Friday, March 25, 2011

Review of In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)


Short Summary

 On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.


 My Opinion

 In Cold Blood is a true-crime novel depicting a crime that has happened more than fifty years ago. Capote was intrigued by the apparent emotionless killing of a family of four and tried to reconstruct the events, perhaps to find the meaning behind it. 

Truth is, there was no meaning, except greed and perhaps lust. Four people died, because of someone blabbing in prison, someone else taking it too seriously and yet another taking it too far. Of all the ways this could have been prevented, it didn't stop it from happening. 


The story itself is divided in parts. The first part revolves around the Clutter family, you get to know Clutter senior, his wife and two youngest children who still lived at home, preparing themselves for Thanksgiving to come while doing the daily tasks that every farm brings along. 
The next part focusses on the preparations of the two culprits and their eventual doing of the crime, although its not mentioned until later in the book, when they are eventually caught, what precisely happened. 
The third part can be divided in two. On one side it's about the struggle of the detectives to find out what happened, why it happened and who it did. On the other side you have Perry and Dick, the two murderers, on a crime spree across the United States with a quick stop in Mexico. Their behaviour is erratic to say the least, as if they don't grasp the enormity of what they did one night in Kansas. 
The last part, is when they are caught by the police, due to them turning back. They give a complete account of what happened that night, passively sit through their trial and in the end have their punishment fulfilled. 


My general feeling about this novel is ambiguous. The subject, the crime, is horrendous and with Capote's vividness in describing it, I got chills more than once. He also tried to make you feel compassionate about the two killers, as you delve deeper in how and why they are what they are, but somehow you feel distant from them, secretly rooting for them to slip up and get caught. 
It might have been different if you got to know them before they commited the crime, but as it was, I never felt compassionate. Even with a sorry childhood, that's no excuse to kill four innocent people. 
One thing that did irritate me about this book, and that was the constant repitition. In the end you get several accounts of what happened, all very detailed, but very much the same also and it slowed down the emotional engagement I felt earlier in the book. 


In the end, for my first true-crime novel, it wasn't bad. It was written well, but somehow I couldn't manage to read more than a dozen pages a day, which explains why it took me so long. Maybe it's the fact, that for once reading wasn't an escape, but more of a wake up call. "Look what can happen, look what has happened already. "


I do recommend it, for those interested in reading of the more horrendous crimes in the late fifties, early sixties. The Clutter family might not have earned international fame, but they do deserve some credit of having become involuntary leading roles in a novel that shouldn't have been written in the first place, if you think about it. Not that Capote made a mistake, but I think we all rather saw Nancy Clutter marry her highschool sweetheart instead of eternal glory in a Truman Capote novel. 

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

A Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)


Having finished this a couple of days ago, I felt I needed the time to reflect upon it and gather my true opinion.

I still have mixed feelings, but I'll delve deeper into that after we see ..

.. what the book has to say about itself.. 

It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a Handmaid in the home of the Commander and his wife. She is allowed out once a day to the food market, she is not permitted to read, and she is hoping the Commander makes her pregnant, because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she was an independent woman, had a job of her own, a husband and child. But all of that is gone now...everything has changed.

What I have to say.. 

In the very dense summary of this novel, you get a taste of what this book is about, but it is so much more. 
Offred, (of Fred) is an inhouse woman who's main function is to get pregnant. The reason this is so important, is due to a war where certain chemicals which causes infertility amongst others, were used. 


It seems a simple explanation, but it isn't so. 
The world is under the reign of a theocracy and the bible rules life, yet again. 
Due to the low childbirth rate and the high number of stillborns and misshapen babies, child bearing has become big business. Free access to sex has  been taken away and men are rewarded with a wife and later on a handmaid, when they've done their country a good deed. 


These men themselves are mostly infertile but it's a taboo to speak of it, since men have become rulers of the house and the world again, pulling the wife back to kitchen duties and spreading her legs in the bedroom. Marriages devoid of love, they seek comfort in the extreme. 

One of their duties would be to conceive a child, whether with their own wife or with a handmaid, a woman assigned to a household. Every step of the way is calculated, so passion can't find a way in. 

Offred finds herself in a household where she is envied and hated. While she tries to get pregnant, she reflects upon her life before the change. She had a husband and daughter of her own, but that is all in the past. 
We follow her on an almost daily basis, being there on her monthly inspection, the 'insemination', even present at a child birth of one of the other handmaid's. 
A conspiracy is hushedly talked about, but in the end, will she ever be free? 


A rather jagged review of mine, but I don't want to give any big spoilers. The novel is quite good, although it didn't alltogether meet up to my expectations. 
The world that Atwood creates is distinctly dystopian, even to a frightening level. Being a woman, I got goosebumps when she described the humble ways of her life. Not even having the permission to talk to another man, being careful to avoid eye contact. 
Having an interest in dystopian fiction, I was enthralled in the beginning, eating up the pages as I went, but I missed something in the end. There is no change, no goal she pursues, instead I got a kind of 'Deus Ex Machina' feeling from it. The Hollywoodian Happy Ending, sort of speak. And after reading sublime novels as 1984 and Brave New World, I do believe that either the character fights or they perish, and neither happens in this novel. 


I'm still giving it a good score. On GoodReads 3 stars out of 5, so if you're into dystopian fiction, you should give it a try.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald




... is a letdown. Truly I wonder who makes up the 1001-books-you-need-to-read-before-you-die list, because some books just shouldn't be on there.

Maybe this novel was outrageously popular the time it came into printing, but I didn't see what all the hubbub is all about.
It is so with many classics, and this is no exception.

What the novel has to say about itself
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream. It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

 And now what I think
I find this to be complete rubbish. It isn't written in crystalline prose, and it isn't the best kind of poem. I wrote better poems in kindergarten. 
I find the characters to be distant, non-living, non-breathing superficial party-going bland words in a book. Yes, that would be adequate to describe them.
What is supposed to be the search for the American Dream and a story about a impossible love is just blah blah blah, I wrote it in 1922 and therefore it is good.

I realize many would disagree with me, on this subject, but please remember that I am living in a free country, so therefore have the luxury of expressing my opinion.
If it doesn't coexide with yours, then I'm agreeing that we are disagreeing.

But I wouldn't recommend this, I would rather write letters to the schoolboard if my children should have to read this as an assignment, knowing there is so much more truly wonderful and symbolic prose out there.

If you want to read a novel about an empty search for the American Dream, one that truly grips you by the throat, instead of seeming a written episode of The Bold and the Beautiful, read Grapes of Wrath by John Steinberg. That is literature, and how do I know this? Because it isn't compared to a poem.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides


Finally, I finished it.
It was an extraordinary book though. One to remember, one to cherish, one to reread many times over in years to come.


In short

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver-s license...records my first name simply as Cal." 
So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.


My thoughts


Being over 500 pages long, Middlesex was a book that took me longer than expected to finish. The reason behind this would be that you can't rush this novel. 
It's a beauty and quite unique in its kind, which makes me want to thank the person who recommended it to me. At first it seems a bit daunting, knowing a little of the plot but not enough to be truly intrigued. Also Pulitzer Price winners don't necessarily guarantee smooth reading. 
This was luckily not so. You rather quickly get drawn in by an outstanding narration, one I've rarely encountered and it can be said that I read a lot. (Another one of those vivid, wonderful narrations is The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, which I just ate up)


The narrator is at the same time the leading lady/gentleman, in which she alternately plays the role of being her/himself and the allknowing third person. 


After a quick hello, you get transported back to the beginning of the 20th century, to her grandmother still living in Turkey and her flee to America, after the greek got slaughtered by the Turkish regime.
There we are part of her life in Detroit, where we our first hand witnesses to a secret that will fill her life with dread and anxiety. We follow the lives of her son and his wife and their children, which the narrator is one of. 


The story goes back and forth between the present (2001) and the past (right up until the late 70's). In 2001 we see Cal's firsthand experience with trying to establish a normal relationship with a woman despite his setback. We get glimpses of how he shoots, but draws back when he could score, scared of showing how he is made. 
The reminiscing is mainly from a woman's perspective, since Cal started out life as Calliope, a little baby girl and throughout the novel, this female touch is noticeable. The eye for detail and the human emotions that make this novel so worth while have a feminine feel to it, even though it is supposed to be written from a man's perspective. 


All in all, it's a pearl amongst rhinestones and I can't but recommend this further!! A must read, truly!! 

Check out these other reviews!!!