched a beginning there, a blank page waiting the first words of a story. The light flowed across the bar, scattered a thousand tiny rainbow beginnings from the colored bottles, and climbed the wall toward the sword, as if searching for one final beginning.

But when the light touched the sword there were no beginnings to be seen. In fact, the light the sword reflected [Ed: *&#$$*# sword -- it's the second in 20+ small pages that he's given us this " old dull sword" routine] was dull, burnished, and ages old. Looking at it, Chronicler remembered that though it was the beginning of the a day, it was also late autumn and growing colder. The sword shone with the knowledge that dawn was a small beginning compared to the ending of a seas: the ending of a year. [Ed: It shone with what?)

Do you see what he’s trying to get at there? Not me. Something about…no can’t fathom it. For a “thoroughly adult” book he does not think much of our intelligence. I get that fire might something to keep an eye on in the book but if I read one more line about fires snapping, crackling, blazing, flaring, spitting or glowing I’m going to burn…a fake copy of this book because I still have the receipt for the real one and the return window is still open. Whether you like Tolkien’s prose or not it’s difficult to deny that he had a particular style that showed its influences while seeming authentic rather than imitative. There is nothing that stands out about Rothfuss’ prose, much less anything musical. The best thing I can say is that he avoids writing any poetry for the most part, sticking to cute childish limericks.

That’s another thing. The different peoples presented are poorly costumed facsimiles of real world counterparts. So the main character’s people are gypsies with a different name and they meet up on a dour community who are costumed Puritans. I’m becoming quite bored with religious folks being used as the predictable resisters of all joy and intellectual curiosity. Wyndham has them in The Chrysalids but he makes the community’s philosophy work as an understandable, natural reaction to the events rather than a story element he hit with a dart on a story board. It’s FANTASY, Rothfuss. Be inventive! Go crazy! Maybe make the religious folks curious and open-minded, eh? Maybe make the non-believers rigid and unwelcoming? LOTR’s appeal was that while its influences and source material were obvious on a conceptual level Tolkien went to great lengths to make something completely new — or to make it appear so. It’s the difference between the good ol’ days of remixed music when the artist gave it such a different setting that a new side to the music was exposed, a new angle provided — not these days when a “remix” means asking a rapper to add a verse.

High fantasy is not for me. Tolkien and Kay were flukes in a genre filled with flawed heroes spouting cheesy lore. At least in romance the tortured alpha heroes are sexy.

Thursday quiz at OUP

Section Seven: Espionage and Intrigue
1. Spy for Walsingham and stabbed in a brawl, as legend has it.
2. Pseudo-equine archetypal guise for malice.
3. The Prince’s schoolmates set against him by a usurping uncle.
4. An anarchist plots to blow up the Greenwich Observatory.
5. A holiday sailing trip cum plot to foil the Germans.

Section Eight: Political Animals
1. A sea monster lends its name to his principle of a strong state.
2. Taking America as a model, it Pained the English government.
3. Her vindication laid the foundations for modern feminism.
4. For everyone and no-one, this book killed the deity.
5. This tract takes its title from a head of state.

Yes, another one that is perhaps more fun and, to fit the site, book-related. To commemorate the relaunch of the Oxford World Classics — they’re getting a fresh new design and everything! First heard about it on Bookslut — the OUP blog is posting a series of quizzes the answers to which will be posted on Friday. I’m dismal at it but maybe you could give it a go?

Monday’s quiz

Section One: Their Daily Bread
1. The witch of the place presides over a rotten wedding feast.
2. His sweet tooth eats through a Wilkie Collins epic.
3. He fried his kidney in Dublin town.
4. She takes the credit for the boef en daube.
5. Her cupboard was full of jam tarts, lemon tarts, Spanish tarts and cheese-cakes.

Section Two: ‘It’s a hard-knock life’
1. Misselthwaite’s maid.
2. Raksha’s man-cub.
3. Discovered in a handbag at Victoria Station.
4. Would rather sail the Mississippi than paint a fence.
5. Left Kansas for emerald delights.

Tuesday’s quiz

Section Three: Black and White and Read All Over
1. A seductive Mother Superior and a naïve with no vocation.
2. This cloistered anti-hero’s downfall is akin to Legion’s end.
3. An eighteenth-century reverend faces the trials of Job in Edenic England.
4. This almost-saint journeyed from Huntingdon to St Albans.
5. His saucy epic satires spite his regal Roman name.

Section Four: In the Wars
1. Russian epic retelling of the Napoleonic invasion.
2. The Wretched man the barricades in grande Paris.
3. Story of young Henry at Chancellorsville.
4. Led the invasion of Gallia and wrote about it.
5. A Prussian intellectual’s military manifesto.

Wednesday’s quiz

Section Five: That’s Amore
1. Sanskrit text on life, love and spirituality.
2. Banned as obscene, it revolutionised the understanding of female sexuality.
3. Roman poet banished for his subject of adultery.
4. This Parisian’s deviance gave his name to unconventional proclivities.
5. Classic mother who murdered the progeny as the ultimate revenge.

Section Six: Neither Flesh, Fish, nor Fowl
1. An Italian puppet with greater ambitions.
2. This mad scientist’s creation begs for a female companion.
3. Has coffin, will travel.
4. This loch-dwelling mum seeks medieval revenge.
5. Gothic nocturnal female whose bloodlust stoked a later novel.

Keep an eye on the blog for the other two!

The original authors of this exercise are Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, and Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright. (via Charlotte’s Web)

Bold the true statements. You can explain further if you wish.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
9. Were read children’s books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
Swimming, ballet, music (piano, violin, voice), a brief spurt with Judo.
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
Private high schools in Jamaica are typically the worst things you could saddle your child with, although they are known to scoop a good public high school teacher or two when they get fed up with low government pay.
17. Went to summer camp
Yeah, loved that stuff.
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
For a very brief period in preparation for Common Entrance (10+) exams when I was in prep school (private elementary).
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
A few times but 90% of them it involved staying with family.
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
Either bought new or sewn by my aunt or a close family friend.
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
Yeah, but it was used. My Mum worked with hotels and typically drove company cars so there was nothing to hand down.
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
Not many and I have no idea where it came from because none of it was my type.
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house
My extended family (aunts and cousins). I guess it was a “single-family” house that my Mum extended it. This only happened after she decided to get my younger brother and I out of hotel living. I got shipped to boarding school. On breaks I’d as often stay with my Mum (at hotels) than in Kingston (at the house). So I only felt as if I properly lived in such a home for sixth form.
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
Don’t have a clue.
25. You had your own room as a child
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
Yes, but that was only after I took SAT I on my own. The tutor heard of my score and “recruited” me for his college prep programme but I never paid anything since he doesn’t prep for SAT IIs as they are subject specific. I was doing my A-levels. (SAT IIs were much easier.)
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
Never and still don’t. The idea makes me uncomfortable — seems excessive and guaranteed to suck away precious hours. I’m in a situation now, though, when the available tv is so small and pathetic (and often co-opted by the landlady’s boyfriend-now-husband to watch Westerns) that I may invest in one.
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Well, you know, us Caribbean folk like to go abroad.
31. Went on a cruise with your family
Don’t think I’ll ever do this. Stuck on a ship with fake golf courses and retirees chilling by the pool and godawful night entertainment? Do not want. (Maybe those Antarctic/Arctic cruises? Maybe. There seems to be something to those.)
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family
N/A

Yikes. Lots more bolding than I expected. Feel free to do this one if you care to.

How many books have you downloaded from the Tor free e-book programme?

Four but only two should count as the books by Scalzi and Wilson were the only ones in which I was truly interested. The others were I-know-I’ll-hate-this-but-it’s-free-surely-there’s-other-good-books-in-this-deal. So far I’ve tried one of the latter group and it was about as horrible as I expected (cheesy high fantasy).

How many have you read?

One and one-thirds.

How many books will you own written by the two authors combined by this time tomorrow?

Five or six. I already own Spin by Robert C. Wilson which I promptly leant to one of my SF-reading pals who hadn’t heard of the author before. I’m in the middle of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War e-book and about a minute ago said out loud to myself, “I have got to get this book in paper form.” The local Chapters has two out of the three books in his trilogy plus The Android’s Dream and I plan to get all three. I’ll try the local indie on the latest OMW release in hard cover plus any Wilson books but I’m not optimistic because it’s not the place to go for genre fiction (unless it’s of the YA variety). So whatever isn’t bought at the indie store will be purchased online. I don’t know which Wilson books I want just yet if that be the case. I figure I’ll put the other titles in a box and make a blind selection.

In conclusion, does this make Tor’s programme evil?

Yes. I was so good at not buying book’s for weeks and weeks and weeks and then look what it did!

I don’t know about this book. Not to be mean but my first reaction on seeing the cover was, Hmmmm, shouldn’t this have an Oprah book club sticker? the NYT’s Kakutani found it “completely original”? Why am I not heartened. I had the feeling it was going to be one of those melodramatic, multi-generational matriarchal family sagas — I don’t really do multi-generational family sagas. (It’s why I have Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and not Buddenbrooks. Also it was name checked in Norwegian Wood a lot but, yeah, I’ve seen ol’ Budden in used book stores and haven’t gotten past that word in the various novel summaries.) Anything labelled a “saga” gets a suspicious glance.

I’m not even past page 20 yet and already I’m annoyed. I think she cheated in the first chapter — couldn’t figure out a way to start the story right so she split it two under the headings of different names and proceeded to give us character profiles. The paragraph organization seems out of whack. I suppose Garcia could have done it for artistic effect — the grandmother at the beginning is a bit addled and unsettled from her husband’s death in a different country so the structure reflects this. But it’s not working for me. The sentences don’t hang together and I feel disoriented within paragraphs wondering what the hell I’m supposed to be getting from any of this.

Already the expected fat but stern, lovable and quirky female character has popped up in the form of a nurse-turned-baker.

I’m still going with it. It’s under 300 pages and it’s not awful. For a decidedly more effective, less colourful, romantic and quirky take on Cuba see When in Cuba, a photography feature by Boogie on First Magazine. If you like what you see there check out the rest on his website (click on “Cuba”).