The joules of men

I started reading The Windup Girl some time ago, by Paolo Bacigalupi. It's slow going and fairly demanding reading, but in a rewarding way. There are no infodumps here; the reader has to figure out the terminology and the society and the politics as they go. It's rich world-building. (In this way this book is reminiscent of the work of China Miéville. These authors give their readers a lot of credit.)

Hock Seng's treadle loses its rhythm. "This is a difficult thing, I think. Even the Dung Lord must bow before the Megodont Union. Without the labor of the megodonts, one must resort to the joules of men. Not a powerful bargaining position."

I love this passage from early on in the book, because it makes no sense (what's a megodont? what's a dung lord?), but of course it makes all kinds of sense.

I imagine breaking the lines, for it to take the form of a poem.

Hock Seng's treadle
loses its rhythm.
"This is a difficult thing,
I think. Even the Dung Lord must
bow before the Megodont Union.
Without the labor of the megodonts,
one must resort
to the joules of men.
Not a powerful
bargaining position."

The language of science fiction is poetry.

So I'm plodding along and figuring things out, but also reminded of the value of taking things slow, the richness of slow reading.

Here we have calorie companies and generipping and seedbanks.

Best to trust no one, even if they seem friendly. A smiling girl one day is a girl with a stone bashing in the brains of a baby the next. This is the only truth. One can think there are such things as loyalty and trust and kindness but they are devil cats.

My mind plays tricks on me

So with morning coffee I read chapter thirteen, about Julius stopping at a bank machine and freezing on his PIN, trying and thinking and just blanking some 20-odd times. My mom meanwhile is turning the house upside down looking for the soup packets she meant to send home with me — my favourite instant soup she'd set aside so it wouldn't be forgotten. Don't worry about it, I tell her. Like the kid's school pictures I spent the last 3 weeks looking for (and finding in a place I'd already checked twice), and disc 2 of season 3 of Doctor Who, the one with the Shakespeare episode, which inexpicably isn't in its DVD case — I'm still looking for it.

Chapter fourteen, Julius goes to visit the professor. But wait! Didn't he die? Julius had called, and a strange woman answered and told him he'd died. Did I imagine this? But if I don't know for sure whether I read this, I won't know for sure how to understand the next part of the story. Was it someone else who died? (I know the patient died, but the circumstances were different; I'm not mistaking that death for this one.) Why am I so sure it was the professor? Maybe it's not in this book at all, maybe it's some other book I was reading, but I haven't been reading anything else. Maybe I dreamt it. When I woke up with someone's name on my lips, maybe it's because I dreamt I phoned and learned he died, and for some reason I associated him with the professor.

I can't read forward until I know.

J-F ask for his mouse, knows I have the mouse, accuses me of hiding his mouse. He'd handed me the mouse and asked me to tuck into one of the bags. I don't remember this. I can describe the contents of my suitcase in detail, down to the kid's spare socks, the white ones with the blue and green flower shapes, in the back bottom left corner (when the suitcase is oriented as it's lying open in front of you) and the travel size body lotion and spare plastic bag tucked in the top outside pocket. J-F never remembers anything. J-F insists. I think he must be joking, but I can't be sure.

We pack the car. I find the GPS jammed under the seat. It's been "missing" since January. I assumed it had been stolen out of the car, since J-F often forgets to lock it. I spend the next several hours checking the book up to page 168. I skim backwards and forwards. It might've served my purpose better if I actually reread the book, carefully, starting at page one, but as a rule I don't read in the car, much as I would like to, because it's rude; not reading is a gesture of solidarity with the driver. But this isn't reading, it's looking for something. I don't dare turn past page 168.

No one died like I remember it.

I finally settle into bed, leave the day behind me. The kid left her necklace on my mom's dresser. Nothing to do but read forward. Let Julius visit the professor, who in my memory is already dead.

Chapter sixteen, Julius calls up the professor, and a woman, not Mary, tells him he died, and he hangs up, just like I remember it.

Why would I have read page 183 if I hadn't naturally arrived there? When did I do this? I never skip forward. When I test drive books at the store, I start at the beginning. It's not standard to excerpt pages from the latter portions of a book. Did I flip open to page 183 by accident? The contents registered themselves on my subconscious mind, while I consciously worked to erase them? My mind plays tricks on me.

Trying to read

(Not to be confused with trying to blog, which is an altogether different, but perhaps related, sort of problem.)

Somehow, and I think this is out character for me, I've been reading myself into a hole.

Book I'm desperately trying to finish:
— The Manuscript Found at Saragossa, Jan Potocki.

It's big! I didn't realize just how big, because I'm reading it as an ebook, but the print version comes with 656 pages. You kind of lose sight of your progress through a book when it's electronic. Yes, there are page numbers (which I haven't entirely figured out — numbers corresponding to, I believe, the print edition's page numbering appear in the right margin (522 now), but there's another set of numbers at the bottom showing that I am currently at 544-545 of 654, which numbering must include, I'm guessing, the print edition's table of contents, introduction, etc), but your progress isn't tangible in the way your finger measures what's been read versus what's yet to be read when it holds your place as you carry your book from one reading spot to another. This really does bring a new dimension to losing oneself in a book.

Books I'm also reading, but no, not really; I stopped reading them so I could finish Potocki:
— Parrot & Olivier in America, Peter Carey, which I was really quite enjoying.
— Granta: Sex, which I was also enjoying in rather a different way (I'll be writing more about this).

Book I bought (in eformat) because I couldn't help myself, fully intending to devour it straight away, but which is sitting patiently awaiting Potocki's completion:
— The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larsson.

Books I've "temporarily" set aside:
— The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann. I love this book! I just need time to read it. I think I'm about halfway. I've been reading it in spurts, and that mostly seems to be working, if you think dropping it for 2 months at a time is OK (which I'm not sure I do).
— Memories of the Future, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. I loved the first story, but I broke off during the last, longish story when I realized I was reading the words but none of them were making any impression on me. This book deserves better from me.

Books I'm considering reading in the near future, like starting tomorrow:
— The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson, which is fucking huge. I've had these books forever, and they've been propping up my tenuously attached bedside shelf, but now Girl Detective is reading them, and while I can't really get excited about them, I kind of feel like this is the right thing to do, to take advantage of a group reading (and thereby morale-boosting) opportunity — it's now or never. Is anyone else reading along? Has anyone previously read this trilogy? Advice, strategies, warnings are welcome.

Books that I am allegedly still reading; no, I could never abandon them!
— The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, Ghalive Lahnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami. I started reading this in January 2008. And I think it's amazing. And the flavour of the Saragossa manuscript puts me in mind of it.
— The Collected Poems, 1956–1998, Zbigniew Herbert. Well, poetry. I'm just not trying hard enough.
— The Last Supper, Paweł Huelle. I'm in the wrong headspace for it, but I don't know what the right headspace might be, nor where I could find it.
— A Perfect Vacuum, Stanisław Lem. I couldn't help but dip into it once I'd finished Imaginary Magnitudes, but then I restrained myself, thinking that, as an anthology of reviews of nonexistent books, it would make a great companion read to Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas (also sitting on my shelf for well over a year now), if only I could clear sufficient mental room to tackle them both in tandem.

That's not to mention the other various books lying round the house that I have not started and which I fully intend to get read this year (including, for example, the dauntingly large Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and JG Farrell's Singapore Grip).

Observation:
Five of these books are Polish, in one way or another. Krzhizhanovsky wrote in Russian but is considered ethnically Polish (a typically Polish surname rendered in Cyrillic and then into English); Potocki, a Polish nobleman, wrote the Manuscript in French. (The three others are Herbert, Huelle, and Lem, in case you're wondering.)

Book that I'm craving:
Something small and light and finite.

An unearthly whiteness

I've wanted to read Ice, by Anna Kavan, ever since I read about that troubled writer in Doris Lessing's collection of essays, Time Bites. It's been a hard book to find, but it's suddenly available here and there (get your copy now), having been recently (2006) reissued (three cheers for independent publishers, but I do wish they'd invest in a proofreader — on the spine the author's name is spelled "Ann" without the final "a").

I'm not altogether sure what to make of it, but it is weirdly beautiful.

The unaccustomed cold made my head ache as I stared out, straining my eyes in the effort of trying to avoid icy patches, where the car skidded out of control. When the headlights fled over the roadside ruins from time to time, the brief glimpse always surprised me, and vanished before I was sure I had really seen it.

An unearthly whiteness began to bloom on the hedges. I passed a gap and glanced through. For a moment, my lights picked out like searchlights the girl's naked body, slight as a child's, ivory white against the dead white of the snow, her hair bright as spun glass. She did not look in my direction. Motionless, she kept her eyes fixed on the walls moving slowly towards her, a glassy, glittering circle of solid ice, of which she was the centre. Dazzling flashes came from the ice-cliffs far over head; below, the outermost fringes of ice had already reached her, immobilized her, set hard as concrete over her feet and ankles. I watched the ice climb higher, covering knees and thighs, saw her mouth open, a black hole in the white face, heard her thin, agonized scream. I felt no pity for her. On the contrary, I derived an indescribable pleasure from seeing her suffer. I disapproved of my own callousness, but there it was.

This passage came out of nowhere (the first of many instances like this). The narrator is driving along a road, and suddenly we veer right off, but only for a paragraph or two, and the story picks up again where we'd left off. Is this deviation from reality a dip into his imagination, or his own psychological problems, or a poeticized version of his haunted reality?

And what is this ice, then? A symbol or metaphor? Of what? the girl? the relationship? the world? What?

I was frustrated by this novel early on — had no idea what was going on — even while the language danced hypnotic circles around me. One day on the metro, I found myself formulating the thought, "I don't have time for 'difficult' novels." Of course, I don't really mean that; but every now and then I have to question why someone would choose to eschew typical narrative patterns, when they would serve the purpose equally well. Now, I'm sure there is, in fact, another purpose. And it's only pretentious on the part of the artist when I don't get it.

Anyway, here I was, reading on the metro, not fully getting it. The only way I could describe this book is "trippy" (the more literary among you may prefer the term "slipstream"). And I was a bit pissed off about about not getting it. I happen to like, have always liked, "hard" books. Am I so out of practice? Are my hard books not challenging me enough? Have I deluded myself in my belief that my reading interests are open-minded and far-reaching? I'm a far better reader now than I was 20years ago, thanks to my experience in reading and in life — was this book so far beyond both?

But a funny thing happened. It started to come together. Whether it's because I'd been out of the habit of this kind of challenge and it took a few days to warm up those muscles, or because the narrative style took a turn, I can't say. But things became more obvious toward the end.

Doris Lessing said, "This Ice is not psychological ice or metaphysical ice; here the loneliness of childhood has been magicked into a physical reality as hallucinatory as the Ancient Mariner's."

Ice is not the sf dytopian novel I was expecting. The end of the world serves as a backdrop; apart from whatever metaphor or poetic imagery it may serve, the ice that is descending upon the world allows for chaos, an imbalance in the social and political structures, allowing these characters to move and act as they do.

I'm not sure I'd categorize Ice as dystopian at all (much the same way I don't think McCarthy's The Road qualifies; the wasteland setting is an accident of circumstance, even if essential to propel the characters, but the book's not about that); it's a book about a dysfunctional relationship.

Ice is about a girl and the narrator, their past locked into their present, with no hope of a future.

Then there's the other man, who may be that side of the narrator he doesn't like to look at square on.

In an indescribable way our looks tangled together. I seemed to be looking at my own reflexion. Suddenly I was entangled in utmost confusion, not sure which of us was which. We were like halves of one being, joined in some mysterious symbiosis. I fought to retain my identity, but all my efforts failed to keep us apart. I continually found I was not myself, but him. At one moment I actually seemed to be wearing his clothes. I fled from the room in utter confusion: afterwards did not know what had happened, or if anything had.

Elsewhere: The Times Literary Supplement, and a more scholarly take.

Personally, I did not know what had happened, or if anything had.