A Mysterious Flame Sparks a Mysterious Mark

Sometimes, a reader manages to be treated to two wildly different and yet equally good reads in the span of a weekend. This indeed was the case for myself, as I completed on Friday Isabel Allende's latest work, Zorro (published this past May simultaneously in English and Spanish editions), and Umberto Eco's newest work, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (the English translation was published around the first of June). These two works by two widely-acknowledged masters of prosery are very different in theme and focus, and yet there is a connection that binds them deeply together, at least within the recesses of this reviewer's heart.

Allende has made a name for herself, both within the US and in Latin America, for stories that invoke a sense of magical realism, yet while containing fully realized characters. She continues this blending of elements in her retelling of the Zorro myth from the vantage point of how Diego de la Vega became the Masked Zorro. Hard as it is to believe, this is the first full-length written novel devoted to Zorro and Allende has taken great pains to make the experience a vivid one for the reader. Now I read this book in the original Spanish so I have little idea how the translator might have rendered this into English, but Allende was very detailed and yet brief with her descriptions of the plains, mountains, and arroyos of Alta California during the Mission Era of the 1790s. The scenery either glows or is dank based on the needs of the plot, and the places just seem so alive. Her human characters, however, are a fitting match, from the couragious Toypurnia, who meets her match (and makes a match of a different sort) in Alejandro de la Vega, to the dastardly Rafael Moncada to Diego himself. Allende has breathed life into all of them, placing motivations into their actions that go far beyond mere swashbuckling and which touch upon how utterly human these legendary characters really might have been.

The plot moves quickly, but do not be disappointed if there are few scenes involving the masked man with the Z logo. This is, after all, a prequel of sorts, explaining how Diego de la Vega became Zorro and why his struggle for justice for all resounds so much with our imaginations, nearly two centuries after his legendary exploits were supposed to have begun.

Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana reveals a much more introspective Eco, one whom seems to be concentrating more on the mysterious of one's own membrances rather than on contextual wordplay which was his hallmark in tales such as The Name of the Rose and Baudolino. The story is an interesting one, as an antique book dealer, Yambo, suffers a mysterious ailment and is left suffering from partial amnesia. While he can remember quite clearly the things he has read, he has absolutely no memory of his personal life.

While I'm not going to spoil the plot of this story (and to say much more than what I'm about to would ruin all sorts of surprises for the reader), I will note that Eco displays a very keen wit here, one in which the protagonist's partial memories of the stories read, the loves forgotten or transmogrified, or the experiences buried in the tales of comic books and children's poetry are all somehow blended into an exploration of what makes one a human being. It is by far the most moving of Eco's stories that I've read and underneath the veneer of harmless retrospection, one of the most penetrating and even frightening looks into what makes us us. The closest tales I can think to what he tales are some of Borges's tales (especially the inversion of Funes, the Memorious) and Gene Wolfe's Latro in the Mist duology, not to mention a possible connection to the movie Memento (which I haven't seen, yet have heard that it covers some of the same themes as this book). But Eco doesn't copy any of these authors; if anything it's more of a coincidental convergence of ideas, as Eco's exploration of the Self goes in different directions than the authors I've read before.

Now I've said that there is a common bond between these two authors, tenuous as it might appear at first glance. What struck me most after completing both of them was just how well the authors used their abilities with the written Word to invoke reflective responses on the reader's part. Whether it be by enabling us to imagine a young Zorro in action or finding ourselves reliving vicariously our childhood memories of action-packed Saturday matinees through Yambo's struggles to make sense of himself, both Allende and Eco invoke that "mysterious flame," that je ne sais quoi, that unspeakable and yet utterly heartfelt something, that causes us to dream the dreams that we dream, to feel the fears that we feel, to love those whom we love, to be just what we are - human beings.

In short, these authors' works reflect the very best of what fiction of any sort, whether you want to call it speculative or not, can inflict upon the reader's emotions. These are stories well worth reading and re-reading, if only for the memories and the often-futile grasps for understanding that we might have as consequences of having read them.

My Half-Year Reading List

Hard to believe the first six months of 2005 have come and gone and that we are now beginning the backstretch of the year! I know many of the readers here at OF are competing in the 50 book challenge. While I'm not aiming to read 50+ books this year per se (schoolwork and worky-work are combining with my need to devote hours to exercise each week to keep me from having much free reading time), I thought I'd list the books I've completed so far this year. Of course, I might be forgetting a few by accident, but I know I've read and completed these books in 2005:

Jorge Luis Borges, El Hacedor; Ficciónes (English); Ficciónes (Spanish); El libro de arena

Eduardo Gonzalez Viana, Los sueños de America

Julio Cortázar, El autopista del sur y otros cuentos

Carlos Fuentes, Inquieta Compañia

Harriet Beecher Stowe, La cabaña del tío Tom

Umberto Eco, On Literature

Xavier Velasco, El guardián diablo

Ciro Alegria, El mundo es ancho y ajeno

Caitlin Sweet, A Telling of Stars; The Silences of Home

Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño

Jon Stewart, et. al, America (the book)

Angélica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial (Spanish)

Alison Croggon, The Naming

Yuri Andrukhovych, Perverzion

So yeah, not that many books so far this year, 18 in total, but considering that 11 are in Spanish and only 7 in English, that's not too bad, is it? And after this week, I should have almost two free months to catch up on my reading and here are the planned reads for the next few weeks/months:

To Finish Reading:

Isabel Allende, Zorro (Spanish)

Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana


To Start Reading Soon:

Kevin Radthorne, The Road to Kotaishi (Parts I & II)

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Ian Cameron Esslemont, Night of Knives

Isabel Allende, La Casa de los Espiritus


Later, Possibly:

George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

Gene Wolfe, Starship Strains

R. Scott Bakker, The Thousandfold Thought (but that depends on a few things, such as whether or not I get an ARC copy before December 31st)

Dan Simmons, Olympos


Possible Re-reads:

Bakker's first two books

Erikson's Malazan series and the two Korbal Broach novellas

Dan Simmons, Ilium

And possibly a few dozen more books in Spanish, as I plan on focusing more on Spanish than I will on English-language books this year. Hey, gotta learn the language, written and spoken, as well as I can if I want to work the job that I'm aiming for when I finish school in the next year and a half or so, right?

So what books have you completed this past half-year and which do you think you'll finish in this second half of the year?

Have aliens really taken the place of angels?

Guardian Unlimited | Arts Friday Review | 'Aliens have taken the place of angels'

In Friday's issue of The Guardian, Margaret Atwood tackles issues pertaining to the importance of speculative/science fiction in contemporary society. It was an interesting read and I found much with which I could agree, even if I do still disagree with her definitions for speculative and science fiction, as I see speculative fiction as being much more than just writing fiction based on plausible technologies.

But there's an interesting point she makes in her article, that of meaning. In a world where it seems like each discovery alternately excites and confuses us, where fundamentalists of all stripes have come clamoring for their voices to be heard as a clarion call to something concrete and specific in a world where it seems such certainties are chimeras, there is something about speculative fiction (or if you prefer, science fiction, fantasy, etc.) that reaches out to us, something to which we could grasp and hold tight in a sea full of undefinables.

Recently, there was a post over at SFF World dealing with the issue of whether or not the Bible could be considered a Fantasy. While the purpose of this post is not to debate that point (and my own opinions can be found embedded in that huge thread), perhaps it does serve to illustrate certain deep connections between our cultural religious past and our current society that serves us good and evil in Star Wars cups sold at fast food restaurants. Maybe the aliens will be our angels, but will there be a shift in the meaning that these potential creatures might hold for us? Perhaps, all we can do is just speculate and wonder.

I Narrator

I might as well splash my first posting here, half a year late at the very least. Anway, I've been thinking over the past several weeks about the power of the narrated story, somewhat like Larry's post about the power of stage plays on the audience.

Over the recent weeks, I've been reading Gene Wolfe's Wizard Knight, Caitlin Sweet's A Telling of Stars, Matt Stover's Heroes Die, and Dan Simmons' Olympos. These very different novels and authors have each added to my thoughts on the power of perspective storytelling. Many of us are familiar with the pull of stories told in the typical 3rd person format. Some people are truly drawn to 1st person narrative for the obvious reasons of the immediacy of the story and the main character's reactions. For me, I've realized that I enjoy types of "Telling", to borrow Caitlin's term, a narrative within the larger narrative. This "telling" can come out in different styles and forms in written works, but they all have in common the sense of a deeper sharing of the story, readers and the characters.

Much like a play unfolding before an audience, certain aspects of this "Telling" style draw the audience into plot, setting, development, suspense, more directly than many other forms. Gene Wolf's Sir Able, in Wizard Knight, is writing a letter to his brother, a letter that we are reading. Through the process, the character has to contextualize his experiences, his gained understandings of the events going on around him. He also happens to underexaggerate, smooth over, forget, avoid and lie about certain details. The telling here becomes a living thing. The entirety of the novels exist as this letter; however, Wolfe has managed to create a story that is somehow larger, more complex than the entirety of the written work... he managed to put his letter-styled novels into a larger context without even writting it.

Caitlin Sweet's A Telling of Stars is both a telling and a story about a series and intersection of many tellings. The novel is tied together in a weave of different characters stories, partially revealed for the most part, that bring a greater understanding and deeper feel to the overall story, which turns out to be a Telling of it's own. While the novel is not directly a first person account, it does force to reader into multiple and ever-changing understandings of characters, events and situations as each new element and telling brings in a new texture to the main chracter's world. The interesting thing is that these interconnected tellings seems to be the power behind the reader's connection with the characters and the story. There is a kind of power in the constructed words of the characters in this novel that allow us to sit next to the characters for the revealing.

Both Simmons and Stover use "Telling" in more conceptual ways in the noted novels. In Ilium and Olympos, Simmons is working with a multi-part story, one part revolving around a re-telling of the epic battle for Troy, Homer's Iliad, from the perspective of an on the field scholar. This part of the novel also happens to be in 1st person narrative. Thus, we get commentary on actions, characters and developments from an observer. This device allows the reader to enter into the novel in a different way... with specific context and conversation as much as a simple reading of the plot elements. Simmons explores the ideas of "Telling" in other ways as well... the events of the war of Troy enter into another arc of the story, but as a form of media entertainment... also as an intended means of education. This gives characters not involved with the Troy arc an odd connection and interplay with the other section of the novel. As events unfold, the reader finds themselves in much the same situation, holding "observed" information from the Troy arc as new characters and events unfold. Finally, Simmons' has created a society where history has been lost, for the most part, and the power of the story has been reintroduced. So in one book, you get a narrated story of a war, a complex interaction with that narrated story, and actual stories of events and developments that happen off the page. All in all, this creates the sense of a much more developed and complex world and story than simply spelled out on the pages.

Stover goes at this in even another way. In Heroes Die, Stover creates a world that watches actors transport to another world for the purpose of adventure. It is like reality tv and fantasy high adventure combined. The interesting aspect for the reader is that Stover places us on both sides of this "Telling". We are sometimes in the PoV of a watcher of events, the PoV is actually coming from a person virtually "living" the main character's events. At other times, we are getting a more standard style of story, though the character will break into monologue for the benefit of those watching his "adventure". In this way, the reader gets involved in several different levels of the story, from the main characters personal thoughts, his carefully crafted and contextualized telling of events, and a completely removed and almost secondary connection to the story. It is an interesting concept, and it was used to great results in the novel.

What captures you when reading? Are there times when you feel more connected to a story than at others? Is there a narrative style that makes novels more immediate to you when you're reading?

For me, an author's ability to involve me in the story by changing my typical relationship to the words on the page makes all the difference. "Telling" makes me feel involved in a novel in ways that are different... I can be further removed and seeing the story through the lens and context of a character, or I can be so far into the events and actions of a character that it's difficult to make out a larger story. The styles and techniques are different, but I enjoy the results.

Anyway, I'd love to hear any thoughts or comments.

Jake

A Postmodernist Bulgakov?

I just had the pleasure of finishing a novel recommended to me by Maciek/Vanin called Perverzion. The work of an Ukrainian novelist/poet/essayist/translator, Yuri Andrukhovych, Perverzion is a great many things all bundled up into one paperback volume of 326 pages. It is in turns a murder/suicide mystery, a exploration of morality and the interstices that take place in human lives. It is a farce, a prosy poem full of allusions to other allusions. It deals with religious matters of the soul; it is concerned with the postmodern decline and fall of the Carnival. It is also a love story, and a story of love misled. It is all of these things and many more.

The story revolves around the last days of one Stanislav Perfetsky - poet, gadfly, one-time stripper in a club catering to older women. He is a romantic and yet utterly beyond this. His travels across Europe, from Lviv in the Ukraine to his apparent end in the canals of Venice, are the stuff of legend. But just who is Perfetsky? Andrukhovych explores this with a series of chapters written apparently from the perspective of those who knew him, who were baffled by him, who were sleeping with him, and who were spying upon him. It is a fascinating mosaic quilted together with a deft comic touch.

Now I mentioned Bulgakov in my title, because the translator in his introduction refers to similar thematic elements present in both, combined with a mutual gift for the absurdly meaningful. While I need to re-read Bulgakov to ascertain just how accurate these claims are, I do recall a certain sense of devilish glee in both works, as the authors tweaked the noses of the pretentious (the chapter on the conference regarding post-Feminism is something to behold, intersplicing the "saintly" Perfetsky's making out with Ada with the speaker's Andrea Dworkinesque denunciation of almost all sex as rape) in their satirical ramage through their tomes.

While this book certainly contains elements of the supernatural (as does Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita), it is very difficult to classify Perverzion as belonging to any one school or genre of writing. It is simply sui generis, which certainly would be pleasing to Perfetsky himself to know. If you are a reader who likes challenging books that have a high reward potential, then I highly recommend that you buy Perverzion.

Life is but a dream?

To be, or not to be, - that is the question -
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? - To die, - to sleep, -
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and teh thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, - 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, - to sleep; -
To sleep! perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause...

Hamlet, Act III, Scene I

Those who know me well will tell you that I am a huge lover of plays. For me, plays constitute the boundary between the Written and Spoken worlds. So much can happen in a play that cannot happen elsewhere. Unlike movies or television shows where the viewer is only a passive, non-essential part of the performance, the play often requires active audience participation. It is our applause, our interest, our own emotional baggage that the playwrights seek to attract, and in some cases, to deceive.

The actors are truly in action, moving about, morphing our perceptions with just a few well-placed words and a timely twinge of emotion that might flicker across a performer's face before it is replaced with another, possibly mysterious sign of feeling. A play is staged, but yet it conveys deep truths about ourselves when it is performed well. As Shakespeare had Hamlet's character say later in Act III, "The play's the thing."

What power in such lines as that or in Hamlet's soliloquy! I have found that good playwrights can create a world full of Feeling and Meaning just by allowing us audience members to do exactly that, to listen and to react to what is being said, and even more importantly, to how it is being said. One of the main weaknesses that I believe speculative fiction has as a whole is that this genre has failed to capitalize upon the power and beauty that is inherent in the play form.

In many ways, plays provide people with the avenues for emotional/personal escape that lovers of speculative fiction claim for that genre of literature. While watching Hamlet's dilemnia, or perhaps pondering the often-sad realities found in Thorton Wilder's Our Town, or even considering the notion that Life itself may be just only (and so much is this only!) a dream, as Segismundo does in Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño (Life is (a) Dream), the playwatcher can be caught up in such a way that is virtually impossible for any written work to perform unaided. For words to have true power, I believe they must resonate within the hearts of the recipiants, which means they must be spoken as well as read.

But yet plays are not as important as they used to be in everyday life. From television, movies, and video usurping some of the exciting visual moments, to radio and the above extracting the auditory elements, plays have been pushed into the background of posh theatre groups or rinky-dink high school performances. Where are the Georg Taboris daring to rewrite histories such as Hitler's youth into dreamscapes of the human psyche? Where are the Henrik Ibsens, reminding us of the often sad truths to be found within the doll's house? Where have they all gone? Is there any future left in the play format?

I believe that there might be. For as I tried to say above (and fear that I might have failed at my task), plays just offer something more meaningful for those people who "get it." There are more direct connections, as the actors and actresses may appear at the end and bow for our applause. We give immediate approval or disapproval to these performances. Seeing sometimes our hopes and fears presented in a play can just be so rewarding, that it is a wonder that we don't see more plays being written today, in this world of dislocation and alienation. Perhaps that is a field that someone with a keen interest in the speculative can explore to greater extent. Because I suspect that the play form can be paired quite well with the speculative. But maybe I'm just only dreaming. It wouldn't be the first time.

Well, time to get this blog active again, yes?

So it's been a long, strange trip since I last updated this Blog back around New Year's. Since then, I've returned to school full-time as a Social Work major and I just haven't had the time/energy/desire to immerse myself in speculative fiction like I did the year or so before. But now that summer is fast approaching, I should have some free time coming up to making at least occasional posts here.

Considering that this is basically a blog for some of the OF Admins to comment on whatever floats their boats, hopefully there will be more variety in the posts. After browsing through a few other blogs, I thought maybe we could better integrate this Blog of the Fallen with OF as a whole. So I'm going to try to do these things with my future posts here:

1) I'm going to provide more short reviews here, especially of works that might not fit exactly within the parameters of speculative fiction but which might be of interest to the reading public.

2) More comments about discussions, debates, etc. within and without the field that I encounter in my personal life or elsewhere on the Web as a means of provoking thoughtful discussion.

3) Less links to places like this.

In the coming weeks, I plan on kicking things off by reviewing books I recently received from publishers, such as Alison Croggon's The Naming, Kevin Radthorne's The Road to Kotaishi, Julie Czerneda's Migration. Also, expect reviews shortly over Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Yuri Andrukhovych's Perverzion, and Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño.

If there are other things you wish to see from this blog, please leave a suggestion here and I'll see what I can do. The more that reply, the better!