TWIB-III: 16

[akujunkan]

Three books this week, two of which were in English.

1) Are You Loathsome Tonight - Poppy Z. Brite
PZB is a guilty pleasure of mine. She writes good crappy pulp fiction set in the south with a proper southern gothic feel. That last bit is important, because said atmosphere is often just as much a player as the human(esque) characters, and (one rather suspects) PZB's novels would not be half as good were their settings not so fully developed.

Which is ultimately why I found Are You Loathsome Tonight so utterly underwhelming. From the pretentiously masturbatory introduction and juvenile (oh, sorry, I meant humorous) decision to include a Letter from a Hater, one gets the feeling Brite's opinion of herself as a writer is a bit higher than warranted by her actual talent. The stories themselves are mediocre and follow a predictable pattern: perfunctory introduction of the characters and setting followed usually by an uninspiring sex scene and always by gore, and ending with a Gotcha! climax that even quasi-experienced readers will spot coming from a mile away. Which isn't to say that the stories are terrible, just that they are absolutely indistiguishable from standard online fanfic fare, and the easy availability of such on the net makes me demand more from anything I've paid money to read.

It's a shame really, because I think several of the stories in Loathsome (most notably "Mussolini and the Axman's Jazz") would have been much better (although not necessarily any less predictable) had Brite written them as full-length novels instead of short stories. In short, this book's a library loaner for everyone save hardcore fans.


2) Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut
Player Piano is Vonnegut's first full length novel, and it finds him channeling Orwell's 1984 and Yvengy Zamyatin's We. Practically, this means that I found it ten thousand times more enjoyable than the former but not nearly as good as the latter. It's still quite an entertaining and incisive read (if not quite as prophetic as Breakfast of Champions); I found my that appreciation of said prophetic aspects increased if I kept world events in the three decades following WWII (China's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; the USSR's mishandling of Eastern Europe; the chaos of post-colonial Africa and Southeast Asia) in mind while reading, instead of focusing on how Player Piano's computerised nightmare society never manifested itself in the modern day (or at least not as overtly as in the novel). And I will always find the ending problematic: Yes, Proteus can no longer exist in a society he finds bankrupt. Yes, the resistence is too immature--and more importantly, just as manipulative as the society it claims to be fighting against, for Proteus to find a home for himself there either. So wouldn't the real act of resistance be to opt out of the system entirely, instead Proteus's trite decision to become a passive Christ allegory?

On a slightly unrelated note, I'm glad I'd already read the Dell edition of Player Piano; the edition I read this time around--Masterpieces of American Postwar Fiction--was so riddled with grammatical and typographical errors I feel sorry for the Japanese readers who've attempted to get through it.



That will be all.

Comments

Player Piano

[wombatdeamor.livejournal.com]

I had trouble getting through this book when I read it. It seemed to me like Vonnegut hadn't yet figured out how to be Vonnegut. There wasn't anything that screamed out at me the way some of his other books that I've read have. But, I plan on rereading it this summer. My plan is to scoure the Earth, searching for the holes in my collection, so I may sip from his lemonade. I love the fact that he was a Hoosier. It gives me hope.