A poignant, satirical commentary on modern Canadian culture, “There’s stupidity … and then there’s willful stupidity.”
Pick a country, any country. LooA poignant, satirical commentary on modern Canadian culture, “There’s stupidity … and then there’s willful stupidity.”
Pick a country, any country. Look closely and it won’t take an astute observer long to determine that modern politics, modern government, modern courts and laws, and modern culture lie somewhere in a triangle bounded by “shitstorm”, “clusterfuck”, and “incurably dysfunctional”. The USA today, for example, is within a hair’s breadth of placing a convicted felon in the Oval Office, empowering him with the assistance of other varied criminals in their House of Representatives and the Senate, and enabling his conversion of the country to a neo-Nazi theocracy. (But I digress …)
I might prefer to think otherwise but Canada is not immune.
Its situation may be somewhat more peaceful (one might say somewhat more “Canadian”) but, sadly, we have our troubles. Ineffective minority governments created by an aging and ineffective “first past the post” electoral system drastically in need of revision; enormous disparities across the country in local language, culture, regional economics, provincial and municipal GDP, taxation, and employment; perennial head-butting with Quebec; aboriginal issues writ large; our very own national version of participation in the global flirtation with hard right wing politics; and so on. KING JOHN OF CANADA is a satirical vision of a country on the verge of national break-up, and provincial and municipal secession via the typically Canadian approach of democratic referendum, a country that comes to grip with its issues by the very unlikely method of dissolving the office of Governor-General, Canada’s head of state and local representative of the King or Queen of England, and installing its own down home monarch selected by (are you ready for this?) lottery!!
I was ecstatic over the enormous possibility for satire and commentary promised by KING JOHN OF CANADA’s brilliant creative premise. But, ultimately, I was sadly deflated by Gardiner’s inability to put together an interesting, compelling story line and novel that took advantage of those possibilities. Not to take away anything from his observations on Canadian culture and its current political situation, but KING JOHN OF CANADA just fell flat for me and, to be honest, I didn’t even bother finishing it.
Some of those observations:
“Quebec was the place where most money in Canada was spent, Toronto was the place where it was earned … Toronto’s duty was to be taxed. While the federal government pumped money from the city to pay for daycare in Quebec, Toronto’s public schools were being closed for lack of funding.”
On politics in journalism:
“If a liberal minister spoke approvingly of motherhood, headlines were to read: ”GOVERNMENT SLAMS DADS”. Managements with a Christian bias referred to employees of fertility clinics as “abortionists”, while writers for publications belonging to Jewish-owned syndicates understood that there was no other noun for the adjective “Palestinian” but “terrorist”. And so it went”
On the legalities of a referendum for secession:
“The plan was to position Toronto independence as a fait accompli. There was any number of legal barriers, of course – not the least of which was that, technically speaking, municipalities had no standing in the Constitution – but revolutions don’t respond to legal niceties.” (Something right-wing USA would do very well to bear in mind when they scoff at the Constitutional illegality of California or New York seceding from the USA. But, once again, I digress … )
On Quebec and bilingualism as national cultural policy:
“There was never any shortage of billboard-sized examples of Quebec’s contempt for English Canada … On one hand, here was the federal government spending tens of millions encouraging anglophones to learn French; on the other was Quebec, defying the country’s own Charter or rights in its determination to suppress the use of English in the province.”
Well, there’s plenty more where those came from but I think you get the idea. Lots of meat in KING JOHN OF CANADA but, for my money, it was presented poorly, it was under-cooked, and there were no potatoes, vegetables or dessert.
The kindest word I can think of is "disappointment"!
If I hadn't so thoroughly enjoyed many previous novels by Karin Slaughter, I would have done the wThe kindest word I can think of is "disappointment"!
If I hadn't so thoroughly enjoyed many previous novels by Karin Slaughter, I would have done the wall-banger toss much earlier.
It is an unavoidable reality that prolific authors will inevitably pen what some readers think is God's gift to literature but they will also craft what readers will characterize as their worst effort. At three novels, it is obvious that one will be the best, one will be the worst, and one will fall somewhere in the middle. For Karin Slaughter's sake, I fervently hope that PIECES OF HER is that rock-bottom effort which will make anything else she produces look better by comparison.
This one was an absolute hot mess of indecipherable plot, names, motivations, and events that I gave up on as far along as page 480 out of 630. I no longer cared and, indeed, I found it was actually making me angry in the attempt to understand where it might possibly have been headed.
“I know that colony is a purgatory of fatal illnesses and rebellious Negroes.”
As a fictional recounting of the late 18th century French and Spanis“I know that colony is a purgatory of fatal illnesses and rebellious Negroes.”
As a fictional recounting of the late 18th century French and Spanish colonial experience in Saint-Domingue (now known as Haiti and the Dominican Republic), ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA is also a gut-wrenching telling of the story of slavery and the black’s rebellion on the island against their cruel, self-satisfied owners. That story of bondage, violence, brutality, and fear is told through the eyes of Tété, a mixed-race mulatto slave and a concubine, the daughter of a black mother and a white sailor, parents of whom she has no knowledge or recollection and Toulouse Valmorain, a naïve young French landowner who arrives on the island in 1770 with dreams of becoming wealthy running his father’s sugar plantation.
As I read ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA (and, sadly, well past the halfway mark of the novel, set aside as a DNF), I was reminded of my thoughts while I read José Saramago’s BLINDNESS whose back cover marketing blurb gushed,
“A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century. BLINDNESS is a powerful portrayal of man’s worst appetites and weaknesses – and man’s ultimately exhilarating spirit.”
Hmmm … in short, a clearly very high-minded and literary description for a very literary novel. One of the back-cover marketing blurbs for ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA was no less “literary” in its high-minded and high-brow praise,
“A powerfully evocative narrative … Allende is at her best here: spinning words like spells, enthralling the reader with surreal visions of the New World”.
In hindsight, I should have been expecting exactly the kind of novel that I had in my hands.
There is no question that ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA has moments of breathtaking brilliance. The outrageous self-entitlement and pompous superiority of the colonial white slavemasters was beyond shocking and gripping. But the mixture of history, races, emotions, a myriad cast of characters and narrators, and Allende’s style of literary composition of ideas just never gelled into a story that I felt compelled to finish. One or two stars for my personal reaction and the fact that it was a DNF combined with three or four stars for the episodic “wow” moments averages it out to a rounded down two star “been there, done that” for me.
The back-cover marketing blurb seemed to hold promise ... a geologist adventurer likened to a combination of Dirk Pitt I wanted to like it ... really!
The back-cover marketing blurb seemed to hold promise ... a geologist adventurer likened to a combination of Dirk Pitt and James Bond. Sounds good so far! But then came the science and my credibility meter slammed so hard into the red zone that the needle snapped off when it hit the stop at the top end. At 140 pages, my eyes had rolled into the back of my head and I closed the novel with disgust and a distinct sigh of resignation. If Jack Du Brul had submitted his manuscript as a sci-fi novel instead of an adventure thriller, the publishers would have laughed him out of the building and sent him packing.
I get it! You're gay, you're indigenous, LGBT two-spirit! But surely there must be more to your li"I figured out that I was gay when I was eight."
I get it! You're gay, you're indigenous, LGBT two-spirit! But surely there must be more to your life than raw, graphic sex. I bailed after only a few chapters and decided that, awards and commendations notwithstanding, this one just wasn't my cup of tea....more
“Cal and I are not in the Silver world anymore … we have escaped.”
When I reviewed RED QUEEN, I characterized it as
“a timely and thrilling dystopia“Cal and I are not in the Silver world anymore … we have escaped.”
When I reviewed RED QUEEN, I characterized it as
“a timely and thrilling dystopian young adult tale of revolution in the face of authoritarian rule by a patriarchal royal family and a right-wing population that see privilege and rule as their right by virtue of their physical superiority (endowed, of course, by no more than the coincidence of their birth genes)”
set in a world
“populated by two peoples separated by their DNA and their blood – red (effectively like yours and mine and our fellow normal and human readers) or silver, that comes with a bewildering variety of fantastic and near magical powers.”
I praised the novel for its commentary on a variety of disparate themes –
“coming of age and young love (including, of course, the almost mandatory love triangle); family; war and death; slavery, totalitarianism, and revolution; courage and heroism, loyalty, and friendship; compassion contrasted with anything that a reader might consider its opposites; government; hereditary royalty, and more.”
GLASS SWORD not only failed to clear the expectations set by this fabulous opening novel, it tripped and fell before it even got to the point of attempting to jump over the bar!
While I was happy to give RED QUEEN a 5-star rating and a place on my Top 10 Reads of 2022 list, its sequel, GLASS SWORD (which I was anticipating with a world of high expectations) on the other hand is a classic example of fall-flat-on-your-face crash and burn! The plot, such as it is, includes only an endless pointless search for Aveyard’s mental vision of a Legion of Super Heroes – those other folks in Cal Calore’s and Mare Barrow’s world who were inexplicably born with the hybrid gene that gifts them unimaginable (and unexplained) super powers. In short, she’s accumulating a revolutionary army of red-silver hybrid X-men. The meandering search and Mare Barrow’s perpetual introspection questioning her abilities, her motives, her judgment, and whether, in fact, Cal is to be trusted any more than his evil brother Maven becomes a flat, boring trudge that actually escalates into aggravating and pushes the reader into a “GET ON WITH IT!!” mental state.
Sorry, Ms Aveyard. This reader simply lost interest and endurance waiting for something meaningful to happen. GLASS SWORD was, regrettably, set aside as a 1-star DNF and KING’S CAGE or any subsequent novels in the series were permanently removed from my TBR list.
“Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time.”
“I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to slee“Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time.”
“I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to sleep. People need to believe there’s more to the world than there is.”
“And the world is just shit … there’s no need to imagine the planet as some malevolent force seeking vengeance. It’s a rock. This is just how life is supposed to be: terrible and brief and ending in – if you’re lucky – oblivion.”
NK Jemisin can turn a phrase. There’s sure no doubt about that. And I can recognize and appreciate an artful double jab and left hook at theism, organized religion, and the dismal state of world affairs when I see one. But despite that and notwithstanding my characterization of Jemisin’s THE FIFTH SEASON as one of the finest fantasy/sci-fi novels that I’ve ever been privileged to clap eyes on, THE OBELISK GATE just wasn’t working for me. I thought that the dialogue was strained and neither the character, the continued world-building, or plot development was coming into focus for me. I really, really wanted it to work but, despite forcing myself to read through to the halfway point, I ended up setting it aside for future consideration.
I’m going to make the assumption that the novel IS as good as most readers say it is and the fault rests with me and the state of my mind when I gave it a shot. Perhaps after a year’s lapse since my reading of THE FIFTH SEASON, I had lost a little of the momentum and enthusiasm necessary to tackle such a monumental and complex literary challenge. I had also just returned from a month long vacation in Egypt and Europe. My body was tired and my mind was probably not up to the demands of that kind of a novel.
There's literary licence and there's total lack of credibility!
See what YOU think of this excerpt on a car chasing a freight train:
"The second the cabThere's literary licence and there's total lack of credibility!
See what YOU think of this excerpt on a car chasing a freight train:
"The second the caboose passed by, Bell gunned the Wolf's motor and drove it out of the thicket, up the gravel embankment, and onto the tracks. He fought his right-side tires over the nearest rail and opened the throttle. The Wolf tore after the train, bouncing hard on its ties. At nearly forty miles an hour, it bucked violently and swayed from side to side. Rubber squealed against steel, as the tires slammed against the rails. Bell halved the distanced between him and the train. Halved it again, until he was only ten feet behind the train. Now he saw that he could not jump onto the caboose without pulling alongside the train. He slewed the car back oer the rail and steered on the edge of the embankment, which was steep and narrow and studded with telegraph poles.
He had to pull alongside the caboose, grab one of its side ladders, and jump before the race car lost speed and fell back. He overtook the train, steered alongside it. A car length ahead, he saw a telegraph pole that was set closer than the others to the rail. There was no room to squeeze between it and the train.
Bell gunned the engine, seized the caboose's ladder in his right hand, and jumped.
His fingers slipped on the cold steel rung. He heard the Packard Wolf crash into the telegraph pole behind him. Swinging wildly from one arm, he glimpsed the Wolf tumbling down the embankment and fought with all his strength to avoid the same fate. But his arm felt as if it had been ripped out ofhis shoulder. The pain tore down his arm like fre. Hard as he tried to hold on, he could not stop his fingers from splaying open.
He fell. As his boots hit the ballast, he caught the bottom rung of the ladder with his left hand. His boots dragged on the stones, threatening his precarious grip. Then he got both hands on the ladder, tucked his legs up in a tight ball, and hauled himself up, climbing hand over hand, until he could plant a boot on the rung and swing onto the rear platform of the caboose."
ARE YOU KIDDING ME???
Do I really look that stupid to you, Mr Cussler? Sad to say, I was enjoying the story up until that point but when you insult my intelligence and credibility to THAT extent, all bets are off. This book is relegated to my DNF list and is headed for the local Little Free Library box. Maybe somebody else is more willing to accept that kind of nonsense than I am!
“I’m not entirely convinced that there are limits to misfortune and evil.”
I should have been expecting exactly what I got. It isn’t as if there weren’“I’m not entirely convinced that there are limits to misfortune and evil.”
I should have been expecting exactly what I got. It isn’t as if there weren’t any clues or warnings. The first, of course, was that José Saramago had previously won a Nobel Prize in Literature. I have no wish to be pretentious or snobby about literary writing but it does stand to reason that a Nobel Prize winner’s writing would be … well, literary! The back cover marketing blurb gushed, “A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century. BLINDNESS is a powerful portrayal of man’s worst appetites and weaknesses – and man’s ultimately exhilarating spirit.” Hmmm … in short, a clearly very high-minded and literary description for a very literary novel.
There is no question that BLINDNESS, the story of humanity’s response to an epidemic of “white blindness”, has moments of breathtaking brilliance. And the plot idea itself is compelling stuff. But the mixture that was dystopian, apocalyptic, suspense thriller plot and Saramago’s style of literary composition of ideas just never gelled into a story that I felt compelled to finish. One or two stars for my personal reaction and the fact that it was a DNF combined with four or five stars for the episodic “wow” moments averages it out to a three star “been there, done that” for me.
But there’s no doubt you’ll have to come to your own decision.
Cinq nouvelles pour dire qu’il aime les jeunes femmes de couleur!
PRINTEMPS ET AUTRES SAISON, cinq nouvelles, cinq saisons métaphoriques, cinq histoirCinq nouvelles pour dire qu’il aime les jeunes femmes de couleur!
PRINTEMPS ET AUTRES SAISON, cinq nouvelles, cinq saisons métaphoriques, cinq histoires des jeunes filles de couleur. N’importe qu’elles soient Marocaine, Arabe, Juive, gitane ou créole, ces filles viennent d’ailleurs inconnus. Elles ne connaissent leurs propres histoires, d’où elles sont venues, leurs destins et ni même leurs parents. Elles sont tous exotiques, suaves, sauvages. Lorsqu’on est près d’une de ces femmes belles, “Le temps ne passe pas” et “le coeur batte trop vite”.
JMG Le Clèzio peut écrire et il sait construire une belle phrase. Il n'y en a pas la moindre doute. Ses mots sont poétiques, moelleux, douleureux, et évocatifs … la première fois. Peut-être même la deuxième. Mais, la troisième et la quatrième? En fin, je suis amené à la conclusion qu’il est amoureux de ses propres mots. Par exemple:
“La nuit, j’écoute les coups de mon Coeur. J’attends, les yeux ouverts, je ne sais pas ce que j’attends.”
Deux pages suivantes:
“Il y avait les coups lents des heures au clocher de la cathédrale, et en hiver le vent qui soufflait dans les gouttières, la pluie qui glissait sur le toit, comme un bruit de la mer.”
Quelques phrases plus tard:
“La nuit, j’ai l’impression que rien ne peut changer, que le temps s’arrête et flotte dans le silence.”
Et, encore une fois:
“Il y a avait deux portes-fenêtres très hautes, et à travers les lattes des volets, je voyais la lumière de la nuit. Jamais je n’ai revu une lumière de la nuit … je croyais que c’étaient ces étincelles que je respirais, qui entraient en moi, me faisaient tressaillir. Mon coeur battait vite et fort … mon coeur battait comme si j’allais affronter des dangers.”
Trop beaucoup de mots et trop peu d'histoire. Ça me semble qu'en rêvant de ces filles, il s’imagine que le coeur batte vite et fort, il commence à respirer rapidement et à trembler. Peut-on dire “fétiche”?
Ted Riccardi obviously couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted to portray Holmes as a private consulting detMy name is Holmes ... Sherlock Holmes!
Ted Riccardi obviously couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted to portray Holmes as a private consulting detective on temporary hiatus after his battle with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls or as a secret agent working in the Far East on behalf of the British government under the control of his brother Moriarty. Whatever ... ho hum! It didn't work. These stories are over long, over written, and tedious in the extreme. Beyond that, Holmes' skills are extended to the point of ridiculous - an academic and scientific polymath and a polyglot in a myriad of languages many of which lesser mortals in western culture would never have even heard of ... yeah, right!
A very poor imitation of Conan Doyle's masterful stories and definitely not recommended as a worthy addition to the Holmes canon.
“He is single-handedly responsible for every wedgie, swirly, and locker-pop I’ve ever gotten”
I’ve read some fabulous novels by indigenous Canadian“He is single-handedly responsible for every wedgie, swirly, and locker-pop I’ve ever gotten”
I’ve read some fabulous novels by indigenous Canadian authors over the last couple of years and, based on some stellar reviews, I was definitely looking forward to SON OF A TRICKSTER. Damn, I really wanted to like it!
But this thing is an incomprehensible hot mess – self-indulgent parents indulging in irresponsible behaviour and irresponsible parenting; binge drinking and alcoholism; criminality that, in some instances, might make a Mafia Don blush; drug crimes, drug trafficking, and drug abuse; ugly violence; mean-spirited revenge; simple low-life behaviour; broken and dysfunctional family, friend and sexual relationships – and none of it related in any meaningful way to the underlying Canadian aboriginal social problems that might have been contributing factors to these stories.
Maclean’s magazine commented, “Robinson has a gift for making disparate elements come together into a convincing narrative, …” Well, I’ll agree the story elements were certainly disparate. But, as far as I could see, they started disparate and remained that way. The plot was muddy, confusing, and impossible to track. Indeed, to this reader, plot was all but non-existent.
The Globe and Mail added their two bits worth, “Funny and poignant”. The humour and poignancy simply escaped me. I thought it was sad and pathetic from first page to the point where I decided I had had enough.
A DNF wall-banger for this reader and I’ll close by adding that the prospect of picking up the second and third installments in a trilogy make me want to join Jared throwing up. God knows he did it often enough.
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