Amélie Nothomb - Hygiène de l'assassin

Po dlouhé odmlce jsme se s Awaris usnesli na tom, že je na čase vrátit se k literárnímu blogování a zase začít svět oblažovat svojí sečtělostí. Ostatně, co může být větší potěcha, než když na váš zapadlej blog napíše sám autor knížky, že jo?

Můj návrat na scénu padl na Amélie Nothombovou a její Vrahovu hygienu, o které psala i Awaris zde. Od Nothombové jsem předtím četl Stupeur et tremblement (Strach a chvění) a Ni d’Ève ni d’Adam (Ani Eva, ani Adam), protože to jsou oba její romány z japonského prostředí, takže jsem se do nich pustil po začátku kurzu japonštiny. Vrahova hygiena nicméně jen utvrdila můj názor na slečnu Nothombovou, a to že mi celkem dost leze na nervy.

Knížka je série rozhovorů mezi novináři a spisovatelem Prétextatem Tachem. Tach je první liga spisovatelů, má dokonce Nobelovku, nicméně podle doktorů za dva měsíce umře na rakovinu. Rozhovory s ním jsou velká událost, protože jinak ani nevychází  z domu, kde jen sedí, jí a pije nějaký odporný pití, ve kterým si rozpouští kostky másla. Navíc je tlustej a hnusnej a vůbec. Na novináře valí svoje pochybný teorie o životě a literatuře a nadšeně je zasypává nejrůznějšími intelektuálními bonmoty stylu „Pokud autor nepíše s radostí, měl by přestat psát úplně“, „Každá kniha by měla člověka po dočtení změnit, něco v něm zanechat“, popřípadě obhajuje válku, protože jinak by ta dnešní mládež neměla nic kloudnýho na práci. Další argument je, že v televizi už mu jednou politici slíbili pořádnou válku, takže teď očekává, že se mu jí dostane. Novináři se zmůžou jen na stereotypní otázky, které by se daly použít v jakémkoli interview, a slepě si to nakráčejí do sebezjevnější pasti, kterou jim spisovatel svojí rétorikou postaví do cesty. Tach se navíc vyžívá v hnusu jak ve svých knížkách, tak v reálném životě (viz pití másla) a všichni novináři nakonec rozhovor ukončí hrůzou nebo hnusem.

Na scéně se ovšem objevuje mladá, investigativní reportérka Nina (aka Mařena Jakoprase), která rozhovor začne tím, že Tachovi vezme vítr z plachet a ukáže mu, že z ní si teda předložku před dveře dělat nebude. Postupně se začne vyjevovat Tachova tajená minulost, aby se vše zakončilo odhalením, že Nina je vlastně stejná jako Tach (tudíž nechutná, ale svobodná). To se ovšem neobejde bez hutné dávky slovních přestřelek, podivných teorií, odkazování na Célina a menstruační krve.

Tachova nejlepší klička je vytvoření vlastní definice slova „číst“, kdy to neznamená prostě číst, ale opravdu pochopit dílo. To se podle něj s jeho knihami ještě skoro nikomu nepovedlo. Nemohl jsem se zbavit dojmu, že mi Nothombová mezi řádky ukazuje prostředníček, protože pokud nejsem s to z tý její přehršle prázdnejch výkřiků vymyslet něco kloudnýho, není to její chyba. To jen já neumím číst! HA! Geniální, to se fakt musí uznat.

Takže můj závěr je, že Amélie Nothombová je neskutečnej egomaniackej pozér, schopnej si jednoho dne říct, že ode dneška trpí potomanií, její rozhovory na internetu dělají dojem, že je dopředu nacvičila, a na přebaly knížek dává podivně často fotky sama sebe. Sorry, ale tohle asi fakt nemám zapotřebí. Never more (teda…. Jamais plus).

Iain Banks: The Crow Road (Vraní ulice)

   I chose this book mostly because it usually ranks quite well (and for some time probably will) in lists of the best opening lines of novels. It’s quite easy to believe considering the first sentence is: It was the day my grandmother exploded. Also, Awaris seems to adore this author which is usually a good sign (if you want to read her review, I warn you it reveals more or less all major points of the story).

   The story begins with death (quite obviously) and death tends to stick on all protagonists for the whole book. Two main narrators are Prentice and his father Kenneth but there are more. There are also few bits of Prentice’s uncle Rory’s stories. It’s kind of a family chronicles of the McHoans, the Urvilles and the Watts. Relations between tha characters are quite complicated but on the other hand, I like making family trees when reading a book (I have a sheet with War and Peace characters somewhere…at least from the part I read. And of the Buendías family from One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was few years later I found out that you are actually supposed to confuse the characters…whatever).

   In the beginning of the story, Prentice and Kenneth don’t speak to each other after having argued about religion – Kenneth being a devout atheist and Prentice having some feelings that this whole world is kind of unjust and that there must be some hidden logic in it, something bigger that knows things are just as they should be and that all of this happens for a good reason. Considering Prentice’s uncle Rory has been missing for some ten years by that time and one of his best friends has just died in a pretty awful accident, it is quite understandable. As you might have guessed, one of the points of the book is that Prentice and his father are basically the same (stubborn assholes…at least sometimes).

   Another plot line is Prentice’s research on what happened to his missing uncle Rory who left one day and no one has ever seen him again. Rory was a traveller, he wrote some books about his travels to India and other parts of the world but always felt as a failure. Even more when Kenneth published book of stories he used to tell to his children and kids from the neighbourhood. This book affected Prentice too because he feels that his father’s stories were a private thing and that he spoiled it somehow. Which only shows that Prentice is in awkward teenage self-centred phase (On the other hand, I get him. My father once wrote in an article that my sister and me are crazy about Pokémons and we speak about nothing else and play with the cards all the time. Which a) was not true, we watched it sometimes but weren’t crazy about it and b) we were actually forbidden to collect the damn cards. Anyway…how dared he?).

    Prentice is pretty cool character, really cynical and funny, but sometimes rather full of himself and sometimes plainly obnoxious. Well, that’s how people are, I guess. Structure of the book is quite complicated as the narration shifts not only between the two major characters but also jumps into different moments in past. Quite often different parts of the story are somehow connected, for example the character thinks about some old story or mentions some fact and the following part comes back to it and gives some more insight. There is almost unsupportable number of characters and it takes time to remember who is who. The book is also full of suspension, sometimes it takes rather long before you are really sure who is the narrator in the moment or when the event being that is being described took place; sometimes you get some information but must wait pages and pages before it gets properly explained. You should be also prepared for a huge load of sarcasm, cynicism and black humour.

   If there is something I kind of didn’t like, it was the beginning and the ending. Or at least that the book starts with a funeral and ends with some weird kind of atheist baptism. Was that really necessary? Well…it probably was considering the constant presence of death, what better ending could there be? But still, it’s the kind of symbolism I could live without.

    In all other (numerous) aspects, I think it is an amazing book. It’s funny and dark in the same time, the storytelling is amazing and it makes you…yes, I going to say that…it makes you think.

   Oh, and the name of the book is from the Scottish saying to be away the crow road which means to die. And there is also a street called the Crow Road in the book.

William Trevor: Děti z Dynmouthu (The Children of Dynmouth)

   Well, after a few weeks with no review, I am back. I read this book quite a long time ago so I can’t remember it very well. But I will do my best. We chose this book for our reading club, I had had no idea what it was about, who was the author…I really didn’t know what to expect. But the book surprised me – it is really good.

   It takes place in Dynmouth – an imaginary little town on English coast (in the exact place where Francis Drake destroyed the Spanish Armada…it’s probably somehow meaningful for the book, I just didn’t find out how exactly). The main character is a young guy called Timothy who spends most of his time on his own, watching telly. His mother and sister have to work and even when they are at home, they don’t pay him much attention. As expected, Timothy seeks attention elsewhere.

   As he has very little to do, Timothy browses the town and watches people. Unfortunately, he watches them more or less all the time (except for the time he watches TV) and with no regard to their privacy.

   There is an annual festival where people have different performances and they can win some totally worthy prizes (something like British Hillbillies Got Talent). Well, Timothy thinks he can participate. Not only participate, he can win. He makes up a funny scene about a serial killer and his three victims (young brides) who he drowned in bathtub. Obviously, no one thinks it would be even remotely funny but Timothy is resolved to get all the props he needs (a bride’s dress, a bathtub and a curtain).

   He may be a complete weirdo and the most antisocial guy in the town, but it doesn’t mean he’s stupid. He starts blackmailing his neighbours in order to get all those things and when they don’t agree to give what he wants…well, that’s when the real fun starts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really matter if people obey him or not, he tells their secrets to everyone anyway.

   There is no point in describing the whole of the plot so I will proceed right to the core of the matter. Timothy is an ass (obviously) but he is a) still more honest than most of the town and b) unlike the others, he sees the life of the town as it is. On the other hand, he might see through people’s masks but when it comes to his own life and the way he lives it, he is just as delusional as everyone else. Another point of the book is that people never really change. Timothy forces some of the inhabitants into really tough psychological struggle, they get through it and than…they carry on as they always have. An lastly, Trevor shows not only particular stories but he also presents the town as a unit. There is an old crazy religious lady, a divorced couple, an unfaithful husband with a young mistress, an old couple, a spinster who has spent all her life waiting for her beloved man to leave his wife, etc. Not only you can find almost same pattern in basically every town and village, people themselves repeat it – the children in the story begin their way to become some of these people themselves.

   It’s not a very nice book. I really hated Timothy. I wanted the little sod to die (I somehow expected that someone will lose their nerves and do him in). People in the city are all weak and when he threatens them, they run or they just let him hurt them. But…that’s probably how it is.

Paul Murray: Skippy Dies

   I have no idea how I cam across this book, I guess I must have read about it somewhere on the Internet. Than I asked my Dad to get it for me for Xmas and it was only now that I finally got to read it.

   There is not much of a story, at least there is no clear story line to follow (although the book has 660 pages). It’s more of a mixture of characters who are trying to somehow lead a worthy life (in which most of them…if not all of them…fail) or at least survive (in which some of them fail too). The story takes place in Seabrook – a prestigious Catholic boarding school in Dublin (it actually doesn’t exist but it is based on a school the author attended). The book presents us with POVs of several characters – mainly Skippy, Ruprecht, Carl and Howard. There are some other minor narrators, like Greg, the headmaster and evil incarnated; Father Green (aka Père Vert), a French teacher who hates French people and language, he hates teaching and most of all...he hates teaching French; and Lori, Skippy’s and Carl’s dream girl.

   Skippy is a student at the school, he’s 14 year old and for some unknown reason (later it is known, of course) he is so depressed he has to swallow handfuls of pills. He gradually falls deeper and deeper into depression until one day, he sees Lori and helplessly falls in love. Ruprecht is his friend and room-mate, a overweighed genius whose best entertainment is to sit in basement, trying to contact other intelligent species in Space. He tries to prove the string theory but after Skippy dies, he kind of loses it and tries make a contact with the beyond. Carl is same old as Skippy and Ruprecht but he’s a big, strong guy, a bully and a drug dealer and drug addict in one person. And Howard is their History teacher with a girlfriend whom he no longer loves who falls in love with a super-hot bitchy substitute teacher Miss McIntyre.

   The over-all feeling you’ll get from this book is a super-deep depression because this world is just fucked up beyond repair. All the characters try to deal somehow with this fact…mostly by getting high or drunk…or, in Ruprecht’s case, by eating piles of doughnuts. Sometimes, they get almost philosophical and reflect about life and world and Universe and Love and stuff and there are some really interesting ideas. The book mixes all kinds of moods – it’s funny, tragic, cynical and in a way brutal and disgusting in the same time. Sometimes it might be a little bit too much (one of Lori’s chapters will change your attitude to oral sex forever).

   But besides great characters and ideas, there is Murray’s excellent style. If you happen to teach about direct, indirect and all-those-between-direct-and-indirect speeches in English, use this book as your source text. On the other hand, it sometimes get a little confusing (especially Carl’s chapters lack quotations marks and sometimes they lack diacritics completely). He uses unbelievably wide range of similes – from biblical visions (used in really funny way – like when he describes Ruprecht putting his robot on floor as Moses’ mother letting her baby float in basket) to contemporary movies and computer games. He also has wonderfully imaginative, almost poetic language – mostly in the part when people are affected by drugs (I doubt there is any other book in which someone would describe eyes of someone on drugs in so many different ways).

   I really loved this book and if it weren’t so long, I would be sure to read it again sometime later. Hard to say if I’ll ever make myself re-read the whole novel but it is worth it. It was longlisted for Booker Prize 2010 so I really wonder what the awarded book is like because it should be frelling awesome if it beat Skippy… Anyway, there will be a movie next year so there should be a trailer soon. 

Beryl Bainbrige: Zachraň se, kdo můžeš (Every Man for Himself)

   We read the first chapter of this book at a literary seminar and than I chose to read it at our Reading Club. Nevertheless, there was a last minute change of plan and we will read something else.

  I wrote the fist paragraph of this review few days ago and I have to say I have been a little bit lost about what to write about this book since. I also forgot all the interesting things I noted when reading it (those I didn’t write down because they were all so clear and easy to remember…I’ll never learn). Anyway, I’m gonna do my best.

   Few interesting facts – it won the Whitbread Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize and was a nominee of The Booker Prize. It treats the Titanic disaster and it was published the same year the movie Titanic went out. Many people probably believed the movie was based on this book and the success was great…I don’t think Bainbridge calculated like this when she was writing the book but still…lucky girl.

   The narrator’s name is Morgan and he’s a young, rich American. The story begins on the day of Titanic’s departure when a man, completely unknown to Morgan, dies on the street and gives him a photo of a Japanese girl. The reader doesn’t know from the beginning that the mentioned ship is Titanic but…there’s hardly anyone who has ever taken this book into his hands without knowing what it is about (and for those few who really did not know…the cover spoils the surprise anyway). The way Bainbridge reveals the name of the ship is one of the things I appreciated about this book. She feels no urge to dramatize new revelations. The name is mentioned only by the way and as if the reader was supposed to already have guessed it (he probably is). She doesn’t put it at the end of a paragraph or a chapter…the name just appears and you tell yourself: “OK, so I was right.” Nice change…

   There is not much of a story to tell. Morgan meets with bunch of rich people who all know each other…the world of wealthy is small. There are quite many characters and it might be a little difficult to get who is who at the beginning (ok, it’s not such a challenge but most of them turn up in one scene). A series of shorter episodes follows and it’s rather a mosaic of people and their characters than an epic story. Of course, the ship sinks but I felt like it wasn’t such a big deal for the author. It seemed to me that she used the catastrophe to make a morbid atmosphere rather than anything else.

   So, the book focuses rather on Morgan than on the story. He seems quite detached from the rest of his friends. One of the things is that his childhood wasn’t particularly easy one. His father died before Morgan was born and his mother followed few years after that. He spent some time in an orphanage and later his family found him and his aunt and uncle raised him. I am not absolutely sure but I believe that when they took him to their home he was old enough to remember it so he feels different from people who have always lived in wealth. The aunt and uncle didn’t really make it easier to him – for example, Morgan recollects that once he travelled with them on a ship but they were in the first class and he was in the third…quite clearly so that people didn’t know about him.

   But he is quite a likeable characters. Yes, he is detached and sometimes behaves oddly (he stole a picture of his mother from his uncle’s study) but he’s very ironical and pretty fun. Bainbridge’s style is another thing why this worth reading. You feel the whole time like nothing serious is actually happening. Titanic goes down. People die. Yeah, well. What’s next? She makes kind of morbid atmosphere from the very beginning – a man dies on the very first page of the book and the way she (or rather Morgan) describes it is quite cruel (the dying man holds on a fence and Bainbridge/Morgan makes a simile with an old scarecrow). There are also many moments when a character says something like “Yeah, but this ship is unsinkable” and everyone laughs. It’s not some extremely innovative idea but yet…it gives you the shivers.

   There is also kind of a detective story, because Morgan a bit by bit discovers some facts from is childhood. There are also different interconnected characters and events, sometimes rather implied than really said, so that’s interesting too.

    To summarize it, Every Man for Himself is an interesting book – it probably won’t sweep you off your feet but it’s still a good reading.