Stephenie Meyer's Twilight: A Fantasy of Helplessness

This is the promised review of Twilight, everybody. I did all I could to suffer through it. Now I'm due for some good reading because I feel like my brain has been polluted by the horrible writing in this book.

The genre of female coming-of-age stories, to which Meyer's Twilight obviously belongs, underwent a profound transformation in the recent decades. Since the inception of the genre in the 18th century, the central idea of female novels of growth and development was a conflict between the female protagonist and the repressive patriarchal society that strives to stunt her growth and infantilize her. The heroine struggles valiantly against the patriarchal authority that prevents her from developing into a fully grown individual in every sense of the word. Often, however, she loses in this struggle and either dies or consents to being transformed into a perennial child at the mercy of a husband, a father, a family member, etc.

When the women's liberation movement made huge advances in its feminist struggle, everybody expected female coming-of-age stories to reflect the changes in the position of women in society. Finally, we were to read female Bildungsromane where the protagonist takes on the world, grows, develops, and uses her newfound freedom to become a complete and fulfilled adult who does not permit others to stunt her growth. Finally.

These expectations, however, were not fulfilled by the works of literature created by female writers who live in this new, liberated reality. I initially observed this phenomenon in the contemporary Spanish literature but Twilight demonstrates that this tendency also exists in other countries that have made important feminist advances. The tendency I'm talking about consists of the appearance of a huge number of female coming-of-age stories where the female protagonist goes to incredible lengths to infantilize herself. No oppressive patriarchal society persecutes these heroines trying to stunt their growth. Just the opposite, the female characters of contemporary female Bildungsromane often have a lot more freedom than most actual women of that age.

Take Bella Swan, for example. She finds herself in a situation where her divorced parents remove themselves almost completely from the task of supervising her. Bella could use this freedom to explore different facets of growing up, experiment, develop in a variety of directions. However, just like so many female protagonists of such novels she chooses to hand the authority over her life to a male protector/savior and his clan. Bella infantilizes herself in a society where nobody demands that from her. She goes to extreme lengths to become a perennial child coddled and protected by the Cullens.

In this sense, Bella does not stray far from her mother whom she describes as lost and useless without male protection. This is how Bella talks about her mother:

I felt a spasm of panic as I stared at her wide, childlike eyes. How could I leave my loving, erratic, harebrained mother to fend for herself? Of course she had Phil now, so the bills would probably get paid, there would be food in the refrigerator, gas in her car, and someone to call when she got lost, but still . . .

However, those protagonists of today's female Bildungsromane whose mothers are passionately feminist are as likely as Bella to stunt their own growth and infantilize themselves. Much has been said about the nature of Bella's relationship with Edward Cullen. While I was reading the novel, however, I couldn't help noticing how much their relationship resemble that between a very small child and her parent. She pesters him with questions (and if you have ever spent any time in the company of a three year old, you can't fail to see the resemblance), he watches over her as she sleeps, he is always there to protect her from the big, menacing world she does not comprehend.

Twilight is a particularly badly written representative of a powerful trend within the genre of female coming-of-age stories of our feminist era. Women are now in a position where they have to confront things that their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers never had to. Fantasies of helplessness, such as the Twilight Saga, allow female readers to imagine a world where they do not have to shoulder these new responsibilities. They can imagine themselves as eternal children supervised, protected and watched over by supernaturally strong and powerful men.

Now I have a few questions for my readers. The ideas I explore here are the ones that I developed in my doctoral dissertation. I want to spend this summer reworking it into a book. Did you find this post interesting? Easy to understand? Would you like to hear more on this subject? Any feedback will be welcome. Harsh criticisms will also be useful. 

An Update on My Heroic Struggle with Twilight

I know that I promised to take a glance at the Twilight Saga and post a review. But, sheesh, people, how can anybody manage to get through this thing? Forget about the plot, forget about the characters, just tell me how it can be humanly possible to read something so badly written? I've managed to get through sixteen pages in this entire time and the flat, choppy sentences are driving me up the wall. 

Teenagers don't talk like that, act like that, or think like that. Why, oh why, do they read thousands of pages of this sad excuse for a novel? There is so much great stuff to read in the world and so little time to read it. And still people choose this??

I knew Twilight would be bad but I had no idea it could be this abysmally low-quality.

Poor Che Guevara

I feel very sorry for Che Guevara. When he decided to go on his suicide mission in Bolivia, could he have imagined what would happen to him after his death? And I don't mean the mutilation of his body. I'm referring to the way his image and his name were commercialized. Che Guevara's name is now commonly used by spoiled rich brats to symbolize their boring rebellion against their parents. 

Che
The star of a revolutionary

And do you remember The Motorcycle Diaries? The movie was such a disgrace that it would make even the staunchest fan of Che Guevara feel happy that his idol is dead and can't see how a bunch of stupid movie-makers turned a revolutionary hero into a pathetic eunuch. 

Now the Che hagiography has taken a step further into insanity. An Argentinean publishing house has released a book about Che for children. (The link is in Spanish.)

The book is very colorful and, of course, all scenes of violence have been excised from this G-rated version of the revolutionary's life.

Just look how cute Che is walking on a tight-rope with his bunch of flowers and all. 

What a way to castrate a threatening image of a revolutionary figure. I wonder which ultra-conservative organization sponsored the release of this book. If the little Argentineans are taught to see their major revolutionary figure as silly and toothless, they will be lest attracted by the romantic notions of revolutionary activity.

I found the reference to this book on this Spanish-language blog.

Ricardian: A Review of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time

Most of my readers didn't warm to my first Ricardian post. This is completely understandable since the subject of whether Richard III did, in fact, murder the princes Edward and Richard in the summer of 1483 is quite academic. I will keep indulging my love of Ricardian arcana from time to time, while you should feel free to skip posts tagged "Ricardian" if the subject bores you. 

Josephine Tey created several classical British mysteries that any lover of the genre would appreciate. Few people know, however, of her contribution to Ricardian Apology. In The Daughter of Time, Tey offers us her take on the provenance of the myth that blames Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England, for the murder of his nephews (the Princes in the Tower.)

Inspector Alan Grant finds himself stuck in a hospital, bored and desperate to participate in some sort of an investigation. While he is in a hospital bed, he only has access to history textbooks. The story of Richard III catches his eye and as he begins to read accounts of Richard's "crimes", Grant realizes just how senseless and lacking in logic all accusations against Richard are.

I might have believed Grant's asseverations
that murderers don't look like this
had I never seen pictures of Ted Bundy,
a wholesome-looking serial killer

The Inspector's journey begins in a way that I didn't find very convincing. Grant looks at the famous portrait of Richard III and realizes that a man who looks this way could not have possibly been a cold-blooded murderer of two small boys. This, of course, is very naive and smacks of Lombrosianism that had been discredited long before Tey wrote The Daughter of Time.

This, however, is the only weak point of an otherwise logical and reasonable account of the numerous holes in the myth of Richard's guilt. Inspector Grant and a young researcher who helps him discover the truth soon realize that Richard III had absolutely no reason to kill his nephews. The boys had been declared illegitimate by an Act of Parliament and Richard III occupied the throne as a well-loved and legitimate King of England. Elizabeth Woodville, the boys' mother, was friendly with Richard III until his death. Would she had visited his court and allowed her daughter to do so had Richard III, indeed, murdered her small sons? That seems highly unlikely. Moreover, after Henry Tudor defeated Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth Field, he never declared publicly that Richard had killed the boys or even that the boys were dead. He did, however, imprison the boys' mother in a convent. 

In the view of these facts, Grant arrives at a conclusion that the first Tudor king, Henry VII, was the only person with means, motive and opportunity to kill the Princes. Having absolutely no claim to the throne, he needed to destroy the Plantagenets so that nobody would dispute his rise to power. I need to tell you right now that not every Ricardian shares Tey's belief in the culpability of Henry Tudor. There are many other suspects, and you can make up your own mind as to which one is the likeliest murderer. I will keep bringing you these accounts on a regular basis.

Book Reviewing Policies

People are writing in more and more often, asking if I'd be willing to read and review their books. I'm not at all averse to doing that. If you are considering sending me a book for review, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Send your proposal to clarissasblog@hotmail.com. Don't forget to mention your book's title, genre, and page length. Also, provide a brief summary.

2. I reserve the right to express my honest opinion about the book. If I don't like it, the review will reflect that.

3. Hard copies of books are preferred. I read too much off a computer screen as it is, and it hurts my eyes. Of course, if the book sounds really interesting, I'll accept it anyway in the .pdf format.

4. Don't send any books until I explicitly agree to review them.

5. I will not review any of the following:

* romance novels;
* anything to do with zombies or vampires;
* fantasy;
* sci-fi;
* books on mafia and organized crime;
* books where the main character is the President of the US;
* books that contain more than one car chase;
* books where martial arts are important;
* books about the CIA;
* books where somebody is dying of cancer for over 15% of the entire length of the book.

No offense, people, I just don't get this kind of books, so it makes no sense to expect me to write intelligent reviews.

6. I'd be willing to accept for review books in the following languages:

* English;
* Spanish;
* Russian;
* Ukrainian;
* French;
* Portuguese.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: A Review

A fellow blogger Izgad brought to my attention James Finn Garner's Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. I bought this great book on Kindle yesterday and laughed until I almost howled. I know the book was published quite a while ago and I'm really late to any discussion of it. So I'm just going to share some of my favorite quotes from this hilarious little collection.

Here is the beginning of the very first story in the collection. If you don't think this is hysterically funny, I have no idea how that's possible:

There once was a young person named Red Riding Hood who lived with her mother on the edge of a large wood. One day her mother asked her to take a basket of fresh fruit and mineral water to her grandmother's house--not because this was womyn's work, mind you, but because the deed was generous and helped engender a feeling of community. Furthermore, her grandmother was not sick, but rather was in full physical and mental health and was fully capable of taking care of herself as a mature adult.


Unfortunately, there are some hapless academics who pontificate to their students in this manner, which is sad and deadening to any critical capacities the students might possess. I have written before about the pseudo-liberals' attempts at castrating language, so I won't repeat myself.
I have also been guilty of writing in a way similar to the one that is being parodied in the following priceless retelling of the story of Three Little Pigs:

"At the house of sticks, the wolf again banged on the door and shouted, "Little, pigs, little pigs, let me in!" The pigs shouted back, "Go to hell, you carnivorous, imperialistic oppressor!"

Just compare it with a quote from this very heavy-handed review I wrote:

At the beginning of the series set in 1915, we see Maria, an illiterate day laborer who is a lover of a rich mill-owner and a mother of his illegitimate child. One day, the mill-owner and his buddies are making fun of Maria because of her marginalized social status.

At least, I caught myself in the process of adopting this weird, pseudo-progressive language and stopped in time. Many people, however, do it completely in earnest, which makes their writing sound extremely comical. What's even worse, they try to censor everybody who doesn't share their terror of language. As the example of my clumsy review demonstrates, such things might happen to all of us. Still, there are those who don't have the requisite sense of humor to understand the extreme silliness of any attempts to purge the language of half its vocabulary and literature from all of its "offensive" masterpieces.

The author ridicules not only the pseudo-liberal language purges but also the efforts to rewrite famous fairy-tales that have become even more common since the book was first published. This is how the tale of the three little pigs ends in this politically correct version:

Their next step was to liberate their homeland. They gathered together a band of other pigs who had been forced off their lands. This new brigade of porcinistas attacked the resort complex with machine guns and rocket launchers and slaughtered the cruel wolf oppressors, sending a clear signal to the rest of the hemisphere not to meddle in their internal affairs. Then the pigs set up a model socialist democracy with free education, universal health care and affordable housing for everyone.

It was especially disturbing to read Garner's retelling of the fairy-tale of Rapunzel. Last year, Disney released Tangled, a very weird retelling of the famous German tale. The fairy-tale enjoyed great popularity for centuries until Disney decided that it could be improved by injecting modern sensibilities into it. The result was considerably inferior to Garner's hilarious parody. Even then, there were pseudo-progressive bloggers who claimed the story was racist because the protagonist is blond. The arguments that this German story was created by German people many of whom are, indeed, blond were also rejected as racist. At the end of the discussion, I started feeling like my own blond hair was some kind of a racial slur.

Even though Garner's book was published a while ago, it still merits attention as a reminder of how far pseudo-liberals would go in order to distract our attention from the sad reality of how decidedly unprogressive their views actually are.

P.S. Last night my husband and I were discussing Politically Correct Bedtime Stories and laughing at the funny quotes. He reminded me of the review I quoted above and that was written in the same silly style and of how funny it was.

"But you still like my blog more than anybody else's?" I asked in jest. 

"Of course, I do," he said. "I'm completely monogamous even though all other lifestyle choices are perfectly acceptable, valid and worthy of respect and it would never occur to me to claim that my way of being is in any way or manner preferable to anybody else's and should be deemed superior to anybody's because that would be offensive, condescending and wrong."

Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: A Review

After the disappointment of Selina Hastings's biography of Somerset Maugham, I didn't expect much from Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, a book that has served as an inspiration to Hastings. Still, I was too sick to process anything more complex than a biography, so I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, I really liked it.

For one, McKenna doesn't take on a task that would be excessively hard for him to carry out and never promises anything he will not be able to deliver. He makes it very clear from the start that this book is dedicated exclusively to Wilde's sexual biography and nothing else. Unlike Hastings, he doesn't attempt to cover every aspect of his subject's life or offer inane pronouncements on the subject of his literary work. Wilde's artistic production is discussed only in terms of its connection to his sexuality.

It is obvious that McKenna has done an incredible amount of research. However, he is different from Hastings in that he doesn't expose the readers to a barrage of irrelevant minute details of Wilde's existence. Every new personage he introduces is relevant to the culminating moment of the book: Wilde's trial. McKenna never forgets to attract the readers' attention to the information that will become crucial much later in the book. Every fact that the author mentions serves to advance the story, so it's easy to follow the narrative without getting distracted from the story-line. McKenna makes every effort to remain objective and, unlike Hastings, never tries to offer inane judgements where none are needed. This is quite a feat for a biographer of somebody as controversial as Wilde.

In spite of McKenna's objectivity, Wilde comes off like a very disgusting individual who bullied underage boys into having sex with him and might have been on the verge of pimping his 9-year-old son to Lord Albert Douglas on the very eve of the scandal that eventually put him in jail. One of the reasons I rarely read writers' biographies is that I'm fearful of being so disappointed in them that it will prevent me from enjoying their work ever again. Of course, there are artists of such stature that you can forgive them anything. Francisco de Quevedo was an anti-Semite and a hater of women. Dostoyevsky was also a rabid anti-Semite who treated his wife horribly. Juan Goytisolo is a passionate misogynist. Still, they created works of art of such magnitude as to be enough to redeem our entire civilization with all its faults. In my view, Wilde is nowhere near that category.

Biographies are often boring, especially if they discuss people whose life journey has been written about and filmed many times. This is not the case with The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. McKenna offers some very interesting findings. I used to think that my knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Wilde's trial and incarceration was quite good. This book, however, proved me wrong. After reading it, I realized that the case was a lot more complex than I thought. The book really reads like a mystery novel. 

Of course, I wouldn't be myself if I didn't find anything in this biography to make fun of. McKenna sometimes creates phrases that are quite heavy-handed. I will give you a few of my favorite examples:

1. Certain events were enough "to send him rushing towards the bacteriological sanctity and safety of marriage." You have to agree that the bacteriological safety of marriage sounds perfectly hilarious. Coupled with the general tone of the book that often borders on pompous, this turn of phrase is priceless.
2. "Oscar performed his husbandly duties manfully and to good effect. Just four months after her marriage, Constance found herself pregnant." It is highly debatable whether the appearance of children in such a loveless and miserable marriage was such a good effect, of course.
3. "The love of Oscar for Constance, and of Constance for Oscar, was a strangely arbitrary, ill-considered, precipitate sort of love." This sounds like there is love that isn't arbitrary or precipitate, which is hardly possible. A calculated and well-pondered sort of love is no love at all.
4. "The locus of Oscar's sexual interest in Constance lay in her virginity, and in robbing her of that virginity." I don't know how it's possible to "rob" anyone of their virginity, as if it were an actual object and not a social construct. It is especially difficult to do so within a fully consensual relationship.
5. "Pierre Louis is usually regarded as a red-blooded heterosexual." This, of course, immediately made me wonder what other kinds of blood heterosexuals might possess.
6. "The letters were from Oscar, Lucas D'Oyly Carte and others, and were indeed compromising. Wood knew that they were worth their weight in-gold." Given that letters don't weigh all that much (and here we are talking about pretty short letters, too), one is left to wonder whether their weight in gold was really that big of an amount. 
7. "Charlie even accepted a preserved cherry from Oscar's own mouth. `My brother took it into his, and this trick was repeated three or four times.' It was quite clear to everybody that Oscar wanted Charlie to take more than just a preserved cherry into his mouth." We cannot possibly know what was clear to everybody who was in the room at that time or what Oscar wanted Charlie to take into his mouth. Thankfully, such heavy-handed attempts at guessing are very few in the book.

McKenna is, however, perfectly capable of creating a very powerful, pithy, incisive sentence. Consider this one, for example: "In the eyes of the Victorians, there was only one thing worse than a sodomite, and that was a proselytising sodomite." In spite of some minor slips, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde is a very good book that I enjoyed a lot.

V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River: A Review

I want to begin this new year of blogging with a review of one of the most famous books by V.S. Naipaul, a controversial writer and a Nobel Prize winner. Before I begin, I want to warn you that if you are here with the goal of ripping off this review to pass it as an essay at school, you are making a huge mistake. Not only because plagiarism is always stupid and wrong but also because my reading of this novel is very different from what your teacher wants to hear. Feel free to see if I'm right at your own peril.

V.S. Naipaul differs from many other postcolonial writers in that his attitude towards independence is a lot more complex, painful, and honest than the usual starry-eyed "Yippee! We are finally free from the vile, horrible empire" we keep getting from the writers of the postcolonial reality. I am a postcolonial subject, too. Believe me, there is nothing I like more than denouncing the ills of imperial domination. This is why I have to admire Naipaul's courage in demonstrating the fallacies of an unconditional acceptance of independence.

A Bend in the River describes post-independence struggles of an unnamed African country whose experiences are in many ways similar to those of other newly independent nations irrespective of their geographical location. The process of creating a new, post-colonial identity is central to such nations. Naipaul realizes that the only way of analyzing the workings of identity formation is from a distance. This is why the first-person narrator of this story, Salim, is a perennial outsider in all communities he inhabits. As an onlooker, Salim is in the position to notice and analyze identity-related issues better than others. This capacity, however, results in his marginalization:

A Bend in the River is a story of Salim's efforts to accept unquestioningly the nationalistic discourse of the country where he comes to reside and his failure to do so. As hard as this character tries, he never manages to escape the realization that independence is a lot more problematic than anybody around him wishes to accept. In the novel, we see a gradual disintegration of a newly independent country that leads to an ever-growing violence.

So from an early age I developed the habit of looking, detaching myself from a familiar scene and trying to consider it as from a distance. It was from this habit of looking that the idea came to me that as a community we had fallen behind. And that was the beginning of my insecurity. I used to think of this feeling of insecurity as a weakness, a failing of my own temperament, and I would have been ashamed if anyone had found out about it. I kept my ideas about the future to myself.

Naipaul's writings have been very controversial because he verbalizes those feelings and experiences of post-colonial that we don't want to acknowledge even to ourselves. Salim's friend who is even more removed from his country of origin by virtue of his European education expresses some of these concerns whose mere existence is unacceptable to many:

I hadn’t understood to what extent our civilization had also been our prison. I hadn’t understood either to what extent we had been made by the place where we had grown up, made by Africa and the simple life of the coast, and how incapable we had become of understanding the outside world. We have no means of understanding a fraction of the thought and science and philosophy and law that have gone to make that outside world. We simply accept it. We have grown up paying tribute to it, and that is all that most of us can do. We feel of the great world that it is simply there, something for the lucky ones among us to explore, and then only at the edges. It never occurs to us that we might make some contribution to it ourselves. And that is why we miss everything. When we land at a place like London Airport we are concerned only not to appear foolish. It is more beautiful and more complex than anything we could have dreamed of, but we are concerned only to let people see that we can manage and are not overawed. We might even pretend that we had expected better. That is the nature of our stupidity and incompetence. And that was how I spent my time at the university in England, not being overawed, always being slightly disappointed, understanding nothing, accepting everything, getting nothing.

"Our stupidity and incompetence?" How dare he? Haven't we been schooled to proclaim ourselves as owners of alternative and much better forms of knowledge, inhabitants of a different kind of civilization? Haven't we been told ad nauseam that we have our own Prousts and Hegels? And if nobody knows or appreciates this special contribution of ours, that doesn't mean anything is wrong with the contribution. It just means the world is unjust and its system of values is all wrong. This is what we defend with everything we have while falling over ourselves in our rush to possess as many attributes of the hated colonial masters. Contempt and desire of that which is apparently so disdained are among the unavoidable attributes of the postcolonial experience.

Naipaul's analysis of every facet of how national identities are created and imposed is nothing short of brilliant. To give just one example, every national identity requires legitimizing heroic figures that embody the best characteristics of the nation. These figures are invented, distorted, mythologized and contested by groups within the country that struggle for the right to propose their own version of national identity. Naipaul demonstrates with absolute brilliance how such symbols of national identity end up robbing the national subject of individuality:

I studied the large framed photographs of Gandhi and Nehru and wondered how, out of squalor like this, those men had managed to get themselves considered as men. It was strange, in that building in the heart of London, seeing those great men in this new way, from the inside, as it were. Up till then, from the outside, without knowing more of them than I had read in newspapers and magazines, I had admired them. They belonged to me; they ennobled me and gave me some place in the world. Now I felt the opposite. In that room the photographs of those great men made me feel that I was at the bottom of a well. I felt that in that building complete manhood was permitted only to those men and denied to everybody else. Everyone had surrendered his manhood, or a part of it, to those leaders. Everyone willingly made himself smaller the better to exalt those leaders. . .  We have nothing. We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves.

As much as one might admire Gandhi, it does get annoying to encounter yet another set of pious platitudes every time his (or any other independence leader's) name is mentioned. Any national identity is based on a set of myths that fall apart under even a very superficial kind of scrutiny. This is why national identities are so bound with emotions: we have to be blinded by our deeply emotional response to our particular piece of painted fabric, venerated independence leaders, mythology of first oppression then liberation in order to buy these poorly constructed myths.

Naipaul has made himself hated by many when he started discussing the problematic nature of each newly-achieved independence, each nationalistic mythology. His honesty leaves me speechless, while his beautiful writing style makes me feel ashamed of everything I have ever written in English. We often believe that a great writer is somebody who makes us nod our heads and think, "Oh, this is so true." That isn't greatness, though. A true genius tells us things we never thought of before, makes us angry by an assault on widely-accepted trivialities. This is precisely the kind of writer Naipaul is. A Bend in the River is, in my opinion, his angriest and consequently his best novel.

What Is Your Favorite Book of 2010?

I started thinking about all the new books (70+) that I read this year, trying to figure out which one I enjoyed the most. My answer to this question surprised me: El corazon helado by the Spanish author Almudena Grandes. This book is 1248 pages long and could have easily been at least 200 pages shorter because it does get repetitive in places. Still, it's really good. Almudena Grandes first became popular when she wrote her pornographic bestseller The Ages of Lulu. Since then, the writer has been trying hard to prove that she can attract readers with anything other than graphic sex scenes.

Even though I have published scholarly articles on Almudena Grandes and used her work in my doctoral dissertation, I didn't really consider her to be a serious writer. Her magnum opus Corazon helado, El (Spanish Edition) (translated into English asThe Frozen Heart) finally managed to convince me that Almudena Grandes is worthy of attention as an actual artist. The novel is about the trauma of the Spanish Civil War as it is relived by the representatives of my generation. Even though this topic has been addressed by numerous writers, Almudena Grandes still managed to make her lengthy novel impossible to forget or confuse with any other.

I haven't read the English translation of this novel, so I don't know whether it's any good. It does exist, however, which is always a testimony to a novel's success.


Of course, unless you are really interested in the Spanish Civil War, I don't think I would necessarily recommend this novel to you. El corazon helado is also a beautiful love story, which, in my opinion, is an absolutely impossible genre to write in nowadays. Everybody who writes about love ends up being either vulgar or sappy. Almudena Grandes, for the most part, manages to avoid that. Seeing a good romantic story that is well-written and not all that cheesy might be a reason to read the book.

The reason why I'm writing about this book is that I'm truly surprised that it was the one I enjoyed the most out of the entire year of reading. There have been more important and better-written books, yet I still remember this one with the greatest fondness.

Which was the book you enjoyed the most in 2010? Please share your favorite in the comment section.

Ruth Rendell's Tigerlily's Orchids

Life is hard for us, American-based fans of the incomparable mystery author Ruth Rendell. Every time her new book comes out, we either have to sit around waiting for over 18 months for an American edition to come out, or hunt around for a copy someone might have brought from Great Britain and might be willing to sell. Some people, of course, are lucky enough to have close friends in Great Britain and can pester them for a copy of Rendell's new book. I have not been blessed in this department, so I have to cast my lot with used books sites.

Ruth Rendell is admirable on several accounts. As an auto-didact, she has a range of vocabulary and the breadth of erudition that many of her Oxford-educated peers do not possess. She is 80 years old, but this prolific writer keeps releasing new books on a regular basis. The great changes that have taken place in our Western societies over the last 50 years and the incapacity of many people to adapt to said changes form one of Rendell's favorite topics. Still, this writer who was born in 1930 has an astonishing understanding of today's realities. In my favorite novel by Rendell ever, 13 Steps Down, she created a memorable character of Gwendolen Chawcer, an elderly bookish spinster who is terrified of "new-fangled" (her favorite word) devices such as computers and microwaves. Even though Rendell understands how terrifying modern reality can be to older people, she seems to have a perfect grasp of today's modes of existence.

Her most recent novel* Tigerlily's Orchids (Import Edition) Hardback is not Ruth Rendell's best work but it's still a joy to read. The book is light on mystery. You pretty much know exactly what's going to happen, and there is little (if any) suspense. The strength of Tigerlily's Orchids (as well as of this writer's entire corpus of work) lies in Rendell's gift of creating delightfully quirky characters who are weird in most endearing ways. I am usually horrible with characters' names (which, believe me, is a huge problem for a literary critic.) You can see me engrossed in a book and ask me what the names of the protagonists are, and more often than not I will not be able to say. Ruth Rendell, however, is so good at creating memorable characters that even my unreliable memory always retains their names.

What I like the most about Rendell's books is her skill in taking any minor quirk in a character's personality and demonstrate how this touch of strangeness can gradually develop into full blown insanity, taking this character along some very dangerous paths. I might be projecting here, but I believe that everybody has this little place within them that houses some uncanny oddity, some little spot of the bizarre, some minor obsession. We keep it under control - for the most part - but it's very pleasurable to imagine it unleashed, they way it is in Rendell's books. I have read interviews with Ruth Rendell and I have no idea where this proper and quite sheltered older lady** found her deep knowledge of the darker side of human psyche. Still, nobody writing today describes a gradual slippage into insanity better than Rendell.

If there is a Rendell fan among my readers, please make yourself known. I have tried foisting Rendell's books on everybody around me but, somehow, I can't find a true lover of Rendell's books among people I know.

* Rendell's The Vault is scheduled to appear in 2011 to the delight of her fans all over the world.

** Rendell is also a very kind human being. When I was a teenager in Ukraine, I wrote her a letter to express my admiration of her novels, and she responded with a long letter and a gift of books. It was next to impossible to find new Enlgish-language books in my country at that time, so this gift was priceless to me.

Paper Books

So last night, after a very long break, I started reading a paper book. Since I bought my first Kindle in May of 2008, I gradually stopped reading paper books at all. They are bulky, heavy, inconvenient. If you underline quotes in them, the marks are usually indelible. Besides, you can neither transfer underlined quotes and notes on the margins to your blog nor tweet them. And what's the point of a good quote, if you can't share it with anybody and receive instant feedback?

When another book or article is mentioned within a paper book, I can't find out how much it costs and what other people have to say about it. And it is really confusing to be reading a book whose Amazon ratings are unknown to you. How should a reader even know what to expect from it?

Another annoying thing about a paper book is that whenever I encounter a word I don't know, pressing my finger on the margin next to the unknown word does absolutely nothing. A dictionary doesn't come up to inform me what the word means, which is beyond inconvenient. And what is one supposed to do when one gets bored with the book? A paper book doesn't allow you to switch to a game or even play music. It doesn't even know how to narrate the text for you out loud while you are doing something else. What is a reader supposed to do, just stay reading and not do anything else in the meanwhile? How is that even possible? And how is one supposed to update one's social media while being stuck with this unwieldy paper device? I mean it isn't like a person can be expected to go for an entire half hour without checking their Twitter account, their e-mails, and their blog, right?

In short, paper books are a horrible drag. Who on Earth invented these cumbersome, inconvenient things that haven't released a new version in 570 years?

Selina Hastings's The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Review, Part II

What I find especially interesting about Maugham - and what I wished this biography addressed a little more intelligently than it did - is how fast his fame faded. As Hastings points out, Maugham's works have even been adapted to the screen more times than Conan Doyle's. Still, today almost everybody knows Conan Doyle, while Maugham's name is familiar to a very narrow circle of readers. I only know his work so well because in the Soviet Union where I was born censorship limited our familiarity with English-speaking authors of the XXth century to those writers who remained completely untouched by Modernism and continued writing in the outdated realist style. And herein, I believe, lies the main reason for Maugham's loss of popularity.

Hastings recognizes that

it was not done in highbrow circles to take [Maugham's] writing seriously.

Incapable of finding an intelligent explanation of why Maugham was not seen as an equal by the artistic giants of his era, Hastings provides an answer of her own: they were jealous of his affluence, his big villa and his expensive limousine. Once again, one wishes that Hastings had some minimal familiarity with the development of literature in English. Maugham knew that he was consistently considered "a second-rate writer", and it's obvious that this knowledge was deeply painful to him. It is a disservice to the writer not to explore this issue and, instead, concentrate on excruciatingly boring sex lives of his numerous acquaintances.

Hastings's inadequacy at a serious analysis of Maugham's legacy reduces her to filling page after page with painstakingly researched minutiae of the author's daily existence. We find out the names of everybody who visited this extremely hospitable writer at his villa, what the guests ate and drank, where they went after lunch and before afternoon tea. Hastings provides us with names and brief biographies of pretty much everybody Maugham met in his long and active life. We are even regaled with the knowledge that one of the writer's male lovers used to sit in the patio of Maugham's villa in pink shorts at a certain point in time, while another lover walked around in very short white shorts out of which his thighs bulged ridiculously, and that Maugham once won $12 at a game of cards (which was far from the only one he played in his life). This wealth of mundane details can be of interest only to the most assiduous of fans. Since I am not one of them, I found those pages of the The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography incredibly tedious.

This biographer's tendency to disregard what really matters in favor of utterly trivial details manifests itself especially strongly in the last third of the book. Hastings mentions a couple of times in passing Maugham's "socialist beliefs" but fails to elaborate what they consisted of and how this intensely snobbish writer who spent his life in a relentless pursuit of aristocrats managed to remain any kind of a socialist. Instead of discussing Maugham's politics, a feat for which this biographer is signally unsuited, Hastings tells us at length what cars the author bought before and after the war, that writer Ian Fleming enjoyed beating his wife with wet towels, and what a lover of Maugham's lover's lover (no, there is no typo here) wrote in a letter that had nothing whatsoever to do with Maugham.

The entire effort that Hastings made in writing this book can be summed up in the words of one of my favorite colleagues: "Incompetents abound."

[The first part of the review is located here]

Selina Hastings's The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Review, Part I

I started my Thanksgiving break with a plan to relax completely and exorcise the accumulated exhaustion of a very difficult semester. In order to do that, I embarked on a project of reading Selina Hastings's bulky biography of Somerset Maugham. In case you don't know, W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was one of the most successful and popular British authors in the period between the two great wars. Today, most people don't know Somerset Maugham and he isn't widely read at all. His novel Of Human Bondage is still quite popular. However, his short stories and plays that made Maugham so famous have fallen out of favor with the readers. There are several reasons for that. For one, Maugham was a strong believer in the colonial system of the British Empire. His colonialism jumps off the pages of his short stories and is quite disgusting. He was also a vicious misogynist and made a career out of selling his contempt towards women. Maugham pretty much missed the boat of Modernism and kept writing in a plodding realist style, which was quite unsuited to the realities of the XXth century.

Obviously, Maugham's colinialism and male chauvinism disgust me profoundly. Still, I have to confess that I have a secret love for his short stories because they are so beautifully crafted. It is my contention that before Julio Cortazar's time, nobody could write a short story better than Maugham. If you have no idea what I'm on about, just read Maugham's short story "The Lotus Eater" (which is available in open access online here) and you'll see what I mean. Sadly, Maugham proved incapable of inscribing himself into the XXth century either ideologically or stylistically. He wasted his considerable gifts on pushing the outdated message of colonial and masculine domination, which is why his erstwhile fame is well-nigh forgotten nowadays.

Unfortunately, Selina Hastings lacks the most basic understanding of how to analyze literature. She could have definitely benefitted from taking at least a couple of literature classes. Then, she would have known, for example, that it is wrong to confuse the writer with his characters. She has this annoying habit of saying: "This is what Maugham felt/thought/did" and trying to prove that with a quote from his novel Of Human Bondage about the feelings, thoughts and actions of the novel's protagonist Philip Carey. As autobiographical as that novel might have been, Carey and Maugham are not the same person. Trying to psychoanalyze the author on the basis of what his characters say or do is the kind of a rookie mistake that a serious literary biographer should never commit. Whenever Hastings attempts to offer an analysis of one of Maugham's works, she invariably slips into the language of a seventh-grader's book report:

One of Maugham’s greatest strengths as a novelist is his ability to create three-dimensional characters, women as well as men, interacting with one another.

Imagine that. A novelist writes about men - and even women - who actually interact with one another. This surprising fact definitely needed addressing in the writer's biography.

Given to hero-worshipping her subject, Hastings manages not to notice his vitriolic hatred of women. She goes as far as suggesting that the opposite is the case. For this biographer, Maugham was

a man who enjoyed the company of women, who in his fiction and his friendships was so understanding and compassionate toward them.

I wouldn't be able to address Maugham's friendships with women (although I do know - and Hastings offers ample proof for my opinion - that he treated his wife and daughter abominably), but as for his writing, it isn't often that one encounters an author who has done quite as much as Maugham to create a gallery of horrible, nasty, disgusting, stupid, venal, brainless women. It is unsurprising that Hastings, who can construct a turn of phrase as atrocious as

doctors, diplomats, traders, missionaries, and their women

would be incapable of noticing Maugham's misogyny. Hastings is so blindly uncritical of Maugham's every word, position, and action that she quite sincerely suggests that one of the reasons why Maugham's marriage was such a disaster was that

the traditional feminine occupations of knitting and needlework held no appeal for [his wife] whatsoever.

Of course, it is just as probable that the marriage suffered more because of the fact that the traditional husbandly occupation of having sex with his wife held no appeal whatsoever for Maugham, who was gay. Hastings, however, chooses to demonize Maugham's long-suffering wife Syrie for not learning to knit, which, as Hastings seems to believe, would have distracted her from her husband's numerous homosexual affairs and turned this marriage into an endless bliss.

[Find Part II of the review here.]

Ken Follett's Fall of Giants: A Review, Part II

In the first part of this review, I discussed the numerous historical errors that Ken Follett makes in his novel about World War I. This author tortures and murders facts of history with a terrifying abandon. By the end of this very long book, I thought that nothing else could possibly shock me until I encountered a description of "surly Russians" engaging in group sex in broad daylight in the streets of Petrograd. And then engaging in more public sex with children.

However, Follett's complete disregard for historical facts is not the only problem with this book. His entire understanding of important events in history is extremely limited and often naive. In Fall of Giants, World War I and the two Russian revolutions are a result of backroom deals between inept diplomats and bored society ladies.

''On or about December 1910 human character changed,'' Virginia Woolf once said. Since then, volumes have been written on the profound ideological shift that was caused by the advent of Modernity. The unwieldy, otdated empires of the Romanovs, the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns could not adapt to these radical transformations and had to plunge into suicidal warfare, social unrest, and revolutions. Follett's grave intellectual limitations (and what else can be said about someone who relies as much as he does on silly cultural stereotypes?) prevent him from realizing that the events he describes are too important to be addressed in a superficial manner. This writer is, unfortunately, too self-assured and condescending to consult the existing body of scholarship on the events of 1914-1919.

I do not recommend this book to anybody. Not only will you not learn any reliable information about this period in history, you will not even have a good time. If the first part of the book is at least marginally entertaining, the second half of it is excruciatingly boring, long-winded and extremely repetitive.

Ken Follett's Fall of Giants: A Review, Part I

If you were one of those people who eagerly awaited the release of Ken Follett's Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy), you are in for a nasty surprise. This book (which is supposed to be the first in a trilogy) is nothing whatsoever like The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End. Even though those books could teach you absolutely nothing about Medieval history, they were highly entertaining. I read both of them in a couple of days and enjoyed myself immensely.

The annoying aspects of Fall of Giants are many. I have already written about Follett's complete disregard for facts in his depictions of the Russian Orthodox Church and the history of Russia. He also bases his book on the most tired and silly prejudices about the nations he discusses. All Germans are "orderly", "well-organized", punctual, and prissy. All Russians are "surly", "primitive", "barbaric", "corrupt", violent, alcoholic criminals. All Russian women are, of course, drunken whores. The only marginally acceptable Russian is the character who is obsessed with moving to the US. All Austrians are effete, perverted, weak, hysterically aggressive, unreasonable idiots. The French are weepy and useless fools. The French women are also all whores, but at least they whore around while sober. And, of course, all Jews know and help each other, forming a sort of an international Jewish mafia. All British people are insanely promiscuous (don't ask.) The culmination of the British promiscuity is reflected in a scene where the sister of an English earl (sic!) gives a hand-job to a German attache in the opera-house behind the backs (literally) of her brother the earl, Lloyd George, and foreign dignitaries. To top it all, there are the saintly Americans who, after torturing themselves over it for hours, decide to send invading troops to Mexico in order to bring peace and democracy to the wayward Mexicans. To the Americans' huge surprise, Mexicans are not overjoyed about the invasion and fail to be grateful to their caring neighbors to the North.

The way Follett panders to his American readers is so obsequious that it borders on disgusting. Unlike those nasty Europeans and tyrannical Mexicans, America (meaning, of course, the US) is "rich, busy, exciting, and free." There is no anti-semitism (once again, this is taking place in 1914), workers have amazing working conditions, are rich, and enjoy running water and electricity at home. Of course, each worker has at least two rooms all to himself. (I guess, Upton Sinclair is not to be trusted in his accounts of the horrible living conditions of immigrant workers in the US at the turn of the century.) American women are not subjected. They are all independent, "free", and have exciting careers. I wonder what happened since 1914 to change all that. Possibly, an explanation will be forthcoming in the next two books in the trilogy. The only problems that exist in the godly America are caused by the surly, criminal, promiscuous immigrants who keep trying to take advantage of the saintly Americans.

If you think that the above-mentioned things are enough to put you off the book for good, just wait for the second part of the review where I will tell you why the book is even worse than what you might have imagined based on the first part of the review.

Cold War Mentality in Ken Follett's Fall of Giants

I can never say no to my readers, so after getting several requests for a review of Ken Follett's new book Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy) I started reading it. The book is almost 1000 pages long and I will post a review as soon as I'm done. For now, I wanted to discuss this curious phenomenon that I have been noticing for a while where English-speaking writers fall into an outdated and ridiculous Cold War mentality whenever they write about Russia. I shared a while ago that I feel a deep-seated postcolonial resentment against Russia. Even so, things that Follett writes about that country are completely wrong and often offensive.

Take, for example, Follett's description of the Russian Orthodox Church. I'm no fan of the ROC. Today, they represent a very conservative and stifling force within Russia. During the Soviet era, Russian Orthodox Church collaborated with the KGB, betraying the confidences of their parishioners. Still, this doesn't mean that accusing the ROC of every sin under the sun is either reasonable or acceptable. The following passage in the novel is so blatantly wrong that it's scary:

I went to the church and told the priest we had nowhere to sleep.” Katerina laughed harshly. “I can guess what happened there.” He was surprised. “Can you?” “The priest offered you a bed—his bed. That’s what happened to me.” “Something like that,” Grigori said. “He gave me a few kopeks and sent me to buy hot potatoes. The shop wasn’t where he said, but instead of searching for it I hurried back to the church, because I didn’t like the look of him. Sure enough, when I went into the vestry he was taking Lev’s trousers down.” She nodded. “Priests have been doing that sort of thing to me since I was twelve.” Grigori was shocked. He had assumed that that particular priest was uniquely evil. Katerina obviously believed that depravity was the norm. “Are they all like that?” he said angrily. “Most of them, in my experience.”

Of course, there are freaks and criminals everywhere, but this blanket accusation of mass pedophilia amongst the priests of the ROC is not sustained by any kind of historic evidence. The priests of the Russian Orthodox Church are not only allowed to marry, they are required to do so. This suggestion that the ROC priests molest their parishioners' children en masse is simply wrong.

Follett also states that the ROC priests massively collaborated with the secret police during the tsarist regime. As I said, such collaboration with the secret police did, in fact, take place. However, it happened during a completely different time period and under completely different circumstances. I'd never even heard of any suggestion that the priests of the Russian Empire collectively betrayed secrets told to them in confession to the tsar's secret police. This is a figment of Follett's unhealthy imagination.

This tendency to collapse historic periods in Russia into one huge mess is evident in many other aspects of Follett's novel. He doesn't seem to realize that serfdom (the Russian equivalent of slavery) was abolished in 1861. The nobles who owned peasants before serfdom was abolished did, indeed, torture, maim and kill their serfs almost indiscriminately and sometimes with no punishment. That, however, became impossible after 1861. At the turn of the XX century, the relationship between the nobles and the peasants, while still problematic, was in no way similar to the way it was in the pre-1861 era.

Another facet of Follett's annoying Cold War mentality is his tendency to present all Russians as heartless, vile jerks. There is a scene (that takes place in 1914) when a police officer assaults and tries to rape a young woman in the streets of St. Petersburg. The narrator makes a very weird statement about how "no Russian would address a peasant . . . courteously." This is, of course, ridiculously wrong. There always were many people in Russia who would address anybody in a courteous way. Suggesting otherwise, is simply offensive.

Thankfully, the young woman who is assaulted by the police officer is saved by a character whose kindness, helpfullness and charitability turn him into some kind of a Jesus-like figure. So who is this Christ-like character who roams the streets of St. Petersburg saving damsels in distress and offering his assistance to anybody in need of it? Who is this Savior of the poor and Redeemer of the downtrodden? The answer is obvious. He is an American from Buffalo and against the background of the vile, abusive, nasty Russians, he offers an example of what a good human being looks like.

So if you thought the Cold War is over, read Follett's book and think again.

V.S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa: A Review, Part II

At the very beginning of the book, Naipaul shares that he decided to come back to Africa because it was a place that inspired A Bend in the River, one of his greatest masterpieces. To me, it seems like the author decided to visit the place that inspired him so much decades ago in search of his somewhat lost creative spark. He mentions in The Masque of Africa that while he was writing his 1979 novel, he hardly saw anything around him. It's obvious to any one who read A Bend in the River that this novel had a lot less to do with Africa than it had with Naipaul's own post-colonial experiences. This is why his attempts to open himself up to Africa and African belief systems fail so badly: he is a writer who writes beautifully about himself, but has no interest for nor patience with things that don't concern him personally.

Since none of what he sees around has any connection to his experiences, Naipaul feels page after page with gratutitous stories of a lonely, starving kittens and of how much (almost to the cent) he had to pay for every encounter with every person. Whenever the author tries to talk about daily life in Africa, he only manages to produce a string of trivialities. To give just one example:

Uganda was Uganda. Education and school uniforms, giving an illusion of possibility, was easy; much harder was the creation of a proper economy.

It seems like even his signature style that has captivated readers all over the world has deserted Naipaul here. Of course, whenever he abandons the fruitless attempts to discuss things that are of no great interest to him and returns to his favorite subject of himself, Naipaul is back to his beautiful and incisive writing. For example, the passage where he describes his arrival at the airport in Lagos is truly delightful. Then, however, he goes back to a plodding retelling of what people he finds eminently boring (which is pretty much every single person on the planet aside from himself) told him about African belief systems.

From time to time, Naipaul's sly sense of humor breaks through the tedium of his narrative and he regales us with playful little stories about his African experiences. In Nigeria, Naipaul visits a babalawo and asks him to answer a question that supposedly bothers him a lot: "Will my daughter get married?" After showing his surprise that such questions perturbed men from far away lands, the babalawo proceeds to offer his answer:

The babalawo said, “The girl is not going to get married. You have many enemies. To break their spells we will have to do many rituals. They will cost money, but the girl will get married.” Everyone in the room was quite excited. Adesina, his brother, the guide: the babalawo had them all in the palm of his hand. I said, “But what he’s told me is good. I don’t want the girl to get married.” The babalawo looked appalled.

I know that if I were in Naipaul's place I wouldn't be able to resist a similar piece of feminist playfulness. I just wish the writer showed us this side of himself a lot more in this book instead of being ponderous and grave most of the time.

V.S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa: A Review, Part I

I couldn't wait for V.S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief to come out. Naipaul is one of my favorite writers. In his amazing A House for Mr. Biswas, he describes the post-colonial experience, my post-colonial experience, the way nobody else knows how to do. Naipaul is hated by many for his condescension, his nasty personality, his male chauvinism. He is even more hated for refusing to participate in the facile celebration of national independence and an even more simplistic condemnation of the empire. Any search for one's "authentic" self, as Naipaul demonstrates time and again, is a farce. Any "return to one's roots" is silly. Naipaul's honesty about his painful and complex relationship with the Empire has garnered him many enemies. His impeccable style has angered those willing to dismiss him as a quack who only got his Nobel Prize for political reasons.

Many of those who enjoy Naipaul's novels have found his travel books unpalatable. His India: A Wounded Civilization makes many of his reader fume with rage. I have no doubt that the same will be true for The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief. Since I don't know as much as I would like about either India or Africa, I always prefer to read Naipaul's travel books in terms of what the writer is telling me about himself in these books, rather than what he has to say about the places he visits.

Overall, I think the book is a failure. "Against that ordinariness, which consumed everything, there was no defense", says Naipaul about modern-day Kampala almost at the beginning of the book. This statement defines, in my opinion, the general mood of the book. Naipaul never warms to his subject. He lists the things he saw in Africa without offering the profound analysis he is capable of. He allows his voice to be colonized by the numerous interviews with the people he met, most of whom offer nothing but platitudes, such as "We have to have honor for the sake of our fathers," "We have to wake up to our responsibility." In order to offer the readers some respite from the unrelieved boredom of these stories, Naipaul relates stories of African belief that can be seen as shocking, unusual, or exotic. He attempts to substitute analysis with an endless lithany of details about each practice he discusses, which fails to make these stories any less mundane. When that is not enough to interest either the author or his readers, Naipaul enumerates some of the news items from a local newspaper: "Man burns 10 to death in hut," "My husband was hacked to death as I watched," "Accused of burying her son alive," etc. As hard as Naipaul tries to link these events to African belief, he fails since I could read any such piece of news and more in our local St. Louis Metro area newspaper.

[To be continued. . .]