True story: Under the "Taste Preferences" tab in Netflix, where you can review what sort of movies Netflix believes you like to see, my wife and I have earned a "never watch" in the categories of feel-good, inspiring, and sentimental. With that in mind, I have to say that the latest book I've read, Counting by 7s, a YA-novel by Holly Goldberg Sloan, comes perilously close to feel-good and inspiring.
I wasn't totally put off by the book; in fact, I enjoyed it overall, and there were parts of it I liked a lot. The main character is Willow, a 12-year old girl who is something of a child prodigy, able to pick up foreign languages in a few weeks and full of facts, though devoid of social graces. Her interests are plants, medical conditions, and the number 7. You can probably already imagine that she's not too popular at her middle school. Her only friend moved away the year before, and now she only has her plants and her parents. These are taken away from her in one swoop, when her parents die in a car crash, and she's thrust into the youth protection system.
Fortunately, she had already become acquainted with a school counselor after being accused of cheating on a standardized test (she'd gotten a perfect score, although of course she earned it honestly). This counselor, Dell Duke, is one of the worst school counselors in history, a self-involved loser completely uninterested in his students' lives or his job and with a private organization system that involves assigning each student who comes to him with the label of "oddball", "weirdo," "lone wolf," or "misfit." Another of Dell Duke's charges, Quang-ha, a high-school delinquent, and his overbearingly bossy sister, Mai, become involved in Willow's life when they search for Dell's runaway cat together.
If you guess that this unlikely group would somehow bond and change each other for the better, you are not on the wrong track. This goes down better than it might thanks to a large dollop of humor. I laughed out loud a number of times while reading this, and nearly every chapter has a situation or conversation that made me at least chuckle.
Nevertheless, I found the book somewhat predictable. Not any particular part of it, and there are some nicely zany and surprising moments, but the overall direction. Another thing that bothered me was a minor but recurring character that Willow meets, a taxi driver named Jairo. When she sees an odd-shaped mole on the back of his neck, she recommends he see a doctor, and it turns out to be cancerous and caught just in time. Their other encounters are similarly serendipitous, with the whole subplot feeling jammed in to show how special Willow is, rather than because it really serves the larger story in any way.
I cannot say this is one of those YA books I think a lot of adults would like, but I do think middle-schoolers would enjoy its humor. I found it clever and don't think it was a waste of time to read, but for me the author sacrifices plausible plot and character development, especially at the end, to shoehorn in an inspirational message.
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Thursday, June 5, 2014
What I'm Reading: I Served the King of England
Bohumil Hrabal was a Czech writer who wrote during the Communist period. His works were considered anti-revolutionary, I suppose. In any case, I Served the King of England, which Hrabal finished in 1971, circulated in underground editions in the 1970s and was not formally published until 1983.
I Served follows the life of Ditie, who lives with his grandmother in a laundry as a boy and when he leaves home finds a job as a busboy at a hotel restaurant. He learns the art of waiting tables from the maitre d', an older man who's seen it all, and even once served the King of England. As time goes on, Ditie finds jobs at increasingly grand hotels, and finally he himself serves the King of Ethiopia at the finest hotel in Prague. It is in these jobs that he develops twin obsessions with saving money and bedding women, a way to make up for his lack of stature (he's under five feet) and his name (ditie means child in Czech).
During World War II, he woos and marries the German daughter of a high-ranking Nazi official, much to the disgust of his former colleagues in the hotel trade, who consider him a collaborator. His wife and infant son die in the final days of the war. With the money he's earned during the war he's able to buy a hotel of his own, only to see it taken by the Communists when they take charge of the country a few years later. After a period in prison with a group of millionaires accused of exploiting the people, he accepts a series of forestry and road maintenance jobs in the remote mountainous areas of the country, where in the quiet and isolation he comes to terms with his life and what is truly important.
Hrabal's writing is absolutely beautiful. Let me give you a little bit of the book, so you can see how gorgeous it is. In this section he is working in the prison kitchen where one of his daily jobs is to feed the pigeons.
"I had to come out of the kitchen on the stroke of two, and if for some reason the clock didn't strike but the sun was out, I would go by the sundial on the wall of the church, and when I emerged, all four hundred pigeons would swoop down from the roof and fly straight at me, and a shadow flew with them, and the rustling of feathers and wings was like flour or salt being poured out of a bag. The pigeons would land on the cart, and if they couldn't find a place they would sit on my shoulders and fly around my head and beat their wings against my ears, blotting out the world, as though I were tangled up in a huge bridal train stretching out in front of me and behind me, a veil of moving wings and eight hundred beautiful blueberry eyes."
This is one of my favorite parts, although the writing is this good on every page. In its minute observation of details he reminds me quite a bit of Marcel Proust, with the difference that Hrabal is much faster to get to the point. After all, the book is only a little over 200 pages and covers a lot of ground. He (or at least Ditie) is also much concerned with the attractions of the female form and the pleasures it can provide, so you might say Hrabal is like a shorter, naughtier version of Proust, which in my mind is quite a recommendation. I'm not sure this book is for everyone, but for those who are less interested in a rip-roaring plot and more in elegant, thoughtful writing with a strong erotic thread, this book is well worth seeking out.
I Served follows the life of Ditie, who lives with his grandmother in a laundry as a boy and when he leaves home finds a job as a busboy at a hotel restaurant. He learns the art of waiting tables from the maitre d', an older man who's seen it all, and even once served the King of England. As time goes on, Ditie finds jobs at increasingly grand hotels, and finally he himself serves the King of Ethiopia at the finest hotel in Prague. It is in these jobs that he develops twin obsessions with saving money and bedding women, a way to make up for his lack of stature (he's under five feet) and his name (ditie means child in Czech).
During World War II, he woos and marries the German daughter of a high-ranking Nazi official, much to the disgust of his former colleagues in the hotel trade, who consider him a collaborator. His wife and infant son die in the final days of the war. With the money he's earned during the war he's able to buy a hotel of his own, only to see it taken by the Communists when they take charge of the country a few years later. After a period in prison with a group of millionaires accused of exploiting the people, he accepts a series of forestry and road maintenance jobs in the remote mountainous areas of the country, where in the quiet and isolation he comes to terms with his life and what is truly important.
Hrabal's writing is absolutely beautiful. Let me give you a little bit of the book, so you can see how gorgeous it is. In this section he is working in the prison kitchen where one of his daily jobs is to feed the pigeons.
"I had to come out of the kitchen on the stroke of two, and if for some reason the clock didn't strike but the sun was out, I would go by the sundial on the wall of the church, and when I emerged, all four hundred pigeons would swoop down from the roof and fly straight at me, and a shadow flew with them, and the rustling of feathers and wings was like flour or salt being poured out of a bag. The pigeons would land on the cart, and if they couldn't find a place they would sit on my shoulders and fly around my head and beat their wings against my ears, blotting out the world, as though I were tangled up in a huge bridal train stretching out in front of me and behind me, a veil of moving wings and eight hundred beautiful blueberry eyes."
This is one of my favorite parts, although the writing is this good on every page. In its minute observation of details he reminds me quite a bit of Marcel Proust, with the difference that Hrabal is much faster to get to the point. After all, the book is only a little over 200 pages and covers a lot of ground. He (or at least Ditie) is also much concerned with the attractions of the female form and the pleasures it can provide, so you might say Hrabal is like a shorter, naughtier version of Proust, which in my mind is quite a recommendation. I'm not sure this book is for everyone, but for those who are less interested in a rip-roaring plot and more in elegant, thoughtful writing with a strong erotic thread, this book is well worth seeking out.
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