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Apr. 22nd, 2015 10:45 am
Watch out for the skin deep
One of the reasons I gravitate toward duller fiction, at least at home, is that I don't want something which will keep me up all night. But I knew that, with less than a hundred pages left, I had plenty of time to finish Under the skin before bedtime. Still, it left me so agitated that I felt the need to go for a walk about 9 p.m. When I came back, I went for something polar opposite and picked up Le Guin's Always coming home.
Faber manages a good balance between verisimilitude and allegory in his novel. At some point, I realised he was never going to give me some details of his invented world that I really wanted to know, but at this point I was invested enough in the characters and their story that I was able to let this go. I'm not sure I'd be so successful at this on a second reading.
What I really appreciated was his handling of the horror elements. He didn't get as grisly as I expected, but they were no less effective for this. In fact, I think that understating them actually made it easier for them to get under my skin. Also, a goodly amount of Scottish dialect, but no so much that the average reader would put it down in disgust. (At one point the protagonist says, "I have no idea what you're saying". I wonder how many American readers will have the same experience.)
For my commute, I'm back to Mahfouz' Morning and evening talk (حديث الصباح والمساء). It's an interesting experiment, telling a family saga by means of alphabetical entries, but so far I'm finding it focuses my attention on the form at the expense of content. I keep wondering about his process of structuring the novel in order to keep some of the traditional elements of tension and gradual revelation. Jumping from one character to the next in this fashion can make it hard to keep the thread, but if you forget who someone is, you can always flip to their entry. (Though I try not to read too much of the later entries because spoilers.)
The use of patronymics helps a lot as well. (Wait, who's Qasim Amr Aziz again? Or, right, the son of Amr Aziz Yazid al-Misri.) Since the same landmark events keep popping up again and again--e.g. the 1919 Revolution, June 7th 1967--I also think of it as a primer for my eventual reading of his Cairo Trilogy, which Blondie warned me takes some knowledge of Arab history to truly appreciate. Still, I think I would need a decent work of history to really unlock that.
Oh, and I dispensed with The story of Zahra. It did gain some forward thrust and came to a satisfying (and predictably tragic) conclusion. Blondie spoke appreciatively of her Women of sand and myrrh, so on the basis of that recommendation and the strength of her writing in Zahra, I picked it up for four bucks.
Faber manages a good balance between verisimilitude and allegory in his novel. At some point, I realised he was never going to give me some details of his invented world that I really wanted to know, but at this point I was invested enough in the characters and their story that I was able to let this go. I'm not sure I'd be so successful at this on a second reading.
What I really appreciated was his handling of the horror elements. He didn't get as grisly as I expected, but they were no less effective for this. In fact, I think that understating them actually made it easier for them to get under my skin. Also, a goodly amount of Scottish dialect, but no so much that the average reader would put it down in disgust. (At one point the protagonist says, "I have no idea what you're saying". I wonder how many American readers will have the same experience.)
For my commute, I'm back to Mahfouz' Morning and evening talk (حديث الصباح والمساء). It's an interesting experiment, telling a family saga by means of alphabetical entries, but so far I'm finding it focuses my attention on the form at the expense of content. I keep wondering about his process of structuring the novel in order to keep some of the traditional elements of tension and gradual revelation. Jumping from one character to the next in this fashion can make it hard to keep the thread, but if you forget who someone is, you can always flip to their entry. (Though I try not to read too much of the later entries because spoilers.)
The use of patronymics helps a lot as well. (Wait, who's Qasim Amr Aziz again? Or, right, the son of Amr Aziz Yazid al-Misri.) Since the same landmark events keep popping up again and again--e.g. the 1919 Revolution, June 7th 1967--I also think of it as a primer for my eventual reading of his Cairo Trilogy, which Blondie warned me takes some knowledge of Arab history to truly appreciate. Still, I think I would need a decent work of history to really unlock that.
Oh, and I dispensed with The story of Zahra. It did gain some forward thrust and came to a satisfying (and predictably tragic) conclusion. Blondie spoke appreciatively of her Women of sand and myrrh, so on the basis of that recommendation and the strength of her writing in Zahra, I picked it up for four bucks.
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