The Quote Board: Truth in Fiction

First Line Friday: Dialogue

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Wait, what? Who is  Mrs. Dalloway? Who’s she talking  to? And what is it she buying flowers for ? All great questions, and all great reasons for the reader to read further. By starting Mrs. Dalloway  in the middle of things, Virginia Woolf forces the reader to snap to attention. We feel like we’re one step behind and we’d better pull ourselves together if we’re going to make heads or tails of the story. 

It’s kind of counterintuitive, but when we're forced to cut to the chase we become highly attuned to the character descriptions, background details and other exposition that she’ll dole out as the story unfolds- probably even moreso than if we picked up the same story to read “Mrs. Dalloway was self-conscious about her role in London high society, blah, blah, blah…”

Here are some other examples of novels whose characters come out of the gates blabbering:

“—Money . . . in a voice that rustled.”   (William Gaddis, J R )

You better not never tell nobody but God.  (Alice Walker, The Color Purple )

"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."  (Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses )

"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.  (Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond )

"When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing."  (Katherine Dunn, Geek Love )

I’m actually surprised this isn’t used more than it is. My guess is that people think it’s a gimmick, but I think it’s pretty darned effective. You?

Author Look-Alikes Vol. 7

Last time we did this, some of you might have felt that my comparison of David Foster Wallace to the Karate Kid was a little forced. Well, just try to tell me I’m stretching with this one. Young DFW and a young Ben Affleck:

Dark hair, slim face, deep-set eyes, how about Joyce Carol Oates and "The Shining"-era Shelly Duvall?

Or Hermann Hesse and the Nazi from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? (Insert your own Arian race joke here):

And for an interesting twist, how about a writer that looks like another writer? I give you Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner (cross reference with William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett). The only discernible difference between them is that one uses mustache wax, and the other uses a Flowbee:

Finally, this will be seen as unkind, but I can only call them like I see them. I think an aging Isak Dinesen, AKA Karen Blixen, is a dead ringer for Margaret Hamilton, AKA the Wicked Witch of the West:

I’ll get you, my pretty... at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

What Bugs Me Wednesday: Fogg's Non-existent Airship

It has occurred to me that I’m missing out on one of the major perks of having a forum for my own personal ramblings: the opportunity to complain about stuff that bugs me.

So here is the first of what will be a sporadic feature- after all, not a lot of stuff really bugs me- that we’ll call “What Bugs Me Wednesday.”

We begin the series with one of literature’s greatest and longest-lasting lies: the mythical airship in Jules Verne’s Around the World In 80 Days.  Just about every film adaptation, comic book version and dumbed-down retelling has invented some sort of hot-air balloon out of whole cloth (pardon the pun). Even the cover art for reprintings of Verne’s classic is guilty from time to time. Sometimes it’s a zeppelin, sometimes it’s a steampunk airship, but whatever form it takes, it has no relation whatsoever to the story as Verne wrote it.

The incomparable Phileas Fogg and his valet Passpartout do indeed set out on a memorable adventure. They have run-ins with the law, with outlaws, with vigilantes and religious sects. There’s a princess in distress, an opium-den trap and an acrobatic circus. Modes of transportation are rented, bought, hijacked and destroyed, but at no point in the journey do the characters take to the air.

Do they take a turn on the back of an elephant? Sure. Do they cross the Great Plains in a fortuitous windsled? They do. But do they ever set foot in the basket of a hot-air balloon? No, no, a thousand times no. And it’s time for this nonsense to stop.

Pictured above are the thumbnails from the first page of Google Image results for “Around the World in 80 Days.” Take a quick look and you can see how widespread this pernicious falsehood has become. An entire generation is being led to believe that Fogg was some sort of Victorian Steve Fossett. And yeah, it kind of bugs me.

Some Autumn Reading

I rarely read anything twice, much less three or four times. There are just too many good books waiting in the hopper.

But when fall temperatures begin to dip, and the leaves start to signal that they’ve felt it, too, I sometimes find myself pulling a tiny, almost forgotten book down off my shelf.

Thinner than my wallet, and not much taller or wider, it contains just two stories: Rip Van Winkle   and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,   by Washington Irving. It’s a ‘Penguin 60’- part of a collection Penguin released to celebrate their 60^th anniversary in 1995.

I don’t do this every year, but I’ve dusted it off a handful of times in the decade and a half I’ve owned it– at least as often as some people pick up A Christmas Carol   in the run up to the holidays. I find it’s the perfect lead-in to fall, and a nice way to set the stage for Halloween. As you can see below, it would be hard to ‘out-autumn’ Irving when he’s really going for it. First, from Rip Van Winkle :

“It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day, the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet. Streaming files of wild ducks began to make their appearance high in the air; the bark of the squirrel might be heard from the groves of beech and hickory nuts, and the pensive whistle of the quail at intervals from the neighboring stubble-field…”

And then this, from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow :

“As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vast stores of apples; some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun, and giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies; and anon he passed the fragrant buckwheat fields, breathing the odor of the beehive, and as he beheld them, soft anticipations stole over his mind of dainty slapjacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel.”

Taken together, both stories are just shy of 20,000 words. If you’re looking for a light, autumnal diversion, I highly recommend checking them out.

What other books or stories help you set the stage for fall?

Review: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Alright, so, Moby Dick!

I mentioned here how ecstatic I was to finally harpoon the great white whale that has taunted me ever since 7^th grade English. And now it’s time to actually review the son-of-a-gun.

The last thing I was expecting from this bad boy was that it would be laugh out loud funny in parts, yet there I was, just a few pages in, and our narrator Ishmael finds himself apoplectic that he has to share a bed with a heathenistic, cannibal harpooneer, who against all odds becomes his best friend and shipmate. And Stub, good grief! I could listen to the Pequod’s second mate talk to his crew all day long. The man’s hilarious.

But the book is more than just colorful. Melville builds mystery and bad omens into the story from the beginning. The reader goes to sea with the same reservations about the ship and its captain as Ishmael. It’s a well-spun yarn.

Now, the most frequent criticism I’ve heard of Moby Dick is that it’s cumbersome. Not just that it’s long, but that it’s full of meaningless tangential information that doesn’t move the story forward. But after reading it, I’m convinced that people who say this suffer from a general lack of curiosity.

Does he dedicate entire sections of the book to whale taxonomy? Sure he does. Does he mention every piece of art, and list every literary reference that touches on whales, sea monsters and “leviathans” of all orders? You bet. Does he painstakingly document the notorious generosity  of English and Dutch ships to other ships in the whaling trade, and uncover the origin of the “crow’s nest” that adorned the ships of his day? Absolutely. But my  question is, why don’t  you want to know about all of that? It interesting stuff.

If you’re like me, you’re helplessly drawn to Wikipedia by any book you read- fiction or non-fiction- because they open up new ideas, teach you new things and fill in your paltry knowledge of the world around you. But hey, guess what, I didn’t have to do that with Moby Dick  because Melville already did it for me. His tangents were my tangents, his obscure whaling trivia, my obscure whaling trivia. If that’s not your thing, bless your bored little heart.

Now, I do have plenty of my own criticisms. How Ishmael forges a bond, and goes to sea with Queequeg, and then fails to mention him for nearly the remainder of the book. How he jumps from head to head like an omniscient narrator, even though he’s just one of the shiphands. How the Pequod was able to track down and encounter a single, solitary whale in the vast natural range of his species. 

(Just take a look at that map- the blue isn’t just ocean, it’s the almost limitless habitat of the sperm whale. Talk about a finding needle in a haystack!) 

So yes, there were plenty of problems. And yet…  I enjoyed the hell out of it. It was a very pleasant surprise.

First Line Friday: Axioms

Last week we covered first lines that set settings. This week, we pay tribute to the axiomatic opening. Here’s a well-known example that many will recognize:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” — from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Want another? How about this one- equally as famous as the first:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” —from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

These adages can be sarcastic, like Austen’s, or introduce a kind of a farcical situation, like Tolstoy’s. Or they can be whistful observations::

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.” (Zora Neals Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God )

And even wisecracking laments:

“The moment one learns English, complications set in.” (Felipe Alfau’s  Chromos)

You could almost say that The Great Gatsby   begins with an aphorism, too: “…my father gave me some advice…” (Though the adage is only teed up in the first line, and it’s the second line that delivers the punch of wisdom.) Still, it gives the reader a filter through which they are to understand the entire book.

Anyway, I think axiomatic openings are pretty effective. They push you to start asking questions immediately. Do I agree with that axiom? Is it bunk? Why does the narrator lead off with it? What kind of story is going to prove that statement out? And on and on.

Do you agree? Disagree? (As the old adage says, you cannot do both.)

Speed Reviewing

I’m more than a little behind in penning reviews of my recent literary conquests. Hopefully I can get through the backlog before I forget the books completely. Until then, however, I thought it might be fun to play around with a more forgiving form of criticism: the one line review. Here are a handful of so-called classics, summed up in a single sentence:

• Middlesex: My Big Fat Greek Wedding meets 5-alpha reductase deficiency

• Silas Marner, because anti-social cataleptic weavers make good fathers, too.

• Jane Eyre: Finally, a romance for the homely.

• Wuthering Heights: reality TV before TV ever existed.

• Crime and Punishment: it’s Lizzy Borden meets Colombo- in St. Petersburg!

• As I Lay Dying: when your mom dies you should probably cut your dad some slack- unless he’s a complete sumbitch

• The Turn of the Screw: It’s what the Sixth Sense would have been if Bruce Willis were a Victorian era governess.

• Grapes of Wrath, because even though your life might swing between bad and awful, at least you’re not suckling emaciated homeless strangers yet.

Got any others to add?

First Ads for Famous Books

Life’s been so busy since my July vacation that I’ve basically stopped checking in on most of the literary blogs I follow- so my apologies if you’ve seen this elsewhere- but I saw this post over at BrainPickings and thought it was worth sharing: The first ads for famous books.

For example, you've got Toni Morrison rocking a Roberta Flack afro:

Truman Capote looking like he’s pushing barbiturates, instead of books: (I’m pretty sure that pic was snapped in an opium den)

And Kurt Vonnegut pulling off the ‘Get-off-my-lawn-you-damn-kids’ face better than most men 40 years his senior.

Many more here. Enjoy.

Author Look-Alikes: Round 6

The almond-shaped eyes with the little crease underneath, the rounded eyebrows and flawless complexion… they might hail from geographical antipodes, but I think it’s safe to say there’s a little Ashley Judd in Jhumpa Lahiri:

And how about a very young Margaret Mitchell? With those cheekbones and that ultra-serious gaze, she reminds me more than a little of Olivia Wilde:

Another certified looker in her youth, Pearl Buck matured into an amiable Aunt Bee type in her later years:

Now, this kind of match is rare. Look at the hairline, the eyebrows, the ears, the nose, the heavy eyelids- heck, look at everything but that beard and tell me Herman Melville and Hugh Grant aren’t one and the same:

Finally, we have to deal with David Foster Wallace and his persistent bandana at some point. Take away the scruff, the half-smirk, the glasses and about thirty years, and DFW could be reborn as Danny Laruso, AKA the Karate Kid:

Sweep the leg? I don't think so.