(no subject)

[felis_ultharus]

So we were without water here for 24 hours, after my parents' laundry room and the sun room flooded. Giant snow drifts kept us trapped indoors for 48 hours. So yeah, I've had better holidays.

It's given me a lot of time to read, though. I finished Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins.


I hesitate to criticize the book. When melting_penguin gave me the book, she said Robbins was one of the only writers she could read over and over again without getting bored. In the last week alone, I've run into two passionate fans of Robbins. He has a very, very loyal following.

But I can't say I was all that impressed with Skinny Legs and All. Not that it was a bad book, and I'm still glad I read it. And it does have a lot of good points:

• I did like the Neo-Pagan sensibility, rare to find in any novel and especially in a novel written as long ago as 1990. A nice recapitulation of goddess-centred and polytheistic religions of the Near East.
  
  
• Along those lines, there's a nice concept of mythic time here, that ahistorical concept of time that Walter Benjamin claims died with the beginning of the modern world, but which is coming back with a vengeance.
  
  
  • The "wolfmother wallpaper" scenes kept my attention in spite of being so surreal, probably because I understood what he was trying to get at -- that Joseph Campbell/Carl Jung level of mythic consciousness I like so much, and which you see more and more often in the works of writers like Neil Gaiman.
  
  
  
• The novel's best aspect, though, is its meditation on art. It gets these exactly right -- takes on postmodern art and skewers it royally, and gives language to the problem of current trends in art. It captures perfectly the endless repetition and fashion in art, and how it's forsaken its purposes in words better than I could muster.
  
  
• This is one of the funniest novels I've ever read. I laughed out loud repeatedly. The humour manages to carry it through the otherwise clumsy passages.

All that said, there are some serous flaws here, many of which were almost fatal for me. A couple of times I almost put down the book:

• As I said, there was a nice recapitulation of old pagan traditions here. Which was lovely, except that there was more exposition here than a Dumbledore speech, stretching over hundreds of pages.
  
  
• Those epic and fanciful metaphors of his go quickly from "funny" to "silly" to "dull."
  
  
• When, when, when will American authors of general fiction stop inserting purely gratuitous softcore porn into their novels? Honestly, do they think this helps keeps the audience interest? Most authors don't do it well, and even when they do, there's a good reason that all porn in any media is carefully categorized by sex of participants, body type, age, and fetish. Even the best-written sexually explicit material will turn off nine readers in a general audience for every one that it titillates, and either way it makes it hard to take a novellist seriously.
  
  
• And on the subject of clichés, I've known enough decent and honest politicians, and know of so many more, that I roll my eyes whenever I read of a portrayal of politicians as universally monstrously evil and power-hungry. It's little different from the way I roll my eyes when someone makes some worn-out joke about women drivers or Chinese drycleaners. Stereotyping and mean-spirited jokes are bad enough, but if the jokes aren't even original or funny, I have to wonder why the author is wasting my time. In the case of politicians, it's usually a way of the author setting themselves up as superior to the sorry mass of humanity who voted for the politicians -- that is, pure anti-democratic snobbery.
  
  
• Except for the exposition, there didn't seem to be much purpose in the talking inanimate objects. Their stories end strangely, too, as if Robbins just wanted to get rid of them at the end. They're more a distraction than anything else.
  
  
• I was teased by the blurb on the back of the book. It made it sound like Boomer was actually going to convert to an ancient Palestinian Pagan religion, rather than just building a monument to a forgotten religion. I think I would've been far more sympathetic to the book if they had the redneck welder become a Dagonite or an Astarte-worshipper or something.

I'm now reading a history book, Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries by Ramsay MacMullen. So far it's the best thing I've read since Beedle the Bard, which I read on the plane.

Comments

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

The Xtianity/Pagan book sounds interesting. *makes note to put on list*

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It is really interesting. Not only is it excellent history, and a great antidote to the version of things I got in high school, he's one of those increasingly rare historians who can speak in plain English and bring a broader view to things.

It's also meticulously researched. I'm learning more even than I expected to.

[frog-songs.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to hear about your damp holiday. I hope that the damage is minimal.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

They bailed out the water before it did any permanent damage to either the laundry room or sun room. The damage to the pipe itself was very small, but enough to flood everything. The plumbers were able to fix it in ten minutes.