Othello

After Romeo and Juliet, I have now just finished Othello from William Shakespeare. I must be getting used to the old language since I have been a lot faster to read it than Romeo and Juliet; I am getting used to refer constantly to the lexical at the end of the book as well so I'm not too lost when the text gets complicated.

Reading Othello has been much more interesting: the characters are more polished and their feelings are more detailed. I discovered the evil Iago (I am ashamed to admit that I only knew this name from the Walt Disney motion picture Aladdin... Better late than never I guess).

Obviously, everybody dies at the end of the book; Shakespeare likes to torture his characters... Well not everybody but the only guy who survives has lost a leg so... not too far from it :) Poor Desdemona though.

Romeo and Juliet

I thought it would be time now for me to start reading William Shakespeare's dramas. I remember I read a lot of William Shakespeare about 15 years ago in French but I can't remember what I read so now is the time to read it again, but in the original text.

Obviously I was foolish enough to believe that I would be able to understand the text... Oh boy was I wrong!!

The text is complex, the vocabulary is complex and not understanding one every two words makes the reading pretty difficult... It took me about half the book to get accustomed to the text, so when I arrived at around the middle of the play, I decided to start all over again from the beginning. The second time was a bit better as far as understanding is concerned but by then, I had unfortunately made an opinion...

I have been extremely disappointed in this play: I was expecting the magical, or at least powerful, love story and I was left with a boy getting enamored with the first blonde "rebound" girl passing, and some misunderstandings as a plot... The characters are as shallow as can be, which is disappointing knowing the aura of Romeo and Juliet… I guess I got caught up too much in the modern “interpretation” of the legend and expected too much.

A Song of Ice and Fire

This entry will cover all five volumes of the "A song of Ice and Fire" series

• A Game of Thrones 
• A Clash of Kings
• A Storm of Swords 
• A Feast for Crows 
• A Dance with Dragons

The "A song of ice and fire" series has come to me highly recommended by 2 persons so I purchased the first volume on amazon... A hundred pages before the end of volume one, I had ordered the 4 remaining volumes: it's that good. Every volume is around 1000 pages but it had been a long time since I've had such a consuming novel to read; there really were times where I could not put the book down.

To sum up the series very quickly, it is a fantasy novel, set in a medieval world, with just a hint of magic. Kings and heroes brutally clash in a story deeply set in reality: there is no good or bad, there are just characters living their lives, with their own ideas of honor and duty. And the most astonishing trait of the story is the ability of the author to depict a character, invent his history and prepare his destiny, make you love or hate him, and to just kill him at the most unexpected time, for the most unexpected (and usually ruthless) reason.

About the form: each chapter is told from the point of view of a character which sometimes brings false or deformed information. This adds to the un-Manichean side of the story, since the reader is the witness of the feelings that animate the characters, their biases which are often based on misinformation...

There is so much to say since I just spent more than 3 months reading these books.

*** SPOILERS ***
The first shocker in "A Game of Thrones" is of course Eddard Stark's death. After that, the story runs deep with an increasing number of characters, headlined by the Starks and Lannisters, surrounded by the Tullys, Targaryens, Baratheons, Martells and Tyrells and Greyjoys. The story continues in "A Clash of Kings" when 5 pretenders claim the iron throne.
The story culminates in the third volume which is (to me) the very best volume of the series: "A Storm of Swords" is the theater of the infamous "Red wedding" and the surprising events of Joffrey's wedding and such a non-stop series of events that there is no leisure to rest! I must confess that I was as incredulous as I was "happy" reading Joffrey's demise: so many important (and dear) characters die in this third volume that it comes as retribution!
The fourth "A Feast for Crows" and the fifth "A Dance with Dragons" volumes develop more stories around Arya, Jon, Daenarys, Brienne, Jaime, Cersei, the Greyjoys and of course, Tyrion. The story of Daenarys grows more and more important, as does the status of Jon on the Wall and all other stories gravitate around these two. That's why Jon's murder at the end of volume 5 comes as a stunner!
*** /SPOILERS ***

Now, there's only one problem: when will the next volumes come out? Apart from the main cliffhangers, there are still a lot of questions left unanswered: what of Arya? And Sansa? What of Brienne and Jaime? Rickon has disappeared in volume 3 and never been heard of since. What of Bran? Will Robert's bastards reappear? Loras? I guess we'll have to wait several years to find out the answers...

Blog posts flurry!

4 blog posts in 2 days, following 11 months of silence! I've not read a lot lately, my excuse being the "looking for a new job, finding it, changing job"-thing... Not a great excuse, but the only one I've got :)

So now that I'm going to try to find some time for me again, I've decided that I should at least sum up the books I've read in that period, hence the Nineteen eighty-four, The War of the Worlds, and The Island of Doctor Moreau posts that were quite short since it's been a while since I've finished them... And since I've been busy, I've read mostly short stuff, mangas, comics and so on, but nothing too long. I even tried starting La Terre from Zola but couldn't get past 20 pages...

So, the next ones are going to change a lot from my latest readings since first, the writer is not dead (I think) and second, it reaches the limit of the "pocket book": with more than 800 pages, written in small characters, it is... a song of ice and fire.

I won't probably post before a while again :-D

The Island of Doctor Moreau

I've finished this book about a couple of weeks ago, and couldn't put it down. Here again, as in all books I've read by Wells, you will find a strange situation, product of Well's imagination, coupled with an analysis of humanity through the prism of that situation. And contrarily to The War of the Worlds, the narrative appealed to me and I find it quite modern, rapid, and found myself taken in the story.

(Spoiler incoming, be warned!!!) 

So Edward Prendick is dying alone on a small boat, when he is rescued in extremis and left on a completely isolated island with Montgomery, the mysterious doctor Moreau and quite a menagerie. The other companions of Montgomery have strange shapes and behaviours, and the island seems inhabited by quite a number of these strangely shaped individuals. Gradually, Prendick realizes where he has already heard the name of Moreau and he discovers what sort of experiences the mysterious doctor does on this island. Basically, Moreau is trying to transform animals into humans, by vivisecting them, transforming them into imperfect human images. In the process, these animals endure months of physical torture, which Moreau dismisses as a necessity for his experiments. Moreau also tries to put in them some notions of humanity which the creatures adopt like a law: to not taste blood, to not go on all four... He has turned dozens of animals, dogs, swine, apes, hyena; his current creation's screams of pain invade Prendick's mind... But one day, this puma escapes and ends up killing Moreau. Living with the "Beast folk", Prendick can observe that what's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh as the animals slowly lose the ability to speak and revert to animals, until he is finally able to flee on a raft and is picked up by a boat.

This novel certainly lacks the depths of thought that The Time Machine could bring you afterwards, but it's nonetheless a great story, with a great inventiveness, and a great storytelling. And when you know it's been written at the end of the nineteenth century, you have to realize what an incredibly advanced mind HG Wells must have been during his time!

The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds is a very well known HG Wells novel. It's been talked about recently since there must have been a Hollywood blockbuster about it, which I did not see... but I've heard about it through the stuff you missed in history class podcast, which aired a podcast about Orson Wells' rendition of the War of the Worlds on radio and the mass panic it has caused back in 1938. And since I've just finished two great novels by HG Wells, I was decided to go on with this one.

In a nutshell, capsules come from the sky, with aliens inside. Aliens then fabricate huge walking machines and start spreading death and destruction through their heat-rays. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who slowly reconstructs it through his own experience and what he has learned afterwards, from the capsule falling from the sky to the abrupt end of the invaders.

I do not know if that's because we are now too used to stories of aliens invading Earth, but I find the story boring and lacking in rhythm. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that it was plenty crazy and innovative back at the end of the nineteenth century, but I've been disappointed by this one, I think mostly because of the narrative process. I think it illustrates rather well the idea I've got that even if you have a great story, you can ruin it if you don't tell it the right way...

Anyway, I have this other book by H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, I hope I can enjoy the story as well as the The Invisible Man and The Time Machine...

Nineteen Eighty-Four

It's been what? 10 years since I first read 1984? I remembered that the situation that was described was very miserably absurd, but that it was so much possible for humanity to come down to this that it made me sad... Other than that, I did not remember much about the story in itself (which proves my point, writing this blog may indeed be useful to help me remember what I do!).

Re-discovering Orwell's masterpiece was great but again, so saddening. So completely had I forgotten the end that I kept hoping that Winston and Julia could make it through all this. But their humanity is slowly and irreversibly crushed... I don't think I can go over the book in details now since I'm catching up on 6 months of reading on and off.

Simply, it's clearly THE dystopian reference novel, with a exaggeratedly pessimistic vision of the future of mankind, or at least, you hope that it's exaggerated. In the world we live in, I'm not as shocked with the assumed violence of IngSoc or the futile perpetual war that assures the stability of the governing class, because these things already exist in our democracies to some extents, disguised behind politics and lobbies. But concepts such as doublethink make me shudder, it eliminates the freedom to think that makes us humans; you watch the telescreen but the telescreen also watches you, which eliminates your right to privacy.

1984 is dark and powerful, it makes you think, hope for mankind nonetheless, and makes you appreciate better what you have. I think it closes my dystopian readings, and since I've really appreciated HG Wells' novels (The Invisible Man and The Time Machine), I'm moving on to the next ones, The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau.

The Invisible Man

I am still in my cycle of dystopian books, but « The invisible man » by H. G. Wells is not about a dystopia. It just came with the version of “The time machine” I have bought so I figured I’ll just read it right now.
I’ll make it a short entry though. I’ll make it a short entry though. It has the same background as “The time machine” and was written at the end of the 19th century. As seen with today’s eyes, it can be seen as yet another invisible man story, but it could be the first invisible man story.

The fact that the man is invisible is certainly important, and was an innovation in itself when the novel was written, but it’s not the most important point of the story. The way I felt it, the story is more about acceptation and racism than about the scientific experimentation.
First he thought being invisible would only have benefits, but when one is naked, London is rather cold... So he tries to blend in, disguises himself and tries to resume his research to become visible again. The twist is that in order not to arouse suspicion, he doesn’t mix with people and people can sense that he is different. They try to reveal him, and he resists; his difference cannot be accepted by others and he can only find relief in vengeance.
To me, it is a classical story of racism and hatred, and the “invisible man” could have been replaced by the “stranger” in the novel to no great difference.

Next in the list of dystopian novels is 1984. I’ve already read it several years ago, but I am ashamed to say that I remember very little of it; which definitely proves the usefulness of this blog ;)

The Time Machine

I've just finished The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. It's a short novel, which has been written in the last 19th century, and that's what makes it remarkable. Would someone write such a novel today, it probably would not get a fraction of the success this one had, because time travel stories have been extensively covered since.

In this story, the narrator is invited to the Time Traveller’s home for dinner; during this dinner, the host tells his guest he has built a model of a time machine (I won't go into the details of the theory, just that time is seen as a fourth dimension, just as the three space dimension, and that travelling back and forth along this dimension, if not as easy, should be at least as possible as moving along the 3 other ones). To prove his point, the Time Traveller makes his model disappear in front of his surprised guests. Another week, another dinner with his guests and the Time Traveller has finished his real-size construction and is just back from the future, from year 802 701 AD to be precise. He seems ruffled, tired and excited at the same time, excuses himself to his guests, takes a shower and comes back to the dinner room where he rushes to the meat. Then, he tells the most improbable story to his dubitative guests.

*** SPOILER WARNNING ***
He has travelled far in the future where he spent a week and encountered two species that seem to inherit from man, the Elois and the Morlocks. The former, which he first discovers, live happily but futilely in the sun, they are richly clad but have no evolved language, do nothing but frolic in nature, eat fruits that hang from trees and are afraid of the dark. As the Time Traveller founds later, the latter live underground, where they seem to maintain some kind of machinery, although it seems that they do it out of habit since they do not seem to have an evolved language either, are afraid of the day and light and they feed upon the Elois. The Time traveller makes the assumption that the Elois who are now just cattle to the Morlocks, are the ultimate (d)evolution of the former upper / richer class of human society, which must have lived happily and richly in the sun. The Morlocks must be the remnant of the poor working class of that society, which must have been working underground; he supposes that in this condition, they have lost their humanity. Dark vision of the future indeed! The Time Traveller leaves his guests free to believe his story and the next day, he disappears with his "Time Machine", to never come back.

It's a nice novel, and a very interesting read (although it's pretty short) and, for the nineteenth century, brings pretty groundbreaking imagination to the table. But nowadays, it's probably not so groundbreaking. The added value of the "take it or leave it" attitude of the storyteller really adds to the story and forces you to choose side, to believe or not to believe, which is always an interesting experience!

Jennifer Government

Latest read in my current series of dystopian novel is Jennifer Government, by Max Barry.

Great book, great vision of society, and great story. I could bitch that it doesn't last long enough but apart from that, it's a great read :)

First the dystopia: in the novel, private companies have taken over the society, just as the United States have taken over most of the world. Your job is the most important thing and people take the name of the company they work for as their last name (which is why we get two "John Nike" in the story), children attend Mattel or MacDonalds' schools and the governments' only purpose is to ensure that people are globally safe by preventing crime. Quoting the book: "The Government's budget only extends to preventing crime, not punishing it." so no one is going to look for a murderer unless the victim's family is able to provide the operating budget, the Police is a for hire mercenary force, competing with the NRA depending on corporate alliances...
If you thought that this corporate world brings the worst in human nature, you're in for a treat: people don't get more selfish and indifferent about other humans than when they have budget, power, and sell sneakers...
Another great quote from a NRA general: "In the military, we have always had a healthy disrespect for democracy"

Then, there's the story: most of it takes place in Australia, which has just been assimilated by the US. There works Hack Nike, a lowly logistics employee; when John Nike offers him a job in marketing, Hack signs the contract without reading it. John's idea is that, if about 10 teenagers get killed just after buying the latest Nike model, people will go crazy over the shoe! And Hack is to do the killing... Since he signed a contract, he has to do the killing or it's a breach of contract and jail! But since he does not want to kill innocent kids, he goes to the Police, who offers to subcontract!
The story goes crazy from this point on, and we can follow it through a large cast of characters, in a pretty classic style nowadays, where each chapter is narrated from the viewpoint of a different character. The form is classic, and it has some slow moments but overall, the story has several plots, is interesting and it's a page turner, so I guess it values the dystopia.

And finally (and probably the most important thing), I'm now able to brag that I read the same book as Superman!