Hoopty

While I was waiting today for the oil to finish draining out of the rotary-powered object of my affections, I made an effort at finishing off Jeffery Ford's "The Drowned Life" - which might be the strangest collection of short stories I have ever read, rivaling only Jesse Ball's "The Way Through Doors" in terms of twisted visions.

I don't think I've ever mentioned "The Way Through Doors" before and it is certainly worthwhile taking a moment to do so. It basically takes the idea of storytelling put forth in The Arabian Nights and goes one step further. In The Arabian Nights, Scheherazade is the beautiful young woman married to a cruel king, who is known for murdering his wives and their families. Every night, to forestall her execution, she begins a new story which always ends with a character in the epilogue mentioning another strange happening...drawing us further into a web of stories so that her tale never ends, and that each night ends with a cliffhanger.

"The Way Through Doors" similarly drops into another lower level of story again and again, with recurring themes and characters, often throwing out proper names and just using pronouns for a little more confusion. Eventually, however, the main characters (an enigmatic young man and his comatose love interest) pop out the other side of the story back into the first narrative frame. It's hard to envision how bewildering this style can be until you read it.

Anyway, the original book I was mentioning, "The Drowned Life," makes me want to try writing fiction again. Some of the plots sound like things that were dreamt and then spun out on paper - and strange dreams I am in no short supply of. There's a tinge of malevolence and grim weirdness spreading throughout all the stories (a town whose annual ritual is to drink a special liquor that gives you dreams of your dead relatives - the ritual ends poorly with a husband bringing his wife back through the dream with him, half-mutated and horrifyingly alive...for example). It's all pretty impressive.

I've managed to plow through a number of other books recently:

The Savage Garden, by Mark Mills - a young college student looks for a thesis topic in an Italian villa and uncovers details about a memorial garden that points to a message far different than one would assume from a loving husband's living remembrance of his young wife. Woven in it all are details about Italian art, culture, and writing - and even with a little bit of The Divine Comedy making a cameo, which is pretty much irresistible to me. 

The Gathering Storm, by Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson - I wasn't expecting much from this, given that the latter books by Robert Jordan in this series were pretty lackluster and meandering. Jordan's death and the choice of Sanderson to continue the series to its conclusion have brought some much-needed fire and excitement to the affair, though. I really, really enjoyed this book, considering what an enormous and imaginative story Jordan started to weave some 12,000 pages back. I still have no idea how it will all end, but I really do enjoy the way Sanderson introduces themes and focuses on just a few timelines of characters and manhandles them all into willing submission. He also manages to make emotional conclusions not feel...treacly. I hate the forced feeling of maudlin strings, weeping women, and white-washed imagery that you get in TV - and its literary equivalent.

Black Hills, by Dan Simmons - Having read a number of his other heavyweight titles, I knew that I wasn't likely getting into a happy-ending sort of book. This is the man who wrote about the wreck of the HMS Erebrus and HMS Terror in the Northwest Passage and the death of all hands (in The Terror) and Wilkie Collins slowly descending into jealousy-induced madness of his literary cohort Dickens in Drood. Black Hills is about a Lakota Indian, Paha Sapa, who is the last man to touch Custer before he dies and is inhabited by a small portion of Custer's consciousness. It presents a pretty grim picture of Industrial Revolution-era America from the point of view of a Native American, as well as a number of forays into Lakota mythology and religious traditions that add the mystical element that Simmons almost always includes in his historical fiction. Surprisingly, the book ends poignantly, rather than with violent madness.

I also got through "Bowerman" and found that pretty satisfying. I, of course, welcome any and all literary suggestions, with the exclusion of Sarah shouting at me to finally read "The Magic Mountain." I'll get to it someday!