Tropophobia

Invariably when I read one of those novels which alternates between two distinct narratives, I find myself more engrossed in one than the other and end up skipping ahead to see what develops. So it was with The 19th wife. Even though the true story of Ann Eliza Young is in many ways more interesting than Ebershoff's lightweight murder mystery plot, his inability to breathe life into it led to me jumping ahead several chapters to the implausible happy denouement for our hero and his improvised family. I went back and read most of them, but I still have half of the account of Brigham Young's night in jail to go before I can take the book off my nighttable and stick a stake through it.

The happy ending might not annoy me quite as much as it does if he didn't rely on the lazy and manipulative television-police-procedural gimmick of giving a character a horrific backstory in order to engage our sympathies and then essentially ignoring the consequences that would have in the real world. His impoverished runaways are so much more trusting and less self-destructive than any number of well-educated people I've known from good bourgeois homes that I'm left with the strong impression the author has never personally known anyone really screwed up. He's also helped me realise that I really dislike the mystery trope of repeated visits to a risky and/or secured location in order to pick up crumbs of new information. The first time the protagonist revisits the polygamous compound he was kicked out of, you're generally fearful for what might befall him; another two or three relatively uneventful trips back, however, and it becomes just another locale on a par with the Internet café or the lawyer's office.

So, in a word, not recommended. I know a little more about the craziness of 19th-century Mormonism than I did before, but without one iota more insight into the human heart. It could hardly be a more different experience reading Uwe Johnson. My progress in Das dritte Buch über Achim has been glacial. Hopefully it will improve a bit now that I've gotten a bit of feedback from Nuphy, who pointed out how the text cleverly incorporates East German officialese. I'd complained to monshu that I was having the problem of words I thought I knew not meaning what I thought they meant, and now it appears at least part of that is deliberate. The reward, however, is genuinely expressive and superior prose conveying the complexities of interpersonal contact with terrific nuance. Yum!

But now I'm a bit torn. Yesterday evening, the Old Man and I sat on the deck discussing literature with the Time List of great novels as our jumping-off point. It made me want to choose something less disposable for my next English-language novel, but part of the point of having two novels going at once is having a lighter alternative when one is heavy going. So I'm at a bit of a loss for the moment. Maybe this would be a good time to give Roman fever another go, if it's not going to bum me out too terribly.

Moving along

Last week on Facebook I bet a near-stranger that I would cut off my fingernails (his idea, not mine) if his dire predictions about anarchist mayhem came true over the weekend. My counterprediction was that we wouldn't see anything worse than a few broken windows at most. Sadly, our mutual acquaintance deFriended me as a consequence so I'm not in a position to gloat at having been proved right. But really, the relief of an uneventful series of protests is more than reward enough.

There were moments last night, watching the newsfeeds, where I glimpsed the potential for things to get really ugly. Once I saw that barricaded hefted, I thought we'd see some shattered glass for sure. In the end, however, the police seem to have behaved better than I feared them capable of. (One friend reports that supervisors repeatedly broadcast the message, "Remember that you are on live television and show restraint!") Yeah, they busted a few heads, but only after being seriously provoked, and the brunt of their response seems to have landed on those actually doing the provoking; when bystanders complained that they were being given no place to go, the cops pulled back. Most importantly, they identified and surrounded the Black Bloc hooligans early on without disrupting the surrounding march. I didn't see any evidence of the awful baton charges on peaceful parties or instances of kettling vividly broadcast from the streets of Toronto. How refreshing would it be if we're actually learning from Canada's mistakes for a change?

The much-touted traffic chaos turned out to be a bust as well, quite possibly because so much of the workforce heeded calls to stay home. The shuttles I rely on to get into work, which loop down to Chicago Avenue and back north, ran perfectly on schedule. I'm still waiting for a report from our buddy Diego, who announced at Saturday's brunch his intentions to go south for some sightseeing. Again, there were moments on Sunday when I asked myself why I wasn't doing the same. Twenty years ago, I would've been there for sure. But I fall in the vast middle ground between the grannies reliving their rebellious youth and the rebellious youth living it out for the first time.