final thoughts on Oscar Wao

Some news.... I'm just back from a weekend in Montreal.

Where I bought these:

Not, mind, for their high literature-ness so much as their easy-to-read-ness and my own renewed sense that I'm not really being terribly true to my French Canadian heritage si que je ne peux pas parler francais. (Excuse the horrible, horrible French.)

I'll keep you posted on my progress....

Meanwhile, I finished The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I was recently asked why I would read something so very depressing, and I didn't quite have an answer.... For all its hip-hop new American prose (which, Erin, I thought was poetry, but more importantly I think it carried a level of reality that makes the story more accessible to an entire generation or two--this is how people talk, eh?), the story was almost like a Russian tragedy. One of those tales that wends in and out of history, putting forward the idea you are your past, and you are your parents, and you are your family's history, too....

Sort of a scary idea, really.

At the end of the day, though -- SPOILER ALERT -- the story is hopeful.

Yes, Oscar is a tragic figure. Yes, perhaps a great deal of the story is dedicated to the question of whether this tragic figure will ever lose his virginity.

But the image Yunior paints of Lola's daughter, of the little girl who he hopes to one day walk through her family history, as if he is some sort of keeper of all things de Leon, is enough to carry the tale into a sort of optimism. Will the little one avoid the fuku? No, that's not really the point. But will the narrator help her understand her past? Maybe, hopefully. And maybe it's understanding your past that can help you to a happy future? Maybe that's why Lola is so very much the survivor?

Sorry, this is very scattered. I'm playing off book club discussions I only half-understood a week ago, and I suppose just a little bit of jet lag.

Closing arguments, not really related to this argument at all, but to media and democracy:

"No matter what you believe: in February 1946, Abelard was officially convicted of all charges and sentenced to eighteen years. Eighteen years!.... Maybe you'll ask, Why was there no outcry in the papers, no actions among the civil rights groups, no opposition parties rallying to the cause? Nigger, please: there were no papers, no civil rights groups, no opposition parties; there was only Trujillo." (p. 247)

more chick lit-fuelled consumerism

I have a love-hate relationship with Sophie Kinsella novels.

Once in my hand, I can't put the novels down. They're well-written for what they are -- really, really formula chick lit. Perfect if your life is totally out of control, because you know what to expect and, honestly, no one is worse with money than the heroine in the Shopaholic novels.


(In general, I don't hit serious depression mode unless I am completely unable to shop or imagine a brighter day -- say, the 15th and 30th of each month -- when I will once again be able to shop.... Not sure what sort of an -ism that would be....)


The hate part of the equation comes when the characters themselves completely lose control and/or grasp of reality. For example, Becky Bloomwood writing back and forth with her frustrated bank manager in the first book is brilliant. Shipping thousands of dollars of international crap without her husband noticing in Shopaholic and Sister is just ridiculous. I couldn't bother to pick up the baby one, in part because I was done with Becky, and in part because approximately 6,000 books about women wanting babies, or not wanting babies, or simply being obsessed with spawn in general, came out all at once.


My point....


Right. Back to that. I may not be completely done with Ms. Bloomwood. Turns out the banner Kinsella novel is headed for the silver screen. Filming starts in the new year, according to the author's website.

when I grow up

Welcome to adulthood.

I think. In this, my 25th year, I have a selection of shoes I love. I live in a gorgeous bachelor apartment near every necessity, including a mall. I am the woman I've always wanted to be.

Aside from that nasty load of debt -- the result of student loans, poor decision-making, and that lovely selection of shoes.

I find solace in the belief there are people out there who are far more irresponsible than me. Yes, I know that characters in fictional stories are, well, fictional. But they make me feel better.

Like Becky Bloomwood. The completely unbelievable, idiotic shopaholic in Sophie Kinsella's series of tales that make your chin drop to your lap and your eyelids slap your forehead with incredulity.

Becky is the kind of chick lit disaster you can really have fun with. Confessions of a Shopaholic opens when she opens a bill. Actually, that's not entirely true. It starts with a series of (horrendous? embarrassing? have I already said unbelievable?) letters exchanged between her and the poor man tasked with getting her out of overdraft and back onto the road of financial stability.

Becky's tales are painful. Brutal. Hilarious. The downside is that at the end of a day, she needs a man to save her. Frankly, Becky would never actually be able to get out of debt on her own. It's impossible on a PR girl's salary, or a journalist's salary, or a salesgirl's salary. But as a rich man's wife....

Cue Darcy Rhone. The heroine in Emily Giffin's novel, Something Blue, has no choice but to clean up her act without the help of a guy. Darcy finds herself ditched by her fiance, ditched by her new boyfriend, and pregnant. With little cash to start with, she heads across the ocean to London (one of my all-time favourite locations for chick lit), then completely loses her head and starts spending extravagantly with no thought for Baby.

I'll let you find out if or when she comes to her senses.

The classic femme money manipulator? Gone With The Wind's Scarlett O'Hara.

Yes, I admit, there's a giant leap between Becky Bloomwood's ill-fated discovery of e-Bay and Scarlett struggling to keep Tara in the middle of the American Civil War. Additionally, Kinsella's outlook may differ very much from Margaret Mitchell's Depression-era point of view.

But let's remember Scarlett isn't all about keeping the land throughout the book. Sure, by the end she's a tough dame able to keep the books at a lumberyard and keep her family afloat, with or without Ashley or Rhett or whomever. But at the start of Scarlett's tale, she really is a painfully ignorant daddy's girl. Had she the opportunity to pick up a pair of Manolo Blahnik's, she'd grab 'em.

Although I could probably learn a thing or two from her dandy curtain-turns-dress trick....

(By the way -- one of my favourite characters with no sense of financial responsibility? Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw. Technically, a character in a book, although I've never read it.)