Girl Detective

HEY, Y’ALL! I FINISHED ALL 1231 PAGES OF LES MISERABLES!

Before I read this book, I didn’t believe in abridgements of books. Now I do. Seriously, this book begs to be abridged. The edition I read was lightly abridged, and it was still overly long, with stultifying digressions and redundancies, even aside from the two (on cloisters and argot) that Denny, the translator of this edition, chose to put as endnotes. Long chapters that digressed away from the story, on related things like the Paris sewers, were almost always slogs that sometimes defied this reader’s will to keep going. If you are going to read this book, I recommend that you skip digressions. You can tell which they are because they don’t have the main characters. I believe you will lose little or nothing. Perhaps this is me being a cretin or a lowly literate reader, but I stand by this advice.

If the book were only the story of Jean Valjean, Marius , Cosette, Fantine, Javert, Eponnine, the Thenardiers and Gavroche, then this would be a whopping good tale. See the success of the musical as proof. Interestingly, I found the book to have a much more involving and satisfying end than did the 2012 film adaptation, and I was amazed that near the end, after so many pages, I sped up to a gobbling pace.

A word about the particular edition, the lovely Penguin Hardback Classic with the red cardinals. Many of those cardinals disappeared over the course of the reading in little flakes of red paint. These Hardback Classic editions are lovely objects (I have several), but alas, do not stand up well to actual reading. The Penguin trade paperback version is one of the only film tie-in covers I don’t find offensive, plus it would have been easier to schlep around for the many weeks I was reading. For portability and true unabridged-ness, I tried the Signet mass-market edition edited by Fahnestock and Macafee, but switched to the Denny HC because it was pretty, because the MMPB print was too small for my aging eyes, even with bifocals, and because the translation to me felt stiff.

Finder is one of the longest running independent comics out there. Hard to describe, creator Carla Speed McNeil once copped to “aboriginal sci-fi,” and that works as well as anything.

The “through” character, even if he’s often just in the background, is Jaeger, half-aborigine, and thus shunned by all. He can play civilized, but prefers the wild, and this combination seems to drive women wild, though he’s honest and doesn’t pretend he’ll ever settle down. This is a sexually explicit series, so if that makes you uncomfortable, it probably isn’t for you.

Four stories are contained in Finder Library v. 2: Dream Sequence, Mystery Date, The Rescuers, and Five Crazy Women. There’s a mix of high-low, funny-tragic throughout the book. Dream Sequence and The Rescuers are mostly tragic, while Mystery Date and Five Crazy Women are mostly comedy. McNeil’s black and white art is accessible, but nuanced. These stories bear fruit on re-reading, and the end notes in this collection are worth checking out.

In brief, to avoid spoilers:

Dream Sequence: a popular virtual world is invaded by a predator.
Mystery Date: a student of anthropology and prostitution tries to figure out her mysterious new professor
The Rescuers: the baby of a privileged family is kidnapped, and the story interwoven with the tribe of aborigines camping in the area.
Five Crazy Women: Jaeger gets (and deserves) no sympathy from a long-time friend as he pours out some of his checkered past with women.

If you haven’t checked out or heard of Finder before, look for the collection Talisman, and if you like that, seek out the two library collections for the entire series. For ongoing new stuff, check out McNeil’s website.

For those of you familiar with this series and with Friday Night Lights, I have a theory: Jaeger = grown-up, alterna Tim Riggins.

A selection for the 2013 Tournament of Books, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (no question mark, which I find strange) by Maria Semple had been on my radar for a while, recommended in reviews and by friends. Semple’s background includes a stint as writer on Arrested Development, and the book is similar in its same snarky, frantic style. It does, though, have a beating heart that’s perhaps more akin to something from Modern Family.

The novel is made up of a hodgepodge of letters, reports, receipts and articles, tied together with the memories of Bee Branch, an 8th grader at a private school in Seattle. Bee’s mother is the Bernadette of the title, who disappears two days before Christmas, and the novel starts in the month leading up to it. Bee’s father in an executive at Microsoft, and the family is planning a trip to Antarctica, a present for Bee for her all-A grades.

Though the story is often about Bee’s search for Bernadette, it’s the woman herself who is the bright, shining star of the novel. Bernadette is a bundle of crazy, having had a series of disappointments and difficulties both personally and professionally. But watching her navigate her fear of the impending trip abroad and the people around her is a blast. She’s smart, complicated and interesting, just like the book, which I devoured in two days. Fair disclosure: I was also avoiding a deadline and cleaning the house, but still, this book was wildly engaging and entertaining. The ending was abrupt, so I wished for a bit more closure, but like Bee in the book, I’ll take what I can get when a book is this flat-out fun to read.

A selection in this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books, I’m not even sure if Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles was on my radar. I’ve read none of this year’s selections, though many have been highly recommended by friends. But this one I knew almost nothing about, and it’s this kind of reading experience that makes following the Tournament of Books (ToB) such a delight to this geeky reader.

The novel is narrated by Patroclus, who you might remember from Greek myths and the Iliad as Achilles’ best friend. Miller richly imagines the details of their boyhood, and how they came to be immortalized in Homer’s epic. I read the Iliad in my first year of college, in a literature course. It was one of just three books we read. We started with the Iliad, then War and Peace, then Hemingway’s In Our Time. In high school, I skipped reading the books I was assigned, and managed to pull off good grades anyway. In college, though, in that class, I felt the challenge of a semester devoted to just three books, and I read them all. And details of them all remain, these twenty six years later. So I knew how the story would end, but it didn’t diminish by one jot the urgency with which I read this story, consuming it quickly while still appreciating the backstory Miller was detailing, and the lovely prose she used to do it.

Divine blood flows differently in each god-born child. Orpheus’ voice made the trees weep, Heracles could kill a man by clapping him on the back. Achilles’ miracle was his speed. His spear, as he began his first pass, moved faster than my eye could follow. It whirled, flashing forward, reversed, then flashed behind. The shaft seemed to flow in his hands, the dark gray point flickered like a snake’s tongue. His feet beat the ground like a dancer, never still.

I could not move, watching. I almost did not breathe. His face was calm and blank, not tensed with effort. His movements were so precise I could almost see the men he fought, ten, twenty of them, advancing on all sides. He leapt, scything his spear, even as his other hand snatched the sword from its sheath. He swung out with them both, moving like liquid, like a fish through the waves.(45)

Like the film Brokeback Mountain, this is a love story between men that is more about the love than about them being men. And yet, I had two questions in the end. Throughout there is a great stigma attached to their love between men, especially from Achilles’ mother. I had thought this was a stigma now, but not as much in ancient Greece. Achille’s mother, the divine sea nymph Thetis, was an example of my other question. Miller depicts her as cold and frightening, which is fascinating, yet as one of only three main female characters, it gives what felt to me a painfully short and narrow window into women in ancient Greece. Another character, Deidameia, is selfish and cruel, while the third, a slave girl Briseis, is uncomplicatedly good. All other women are mentioned merely as prizes, objects, or occasionally as beloved of men.

I can’t speak to historical accuracy, but I was left with the nagging feeling that a more modern stigma against men loving men was applied to these boys retrospectively as conflict, while a nuanced portrayal of women was not. And while the latter point might have been historically accurate, I wanted something more from the females in this tale.

You know those books that are on your radar forever, and yet you never buy a copy and occasionally hear it recommended to remind you of it, but then years go by, and you still haven’t read it? That book, for me, was Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. Published in 1995, it was on many best-of lists, yet didn’t even make the short list for the Booker Prize that year. When I read the article “Tears, Tiffs and Triumphs,” I was intrigued by how it was mentioned a few times by authors even though it had not won the award itself.

So finally, finally, I have got around to reading it myself, and it is a lovely little book. The German poet Novalis, before he became famous under that name, was “Fritz” von Hardenburg, a young Romantic from a good, but poor family. When he falls in love with a very young middle-class girl, his family is upset. And I too, as the reader, found it baffling. Falling in love on sight with a twelve-year old? And yet, as the story plays out, and we meet Fritz and his Sophie again and again, surrounded by their families and friends, it is completely understandable and sympathetic by the end.

It’s set in the late 1700’s, as the Germans struggle to interpret what the ruckus over in France means for all of them, and filled with memorable characters, great humor, grand grief, and lovely passages of writing.

“I have been in the kitchen,” she went on. “Stewed pigs’ trotters, plum conserve, bread soup.”

“I cannot eat,” said Erasmus.

“Come, we’re Saxons. We can make a good dinner, even if our hearts are breaking.”

I found it a delight.

I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente for one of my book groups. It was suggested by a woman whose middle-school aged daughter had already read it. In my head I though of it as The Book with the Purposely Unwieldy Title.

It flies its geek flag proudly, starting off with a bunch of fantasy tropes:

Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents’ house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday.

This is a modern take on the Victorian fairy tale, and reminded me strongly of Neil Gaiman’s work. The author does not hide the shoulders she’s standing on to write the tale: Persephone, Alice in Wonderland, Narnia, The Wizard of Oz, and Gulliver’s Travels are all given nods. If you enjoy those stories, then you’ll likely enjoy this one, which is a cheeky, knowing take on a lost child’s adventure.

September makes interesting friends and enemies, and takes on a quest, of course. She is by turns afraid, brave, stupid and clever and thus a decent guide to Valente’s version of Fairyland. Originally written as a web series, it tends to wander rather than proceed with purpose.

There are some surprising twists at the end that I appreciated and I found the book engaging and diverting to read. I will check out the sequel, but don’t feel the need to do so now, now, now.

Looking back on what I watched in 2012, there were a lot of crowd pleasers, and not a lot of recent Big Serious Movies. There are a lot on the year-end best-of lists that I haven’t seen, and don’t care to see, like Lincoln and The Master. This was obviously a year in which I wanted to be entertained and I must say, the Marvel superhero franchise delivered in spades with Avengers and Amazing Spider Man, plus the opportunities to rewatch Iron Man and Thor. The Dark Knight Rises was a disappointment, but then, it almost had to be after The Dark Knight, which may be the apex of superhero movies to date.

Watched, and enjoyed, a lot of good TV on DVD: Party Down, Slings and Arrows, Cowboy Bebop, The Wire, Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights.

And went on my usual holiday movie bender, and enjoyed re-watching Planes Trains and Automobiles, Shop Around the Corner, and The Sure Thing. Finished out the year on a high note (no pun intended) with The Big Lebowski. It was a good reminder that re-watching classics is a worthy, and rewarding, pursuit.