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The Book Thief

May 5th 2008 05:04
I am not a person who cries a lot over fictional things. There are people who cry when watching movies, or TV shows, or emotional books. I don’t. Unless there’s really sad music playing- I’m a bit of a sucker then. Play me Mozart’s Requiem and I’ll break down over anything you like. But in general, sad things that are fictional don’t affect me too deeply. With books, especially, when I read up to a part that seems like it will be sad, my imagination shuts itself off. “This is just a fictional book,” I tell myself, “words in ink, on paper. If you close it, all the world is well again.”

Only two books in recent memory have made me cry. One is a picture book of Baboushka, a traditional Russian folktale. There is something so poignant about the woman who lost her child searching for Baby Jesus, that I get all teary, every time. The other book I have cried over is Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. I sat at my desk and bawled for ages reading that, it was so strangely out of character that I didn’t know where to put myself.


The Book Thief is set in Germany during WWII, so you know from the start that it’s going to be tragic, and I’m not giving anything away to say that there are quite a lot of deaths. It is told from the point of view of two characters- Liesel, an essentially orphaned little girl living with a new foster family in a small German town, and Death, who is surprisingly emotional.

Almost anything you read or see or hear about WWII will be heart-wrenching, but that is not the only reason why this book is sad. And it is not just because beloved characters die in the book that I cried, though that was the catalyst. The Book Thief is so very beautifully written, that it gets into your soul, and as the novel moves along to the inevitable tragic conclusions, it reaches you inside- away from your brain processing the words.


Liesel is a little girl, and despite the tragedies she has already suffered in her life, and the terrible period she grows up in, and so a lot of the story is concerned with the little things that make up and colour childhood. There is her relationship with her foster parents, school, games of football in the street, the neighbour boy who becomes her new best friend, lollies, apples, her foster father’s accordion music, and an obsession with books. The reality of the war comes through as air raids, and conscription of soldiers, and the persecution of the Jewish community, and Liesel sees all this with the confused and sad eyes of an innocent child trying to understand the madness, which makes it all the more despicable and tragic.

A devise is used by Zusak, which is to intersperse the overall narrative of Liesel’s experiences with little comments made by Death, facts which he tells us, in boxes in the middle of the page. Death talks about colours- the colour of a day, the colour of a soul. Death looks up at the sky, because it is too difficult to look at Earth. And he is so busy during the war. Death is an very emotional character in this book- not the guy in a black cape who just comes to collect you when your time is up- he is removed from the madness of human existence and sees it, therefore, more clearly. The horror it creates, the tragedy. He feels it more than many humans do.

The sweetness and the sadness of Liesel’s experience, and Death’s observations, combine in Zusak’s beautiful, poetic, and at the same time very simple writing style, which draws beautiful, terrible and sorrowful pictures of life. It is an amazing book, and I would recommend it. But have the tissues by your side as you read it.
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Smug Voice of the Author

April 29th 2008 06:54
In a previous post I mentioned my “Petty-Reasons-Why-I-Will-Thr ow-This-Book-Out-The-Window” list, and I bring it up again because the topic of this post is yet another thing I find extremely annoying; the conceited, or smug, voice of the author. I’m not sure if I’m right here, but I think it is generally preferable for the author’s voice to be quieter than the voice of the characters, or the story. Maybe I should make myself clearer. I think that the reader should be so absorbed in the story, that they cannot hear the voice of the author saying, in the background, “I put this here, because I thought it would make the scene poignant”, or “I put that part in because I want to hector you about a topic I am passionate about:” I don’t want to see the scaffolding behind the story, I want to believe that the story is real and complete and not at all contrived, though, of course, I know that someone, somewhere, thought it all up and put it on the page. The same goes for characters- I want to believe that the characters are real people, I don’t want to think of them as ventriloquist dummies through which the author is telling me things.

Not every book can be perfectly absorbing so that you forget you are reading something an author wrote down, and not every character can be so believable that you forget their dialogue and inner monologue is scripted by some guy sitting at a desk thinking “how do I make this point?” As readers, we learn to accept this. And for the most part even someone as irritable as me can accept this. But there’s something about a smug authorial voice that really grates on my nerves.

By a smug authorial voice, I mean that the author’s voice and intent is clearly present behind the story, but this is more irritating than normal. I am reading a passage, and I am acutely aware that there was a guy sitting at a desk thinking “yeah, yeah, magic castle- and now I’m going to write about just how absolutely fantastic this magic castle WHICH I INVENTED FROM SCRATCH is. Wow, I am so incredibly imaginative and brilliant!” This is how it feels reading some books- like the author is quite up themselves, and it bleeds through from real life into the story.

Of course, the impression of ego which the smug voice conveys might not be true. The author might really be a mild and modest person, I suppose. On reflection, it’s probably quite likely that I have a smug voice as I write this blog, which would make you think that I am a confident, self-satisfied kind of person who always thinks they’re right. I don’t believe that’s true, but that is possibly how it sounds. For the record, it is excusable for me to have a smug authorial voice for two reasons. One, I am not a professional writer, and two, with a blog you are laying your own opinions down, whereas when you are writing fiction, you are meant to convey all your meaning through the story and the characters. Not shouting it out louder than the story and characters.

I think that fantasy novels particularly suffer from Smug Authorial Voice Disease. Fiction authors play god- they create people and lives, and can do what they want with them, which perhaps accounts for the smug voice. Authors of speculative fiction take this even further- they not only created characters, but whole worlds and universes with rules of their own. The guy at the desk is sitting there saying “I have every right to be smug and know-it-allish about Magic Castle Land, because I created it all. I understand it perfectly from inside out, unlike the reader who is necessarily ignorant of this strange place.” That is an explanation for why authors might sounds smug as they write, but I don’t think it is an excuse. Their job as an author is to calm down, stop congratulating themselves on being great, and find a way to make Magic Castle Land as accessible to the reader as possible, so that they understand and appreciate it as much as the author does.

That’s what irritates me- a know-it-all author who won’t share their creation properly with the reader, and instead you can hear them in the background saying “nah, nah, I know all about this, and you don’t.” In my last post I spoke about one of my favourite books, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. Now I want to talk about one of my least favourite books, by way of illustrating my point.

Who has read Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea? And who actually enjoyed it? Congratulations, if you did, it was a feat I could not achieve. That book had all the elements of a book I should have liked reading- the strange archipelagic world, the village boy turned powerful wizard and his quest against the darkness in his soul, and we all know how popular stories about boys learning to become wizards can be. But the book left me completely cold on all points, and I blame Ursula Le Guin for sitting at her desk and saying “nah, nah, Sparrowhawk is my best friend, I have spent years travelling through the islands of Earthsea, I have accompanied Sparrowhawk on his terrifying quest and seen magic before my eyes. But this is all I’m going to share with you about it.” Throughout the whole thing, I felt as though Le Guin was in a room telling the story to herself, and I was only catching bits of it listening at the door. I could not relate to the characters at all; it was just a thoroughly conceited guy named Sparrowhawk who travelled from this island, to that island, and talked in a very pompous and angsty way. I could not appreciate the fantasy world, either, because I was just told the names of islands, and given a cursory glimpse into the culture of those places, without ever being immersed in it. Sparrowhawk’s quest was never of any interest as a plot, because it was just the inaccessible character travelling to inaccessible places, and making long-winded speeches about things.

But most of all, the thing that made the book annoying, rather than just boring, was the smug voice of the author. Because she had envisioned the world clearly, but not shared it with the reader. And instead, you are reading an ego-driven account of all the wonderful things she has invented, that you can’t access to appreciate. I don’t know if I have made my point clearly in this post, but if you want to know what I mean about the smugness, then just read A Wizard of Earthsea and come to your own conclusions.
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The Historian

April 21st 2008 04:24
My life is a little bit busy at the moment, cluttered up by things I should have done weeks ago that have piled up, but what that means is that I haven’t had time to read anything new which I can blog about. So for today, at least, I am going to be talking about a book I read awhile ago. Yes, that’s sort of cheating, isn’t it? But at least I’m honest about it.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova is one of my favourite books, and at a glance seems to be just the silly sort of book I would be interested in. It’s about vampires, it’s about history (which is one of my main topics of interest), and it’s about the Balkans, too (where half of my family comes from, so it’s interesting to me). But the more I think about it, the less The Historian is like the other books that I read.

You see, I generally characterise myself as a Plot Girl, rather than a Word Girl. I will choose books that sound like they have a really good storyline, one thing happening after another, mysteries, intrigues, battles between good and evil, magic, journeys, exploration, quests; and all of it, often, thrown together in one book (or series) with a plot that moves along swiftly. I generally avoid books that sound like they’re going to be wordy. I don’t mind reading something beautifully written, of course, but if given a choice between a standard fantasy novel about a guy going on a quest, with a wizard, etc., or an exquisitely written novel about a woman coping with an emotional journey of some sort, I know what I will choose. Of course, what I’m doing when I make that choice is judging a book by its cover, or what I think it will contain. There’s nothing to say that a fantasy novel with a great plot, written in a pedestrian manner, won’t utterly fail to engage the reader in that great plot, whereas a well-written book with a small story might actually be much more absorbing.

You don’t really know until you’ve tried reading a book whether you’ll enjoy it or not. Just stating the obvious, here. But whether you are a plot-person or word-person decides what kind of book you’ll even try to read. I’ve been thinking about this, so I know that I am a plot-person, but I’m curious about all YOUR preferences, people out there who I hope are reading my blog. If you know your preference, please comment.

So, back to The Historian. For those who haven’t picked it up yet, it is one of the few books I feel confident enough to really recommend. It is the story of a nameless female historian’s teenage travels and the mysteries surrounding both her parents, which she tries to solve. It is written as a memoir of the historian, at first, but also delves into letters from both her parents, and other characters, so that for much of the novel, her father is actually the protagonist. It is partly a historical novel, of Vlad the Impaler (Dracula), the Ottoman Empire, and communist Eastern Europe, mostly.

It is not like the books that I normally read, because I would actually consider it a wordy book- at least by my own standards. It does have quite a good plot; mysteries aplenty, a lot of travelling, and a few spooky bits, but the whole thing moves at rather a sedate pace for such a long novel. Compared to The Stone Key by Isobelle Carmody (which I reviewed previously, and which I guess might be of comparable length), which rocketed along with a million, billion things happening in quick succession, The Historian meanders in places, and takes it’s time to stretch out the fundamental mysteries of the plot. Leading the reader on an exciting adventure is not necessarily the main focus of the plotting. (I apologise to Elizabeth Kostova if she intended it to be, but this is how I read it). The focus is more on the journey, what is experienced along the way, what is learned along the way, and the conclusion of the journey is just the end point.

For a book about Dracula, I actually found it to be a quite pleasant read. I took a long time to get through it, reading a few chapters with a cup of tea, savouring it. (Although, reading it at night, before bed, and then dreaming of undead librarians at your own university library, wasn’t quite as pleasant). The plot, about Dracula, and the several persons who mysteriously disappear throughout the novel, weren’t my main source of enjoyment. I liked reading the words. I love the descriptions of the characters’ travels through the cities of Europe and Turkey, viewing historic sites, eating strawberries while travelling through the French countryside, camping out in the woods of Wallachia. The characters spend quite a lot of time in libraries and archives, in many countries, looking through old books, reading ancient letters and Romanian folktales, and accounts of Vlad Dracula’s torture methods- alright, so it’s not all lovely. But most of these scenes are evocative and interesting because of the way they’re written, quite apart from any relevance they have to the plot.

The plot itself was interesting enough to hold my attention throughout, but I gained the most pleasure from the slowly-paced travels of the various characters through countries and through history, and was not at all anxious, really, to find out what happened next. This is how I wish a lot more novels would be- beautifully written, yet not completely devoid of an interesting and imaginative storyline. Maybe there are more books like that, but I haven’t picked them up and read them, because it doesn’t say “Dracula” in the blurb, and therefore I assume I won’t be interested. But The Historian is a book that I would recommend to anyone who thinks that they might find it interesting.
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Stardust

April 16th 2008 07:37
Today’s post will be on Stardust by Neil Gaiman. Did I read it because I saw the movie? Surprisingly, no. I am reading it because it is set for a subject I am studying, and I haven’t actually seen the film yet.

Stardust as a novel is very visual. The book was originally an illustrated novel (illustrated by Charles Vess), but that’s not the copy that I read, so I felt like I was missing something much of the time. I couldn’t help but wonder, as I read along, whether certain scenes are in the movie and how they would look. Scenes tend to be set up, for the reader to construct in their own heads, and from that perspective to appreciate the beauty or the humour of it, it’s not just described to you like in many other novels. It is a novel which is suited to being adapted to film, so I’m not surprised that it has been. I would prefer to have those original illustrations to look at, or for the author to put me, the reader, into the scene more than Gaiman actually does in some parts


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Final Comments on The Stone Key

April 11th 2008 06:24
I promise that this is the last post I will make on the topic of Isobelle Carmody’s The Stone Key. I have finished it now, and I just have a few more things to say.

First of all, for those who have read their way through the series, The Stone Key does not tie up a lot of loose ends, certainly not as many as I’d expected. A few things are resolved, but mostly things that you have guessed from reading the previous book will be confirmed and consolidated. It also introduces a lot of new mysteries and characters, which you will have to remember, as if your brain wasn’t full enough


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Stews, Trews and Supercomputers

April 5th 2008 07:14
Well, I have almost finished reading The Stone Key by Isobelle Carmody, which, as I said before, is a very long book. For those who haven't read it, the basic set-up is that the world as we know it has been destroyed by the Great White (which sounds suspiciously like a nuclear holocaust), and the survivors have recreated their world in the style of a medieval society. This means horses, villages, wearing old-timey clothes like trews, cloaks and shawls, and eating stews on a campfire in the middle of a journey. If you read fantasy novels, all of this will be very familiar to you.

If it sounds like I am making fun of that sort of thing, you're right, but I do it out of love. If I wanted to read books set in the modern day, I would, but I often go for the medieval-fantasy-world book because I, like many, many others, find it entertaining and interesting. I like to read about people travelling in carts, and stoking fires, and just generally doing old fashioned things. That is the charm of reading this genre of books, and one of the charms of reading the Obernewtyn Chronicles (of which The Stone Key is book 5


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Under new management

April 3rd 2008 00:38
Well, in case any longtime readers of Fiction Arts are wondering why the last few posts seem to be different from what they're used to, it is because this blog is under new managent (by me, logically). And in case the previous owner of this blog comes by, I hope you don't mind, but the site told me this blog was up for adoption.

Anyway, if you haven't read any of the previous posts, I suggest that you do. I have been reading some of the older posts, and they are interesting. For my part, I will be trying to bring my own posts up to the same level of clarity and insightfulness (rather than gushing about whatever book I happen to be currently reading


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Memory

March 21st 2008 06:11
First thing I'd like to say is thank you to everyone who has bothered to look at this blog and to leave comments. It's extremely encouraging to know that you're not just talking to yourself.

I haven't gotten much farther into The Stone Key then when I made my last post, mainly because I have a few things due at uni at the moment and I at least like to pretend that my studies are a priority


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Getting started

March 16th 2008 06:38
Wow, I have my own blog. I'm always reading other people's blogs and reading about people with blogs and now I am one of them. Yes, small things excite me.

This site is not particularly flash at the moment, though I did succeed in making it purple, at least. I will be trying to make it look nicer, but I'm a bit of a klutz when it comes to that kind of thing, so it may take a while


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Welcome, readers and writers

March 14th 2008 07:32
At least, you will probably either be an aspiring writer or an avid reader to have any interest in this blog.

I have started this blog with two purposes in mind. First of all, I love to read, but I am a very picky reader. There are innumerous things that make me through novels out of windows, and I like to talk about this quite a lot. The problem is that none of my family or friends particularly want to listen to me dissecting the book I have just read. So I will be posting my thoughts on books (possibly also TV shows) here, instead


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