As I entered my kitchen the smell of the cat poo was not wholly unpleasant but not wholly pleasant either, it was one of those things that are not whoAs I entered my kitchen the smell of the cat poo was not wholly unpleasant but not wholly pleasant either, it was one of those things that are not wholly unpleasant or wholly pleasant, like receiving a bill you know you can pay immediately, or a kiss from a relative you don’t really like too much because you’ve noticed she’s not that kind to your children. I cleared up the cat poo and reflected that cats are poo machines, we buy them cat food, they shovel it in at one end, then all the time we are stroking them and admiring their lovely fur and supple frames, they are creating poo, which is not so pleasant really, although not completely unpleasant….
Stop, stop, please don’t carry on with this … I suppose it’s one of your parodies?
Well – his style does lend itself…
Yes, but please, the actual Knausgaard is bad enough! Anyway, a parody version is too easy – it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
Well, okay… no need to get tetchy. Parodies are fun! You know, Murakami, Sebald….
Ah yes – I’m glad you mentioned him…. I thought this Knausgaard book reminded me of a much less well-read kind of non-intellectual Sebald –
With an admixture of Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature and some seasoning from Rousseau and Emerson, all that nature nature nature -
Well, that’s his thing….
It’s not my thing. You seen one leaf, you seen them all. Also, what was with this Don’t Give Anyone Any Names business? I am fed up with books with Unnamed Narrators – here we had unnamed everybody. His wife and four children – no names! One time the depressed wife addresses him by HIS name (Karl Ove) so he gets his own name and everybody else is “the siblings” “your younger sister”, “my nearest neighbour”…
I’m getting the idea that this wasn’t your cup of tea either.
Once again I seem to be immune to everybody’s current crush.
Ah don’t look so woebegone, you love it, you old curmudgeon! You can do one of your one star specials!
No, not really…. I can’t deny he’s got…. Soul. His writing is like a spaniel with huge eyes full of love looking at you, defying you not to love it back. It’s all children, and nature, and intimacy, and wife, and wondering about Life Itself, and the aggravations of pettiness (no petrol!) and the wonder of the entire cosmos (look at the ocean! And that castle! And that ant!)
He got on your nerves didn’t he.
Yeah…. Yeah….
So give me an example of all this then…
Okay… here :
The silence reigning there, so specific to sun-filled afternoons in late summer, how the sounds that breach it all seem so far away, almost dream-like, even the sound of the children splashing about in the plastic pool, making a racket, as if the sky is too deep, the world too vast for something as small as a voice to find a foothold in.
It’s like …. “you are getting sleepy…. Your eyes are so heavy…. You are eleven years old…. You will buy my next book…”. There’s one part on page 64 and 65 where he describes being jetlagged as if we need a slow mournful meandering description of what jetlag is because we will never have known such a thing.
Even though I knew I was in Australia, on the other side of the globe, in Sydney, it was as if the sensation of being in Bergen trumped reason… it was almost as if I was sleepwalking.
And I was thinking…No kidding, Karl Ove!
All right, all right. So this three star rating, what – another cop-out?
Ah, the loose and baggy monster that is the three star rating. Some people think it just means “yeah, well, whatever” but it’s more interesting than that. It also means “really excellent but badly flawed” and in this case “I think this guy’s got something, he’s not bad, he’s just…. look, if he rings me again, tell him I’m out. In fact, tell him I’ve emigrated…”.
Does this mean you'll not be reading Min Kamp this year?
In this short strong novel we get debates about light pollution (you can’t see the stars any more), tourism (there are just too many), assisted dying In this short strong novel we get debates about light pollution (you can’t see the stars any more), tourism (there are just too many), assisted dying (it should be legal), abortion (likewise) and, because of the fear of germs, we also get an interesting discussion about whether communion wine should be administered in church by capsules rather than unhygienic shared chalices.
And then the main arc of the plot is all about marital rape which became illegal in the UK in 1991. So I kept checking if this book was written in 1990, or 1980, or 1970 but no, the copyright page kept saying 1905. I guess Hjalmar Soderberg must’ve had a fully functioning crystal ball.
This then is the diary of Dr Glas over the summer months of a single traumatic year. Into the labyrinth of his self torment you will go, his beautiful frightening voice spooling out all the darkness of a man teetering on the edge.
Recommended! Can be read in one day, easy.
Say, would you look at that - a short review, finally. ...more
- Mary Harron’s neat indie from 1996 is everything I thought I needed to know about Valerie Solanas - and if I neWe have had the movie already
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- Mary Harron’s neat indie from 1996 is everything I thought I needed to know about Valerie Solanas - and if I needed more detail I could read the biography :
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But Swedish author Sara Stridsberg thinks there’s a lot been left unsaid and gives us what I guess is a re-imagining of the life and crime of Valerie Solanas, in which narrative energy is tossed aside in favour of repetitious incantatory dissociative scortatory rantings, world-loathing blatherings and rancid vomitaceous outputherings of bile by the righteously furious Valerie-valkyrie of whom it could be said that never walked the earth another being who held half of the human race in such low esteem.
Valerie formed the imaginary Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) and wrote a big manifesto, as you probably know. It points out that all men are highly injurious to all women and if they all died tomorrow it wouldn’t be the worst thing, in fact we might look into the possibility. If men were a race then Valerie preached genocide.
She came out with some zingers :
If they could put one man on the moon, why not all of them?
and, after the assassination attempt :
I couldn’t take living like a lobotomized brood cow, and the world around me couldn’t take that.
Well, there were never any other members of SCUM apart from Valerie but if there was one other member it would have been Aileen Wuernos, a woman whose aim was way better than Valerie’s.
Reporter to Valerie: It looks like Andy Warhol will recover completely. Valerie : I should have done target practice.
And if there was ever a third member, it would have been Andrea Dworkin. They were different, these three, but similar. Andrea was heavy rock, Aileen was sweet country all the way and Valerie was pure punk. Girlschool, Patsy Cline and The Slits.
Along with the incantatory dissociative uniquely Valerian spew liberally doused over ever page – here’s an example :
There is a smell of war about you, a state of emergency, a siege and something else, something wetter, more dangerous : prostitution, dead ocean birds and spiralling loneliness. It does not matter how many times you wash yourself, it does not matter how many times you scrub your crotch
- it looks like the author wishes to further discombobulate the reader by jumbling up the chronology of the story, darting between 1945 and 1991, but there is a discernable logic – the great majority of the short chapters are set in 1968, when Valerie shot Andy and was incarcerated in (the first of many) a psychiatric hospital, and 1988, when she died alone in a filthy hotel room and her maggoty body was not discovered for days. But otherwise, the book progresses straightforwardly through the 40s, 50s and 60s. After 1969 there’s a big gap of 18 years. Then comes the big sleep, and the maggots.
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Back to the Main Event : Valerie was prosecuted for attempted murder but was found to be insane. She demurred from this. Not at all!
Valerie to psychiatrist :
This is no illness. I repeat. My condition is not a medical condition. It’s more a condition of extreme clarity, of stark white operating lights illuminating all words, things, bodies and identities. Within a stroke or a shout of you, Dr Cooper, everything looks different. Your so-called diagnosis is an exact description of woman’s place in the system of mass psychosis. Schizophrenia, paranoia, depression and the potential for destructive acts. Every girl in patriarchy knows that schizophrenia, paranoia and depression are in no way a description of an individual medical condition. It is a definitive diagnosis of a social structure and a form of government based on constant insults to the brain capacity of half the population, founded on rape.
Or more succinctly - Valerie to psychiatrist :
I’ll help you. Diagnosis: fucking angry. Pissed off. Man-hating tigress. All married women are whores. Are you married? Meat is murder. Sex is prostitution. Prostitution is murder
Question: Why did you shoot Andy Warhol? Valerie : These are all the wrong questions. The right question is…why did so many of her kind have no access to weapons?
The story (there is no story) circles round and round three characters like a seagull circling a rubbish dump – there is Dorothy, the alky mother with a terrible taste in men, there is Cosmogirl, Valerie’s one true love girlfriend, and there is Dr Ruth Cooper, the bedazzled psychiatrist. Andy does not really feature. He has a shuffle-on part.
The novel is not interested in Valerie’s lifestory, just a couple of floodlit scenes in it. So there is no mention of the children she gave birth to at age 14 and 15. I dare say Sara Stridsberg had solid artistic reasons for this but I dunno, I wanted the full horrible Valerie life in this novel, not an edited version. I wanted another bit which is kind of skated over –
On 9 January 1969 Valerie was arrested again for making threats against Warhol and Maurice Girodias (of Evergreen Press). She was remanded to the Woman's House of Detention and then transferred to Elmhurst in May. …. On 5 November 1971 Valerie showed up at Barney Rossett's office with an ice pick, threatening to use it. She was arrested, charged with aggravated harassment and held for psychiatric observation but released as there were insufficient grounds to keep her. She was arrested again in December 1971 for harassment and sent back to Elmhurst Hospital for psychological testing…. She continued her harassment of Barney Rossett and Fred Jordan (Vice-President of Grove Press)…
The story of what Valerie did between 1968 and 1988 kind of confirms, alas, that she had overwhelming mental health problems, was not such a pleasant human being, lived on the street a while, had a meth addiction, never did write anything else after the 1960s. A sad sorry story. I wouldn’t want to accuse Sara Stridsberg of serving up a defanged, prettified Valerie, she really really doesn’t, but it’s a partial cropped portrait, a little too stuffed with abstract-poetical-body-in-the-gutter-but-mind-in-the-stars rambling and raving for me.
I see a number of my GR friends have read this but A BILLION MORE of them have this listed as To Read. Yes, I see why. Every single person who has reaI see a number of my GR friends have read this but A BILLION MORE of them have this listed as To Read. Yes, I see why. Every single person who has read this thinks this is a masterpiece but you stroke your chin and you think do I really need a 600 page novel about Icelandic sheep farmers in my life? Even if it is a Nobel prize winning all time masterpiece?
Maybe you are like me, you live in a city and think the countryside is very pretty to visit for an afternoon, what with all the moo cows and baa lambs and horsies and piggy wiggies and goatsies and the less domesticated animals like spiny echidnas and bush babies and alpacas and okapi which I assume all live out in the country since I never see them strolling the boulevards of London or Paris or New York never mind here in Nottingham.
Well, Mr Laxness does mention several times that the countryside is very beautiful but then he strongly implies that you’re not really going to notice it if your whole body is wracked with convulsions and your left leg is turning black because of the unrelenting poverty and lack of vitamins to the point of starvation where you are now contemplating which of your 15 children should go in the cooking pot next.
The alternate title for this novel would be Stupid People. That sounds a little bit harsh, but check it out – our fiercely independent crofter Bjartur of Summerhouses owns a farm where there are rivers with jolly edible fish in them and fields with game birds in them but neither he nor his wasting away to nothing family eat any of them, not a single one. If you’re an idiot from Iceland you just don’t.
The five starry reviews of this long ass book must be written by people who love maximum wordage and minimum action. There are actual things that happen in this book but mainly they’re hurried past. E.g. one of Bjartur of Summerhouses’ children dies and he barely notices. You might think he would be pretty annoyed – one less slave to look after my sheep – but no, the kid is simply not mentioned again.
For those still unsure if you really want to make a space for the world’s grumpiest sheep farmer in your heart, here is a scientific analysis of the whole novel.
WHAT HAPPENS IN INDEPENDENT PEOPLE
Description of countryside (summer)……………………8% Description of countryside (winter)………………………12% Drinking coffee…………………………………..............……..9% Talking about sheep…………………….............…………….15% Talking about elves and ghosties………..............………8% Talking about not joining the new co-operative…….5% Insulting all and sundry……………………….........………..11% People dying………………………………………...............…….4% Tramping through snow (solo)……………….........………9% Tramping through snow (with sheep)…………...………19% Ninja fighting………………………………………..............……0% Hot sex scenes……………………………………............………0% Hot tub scenes……………………………………...........……….0%
I could see this was some kind of achievement, but on balance I think I would rather have a large dead sheep dropped on me from a second storey window than have to read anything more by Mr Laxness....more
I learned that you should be careful who you choose to marry because they can double in size without warning. Also, little kids don’t mind if you tellI learned that you should be careful who you choose to marry because they can double in size without warning. Also, little kids don’t mind if you tell them they are dead. Also, if you cram your house with junk and let rabbits, rats and mice run riot there will be a bad smell. Also, that your dad might be really lovely and kind but also profoundly mentally ill. Also, that a book can carefully build up a very convincing picture of a family’s descent into insanity but then nearly wreck the whole thing with a horrible cliché ending right out of a Victorian melodrama. And finally, that people who say this book is thrillingly unique have never read The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks....more
I finally got my revenge on ABBA. For most of my life I have been bombarded with these four well turned-out glistening Swedes with their blandly superI finally got my revenge on ABBA. For most of my life I have been bombarded with these four well turned-out glistening Swedes with their blandly superior three minute wondersongs and their terrible terrible lyrics. Man, they were everywhere. At one point I think it was compulsory for every British household to have a copy of ABBA Gold, and if you didn’t have one, a burglar would break into your house and leave one on the top of your cd player.
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There was an unspoken agreement that ABBA were the greatest group, greatest songwriters and biggest sellers of all time. (In fact no, no and no. Not even close.) When they finally divorced each other and sang perfectly harmonized and calibrated songs about their divorces and went their separate ways, there was peace in the land, but only for a short spell. Then came the stage show Mamma Mia and it all started again; and when that died down then came the film which it is compulsory to see, and now the film Part Two which very properly is called Mamma Mia – Here We Go Again.
So here comes John Lindqvist with his vastly amusing juxtaposition of ABBA and mass murder – as the simpering sickly sentiments of Thank You For the Music waft around the venue spouts and gouts of blood erupt and howls of agony blend with the melody line. Yes! Finally! Stick that in your cd player and smoke it.
Another way of looking at Lucky Star is Swedish Idol meets Driller Killer, the video nasty from 1979. And a third way of looking at it is that Little Star is a 600 page long very silly shaggy dog story which has really wasted up my last three days but I really enjoyed it. But now I regret bothering with it. Because it’s very silly! 14 year old girls, one clearly some kind of alien, armed with power drills and hammers, wanting to turn into wolves, wanting to be dead, then wanting to be alive again, eating only baby food -YES - Baby Food
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(other brands are available)
I mean, the whole bonkers shenanigans is enough to make a cat laugh. At the end of the 632 pages I thought come on THAT CAN’T BE IT! WHAT?? But it was it.
A comment on John Lindqvist’s prose style seems relevant here. I will quote a very typical example :
It turned out that Anna L and Ronja had passed their driving test, and Anna actually had a car. None of the others had thought of themselves as the kind of group where someone had a driver’s licence, but when it turned out to be the case, a heady feeling of liberation quickly took hold. They had a place to be, they had a way of getting there. Together they had resources and opportunities which they lacked when they were alone.
Oh boy.
I think this strange story could have been something but the author had no idea what to do with it so he sprayed every room with emo-style teen angst and added a lot of sharp edged tools and in time honoured fashion blew the whole thing up at the end. And walked away shrugging and muttering heck, you figure it out, I just wrote it. Don’t blame me.
Another Swedish gift to the world – after lutfisk, Ikea, Abba and the girl with the tattoo on her arse, now we get nice zombies. Well, these ones are Another Swedish gift to the world – after lutfisk, Ikea, Abba and the girl with the tattoo on her arse, now we get nice zombies. Well, these ones are not that nice, I guess. They don’t want to eat you, so that’s a plus, but they have limited conversation and really their concept of personal hygiene leaves something to be desired. But like Paul Simon said they’re all right in a sort of limited way for an off-night. In fact I was behind these zombies all the way until the last quarter of the story when like a cornered Christian Mr Lindqvist starts babbling mystical abstractions in an obvious attempt to cover up the blatant fact that he did not know how to end his story. Up to then it was compelling. For a very specific period of time in a very specific place (Stockholm) dead people come back to life. But in a realistic way, not in a cosy way like in those Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets
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No – imagine your wife dies in a car crash and a week later she wakes up in the morgue – most of her face and right side is still missing and she really doesn’t seem to be quite herself. What do you tell your son? All she does now is flap around vaguely. She’s lost all her ambition. The situation is distressing. So we get three such scenarios and an attempted overview of how the authorities react to 2000 or so re-livers, as they’re called.
All of this is good, very compelling reading. I like stories where the crazy stuff is treated seriously and realistically. Just like it was in Let the Right One In, Mr Lindqvist’s famous brilliant vampire novel. But as I say in this one for the last 50 pages the (living) characters start to spout mystical non-sequiturs which finally aggravated me to death and I died and came back to life and I wasn’t a nice zombie and I tracked Mr Lindqvist down and ate him. You may have read about it in the papers.
For me this was Goat’s Head Soup after Sticky Fingers, Walking Dead season 6 after Walking Dead season 5, Joey after Friends, Roger Moore after Sean Connery, Sentimental Education after Madame Bovary….
First 300 pages : 4 stars Next 60 pages : 1.5 stars Rounded up to 3 stars because I like where this author is coming from even though I didn’t like where he went to in this one....more
It was clear the book had been read up to page 149 – crumbs between the pages, the occasional squashed insect – but after page 150 the rest of the booIt was clear the book had been read up to page 149 – crumbs between the pages, the occasional squashed insect – but after page 150 the rest of the book was pristine, the spine was uncreased.
We got a reasonable set of prints from the cover and ran them though the database of usual suspects. We got an immediate hit – they belonged to Paul Bryant, who we knew from a lot of smart aleck stuff on Goodreads.
We picked him up at 11.30 am on Tuesday hanging around Waterstones. He didn’t give us any trouble. We took him downtown and put him in the box, read him his rights. He didn’t want a lawyer. That was nice. We don’t like lawyers much.
He wanted to know why he was there so we explained. We said that we don’t like book reviewers who don’t finish books they review. 149 pages out of 645 is like nothing. He said it’s not nothing it’s 23%. We asked him not to get lippy and explained that we could cuff him if he would like us to. We explained that we don’t think reviewers have any right to have an opinion on something they haven’t read.
He said that in this particular case he had no grudge against the book, unlike many he had previously abandoned. (The records show this guy is a serial abandoner.) He said that he would be very happy to watch the Scandinavian Noir miniseries they will surely make of this book. But he said that whereas on screen the clunky crime clichés of modern thrillers are often successfully sidestepped by the delicious playing of the actors – say, Sophie Grabol as Sarah Lund or Sofia Helin as Saga Noren - on the page they just lie there and die there. So you get lines like
Are you telling me that you allowed yourself to be outwitted, Goldsrud? How far did he get?
We said that when you read a Joe Nesbo book you aren’t expecting William Faulkner. He said that all due respect he knew that but even so.
We issued him with an official warning – stop trying to be popular, stick to your fancy arse Don DeLillos and Cormac McCarthys. You know what’s best for you. Also, finish your books. Next time we won’t be wearing kid gloves.
He said that line could have come right out of The Son. That’s when he had the minor accident, a report of which has already been filed....more
Editorial meeting of Bryant Reviews Ltd Topic : book 1, Millennium series
- Is everyone here? - We should start anyway. - Okay, well, we have to figure ou Editorial meeting of Bryant Reviews Ltd Topic : book 1, Millennium series
- Is everyone here? - We should start anyway. - Okay, well, we have to figure out how to review this damned Dragon Tattoo book. The problem is, everyone and his dog has already reviewed it, and seen the movie. Movies. What’s left to say? - Well, you could say the same thing about Dickens. - All due respect, Larsson is not no Dickens. - True dat. - True dat? Who are you, gangsta-reviewer? - What about the sandwiches and coffee? - ? - You know, you could do a kind of parody, might be funny… - It’s been done! Haven’t you read Joel’s review? - Done! - Done done done! - Also, really, there weren’t that many sandwiches. I counted, there were 7. It’s a bit of a myth. - That’s 7 more than most sane novelists describe in their novels. I bet you could scour the works of Henry James and not find a single sniff of a sandwich. - That’s cause they only eat ptarmigan’s brains on a bed of rocket leaves in Henry James. - What about the blatant product placement? I mean, I assume that’s what this is. - Product placement in a novel? Can you do that? - Well, listen to this bit :
She set her sights on the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerPC. 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 megs of R.A.M and a sixty-gig hard drive. It had Blue-Tooth and built-in CD and DVD burners. Page 202.
- Yep, that has to be product placement. It’s like right out of a sales brochure. Outrageous really. - So did anyone like this thing? - Oh sure. It was kind of okay. - Okay? - It’s a thriller, you know, it’s not A la recherché du Temps Tattoo. Also, it’s a serial killer thriller, where the victims are females chopped up in various horrible ways. So it’s a completely ordinary thriller. They say shit like “But for you I would be dead!” and “This can’t be brushed under the carpet!” and “Get out of my house this minute!”
(General laughter)
- What about Salamander? - It’s Salander. - Oh yeah, I did that too. Every time it said Salander I thought it said salamander, it was so crazy. - She was a bit off the peg, didn’t you think? - Yeah, it was like a central casting “hip edgy young female character”. - I liked her. - Everyone likes her. Okay, except you. You too? Okay, vote – who liked her? Okay, that’s three who did, so the rest of you didn’t. All right then, we’ll take a contrarian position on Salander. We’ll say, oh, I don’t know, utterly implausible, Manga cartoon, middle-aged guy’s fantasy girlfriend, the goth version of the manic dream pixie girl, you know, that kind of stuff. - Agreed. - What about the plot? - It was just a big fat thriller so it had a big fat villain who was completely silly and an exciting denouement which I’ve been more excited going through a tunnel in a train to be brutally honest. - Anybody else? - Er… I felt slightly tense. Once. - Oh, and did you notice it took like 80 pages to splutter into life and then another 50 pages after the story ended to wind down and go to sleep? - Well look, there’s a deadline here, this review has to be done by Tuesday evening. Any volunteers? - …. - …. - I’ll do it then - Hey, thanks. And as your reward… you don’t have to read The Emo who Played with Fire or The Emo who Fucked Up the Beehive. - Okay, I appreciate that. - The rest of you watch it… I see any review slackness and Emo with the Beehive is coming right at you.
I finally got my revenge on Sweden. For most of my life I’ve been bombarded with newspapers and radio telling me how Sweden is so much much very much I finally got my revenge on Sweden. For most of my life I’ve been bombarded with newspapers and radio telling me how Sweden is so much much very much absolutely completely better than Britain at practically everything. Here’s some random quotes from the BBC news archive :
“Sweden has probably the strongest freedom of information law anywhere in the world.”
“Sweden has one of the best staffed health services in the world. But as a parent, Sweden seems the perfect place to have children.”
“BBC's Joe Wilson on how Sweden became a top athletics nation. What can Sweden teach GB?”
“Sweden says it aims to completely wean itself off oil within 15 years, without building new nuclear plants..”
“In a survey of the 26 most industrialised countries, only Sweden came out better.” (Better at what? Oh… life…love…happiness…)
“Sweden and Denmark show most clearly what spelling reform can do. Sweden has gradually given itself a fairly sound spelling system.” (Yes, spelling reform is important too! Admittedly this didn’t make me as furiously jealous as the other stuff. But still – Sweden. Again.)
“If you want my answer, I think we should look at how they do it in Sweden. They have high taxation and a better standard of living which means everyone feels they should contribute”
Blah blah blah. And Abba too! Is there no end to their tall blond pretty perfection and their warm fuzzy wraparound social democracy? But now, one grungy vampire tale Let the Right One In let’s me know in no uncertain terms that Swedes suffer too. Behind the perky teeth and healthy children and universal dentistry and free housing for all and trams and no nuclear waste and Mamma Mia there’s urban decay, neglected glue-sniffing kids, violence, drunkenness, wasted lives and compellingly unpleasant vampires. This is chicken soup for my soul, with swedes! And not only that, but as many persons have pointed out, this is a kind of anti-Twilight, given that the only sexually attractive vampire around is a 200 year old 12 year old girl and the only attracting going on is with an adult paedophile and a miserable lonely 12 year old boy. So stick that up your sacro-iliac, Bella and Edward! I fart in your general direction! This book gets major points for being so accurate about childhood terrors of the non-imaginary kind (bullying). In fact it's really about childhood neglect and the vampire stuff can be read as an extended poetic symbol. But the vampire stuff is also gory and it rocks, so you can have your sensitive cake and you can greedily gobble it up it too.
Anyway, altogether, a maxillo-facial gothtastic read - 3.5 stars.
*****
Update : the film rocks too. It pulls a few punches and cuts out a major zombie theme but otherwise a does a great job. Rent it!
Up-update - I was referring here to the movie Let the Right One In by Thomas Alfredson, made in Sweden in 2009 and not the Hollywood remake by Matt Reeves just released, which I haven't seen.
Upupupupdate : I saw the American remake and that's great too - I wouldn't lie to you, I was very surprised. So - rent that one too!
Upupupupupupdate : they're still at it! Now I'm being told that although Sweden gets a million tons of snow every day because of their extreme yet kindly efficiency no one ever falls down and no bus is ever late and no road is ever closed yet a couple of days of Swedish snow in Britain and all roads are impassable and all lorries immediately jack-knife and all schools immediately close.
Bite them, Eli, bite them all! Don't leave a single Swede unbitten!...more
Miss Smilla and her cast of characters were so quirky that after 100 pages I found all this quirk over the front of my shirt, all over the dining tablMiss Smilla and her cast of characters were so quirky that after 100 pages I found all this quirk over the front of my shirt, all over the dining table (well, I call it a dining table) and stuck between the keys on my keyboard. Had to get it out with a Swiss Army knife, once it had dried. Sent a sample off to the lab and the results came back "two parts David Lynch, three parts frankly unbelievable heroine, three parts uninvolving plot which moves at the speed of an exhausted glacier". As I thought....more
My dear Sophie, there comes a time when you have to face some harsh truths about this wicked world. And I think that time is now. Some people, and it My dear Sophie, there comes a time when you have to face some harsh truths about this wicked world. And I think that time is now. Some people, and it pains me to say this, are not what they seem. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but that breezy scoutmaster, that avuncular English teacher, and that fit young P.E. teacher might not be paedophiles at all. I know! Sometimes you have to read between the lines, and catch the innuendo in what appear to be innocent remarks. For instance, should the English teacher, maybe whilst tickling your ear or fondling your springtime bouquet, drop casually into the conversation, "Sophie, uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination." Now, that's the kind of thing which should make your girlish senses perk up. He's no paedo - that's pure Wittgenstein. His intention is to inveigle you into his house where he will then read to you at his leisure from Tractato Logico-Philosophicus. He's a philosopher! And he knows that if you philosophise together, even once, you'll be so ashamed you'll not want to admit it to anyone. So, if you even pick up a hint of that kind of thing, you must tell me, Sophie, you must tell me, tell me. only me. Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Promise me, Sophie.
**
The real review : this book was like one of those ideas you get in the pub - here, wouldn't it be SO COOL if blah blah blah - Oh yeah, and then blah blah blah! Yeah! Brilliant! Your round I think! Then the next day you think....naaah. But the next day Mr Gaader still thought it was brilliant, and to be honest, it's like your uncle doing magic tricks not that well, but he's a nice old geezer, so you kind of go along with it. ...more
Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight’s contest is a tag team wrestling match between, in the blue corner, reigning champions The Backstabbing Haystacks, and Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight’s contest is a tag team wrestling match between, in the blue corner, reigning champions The Backstabbing Haystacks, and in the red corner the fearsome Intestines R Us – ladeeeeeeeez and gentlemen let me introduce you to the members of the teams, in the Backstabbing Haystacks we have from Norway the unnamed protagonist of Knut Hamsen’s much-praised novel of terminal anomie Hunger, so I give you Mr Anonymous Hunger (applause, hoots, burgers thrown into the ring); and his team-mate the also unnamed protagonist from Jose Saramago’s also much-praised examination of the fragility of human society, Blindness – I give you from Portugal, near Spain, Doctor Dark (applause, sunglasses thrown into ring). Now Intestines R Us in the Red corner, we have Bruno, the damaged loner from Michel Houellebecq’s searing account of modern sexual disgust Les Particules élémentaires (mild applause, condoms thrown into the ring) and his very popular team-mate Ivan Denisovich who needs no further introduction (big cheers, copies of Stalin’s complete works thrown into the ring).
Referee : Blah blah blah – okay, boys, get stuck in.
Bell : Tingaling !
The guy from Hunger and Bruno from Les Particules élémentaires step into the ring. The guy from Hunger immediately collapses and moans feebly. Bruno looks at him with disgust. He picks up an arm and drops it. It flops back onto the canvas.
Crowd : Murder him !
Bruno : C'est une plaisanterie cruelle. Cet homme est à moitié mort. Et suis ainsi je, les amis.
Guy from Hunger : Uhhhh. Uhhh.
Crowd : Baisez cette merde – kill him!
(Pamphlets pointing out the shortcomings of modern literature and the bankrupt imagination of Western intellectuals are thrown into the ring. Meanwhile the other tag team members outside the ring appear to have died.) ...more
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