felis_ultharus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
felis_ultharus) wrote2006-09-15 03:13 pm
felis_ultharus) wrote2006-09-15 03:13 pm
Entry tags:
The Good, the Bad, and the Depressing of CanLit
I finished my exams today -- I think I did better on today's than on my last one. There were only two questions, and they were on works I'd studied well.
Now I just have one easy class before I graduate -- the easiest class I've done since my undergrad years. Smooth sailing -- assuming I pass the comprehensive exams.
I've been speed-reading a lot of good books.
Irving Layton's poetry is marvellous -- even if he was a cynical egomaniac who was convinced he was both the übermensch and the messiah. But he can be forgiven because no poet working in English has ever crafted free verse more beautifully.
And Rohinton Mistry is also a marvellous novelist -- it takes a marvellous novelist to keep a reader's attention for 713 pages -- but he is depressing. More depressing than a funeral for a small puppy with eulogies read by Joy Kogawa, Sinclair Ross, and Margaret Laurence. Mistry goes out of his way to make his characters suffer.
But I have decided that Michael Ondaatje's whole literary career is a joke or con game that no one else gets.
This clicked when I was reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, and realized that the whole thing is actually a very, very silly send-up of Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie. It's written in exactly the same style -- anachronistic, schizophrenic free verse narrated from the subconscious of a 19th-century historical figure.
The English Patient is also a silly joke, though a very well-paying one.
Ondaatje took a real historical figure -- Count László de Almásy -- and spun a thrilling narrative around him. He tells us how the count rejects all nationalism, falls in love with a woman named Clifton, and how her husband tries to murder the count with a plane; the count comes to a hospital, badly burned, and recounts his story before dying.
Of course, the real count was a staunch Hungarian nationalist who collaborated with both Nazis and Allies in the interests of his country, was probably gay, and died of dysentery after several adventures after the war.
Ondaatje is mocking the whole idea of historical fiction -- of "based on a true story" -- and mocking the people who buy into this. In other words, he's mocking his core audience. And most people haven't figured it out yet.
Now I just have one easy class before I graduate -- the easiest class I've done since my undergrad years. Smooth sailing -- assuming I pass the comprehensive exams.
I've been speed-reading a lot of good books.
Irving Layton's poetry is marvellous -- even if he was a cynical egomaniac who was convinced he was both the übermensch and the messiah. But he can be forgiven because no poet working in English has ever crafted free verse more beautifully.
And Rohinton Mistry is also a marvellous novelist -- it takes a marvellous novelist to keep a reader's attention for 713 pages -- but he is depressing. More depressing than a funeral for a small puppy with eulogies read by Joy Kogawa, Sinclair Ross, and Margaret Laurence. Mistry goes out of his way to make his characters suffer.
But I have decided that Michael Ondaatje's whole literary career is a joke or con game that no one else gets.
This clicked when I was reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, and realized that the whole thing is actually a very, very silly send-up of Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie. It's written in exactly the same style -- anachronistic, schizophrenic free verse narrated from the subconscious of a 19th-century historical figure.
The English Patient is also a silly joke, though a very well-paying one.
Ondaatje took a real historical figure -- Count László de Almásy -- and spun a thrilling narrative around him. He tells us how the count rejects all nationalism, falls in love with a woman named Clifton, and how her husband tries to murder the count with a plane; the count comes to a hospital, badly burned, and recounts his story before dying.
Of course, the real count was a staunch Hungarian nationalist who collaborated with both Nazis and Allies in the interests of his country, was probably gay, and died of dysentery after several adventures after the war.
Ondaatje is mocking the whole idea of historical fiction -- of "based on a true story" -- and mocking the people who buy into this. In other words, he's mocking his core audience. And most people haven't figured it out yet.
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*laughs* That's wonderful. ^_^ I've only read one of his books, Anil's Ghost, in my required can Lit class as an undergrad. Now I'm curious about whether he's doing something similar there... hmmm... It's been so long I can't remember.
Congrats on finishing your exams. It must be such a relief. ^_^
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And thanks. It is ^_^
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How are your studies going, by the way...?
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We're both nearly finished.
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Thursday can't come too soon!
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As for what's next, first I'll finish this school year. Then I'll devote my life to encouraging illiteracy.
Well, no, not really. But if I can get through literary studies and not hate books, I think that's proof of how much I like to read :)
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